He made his first trip to India in 1954 where he studied Indian philosophy and religion at the University of Mysore and Banaras Hindu University, where he met several Western monks seeking Eastern forms for the expression of their Christian beliefs. “I left Europe [for India] as a Christian, I discovered I was a Hindu and returned as a Buddhist without ever having ceased to be Christian,” he later wrote.

In 1962, he was summoned to Rome by Opus Dei director, Josemaría Escrivá, who expelled him after a brief trial where he was charged with disobedience! He became a visiting professor at Harvard Divinity School. in 1966 and a professor of religious studies at University of California, Santa Barbara in 1972. For many years he taught in the spring and spent the rest of the year doing research in India.

Here’s a clip of Panikkar speaking on the metoaphor of ‘windows’ in inter-religious dialogue

If you can’t see the video above: >>>Click Here

In our world, the body and soul are divided in some areas of life, and are lobbed together in others. Science and religion have cleanly divided the two and each has claimed a piece, but many feel that when they are caring for human welfare they’re treating both body and soul. Some believe we have a soul/spirit within the body, others that we are a soul/spirit having a human experience.

A spiritarian takes a different view. The ancient pagan, Porphyry, realized through gnosis, “My true Self is remote from the body, without color and without shape, not to be touched by human hands.” The Bhagavad Gita agrees, saying, “The Self is everlasting and infinite, standing on the motionless foundations of eternity.”

To the spiritarian, the Self, the immortal child of Source, has never been, and will never be, a body. Quantum physics backs up this truth with research that demonstrates that material form is a virtual reality projected by consciousness that exists without form.

Buddha recognized this fact when he said, “Remembering that this body is like froth, of the nature of a mirage, break the flower-tipped arrows of Mara/illusion.” The result? “Freed from illusion … they have renounced the world of appearance to find reality. Thus have they reached the highest.”

We’ve all gotten sucked into a dream that felt absolutely real, yet no matter how convinced we were while the dream went on, we woke up and realized nothing real had happened. A spiritarian realizes that we’re all in a much deeper sleep having a dream that’s turned into a nightmare.

And this is where we see the difference between the humanitarian and the spiritarian. One wants to make the dream more comfortable, the other wants to assist you in waking up and escaping it. As Rumi’s teacher Shams-iTabrizi explained, “All the veils are one veil. Other than that one, there is no veil. That veil is this existence.”

Jesus was both humanitarian and spiritarian. His heart was pained by the misery he saw, so he fed the hungry, gave to the poor and healed the sick. But Jesus was no longer asleep. He woke up, and he became an example of what the waking state looks like. He was no longer fooled by material form and did his best to encourage his followers to see past illusion and “seek first the kingdom.” He made it clear that he was “no part of the world” nor was the kingdom that held his allegiance.

Unfortunately, the majority of Jesus’ followers were more interested in material solutions to their problems and followed him for the immediate aid that he gave. These followers distorted his message as they focused on the ‘doings’ of the body. They didn’t stop to realize if they were fed, they would get hungry again, if they were cured, they could easily succumb to another illness, and even if the body was raised from the dead, it would eventually die again.

Jesus recognized the problem he had inadvertently created when said that others would do “greater works than these.” It’s extremely difficult to think of anything greater than raising the dead, but a spiritarian knows that the greatest work lies in awakening minds caught in the dream of continuous birth and death.

Until we wake up and realize we are not the body or its personality, we will be unable to know our true immortal Self. As the Kena Upanishad explains, “The Self is realized … when you have broken through the wrong identification that you are the body, subject to birth and death.”

Humanitarian efforts are worthy because they awaken love and the realization of our innate oneness. But they also fail because they keep us in the prison of virtual reality. In effect, they are like a person who works to improve prison conditions but fails to tell the prisoners that the doors are unlocked and they can leave anytime they wish.

No matter how much conditions are improved, it is still a prison and can’t compare with freedom. And no matter how much humanitarian work is done in this world, it can never begin to rival or replace Reality. But Hafiz recognized the role of the spiritarian when he said, “the sage … keeps dropping keys … for the beautiful rowdy prisoners.” In actuality, we each have the key in our hand and the way out has always been available. Rumi explains:

“The second you stepped into this world of existence a ladder was placed before you to help you escape. When you pass beyond this human form … plunge into the vast ocean of consciousness. Let the drop of water that is you become a hundred mighty seas. But do not think that the drop alone becomes the ocean. The ocean, too, becomes the drop.”

If we’re humanitarians but not spiritarians, we’re prisoners who are sharing blankets with other prisoners, trying to create the illusion of freedom. If we’re spiritarians, we can put love into action by helping others on a material level, while always remembering that the best help we can give is to live in a way that clearly demonstrates the prison door is wide, wide open.

~ by Lee & Steven Hager TheBeginningofFearlessness.com Dec. 4, 2011

These four camps are: 1) mainstream theist religion (with its sub-camps: Christianity, Judaism and Islam — each of which is further split into different denominations); 2) an amorphous New Age movement; 3) scientific/rationalist secularism; and 4) postmodernism (in both its secular and quasi-spiritual forms).

Each ideological camp possesses certain virtues and certain limitations.

So … which of these four basic ideological camps am I favorably biased toward? All and none. I see advantages and disadvantages to each position. I want to completely affirm what is positive about each of these camps, but, because of their serious limitations, I prefer a way beyond all of them — the Perennial Philosophy / Psychology or Primordial Tradition.

This is that esoteric or mystical way of enlightened adepts, found within all the sacred traditions, who live and teach from the context of authentic God-Realization. I want to celebrate and proclaim what these greatest sages and saints have discovered and so beautifully exemplified. We can be enormously enriched by their virtuous life-examples and inspiring wisdom-teachings, which comprise the real gold shining in a glitz-darkened world.

Anyone who resonates with the mystic Traditionalist / Perennialist view will not be enamored of scientism (scientific reductionist materialism), though a mystic-traditionalist will appreciate the scientific method and careful thinking. Nor will a mystic go along completely with the postmodernists, though appreciative of their Zen-like sense of “indeterminancy,” “non-knowing,” emptiness and “this-ness” and deconstructive stance toward phenomena, dogmas and institutions.

Nor will a mystic be enthused by non-mystical, institutionalized religions, though appreciative of their many exceedingly positive contributions for the individual and the commonweal. Nor will a mystic be impressed by New Agers who invent their own religions or sects based on a few “peak / peek” experiences, fancy thinking and garish gimmickry, though a mystic will appreciate the new, open attitude that New Age circles have catalyzed in our society.

Mystic-traditionalists cherish excellence and find themselves being critical of mediocrity, especially in the fields of psychology and spirituality, where mediocrity often runs amok. A mystic clearly sees the potential in each and every person for so much joy, fulfillment and beatitude, and yet so much of this potential goes unrealized, especially when people explore unfruitful or limited psychological and religious paths.

Though I align with the Traditionalist camp of the Perennial Wisdom, like the mystics in whose footsteps I endeavor to follow, I also tend to be a pragmatist. My attitude: whatever truly works or gets results in wholeness / holiness, then use it. This might consist in devotional surrender to the Beloved, selfless service to one’s community, detached mindfulness or witnessing of the flow of experience, formless contemplation, penetrating self-enquiry (“Who Am I?”), radical stillness / relaxation, group chanting, vision quests in nature, pilgrimage to sacred sites, or “letting go, letting God.”

It seems to me that the world’s religious traditions must be evaluated, not in terms of their membership numbers — it would be better to use percentages of authentically holy people, if that could ever reliably be determined — nor the lavishness of their pageantry and pomp, nor the impressiveness of their architecture and artwork, nor the cleverness of their theological or philosophical schemas. Rather, the traditions need to be evaluated on how effectively they free people from the trap of egotism and liberate them into godliness.

All else, to my mind, is ultimately irrelevant.

~ by Timothy Conway, Ph.D. (Excerpted from his book: Our Religions’ Future, Ch.1: Biases & Basic Issues in Spirituality, 2006.),

~ To read Tim’s unabridged paper on the West’s Four Ideologies and the Perennial Wisdom Tradition, >>> Click Here

It amazes me how I’m provided with roads, food, the internet, someone to cut my hair and fix my computer, giant trucks to pick up my trash and keep up my city, dogs to keep me company and make me smile, a husband who loves me, information that comes to me from various places.

Everything that happens is support for my life and supports other people’s lives too. Isn’t it a miracle that what you and I offer the world also seems to be enough to provide us with this support? We are all contributing and we are all receiving.

We are all moved to contribute, and we are moved by something very mysterious. How is it possible for this immensely complex existence we are part of to function and actually support us? Isn’t this such a miracle! What good fortune to be born into a world that provides for us. Some would argue that it doesn’t do this very well, but truly, isn’t it amazing that it does it to the extent that it does!

It seems that something behind life moves each of us to contribute as we do. We have enough people doing the things that need to be done to make it all work. How does that happen? We didn’t all decide to be doctors, for instance. That would be too many doctors! Some of us had to be patients, anyway. What is behind our choosing to do what we do? Life is a great mystery.

When I can see that others are playing out their role perfectly (and, as a bonus, they’re doing it with their own personal style and unique personality), then I relax and can just let it happen as it is happening. Something much wiser than we are is making it all happen through us. How interesting! I think I will just enjoy the unfolding of the show in front of me. Maybe I’ll jump up and do something too. Who knows? It’s fun not knowing, especially when you realize that we are in good hands.

Even those who cause difficulty and trouble for others have a place in this mystery. They serve a role too. It’s hard to see how they are contributing, but at the very least they contribute to our growth and evolution by challenging us. And sometimes we are the one causing trouble and pain!

I will let the troublemakers be as they are too, since they are as they are. I will let them be part of this drama on earth, since they already are part of this drama. I might be moved to do something in response to them or not. We’ll see. It might be someone else’s role to respond instead.

We all have a part to play, and we just need to play that part. We can hardly not play our part. So I will let life be as it is and let it move me as it does, and I will revel in this great mystery in which I am participating and bring as much consciousness, gratitude, and joy to it as I can. To see the truth about life — that we are part of one Consciousness creating it all — is to be happy and at peace, and from that place of peace, it’s easy to love it all.

~ by Gina Lake from her Blog

It’s easy to blame overeating and junk food for this problem, but many are constantly watching their diet and are still unable to lose weight. We recently discovered why, and in the process, realized a significant correlation between material and spiritual food.

Because we’ve both had major health issues and severe allergies, we’ve been quite careful about what we eat for several years. We’d been exercising regularly, controlling portions and staying clear of what we thought of as junk food, but we both still carried around some extra pounds. Then we accidentally came into contact with a book called Eat to Live by Dr. Joel Fuhrman.

Instead of calling Dr. Fuhrman’s plan a diet, we prefer to think of it as a ‘Live It’ because to be successful, you must make drastic changes in your eating habits and stick with it. Most of Dr. Fuhrman’s patients had become extremely ill or grossly overweight before they were willing to make such radical changes, but they’ve had spectacular results, and so have we.

Dr. Fuhrman contends that Americans are overweight and unhealthy for one reason: we’re not getting the nutrients we need from the food we’re eating. He explains that when you eat nutrient poor food, your body will just keep demanding more food until it gets what it needs. Of course if you just keep eating the same things your body will never be satisfied and this vicious cycle will inevitably lead to excess weight and illness.

Dr. Fuhrman claims that it’s the ‘nutrient density’ of food that matters, not the amount you eat. If you eat only the foods with the highest possible ratio of nutrients to calories and stop eating foods with a low ratio of nutrients to calories, your body will be satisfied, you’ll lose weight and your health will improve. Dr. Fuhrman’s plan is extremely simple: give the body its optimal fuel and you’ll get optimal performance. (By the way, our endorsement of Dr. Fuhrman’s plan is freely given; we’re not receiving anything in return.)

But what has this got to do with spiritual food? Peace Pilgrim, a very spicy spiritual master, once said, “I don’t eat junk food and I don’t think junk thoughts.” Like many other masters before her, she believed what we feed our minds is even more important than what we put into the body. Although most Americans have access to an abundance of nutritious food, a huge percentage of food in grocery stores and restaurants is very low on nutrition and high in calories, which leaves us simultaneously overfed and malnourished.

The same is true of spiritual food. The world is overflowing with an infinite and plentiful variety of spiritual food to choose from, but people are both overfed and malnourished. In both cases the problem exists because we reject real nutrition in favor of the tastiness of empty calories. And sadly, a diet of tasty but non-nutritious material or spiritual food often makes us think the nutritious food seem boring and unappealing.

Much of what passes for spirituality today is little more than sensationalism, but the excitement over specific dates, sacred places, secret information, etc., etc. makes the teachings of the sages that have stood the test of time seem dull in comparison.

Unless we recognize the problem and re-educate our physical and spiritual taste buds, we’ll never feel satisfied.

We might be convinced we have a ‘sweet tooth,’ but in reality, we’re starving for nutrition and addicted to a ‘high’ that we get from the combination of fat and sugar. The same is often true on a spiritual level. We may be addicted to new and exciting ‘spiritual highs’ if we find ourselves eager to keep moving from one new spiritual idea, book, teacher or practice to another.

We tell ourselves that we’re on a spiritual path, but we’re actually just ‘snacking’ to satisfy our curiosity. Curiosity can be a beginning, but it can also be a trap that keeps us from maturing. At some point we need to settle down and begin our inner work. That doesn’t mean that teachers, books, ideas or practices have no merit, but instead of using them as a springboard for deep inner work, we’re like the child who hides their vegetables and goes right to the cupcake.

Rumi was alluding to people who toy with spirituality when he said, “These spiritual window-shoppers who idly ask, ‘How much is that?’…they handle a hundred items and put them all down.”

In that case, spirituality becomes a bag of potato chips. We just keep popping in one ‘chip’ after another, hardly cognizant of what we’re doing. We feel full because we’ve collected lots of information, but we’re malnourished because we haven’t let it reach the heart and bring about real change. We may feel that we’re very busy and involved spiritually, but Buddha addressed this problem when he said, “Few are those who reach the other shore; most people just keep running up and down this shore.”

In our society, we want things to be quick and easy, so we’ve learned to eat on the run. We go to the drive-thru, pick up some food while the car is still running, and head right back to the road. Occasionally people do what we’ve come to think of as ‘drive-thru emails.’ They write and ask us to distill the information contained in the 600+ pages of our books in a few words so they can swallow it quickly and keep on moving.

Like diet pills, liposuction and weight loss surgery, they believe there must also be some form of ‘instant enlightenment gratification.’ As Hafiz pointed out, “God is trying to sell you something, but you don’t want to buy. This is what your suffering is: your fantastic haggling … over the price.”

Spiritual awakening, like Dr. Fuhrman’s plan, is very, very simple. However, that doesn’t mean either of them are easy. Both require that we make major changes, and those changes will be difficult or easy depending on how attached we are to the status quo. Most of the people who finally came to Dr. Fuhrman were in a desperate situation. They stuck to his plan because they faced death or a miserable existence if they didn’t.

Our thoughts and intentions have pushed the earth to the brink of disaster and left humanity in tenuous circumstances. Now is the time to act; the cure for our problems has always been right before us. Yes, big changes can be both frightening and disruptive, but the big question is: Do we want to keep playing around with our spiritual food, or dig in? Do we want to keep looking at the menu, or eat the meal?

~ by Lee & Steven Hager in Spiritual Awakening, Nov. 13, 2011.

Peter Russell explores the problems science has explaining consciousness and proposes that consciousness is not created by the brain, but is inherent in all beings. He shows why mind is more fundamental than matter, and the the key to this shift is the revolution in our understanding of the light.

If you can’t see the video above, >>>Click Here

If pressed for time, you can see the excerpted (10 mins) version: HERE

The DVD and more info available from: Peter’s Site

What do you see while you’re spending so much time looking from one thing to another? Find out in this intriguing short video

Gnosticism has been defined as “a dualistic religious system that combines ideas from mythology, philosophy and the abstruse.” The ’system’, however, turns out to be so diverse and contradictory as to be almost meaningless. It’s like trying to define present-day Christianity by its estimated 3,800 denominations!

One scholar has tried to define Gnosticism in doctrinal terms as: “… the notion that the world is evil, the result of a rebellious angel (demiurge) attempting to create something apart from God. The goal (end) of the Gnostic’s existence is to escape the created world and return to the state of perfection that existed in the beginning, before the creation of the world.”

The early Roman Church gave the impresson that Gnosticism was an aberration or perversion of ‘orthodox’ Christian doctrine and existed from the 1st century CE to about the 5th when it was finally eradicated in a concerted effort by the Church and State powers.

But in actual fact Gnosticism was practiced many centuries before Jesus of Nazareth ever appeared on the scene.

George MacRae highlighted some of the evidence of pre-Christian gnosticism… and concluded that “for a growing number of scholars — now clearly in the majority — such evidence… enables us to rule out… that Gnosticism is to be seen as a heretical offshoot from Christianity’.”

In the early twentieth century, the New Testament scholar Wilhelm Bousset, who traced Gnosticism to ancient Babylonian and Persian sources, declared that “… gnosticism is first of all a pre-Christian movement which had roots in itself. It is therefore to be understood… in its own terms, and not as an offshoot or byproduct of the Christian religion.”

So it’s important to understand at the outset that Gnosticism could refer to a very wide range of religious beliefs and practices, that were generally esoteric in character, and which were often exploited by unscrupulous opportunists two thousand years ago as, indeed, they are right up to this very day.

Our main concern here is not Gnosticism as such, but the concept of gnosis. Gnosis (no-sis) would have been known in India when the Buddha was teaching as jnana (ya-na); both mean “knowledge,” in the sense of “wisdom,” and evidently, both words are from the same root.

The meaning of jnana, as summarized in an encyclopedia, is: “the eradication of the ignorance that sees the illusory multiplicity of the world as real, by attainment of knowledge of the Self (The Absolute),” which is regarded as “a single fundamental reality,” by the presence of which “there is no real distinction between the soul (or essential self) and God.”

As the renowned Indian sage, Ramana Maharshi, once observed: “It is due to illusion — caused by the ego, the ‘I am the body’ idea — that the kingdom of God (realm of Being) is conceived to be elsewhere.”

~ To read the complete article: >>>Click Here

~ Robert Wolfe

The original ‘orthodox’ Christian Church bowed to pressures from Emperor Constantine, rejecting doctrine and gospels not supportive of the ‘orthodox’ worldview of Jesus.

During the first three centuries, debates raged over the divine nature or the divinity of Jesus. Yes, imagine that, for three hundred years, the Christian sects were not convinced that Jesus was the only Son of God.

The debate raged between Jesus being a man verses Jesus the only Son of God because the decision affect the outcome of the orthodox Church; if Jesus was just a man then the teaching of the Resurrection from the tomb did not happen and the orthodox Church had no power to save or damn one’s soul.

Some orthodox Christian bishops taught that Jesus was not a god, but a prophet. It was not until the Council of Nicene in CE 325 that the Church voted Jesus to be divine, the only Son of God, at the request of Roman Emperor Constantine who converted in CE 323.

Emperor Constantine required that Jesus be equal to his own god, Sol. Even after the Council voted to make Jesus divine, some bishops refused to accept the decision and continued to teach that Jesus was not a god, but a man who was enlightened.

Jesus taught that you find God within yourself, not through an external source, such as a church. The sapiental (wisdom) Christian view is that God is within everyone and everything, that nature and the universe is the very embodiment of God and contrary to the orthodox Christian teaching that the natural man is an enemy to God.

When you accept his teachings and the awareness that God is within each person then this is the second coming. The second coming is not a physical event, but a spiritual enlightenment. Looking within oneself is the path of directly experiencing the Divine and the path to salvation.

This teaching was in direct conflict with the Council of Nicene because there would be no need of bishops or the Church to find salvation and therefore, the Church did not control who was saved and who was damned and thus its power and financial empire would vanish.

~ Ed.

Even those physicists who describe how the primordial photons of light transformed themselves into material particles do not seem to fully grasp the significance of the fact that everything in the universe is made of light.

Everyone has heard of the ‘Big Bang’, how all material particles were formed from that initial ‘fireball’ of high-energy photons; and yet it still has not sunk in to the contemporary psyche that everything is made of light.

Scientists say that the light from which the world of matter is made had to have come from the explosion of an unstable super-dense chunk of matter which they call a “singularity”, while people of religious or spiritual beliefs have understood since the most ancient of times that that light was caused by an act of God.

And yet still hardly any of the people in the world have fully grasped and understood the fact that everything is made of light.

Though so much of what passes as ’science’ today is merely the passing fashion of the moment or a speculative theory that can never be substantiated, the current understanding among scientists that all matter is an evolute of an original light is one which seems to allow of no possible future refutation.

That energy and matter are interconvertible, and that the light-energy of the so-called ‘Big Bang’ of fourteen billion years ago transformed into the quarks and leptons that make up the entire world of matter is a discovery that is so incontrovertible, so uncontestable, as to effectively put an end to all future speculation as to what our world is made of.

And, despite the fact that scientific thinkers believe that that pristine burst of light was a ‘natural’ phenomenon (whatever that means), and spiritually oriented people are certain that the light came directly from God, the fact remains that an unimaginably immense blast of high-energy light flashed at the dawn of time in a nascent universe, and each photon of that light became a matter-antimatter pair contributing to make the phenomenal universe of form and substance that we live in today.

Philosophers and sages from the beginning of time have declared that, in addition to the light from which all ‘things’ are made, there is a conscious principle at work in the world that functions as life and awareness, which has been referred to as “spirit” or “soul”.

Materialists deny that such a universal principle exists — even though by doing so, they tend to deny the existence of their own intelligence; while the mystics, seers, and all the worshippers of a transcendent/immanent God affirm the principle of a divine “soul”, and base their lives and actions upon it.

Some say that “soul” is a subtler invisible light that emanates from God and coexists along with the grosser light of which all physical bodies are made, giving life and movement to those bodies, along with awareness and intelligence. And yet, still, nearly everyone in the world seems to be blind to the undeniable fact that everything is made of light.

And even fewer have traced that light, both gross and subtle, to its ultimate source, and come to know the one Spirit who is the Self of all, the One who alone shines in this world as the light from which both body and soul are created.

~ Swami Abhayananda, Body And Soul: An Integral Perspective. available in paperback from amazon.com and Online.