After witnessing the overwhelming popularity of Star Wars, director Francis Ford Coppola told George Lucas he should start his own religion. Lucas laughed him off, but Coppola may have been onto something.
In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes, as Benjamin Franklin famously wrote. Few of us find taxes exciting, but death – even just thinking about it – affects us profoundly in many different ways. This is why researchers across so many different fields study it from their perspectives.
- By Alan Cohen
December marks the beginning of whale season in Hawaii. Around this time majestic humpback whales appear in Hawaiian waters, having traversed 3,000 miles of deep blue sea from offshore Alaska. The whales stay through the winter, mating and bearing their young. To watch them cavort is a spectacle for the senses and the heart.
- By Nora Caron
Great prophets, gurus, spiritual leaders, and teachers across the world encourage us to search for the Great Light and find this mysterious thing they call "enlightenment". Many people begin their spiritual quest with one major mission: to become enlightened. But what is enlightenment and how can we truly reach it?
Children of religious parents may not be as altruistic as their parents think, according to new research from six countries around the world.
Meditation is receiving from God. Prayer is petitioning God — it is a giving out. Meditative prayers are a type of supplication to the divine. In this type of meditation, you are making a specific request to the Higher and then receiving the blessing that the divine wishes to give you.
Do we want to get well — give up our complaining and blaming, our image of a sick self, to do what we protest we can’t? Or do we love our deprivation and misery? Do we keep repeating that the world is against us, that others have all the luck? Does our poor-me status make us feel special?
I created an exercise many years ago where I ask people to write a termination letter informing the old God he is no longer needed. He has served his time, but the job is over. This can be a fun exercise as well as deeply meaningful and transformational.
A Catholic, a Jesuit and a scientist walk into a bar. What do they have to talk about? And just how do those conversations go?
What helps us to let go is that appearances change so completely. Nature is kind in that way — we can't say we haven't been warned. Most leaves wither and fade before they fall, fulfilling every bit of their purpose. My mother came to visit after she'd had two rounds of chemo for ovarian cancer. She didn't look like my mom, but she was still my mom...
Though there is some advantage in doing meditation practice now and then, the real benefits come through establishing the discipline and momentum of daily practice. This is analogous with physical training: intermittent exercise may feel good on occasion, but does little to really develop strength, health, or vitality...
- By Richard Bach
It was midnight, nearly a thousand midnights since Lucky had died, and all at once I felt his weight on my hospital bed. I had heard of it time and again, in accounts of dear animals once gone, come to touch us again. There was no body there just the belief of his weight, but I knew who it was.
Muslims have a religious duty to take action against climate change, according to a declaration released by a major group of Islamic scholars, faith leaders and politicians from 20 countries.
After more than two decades in the ashram with Maharishi, I had not experienced what I was seeking—a true connection and direct relationship with God in a personal way. Luckily, after leaving the ashram, I found a means to connect to Spirit through listening to the “still small voice” of divine guidance and wisdom within—to have direct, two-way “conversations with God.”
You don't have to like your losses, but the path to healing is through acceptance — a learned skill that comes only from doing. The more you courageously face your losses and accept what is, the more you will heal and the happier you will be.
Much of the world believes in a God who hears our prayers and sometimes gives us what we ask for and sometimes does not. Why do hoped-for events or conditions manifest in our lives if it’s not God’s “mood” that determines whether our wishes are granted? How do miracles happen? What makes dreams come true? And what is at cause when they do not?
One of my favorite things to do is to imagine a divine hand upon my head blessing me in my life and letting me know that I am cared for and loved. I do this especially when I feel insecure or stressed. Once while in the emergency room with a badly broken leg and ankle, I closed my eyes and just imagined this other-worldly hand upon my head reminding me that everything would work out alright.
- By Richard Bach
There’s an odd thing that happens to most near-death-experiencers . . . they come back from dying and they’re no longer frightened of it. Maybe the definition of Death has changed for them. It has for me! It changed because there was nothing painful, waiting for me, I didn’t even realize I had died.
- By Diana Lang
Having taught meditation for over thirty years to thousands of people, I can really say that it is the single most important thing you can ever learn in order to expedite and enrich your spiritual life. Everything you learn in school, by analysis or by study, will be exponentially deepened because you meditate.
It was one of the Greek philosophers who first said everything was made of atoms. Now we say atoms are made of positive and negative charges of electricity — pure energy. No one has seen them, but out of that which we do not see emerges that which we do see. The biggest thing in the universe is just made up out of the littlest things.
The ink is still drying on the Pope’s Encyclical Letter “Laudato Si’” or “On Care for Our Common Home,” and scholars, critics and pundits will analyze and assess it for years to come.
Many years after my tragedies were over and done with, and after I was happy beyond my dreams, the idea came to me to make mosaic artwork. A mosaic artist can take bits and pieces of trash and treasure and create something beautiful.
When you return from death or near-death, a new commandment courses throughout your veins and in rhythm with your heartbeat . . . love one another. Experiencers of every stripe, tongue, culture, religion, and mindset find themselves beginning to behave in a manner as if life itself is all about love.