My spiritual blog & articles - My Spiritual Coach

Plato said that all souls are eternal and indestructible. Do you agree?

5/4/2023

I agree with Plato that Soul is, by definition, eternal and indestructible. Bodies and minds come and go. Everything physical withers away and dies, from the tiniest one-celled animal to the whale. Mountains turn into grains of sand on the beach, worn away by time and weather. And deep rivers have dried up into canyons.

Only one thing is eternal—the fundamental Energy of the Universe, which never had a beginning and has no ending. It always was and always will be. It takes many, many forms, but always originates from the One Eternal Source. That is also true about the Soul because it is through our Soul that we partake of the Universe. It participates in us and we participate in it. But most of us don’t recognize the, because we are run by the mind-stream of endless thoughts, fears, and regrets.

Yet deep within each of us, we know that the Soul we were when we are eleven years old is still the Soul we are now. And when we meet someone who is on the same vibrational level as our Soul, we feel a spiritual reaction. Our Souls are tuned into each other. We inherently know that there is something within us and surrounding us that can never die or be destroyed and we feel it in this connection too. It is in a state of growth and freedom, like the expanding Universe itself.

Plato understood that the Great One Source Energy is the fountain of all that is. And that within each of us, regardless of our individual characteristics, is Divine Consciousness. It’s just a matter of how much are we allowing into our fields of recognition and how much of it we are uncovering. For it is all there, like a lightbulb covered over with duct tape. Take away the layers of the obscuring tape and you will find the eternal light of the Soul within.

Why did Buddha say, "All things are impermanent" or "Everything is changing" in his first teaching?

3/10/2023

Buddha discovered a system for alleviating human suffering. He also discovered that one of the major causes of human suffering is that things change. Because we cling to things in the desperate hope that they won’t change and try to control them so they will remain permanent, we are frustrated and frightened. We recognize that, underneath it all, clinging and control don’t work when everything is in a state of flux.

Buddha saw that we cling passionately to our loved ones. And if they die, we can be in mourning for the rest of our lives. Their physical presence is gone. It is not coming back. And we loved them so much, the world looks dimmer and more hostile because of their absence. Who will love us now? Furthermore, this is going to happen to us too. Every cell in our body has changed or been replaced over and over again as we grow, age, begin to weaken, and finally disappear.

This realization causes enormous pain and fear in people and they obsessively fight all the changes: Plastic surgery, large accumulations of wealth beyond what anyone could ever spend, fanatical dietary practices, rigorously dangerous exercise routines, and hoarding all kinds of material goods to hedge against an uncertain future.

The past is not bringing any consolation to our minds in this swirl of change, either. We remember our beloved persons or pets who are gone and the sadness begins again. The recollection of the past, with all of our family sitting together during the holidays or our pets curled up in our laps, underlines the vacuum they have left as the world continues on its inexorable path of transmutation.

An so Buddha told us not to be in denial about this. If we don’t face it, we will be in a constant scramble of trying to keep things the same. And we will always be uncomfortable. We will go through life kicking and screaming over things that are not in our control. We will try to cling, but it will all slip out of our hands. Therefore, we must let it go, let it be the change that is a constant, and follow the Buddha’s suggestions in his Four Noble Truths and The Noble Eightfold path. He gave us a to get out of our misery. If we really adhere to what he presents, we will find a way out of this endless suffering due to clinging to what is constantly changing.

Is it possible to be very intelligent but not spiritually advanced or enlightened?

3/9/2023

Intelligence has nothing to do with spiritual enlightenment. Intelligence depends on the thinking mind, which is like a radar system that ensures our survival. As such, it can be frequently alarmed and live in agitation and fear. Spiritual enlightenment does not depend on the mind, logic, or advanced intelligence. It comes from the heart and gut center and not the head.
We have many different kinds of intelligence, which may be debatable:

Logical-mathematical
Linguistic
Spatial
Musical
Bodily
Emotional
Naturalistic

Our logical-mathematical and linguistic forms of intelligence allow us to communicate our path to enlightenment when we have found it. They also enable us to read books that point the way. But those books are just one way to “get there.” If you can’t read, or even have a below-average IQ, you can still feel at one with the underlying energy flow of the Universe. You may feel it in your bones or through your emotions. Or you may feel the creative forces of nature running through your body.

Sometimes intelligence stands in the way of understanding Source Energy. It wants to dissect, analyze, and prove itself right. It is looking for all the flaws so it can dominate them and protect itself. Very intelligent people can torture themselves endlessly over everything that could go wrong, from cosmic explosions to atomic meltdowns and entropy in interpersonal relationships . Intellectually understanding all the possible consequences of every action can lead to paralysis and incapacitating anxiety.

Spiritual enlightenment is a state of inner peace. It is not the mind racing around trying to solve every problem in the world or even every personal issue. And there are many paths to this peace. The intellect is not usually one of them. Yet the Stoics and other philosophers are able to use logic to arrive at a sense of resignation to what is, combined with a zest for being alive. However, in general, it is not the head, but the heart that opens the gates to enlightenment.

Is it necessary to get rid of desire for enlightenment?

2/28/2023

The Buddha pinpointed that the cause of all suffering is desire. To rid ourselves of suffering we must give up desire. We need to give up this kind of desire because desire is always for something that is not here. It is in the future. And while we are striving after the future and thinking that our salvation and happiness resides in it, we cannot fully appreciate the present moment. Desire is always for something else. We can’t desire it if we already know we have it.

Yet, it is not in human nature to give up desire. Desire is the intention that has fueled great inventions and works of art. Desire has spurred all intellectual and spiritual growth. We want something better. We want to be better. We want to feel better. And we desire to feel secure in the future. Therefore we take action to accomplish our desires.

In this sense, desire is just part of the Big Picture of constant transformation, expansion, and growth. We don’t need to give it up, because it is built into the system of being human. We only need to give up our attachment to the outcome of our desires. Things may not turn out exactly the way we desired and we cannot control that. Therefore, we suffer and the present moment is something we’ve got to muddle through until our next desires impel us to act.

For example, we want to have a fun-filled family picnic. Then it rains, the flies come out and bite us, the ants consume the food, and the car gets stuck in the mud. We can either suffer through this because our desires were not fulfilled, or we can accept that life is full of surprises and have fun dancing in the rain. Our desire to control the outcome of our actions in a mysterious world is what causes so much psychological suffering.

As we begin to recognize that the results of our desires may not always produce what we were hoping for, we gain emotional maturity. We are able to cope with whatever life manifests and even welcome it. “Bring it on. I want such-and-such, but the Universe, in it’s infinite wisdom, has produced something else. Let me welcome this gift.” Desire is a great springboard into the future but contains the element of dissatisfaction that a keeps us looking for more, and more, and more.

And so, desires are not something to get rid of, but rather intentions that are to be put in their place. It’s great if things work out the way we wanted. Yet we are willing to accept whatever happens and not feel we can control everything through just wanting the results we crave. They dissolve all by themselves as an instrument of suffering and become simply the energy of intention.

Can a woman attain enlightenment in Buddhism?

1/10/2023

As a woman, whose entire life has been devoted to the Spirit and the unseen powers of the Universe, I have been dismayed by some of the antiquated views on the ability of women to be enlightened.

In some world religions, such as Svetambar Jains, women don’t have a chance of getting off the wheel of birth and death until they are reborn as a man. They were reborn as women as a result of being deceitful in a former life and have to work like crazy to prove themselves worthy of even being born a male next time around. One of the Jain sacred texts states:
“As the result of manifesting deception, a man in this world becomes a woman. As a woman, if her heart is pure, she becomes a man in this world.”

In the Aganna-Sutta from the Pali Canon, a record of the teachings of Gautama Buddha, imply that women are responsible for the downfall of the human race.

These attitudes toward women were imposed many, many centuries ago, when women were not seen as men’s equals. Historically they were seen as men’s possessions or as brood mares for ensuring the birth of a son. A girl birth was seen as a liability, especially when it came to the dowry for marriage.

In other religions such as Islam, women may not pray in public. They are also not permitted to pray during menstruation as they are not considered clean. Judaism also has constraints around women’s spiritual attainments with the concept of not being clean for the menstruating woman. If a woman is seen as not clean during the natural process that enables her to have a child, it brings a great stigma in terms of self-worth even if it not acknowledged.

Buddhism can then also be seen as a sexist religion in this way. Buddha himself was reluctant to take women as nuns. He was afraid of the various consequences that would arise if women were enrolled. The consequences he thought would have a negative impact on the society at that time, when women were held at little value. It was only upon the request of his stepbrother Ananda that Buddha agreed to take female followers into the worship practice.

And even when allowed to enter the practice, only women were required to follow the eight garudhammas. These are the “eight heavy restrictions” the male practitioners were not ordered to follow. These eight restrictions clearly kept monks at a much higher level than the nuns. One of these restrictions is:

"A nun who has been ordained even for a hundred years must greet even a newly-ordained monk by rising up from her seat and saluting with joined palms."

Therefore, women were not considered as complete entities in the old Buddhism of thousands of years ago. This attitude has still carried over to modern times in some Buddhist societies. Women's bodies are not considered fit to attain enlightenment and to become Buddha. There is a still a concept that women are not complete until they attain enlightenment when reborn as a man. The man’s form is required for completeness. The Bahudhatuka-sutta states that there could never be a female Buddha.

The psychological impact of this view is to keep women in a weaker and inferior position. Their morale is kept low because they think, “What’s the use? What if I get born as a woman again? How holy do I have to be before I get a chance at freedom from this bondage? There’s something wrong with being a woman.”

According to Ajahn Sujato, the early texts state that the first garudhamma, which states that every nun must bow to every monk, was instituted by the Buddha because of the customs of the time. But modern scholars doubt that the rule even originated with the Buddha.

The rules were written only after the people started to become literate. And in ancient times, men were the first ones to learn to read and write. It was only much later that women got the chance to be educated because they were seen to be more at the level of the animals. These rules were written by a male-dominant society to favor that male Buddhists. It was one more power play over women.

But now, the world has changed. Yet fundamentalist world religions have not changed. Their opinions and beliefs are based on what seemed practical many centuries ago. These beliefs do not apply today if they ever applied at all. As a deeply spiritual person, I know that we are not just these bodies, miraculous as they are. At the Soul level, we are beyond being men and women. The body and its endocrine and hormonal systems do not apply to the world of the Spirit. Any view about men being spiritually superior to women is not relevant when we know that women are capable of every task a man can do—and also produce children!

What is the connection between Martin Heidegger's philosophy and Buddhism (especially Zen)?

10/23/2022

Martin Heidegger’s philosophy is deep and complex, and yet he makes statements that are simple and Zen-like. Zen is accepting things as they are and not fighting the flow. This includes the Zen approach to death, which is Life and Death are one. It is a continuum. There is no dividing line between them. As in the world of form, there is actually no dividing line between anything, there only seems to be to our perceptions. Everything interacts as part of a cosmic dance of chemicals, atoms, and non-physical elements. All is one underneath it all.
Heidegger made this statement:

"If I take death into my life, acknowledge it, and face it squarely, I will free myself from the anxiety of death and the pettiness of life - and only then will I be free to become myself.”

He is saying that our fear of death and our craving to “make something” out of our lives puts us on a hamster wheel of tasks and to-do lists that never end but don’t lead to peace, joy, or understanding of our true selves. Instead of being in denial about our own physical death, if we face that it is inevitable, we won’t scramble around living life on the surface. It’s like the Kamikaze fighter who crashed his plane but didn’t die. He expected to. die And when he survived he felt renewed, as if he saw life and all its glory for the first time.

Heidegger also said, “Every man is born as many men and dies as a single one.” He is saying that we are more than the physical bodies, which, like snowflakes are all individual but form the totality of the snowfield. Or like raindrops falling into the ocean. The individuality disappears, once we cross over into death.

This is Zen-like because of the emphasis, that after all, All is One. We realize that the deepest level of our life, what in Zen is called the "true self," is always here-and-now. This true self, even though here-and-now, is always changing. When we are born we enter the world of change and when we die we enter the world of change. It is always the same yet always changing. If we don’t realize this, we live deluded lives. That is why Heidegger said, “Transcendence constitutes selfhood.”

Why did Abraham Maslow say that self actualization was the highest need in his hierarchy of needs?

9/27/2022

Abraham Maslow said, "What a man can be, he must be. This need we call self-actualization."

But we can't get there before we meet all the other needs, including those of basic survival. Animals don’t look at their lives in terms of their potential to grow intellectually or spiritually. They are not concerned with completing their story and creating meaningful lives for themselves. Their main concern is to eat and avoid being eaten so they can procreate and replenish the stock.

Humans, however, have a need, once all their other survival and emotional needs are met, to find meaning in their lives and to demonstrate and fulfill their particular talents, gifts, and abilities. Furthermore, it is not enough just to survive if you are a fully developed human with an intellect and spiritual yearnings. We must find the meaning behind the struggles, difficulties, and sorrows that beset us all. Life is too painful to endure just for the sake of survival.

And so, we seek answers to our deepest questions that other life forms do not concern themselves about: Who are we? Why are we here? Are we just the puppets of our genes or is there spiritual significance to what we are going through? If we are starving, freezing, under threat, and just barely hanging on, we need to take care of that first. But once that has been solved, what is the point of it all?

Thus, Maslow observed that what uniquely defines being human is the drive to self-actualize, or as the Army slogan says, “Be all that you can be.” That means, accomplishing what you love to do, what you must do, and what defines you as the one-of-a-kind being that you are. It also means finding meaning outside of the physical aspects of life. It is about finding your inner life and Soul. Without this, life is a meaningless and fear-driven round of feeding and reproducing, interspersed with short-lived pleasures until we die. And therefore, as humans, endowed with the potential for cosmic consciousness, self-actualization is our highest need.

Does stoicism have a cosmology and views of a soul or life beyond the human experience, or is it more so a philosophy of how to effectively live life?

10/18/2021

For the most part, people think of Stoicism as an extremely practical way of living. It is about accepting what we cannot change. It is also about living life to the fullest because we never know when it’s going to be our last day.
But the Stoics also had a cosmology and a concept of the soul.

They believed in what in Hinduism is called Prana—the breath of life. But they called it the pneuma The pneuma a mixture of the elements air and fire.

This pneuma is the creative force behind the all life, all inanimate objects, and the cosmos as a whole. The highest form of the pneuma is our soul, which they called the “psyche.”
The psyche is a a small part of the overall pneuma, which is the soul of God. Everything that exists is part of the pneuma in some way. Stoics divide it all into two categories:

Passive—matter and the material world, including us and our bodies

Active—divine purpose, or the “logos”

The Stoics saw the cosmos as an all-encompassing presence, with a mega-soul. This is where the god Zeus come into play. He’s the one that holds it all together with the power of the pneuma. And everything in the world is imbued with the pneuma.

I am completely in agreement with this view of the cosmos, minus Zeus. But I understand the need for humans to embody the forces of the Universe, and put a label on them, such as “Zeus” or “God.”

Is the noble eightfold path of Buddhism intelligible?

6/23/2021

Like the Ten Commandments, Buddha’s Nobel Eightfold Path, is simple to understand but not really easy to accomplish. These eight attitudes are not moral precepts about specifically what not to do, though. They are a simple list of how to behave if you want to live a life with a minimum of suffering for yourself and others.

Buddha does use the word “right” but it is not in the sense that you are damned by God if you don’t take his recommendations. It is more in the sense of what is most appropriate for the moment. Here is the Noble Eighfold Path:

Right understanding
Right thought
Right speech
Right action
Right livelihood
Right effort
Right mindfulness
Right concentration

Because they are so simple, people can interpret these concepts in different ways. Huge volumes have been written on the subject. My interpretation, in short, is approach everything with a free, pure, unattached heart. This ensures that we say the appropriate words as well as perform appropriate actions. We consciously put our efforts towards meaningful goals while remaining grounded in what is eternal about ourselves.

Four of the ideas in The Noble Eightfold Path concern themselves with our inner selves: Understanding, thought, mindfulness, and concentration. This is different from the Ten Commandments, which do not concern themselves with a person’s inner life and more with their relationship to Jehovah and with each other.

Four of the items on the Path are action-oriented: Speech, action, livelihood, and effort. The Buddha did not leave anything out. And by not defining precisely what each “right” thought or action is, he left a lot of room for interpretation. But the final test is, by living this way do you alleviate suffering? Thousands of years after he delivered his insights, they are still alive and bringing people and understanding of life, so they have stood the test of time.

What did Echkart Tolle mean by saying problems are illusions, or fear is an illusion?

8/4/2020

When Eckhart Tolle says that problems are illusions, or that fear is an illusion, he is not making light of the pain and suffering we go through as humans. He knows very well the unhappiness and fear that so many people live in, regardless of their external circumstances.

Instead, he is referring to how we create problems and fear in our lives. We assume people are out to get us, that the Universe is playing tricks with us, and that we are helpless victims. Tolle’s approach to problems is threefold:

Leave them
Change them
Accept them

. . . anything else is craziness.

If we have a clear view of these solutions, the problems no longer remain problems because we have walked away, changed the situation, or accepted that the situation is not going to change so we might as well be happy and get on with our lives. Therefore, they are no longer problems, they are decisions we have a to make.

Fear is also an illusion. We cannot touch fear and we cannot make it stand still. It is a part of our thinking patterns that are influenced by so many things, including our brains’ hard-wiring for fear as a survival tactic. Tolle cites the example of sleeping in a safe, warm bed at night. The ego-mind will start conjuring up all kinds of things to be afraid of: Financial ruin, ill health, and even dying.

Meanwhile, we are snug and secure in our warm bed creating mental strife for ourselves. There is nothing to be afraid of and we are tied in knots of fear and dread. That is why Eckhart Tolle describes fear as an illusion. And like problems, fear disappears when we understand the reality of our existence as Eternal Souls.