tom o'brien's List: meaning of life

• Recognising and assessing the religious and spiritual aspects of a person’s life

• Spirituality, in a narrow sense, concerns itself with matters of the spirit, a concept closely tied to religious belief and faith, a transcendent reality, or one or more deities. Spiritual matters are thus those matters regarding humankind's ultimate nature and meaning, not only as material biological organisms, but as beings with a unique relationship to that which is perceived to be beyond the bodily senses, time and the material world.
• For a Christian to refer to themself as "more spiritual than religious" implies relative deprecation of rules, rituals, and tradition while preferring an intimate relationship with God and/or talking to Him as one's best friend. Their basis for this belief is that Jesus Christ came to free man from those rules, rituals, and traditions, giving them the ability to "walk in the spirit" thus maintaining a "Christian" lifestyle through that one-to-one relationship with God. Some excellent resources that further explain the "spiritual Christian" are found in the Bible, Gospel of John 4:24 for example, and in the works of Watchman Nee.^[2] Nee probes deeply into the building blocks of mankind and derives that we are Spirit, Body and Soul.

• interesting worth reading - tom o'brien on 2009-02-02

• Terence McKenna- Eros and Eschaton

• a really interesting plea from mckenna not to sucked or taken in by the routinism and sjam of the common experience
  
  1.50 reality is excelorating to an omega point
  3.00 we are preparing for a forward optimism - tom o'brien on 2009-02-02

• Mind refers to the aspects of intellect and consciousness manifested as combinations of thought, perception, memory, emotion, will and imagination, including all of the brain's conscious and unconscious cognitive processes. It may also include cognitive processes in non-human animals along with the conscious experiences that may accompany them. "Mind" is often used to refer especially to the thought processes of reason. Subjectively, mind manifests itself as a stream of consciousness.
• • subjectively mind manifests itself as a stream of thought - rather than consciousness - ie it obscures consciousness and intead offering 'virtual' or illusionary 'consciousness - it isd this false-self generated experience that tolle is trying to have people wake up to.

  • and others
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  • • read this in relation to tolles ideas

• THE LOST MEANING OF DEATH

  • teaching for the living was put under the guise of instruction for the dead
• • page 20
• • p29 man is a portion of cosmic fire buried in a body of water and earth - Heraclitus

  • p24 the role of the soul - the power of darkness is no malignancy
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  • • p20 reference to be born again

    • ...so then death worketh in us.. our constant dying to the entombment of the 'body' our shell and 'constructed ' life struggles - frees us from the illusions our mind-body creates

    • page 19 great quote i know your doings
• We are reliably informed that the sages of old employed mythical and cabalistic devices at once to reveal and conceal a profounder meaning in their sacred writings, using at times "blinds" to  suggest to the untutored a shallow rendering, while conveying to those versed in symbolical  methodology a far profounder message. The most startling of these ruses was their use of  "death". Teaching for the living was put out under the guise of instruction for "the dead".  Great moral and spiritual systems were cloaked under the mask of "Books of the Dead," as in  Egypt and Tibet. This being so, the sequel will show why a revision of our understanding of  what was implied by the archaic use of the terms will so radically transform the meaning of  every single doctrine of the Christian faith. For the key to the correct interpretation of all  Scripture is just this ancient theological connotation of the word "death".

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• page 6 - values - tom o'brien on 2009-02-03
• from book my thought
  
  the spirit is the one, the soul is the I and the ego eminates from the soul consciousness? the ego is the formed expression of that part of soul in which desires are contained of such a nature that it can be persuaded and hurled upeards and downwards
  
  mind impressionable
  fear as an impression - tom o'brien on 2009-02-03

• • his form is not something that can be seen,
    no one beholds him with the eye -
    by heart and mind and soul is he conceived of:
    whoso knows this becomes immortal.
• Towards a Science of Consciousness

  • the marriage of the sciences
• Since the dawn of pre-history the scattered tribes of man have walked about in all the lands under the sun and contemplated, both individually and collectively the nature of the skies above their heads

• Today, the scientist and the layman ask - How has this been possible? What is the nature of matter and energy? What is the nature of life? What is the nature of consciousness? The emergence of the western scientific program has, for the last three centuries, sought the detailed specifications of the phenomena of nature in the outer world. And today - in the closing decade of the second milenium - it would appear that the quest of the sciences has been turned, at least by way of conferences of scientific and interdisciplinary researchers, towards a focusing on the nature of the inner world of (the cosmos known to) man.

   

    Scientists with unimpeachable credentials in a wide range of fields,  from psychology to molecular biology to mathematical physics,  have begun to assert that understanding the nature of  consciousness is an important scientific goal, perhaps the  most important question that science faces at the present  time. But how to begin?
• "Love the Lord thy God with all thy heart
    and mind and soul and spirit"
• As the mathematician Poincare has shown, there cannot exist any integrable or finite analytical solution to the movement of three bodies, so I am not therefore coming from any philosophy of scientific determinism. Rather I am outlining an attempt at the synthesis of the evolving (natural) scientific tradition and the evolving mystic traditions which share their source with the individuals who also are viewed (often quite separately), as the individuals upon whom the global religions are based.

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• • p 11 merkaba and divine love

• Krishnamurti constantly emphasized the right place of thought in daily life. But he also pointed out the dangers of thought when it becomes knowledge that acts as a calcified projection of the past. According to Krishnamurti, such action distorts our perception and full understanding of the world we live in, and more specifically, the relationships that define it.

• thinking left unchecked serves the ego which is always trying to confirm itself and contain threats to its man-made false selves - delusions - which are man-made through the actions of ego-directed thought - tom o'brien on 2009-02-06

• • the soul flows outwards through the activity of its will - all accessed through the filter of the acceptance of the is-ness of the now - sometimes with reference to the content of the now - but always in recognition of the is-ness of the now - the eternal now - pure unconditioned consciousness - eternal - who i am
    
    i am that i am

  • sensations as belonging to the soul

• Jacobs said he frequently meets people who think God will save their dying loved one and who want medical procedures to continue.

  • they want god to assist - but put faith in the co-involvement of 'mind' rather than heart of the practitioner - they have direct access to 'god' if they go beyond mentation