Albion Publishing
spiritual & religious questions: new answers for new times
Stars in our Souls
Forty-two insights; forty-two challenges.
Richard Dell draws on a lifetime's contemplation of the world physical and the world spiritual. Here are insights into our perennial religious and spiritual questions. Here also is a language that is almost poetical, which is as it should be. How else can we hope to touch the untouchable, speak the unspeakable, except through words that suggest meanings beyond their meaning? How else can the untouchable hope to touch us, except when we have transcended mundane meaning and have somehow felt the stars that are forever beyond our reach, and yet are forever in our souls?
Richard's introduction ends in the following way:
... as the words in this book formed, the stars became a tangible metaphor for the heavens. In one sense, when we look up into the night sky we are literally looking at the heavens, at the ‘starry firmament’. In another sense, I ‘see’ God / Other - call it what you will - in everything. Every grain of dust, every cell, every plant, every creature; everything, and everyone. Certainly I ‘see’ God / Other - call it what you will - in the beautiful and seemingly endless night sky.
ALL THE BOOKS: wisdom engrained in paper. Words that challenge The Word.
Albion Publishing, through Richard Dell's books that embrace new spiritual and religious insights, encourages spiritual awakening and the spiritual quest, by promoting the meaningful, the universalist and the holistic potential in us all: as we reach towards the universal with regards to our religions, spiritual journeys, and our beliefs.
STARS IN OUR SOULS
Forty-two insights; forty-two challenges.
Richard Dell draws on a lifetime's contemplation of the world physical and the world spiritual. Here are insights into our perennial religious and spiritual questions. Here also is a language that is almost poetical, which is as it should be. How else can we hope to touch the untouchable, speak the unspeakable, except through words that suggest meanings beyond their meaning? How else can the untouchable hope to touch us, except when we have transcended mundane meaning and have somehow felt the stars that are forever beyond our reach, and yet are ...View more details...
WILD WINDOWS 1
Wild Windows is a delightful romp through many of the religious and spiritual issues that trouble us today. Tricky classroom questions and the eternal battle between pupil and teacher; deathbed conversions (and how annoying they can be!); pick-and-mixing; the triumph of wishy-washy Anglicanism; the meaning of life (in two parts!); the need for a library of more than one book; the vital question as to whether God can sleep at night; reading ‘Pride and Prejudice' yet again; following your leader by definitely not following your leader; eavesdropping on young lovers and thereby learning the mystView more details...
YOUR FLOCK FORGOES YOUR FOLD
A heartfelt lament for our present-day Christian churches that stick so rigidly to the original teachings of the church; doing so even though the great majority of our churches' flocks are no longer in the fold, are no longer reached by the old words and the old beliefs. By staying true to the original word, our churches are no longer true to their modern flock. Virgin births, resurrections, ascensions etc, no longer ‘speak' to twenty-first-century people who are beyond the fold, and yet who still believe in love and compassion and even universal justice and a benevolent universe; who ...View more details...
THE OTHER MAGUS
In this mystical novel, set during the Second World War, British Army officer Harold's destiny doesn't just belong to himself. His journey isn't just his own. Many souls are linked, as war owns them all. Told by a Cairo Magus that his destiny is upon him, it is in war torn Bosnia that Harold finds love and seeks Bosnia's ‘Other Magus'. Jamila, whom he left in Cairo, never ceases to be linked to him, as her own extraordinary and ‘inner' journey begins...View more details...
WHEN THE TEAMAN TALKS
Set in present day Cairo, 'When the Teaman Talks' is a children's novel for ages 9-12.
For the street boys of Cairo, football is more important than food. When Karim is dropped from his team, it is as if his world has ended. To get back in, and to play in the final, he needs a Manchester United shirt, and he needs revenge. But on the rooftops of Cairo, and from the street tea man, he finds another way. If victory is to be Karim's, even victory against his employer's angry son, it will not come from stealing a shirt.View more details...STARS IN OUR SOULS YOUTUBE CHANNEL
VIDEOS AND SLIDE SHOWS.
STARS IN OUR SOULS YOUTUBE CHANNEL (videos & slide shows)
All the videos and slideshows. Continually updated.
I AM US (video)
Boy meets girl is key to our problems.
Black lives matter, religion versus religion - these are linked. The social, political, religious and spiritual are all linked. The meaning in life that we seek, sense of wellbeing we crave from a healthy environment are linked and entangled. We are the key to everything. Richard Dell's introduction to I AM US, which is number 16 in his STARS IN OUR SOULS, touches on how the way we so often characterize ourselves as one race or another, and as somehow separate and disconnected from all other races, parallels the way we so often characterize ourselves as one religion or another, and again as somehow separate and disconnected from all other religions. This tendency is at once absurd and corrosive. We need to foster a sense of oneness with each other and indeed with everyone. And oneness is actually something we have experienced all our lives. We experience oneness when we fall in love. When we are in love we experience oneness with the other. It is that oneness that we must achieve in every aspect of our lives.
SPIRITUAL INSIGHTS IN A THOUSAND TWEETS 1 - 5 (slide show)
Spiritual Insights condensed into aphorisms maintaining the original twitter format of 140 characters. These first five insights cover:
1. The creation of our universe was not one single moment. It is a continuing and ongoing moment, an eternal unfolding that encompasses ourselves.
2. This new age, this threshold age, marks our coming of age. Now, we sons and daughters of God withdraw from being petitioners of God. At last we become partners with God.
3. The true artist and the mystic have much in common. For both delve deep into their inner being, and the deeper they delve – the more focussed they become within their own being – the more they touch and embrace and connect with the deep and never-ending vastness of the ALL.
4. Our past, and our people’s past, must always be with us. But to remember the past with resentment, anger and hatred, is to be forever bound to that past, and is to forever bind the future. That is true for us as individuals, and is true for us as communities and nations.
5. True free will only exists in how we react and feel about those events external to ourselves. Reality lies within, both in mystic terms, and in terms of true and intimate knowing. What goes on external to ourselves, we can to some extent affect, and to a very great extent can question. It is our inner life that is our Truth, and it is our inner life that determines how we try to affect that which is outside of ourselves.
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SPIRITUAL INSIGHTS IN A THOUSAND TWEETS 6 - 10 (slide show)
Spiritual Insights condensed into aphorisms maintaining the original twitter format of 140 characters. These first five insights cover:
6. Love God if we will. Love all of God's creation because we MUST. For all of God's creation, IS God.
7. One reason the Church grew in its early days, but is not growing now, is not because people then relied on the scriptures, but do not now. It is because the spirit of God and the needs of those earlier times required it to expand. Now, however, we are entering a ‘new time’, and this ‘new time’ is not the Church’s time. But it is always God’s time. As always we are being awakened in order to experience to the full the next phase in humanity’s progression to the stars.
8. Undisciplined thoughts affect everything. Undisciplined bodies affect little. Even beyond the realms of this physical earth, our thoughts are not lost; indeed our thoughts endure. Thus, are we accountable beyond imagining. Thus must we forever be mindful of our minds. It is only our minds that make sense of, and give meaning to, the entire universe of matter. We can taint the world we inhabit with our darker thoughts. Likewise, though we do not realise it, we can taint the higher realms, the very realms of God with our darker selves. We must always take care. We owe nothing less to ourselves, and to all of creation itself.
9. Scriptures must be reinterpreted, because humanities consciousness evolves. As we evolve and learn, so do we enter into new heights of understanding. With new heights of understanding, our scriptures must be known anew. How else, otherwise, can we be true to ourselves, and true to the infinite call of the heavens?
10. There are many paths to God, so there is just one path to God. Pentecostalism and emotional healing are not dissimilar to shamanism; whilst the various mainstream Christian churches, that can range from puritanical simplicity to high ceremony, reflect and even reproduce the varieties of worship to be found in all the religions of the world. Throughout the world, there are the quiet paths, the reflective paths, the rhythmic paths of ritual, the unadorned paths of the ascetics, the ecstatic paths, and yes, the wild paths of the shamans. When imbued with good heart, and only when imbued with good heart, they are all valid paths leading ultimately to God. There are many paths to God, so there is just one path to God.
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SPIRITUAL INSIGHTS IN A THOUSAND TWEETS 11 - 15 (slide show)
Spiritual Insights condensed into aphorisms maintaining the original twitter format of 140 characters. These first five insights cover:
11. This is a key question. Supposing it could be shown without a shadow of a doubt that the Bible told us to hate people and commit murder. Would we, as the people we are today, obey? If not, then clearly we must accept that there is an inner sense of what is right that transcends the Bible and indeed, that transcends all scriptures. This is not to suggest that any of the world’s religious scriptures do so require us to hate and murder – though they can come pretty close – instead, it is to show that when all is said and done, our own sense of what is right and proper trumps the world’s scriptures: every time.
12. Eating food is not a moral issue. How our eating affects others, who need to eat, is. That is inescapable, and not only in terms of how our eating might rob others of the chance to eat; but also, as we are so aware these days, in terms of how our food production can damage the environmental integrity of our planet. Likewise, sex is not a moral issue. How we handle our relationships, is. We are linked with everything and everyone. There is no escaping that. And there is no escaping the fact that there will invariably be people to whom we are beholden. So long as we have any sort of moral compass, and so long as we see ourselves as connected to others, then sex is rarely uncomplicated.
13. A key question for every Christian since the beginning of the Christian Era, is whether he or she would recognise Christ at the Second Coming. Well, here is something that we need to accept, uncomfortable though it might be. The Second Coming is upon us NOW. Christ is here, working through all those souls who see religion as an inner path or journey that embraces inclusivity with all such paths, regardless of detail, dogma, and doctrine. The remarkable growth of new spiritual thinking, of religious and spiritual pilgrims at last beginning to recognise the validity of other ways, is the clear manifestation of Christ being once again in our presence. This is a Second Coming Christ who is not One, but who is Everyone.
14. So many of our overly utilitarian buildings are a true reflection of our present view of ourselves. All that matters with so many of these buildings is that our physical needs are met. The spirit is of no consequence. This might appear to be an inconsequential point. But it most certainly is not. Our buildings, our townscapes, our various environments, invariably reflect us, reflect what we are, and perhaps more importantly reflect what we think we are, what we feel about ourselves. We are not worthless and inconsequential, yet too often the environments that we create for ourselves would suggest that we are. We need to understand that we cannot hope to become spiritually fulfilled within ourselves, and just as importantly spiritually at peace with each other, until the buildings we create, and the towns and cities we live in, and the rural locations we breathe in, reflect that harmony and spirit. Only then might they reflect what we ourselves, at our best, can be.
15. The prophets of Israel continually made the point that if the people of Israel lived by the Law, in other words, in their terms lived ethically, then they would prosper under God. If they did not, then there would ultimately be calamity. When it comes to right thinking and right acting, this had to be so, because of the karma that would inevitably be generated if the thinking and acting was not ‘right’. Now we are in the same situation as was ancient Israel on so many occasions. We, here and now, so often do not behave ethically. Oh, we do not always break the law, but we always hear people boasting about how they pulled off this deal or other by in some way ‘shafting’ their opponents. So often now we do not live honourably. Hence the decline of our nations. Until we restore honour and ethics to our everyday dealings, we shall not come out of our present-day misfortunes. In the 19th century there were undoubtedly unscrupulous people, but nonetheless people were expected to be honourable, and indeed there was a code of ethics that most people tried to operate by. Deals were made, but when made, one did not go back on one’s word. That was the code, even if it was not always adhered to. Do we have any sort of underlying code of ethics these days?
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SPIRITUAL INSIGHTS IN A THOUSAND TWEETS 16 - 20 (slide show)
Spiritual Insights condensed into aphorisms maintaining the original twitter format of 140 characters. These first five insights cover:
16. It is not just the physical environment that has to be redressed. It is the ethical as well. The physical environment is the world in which we live and upon which we depend. The ethical arena is actually us ourselves. At the same time, everything we do and feel and think, is a reflection of ourselves, and in a poignantly meaningful way, is ourselves. When we look upon the wasted areas of our world, be they our blighted urban landscapes, or our scarred and despoiled wildernesses, we are looking at ourselves. When the abuser stares into the frightened and wrecked eyes of the abused, he or she is looking at him or herself. So is it the case with the world that we live in and have created. When we gaze at polluted streams, at razed forests, at denatured pastures, at … We gaze upon the truth about ourselves.
17. The fundamentalist notion that only Christianity is correct, is a latter-day aspect of the notion that only the white European’s culture etc is any good. It is a lingering manifestation of that corrosive superiority complex that has contaminated the world for so long. And this is not unique to the Western world. It is a notion that at various times has infected nearly all the various peoples of our planet. Perhaps it is responsible for most of our ills. Certainly it is an attitude that our religions, be they of the west or the east, the south or the north, must overcome within themselves. Likewise all our various races and all our various colours of our skins.
18. Whether astrology works or not, and I suspect that it is all far more complicated than astrologers would have it, and is intimately linked with the ONENESS of the ALL, which transcends our human based mathematics, geometry and logic. Our present being and our immediate and ultimate destinies are connected with everything, are in fact in a real, profound and universal sense EVERYTHING. Everything is connected and so everything affects everything else to a greater or lesser degree. At the same time we must also take into account all the rhythms of Gaia, of the planet that is our home. Even if our planet Earth was mere dead geology, we will only thrive on it when we live as if it really is alive and in a real sense conscious. It is only a small step to realising that it is indeed alive and conscious and deeply aware of us and what we do to each other and what we do to our ‘it’ to Gaia, to our Mother Earth.
19. What is the difference between trusting a psychic about the world, and trusting a scientist who tells us what weird flickers on a monitor screen mean? One key difference is that what the scientist does is repeatable and can be corroborated by others. But there is an important point that can be made here, and that is – leaving aside the psychic, but focussing instead on the mystic – we can see that both the mystic and the physicist are delving deep into the realms of mystery and indeed of uncertainty: the mystic delving into the realms of mind, the physicist into the realms of matter. Both touch all but unimaginable dimensions.
20. The new ways of spirituality can in one sense mean an end to those profound feelings of religious guilt that can afflict so many. In other words, the artificial doctrinal guilt that religions so often imposed on their adherents can be dissipated in moments, as those adherents become free of the stranglehold of doctrine and theology. But that does not mean that the new ways of spirituality negate all guilt. The key to the new ways of spirituality is that there is embedded in our consciousness and our souls the profound sense of spiritual and actual responsibility. We are responsible for what we think, and for what we do and thereby for what we are. We may be free of an artificial guilt imposed from outside of us, but because the new way recognises our responsibility, that responsibility we thereby have for ourselves and for each other, and for the whole of the world around us, social and environmental, becomes immense. When we get things wrong, as indeed we shall, then there might be some other word for it, but guilt will still play its part.
SPIRITUAL INSIGHTS IN A THOUSAND TWEETS 21 - 25 (slide show)
Spiritual Insights condensed into aphorisms maintaining the original twitter format of 140 characters. These first five insights cover:
21. I heal when I know I’m not a jumble of unconnected parts, but am an interconnected whole. The world heals when we embrace its connectedness. The holistic approach is a healing process in all sorts of ways; ways that can transcend its customary focus on our personal physical and mental wellbeing. The holistic approach which instinctively sees the parts that make up a whole as being intimately connected, will need to be focussed on our social and political arenas if we are to make our societies properly functional, and if we are to bring our societies into a state of ‘good health’ where each and every one of us is seen as a valuable and integral part of the whole. We are all connected. We are all part of the Oneness that characterises a vibrant and healthy society. That does not mean that we will thereby lose our individuality. It means, that we must recognise that we can only achieve true individuality for ourselves and each other when we recognise that we are part of the whole and have responsibilities to everyone else who makes up that whole with us. Only then can we bring about a healing of the social and intellectual fragmentation of Western society, and indeed of all societies, that has been so extraordinary in modern times, yet also so damaging.
22. To heal all nations, we must embrace their ONENESS. To be healed, all nations must rejoice in our uniqueness: our symbiotic entanglement.
23. I am my faith; I am all faiths. I am my country; I am all countries. But in the end, I am me. In the end, I am responsible.
24. To heal ourselves and our nations, we must accept this: that our personal and collective symptoms are symbols. Symbols to be interpreted. Symptoms, be they medical, social or political, are symbols of underlying and fundamental truths about ourselves. Symptoms that are symbols are the keys to ourselves. Our task, as always, is to unravel their meaning, to get into the truth that they are displaying for us. This is why symbols are so important. What we read in a good novel may not be true – Darcy and Lizzie Bennet, for example never existed – but that good novel will be deep-set with truths. As we follow the adventures of the made-up Mr Darcy and Miss Elizabeth Bennet we learn something that is universally true about relationships, betrayals, vanities etc. So is it also is with our dreams, or what we might sense in our meditations. A good novel, and a seemingly significant dream will require investigation, will require unravelling. We will always need to go deep, and that process alone will be part of the voyage of discovery that leads ultimately to ourselves, that leads ultimately to truths about ourselves. Likewise, we are called upon to go deep into the meaning of the symptoms – medical, social or political – that can afflict us. What are they hiding? And more interestingly, what are they saying?
25. Body mind and spirit when ONE, is ourselves made whole, ourselves made complete. The quest for the Grail is within; the Holy Grail is US. Body, Mind and Spirit. We too easily and readily function in just the one plain. We sometimes learn that body and mind are linked. We sometimes manage to recognise that when linked, when seen as two aspects of ourselves, connected and entangled, body and mind as ONE can raise us to new and even unimaginable heights of achievement and awareness. It takes effort. It takes concentration. It pays. Body, mind and spirit as ONE, requires of us even greater effort, even greater depths and heights of concentration. But those depths and those heights can be beyond measure, if we can achieve them. Body and mind as ONE is our first sacred haven on our eternal quest to God, to ourselves, to everything. Body and Mind and Spirit as ONE transcends itself. Body and Mind and Spirit as one, is ONENESS, is us at last ONE with the ALL.
SPIRITUAL INSIGHTS IN A THOUSAND TWEETS 26 - 30 (slide show)
Spiritual Insights condensed into aphorisms maintaining the original twitter format of 140 characters. These first five insights cover:
26. The reason why psychics and dowsers, and others in similar fields – leaving aside charlatans – do not always get the sort of consistent results that science invariably requires of them, is because just as with physicists when working deep in the strange realities of quantum mechanics, they are working at the extremes of physical reality. Consequently, three things affect what they are attempting:
1. the state of the moment. Probing along the very edge of the physical, everything is affected by the quality – not just the quantities involved – of the moment – as Jung has pointed out.
2. The state of the observer – that is the state of the medium or dowser. These practitioners – leaving aside charlatans – are all at different stages in terms of their abilities and indeed of their moral / ethical compass.
3. They are also affected by the moment itself. The observer, in relativity and quantum physics always affects the observed. This is true in matters of the mind and the soul. But also, we must understand that when it comes to such as psychics and dowsers, the practitioners themselves are also affected by the moment and by the state of that they are observing. Reality shifts, and sensitivity to those shifting realities will be in continual flux, will be forever in an all but unpredictable flow.
27. What must, and hopefully will, characterize our new times is our awareness of our universal connectedness. The holistic approach to medicine; to our own selves as being body, mind and spirit – three in ONE – ; and to our intrinsic connection with our planet and the entirety of its flora and fauna, will inevitably and seamlessly bring us to a rational and all-encompassing, utterly inclusive, world view, opening up for us multi-faceted levels and degrees of consciousness. Conscious of our connectedness, we will again both inevitably and seamlessly embrace responsibility for ourselves and how we perceive ourselves, and for our world and how we perceive our world, and of course for each other, and how we perceive, appreciate and seek to cherish each other.28. If If our planet generates ley lines of interconnected energy flows, as some tell us it does; much as our bodies, some say, are connected by acupuncture flows of energy lines, then everything we do to our planet, the roads we carve into the landscape, the buildings we erect, and of course the mines, both deep and open cast, that we gouge out of the rock and earth, will have inevitable deleterious consequences for us all. We are all connected to the ALL. We live and breathe with our planet’s living and rhythmic breathing. We are CONNECTED. We are ourselves, and we are each other, and we are the environment in which we function. Gouge out rock and earth, and we gouge out something within ourselves.
On the other hand, if ley lines do not exist, we cannot, nonetheless, allow ourselves to be cavalier and dismissive with regards to what we do to our planet. We are CONNECTED. We are ourselves, and we are each other, and we are the environment in which we function. Gouge out rock and earth, and we gouge out something within ourselves. We also must then live and breathe, must necessarily resonate with, our planet’s wound. We can never be separate from what we have done, and what we do, and what we will do.
29. One aspect of the British Arthurian legends, that at times lies as dormant and hidden as the Grail itself, is the belief that Arthur and his knights are asleep – the Welsh hills are the favoured locations for their slumber – and that one day they will awake, or be awakened, and shall return to redeem and restore Albion. The ‘Once and Future King’? Such legends and myths exist around the world. They are all but embedded in the human psyche. Even Jesus Christ, we are told, will return in a Second Coming to redeem His people. The truth may well be found in these stories, though with a nuance that makes them profound beyond their mere telling. It is not the Kings and knights of yore, it is not the messiahs and avatars, who will return. These leaders and prophets are in fact the exoteric or outer personification of something deeper and ultimately more powerful. So what is the truth that hides in these legends and stories? It is that in the cosmic rhythm of eternal humanity’s continuing pilgrimage, and in the rhythmic breathing of our planet’s own life and story, and in the eternal and infinite unfolding of the creation itself, there run hidden streams of truth and wisdom, that periodically sink beneath the surface of our awareness, but which periodically, at times that are determined by the undulating rhythm of the ALL and also by our readiness to understand and gain by it, these streams of truth and wisdom emerge into the light of day and into the light of our being; sometimes through the teaching and very existence of some great soul, and sometimes through our own collective readiness to absorb and proclaim and most importantly prosper from the awareness and wisdom that will suddenly touch us all, and just as suddenly change the future direction of our progress for the future, until those streams vanish once again, and then at some future time enter our souls yet again, for the next step in humanity’s all but endless journey to the stars and to God. The keys to the next opening of our souls do indeed lie asleep in the hills.
30. Science is very good at telling us what happens. It is not able to tell us why something happens. It does seem to tell us ‘why’, but it doesn’t. It’s ‘why’ is invariably another, admittedly deeper level of ‘what’. So science will tell us that after a number of observations, it can declare that gasses rise when they heat up. They then investigated why that should be so. Their answer, however, was another ‘what’. They investigated and ultimately they found that the molecules that constituted the gas became excited as they were warmed, and so began to occupy a greater space, thereby lowering their weight to mass, and thereby rising relative to other gases that remained at a constant temperature. This is, of course, another ‘what’.
This does of course beg the question as to what a true ‘why’ would look like. It is indeed possible that all our knowledge and understanding can be reduced down to a multitude of ‘whats’. It is possible, but I cannot help feeling that if we accept that, then we are missing something vital. Many years ago, during my headmaster / headteacher / school principal days, I was eating lunch in our school dining room, half listening to a conversation between our head of science and an eight-year-old boy. They were discussing gravity. I heard the head of science saying that gravity was a consequence of the space-time continuum. At this point I looked up and said that that was indeed what science told us what happens, but why does it happen. Without missing a beat, the eight-year-old looked at me and said, ‘well Mr Dell, that’s when science ends and your Monday morning assemblies begin.
SPIRITUAL INSIGHTS IN A THOUSAND TWEETS 31 - 35 (slide show)
Spiritual Insights condensed into aphorisms maintaining the original twitter format of 140 characters. These first five insights cover:
31.
When we pray, we are in a sense talking to God. When we meditate, we might say that we are in essence listening to God. In reality, of course, the situation is far from being such a binary one.
In praying – in talking – we are undoubtedly engaged, undoubtedly aware. Even at its most basic level we can claim that we are deep in a sort of spiritual therapy, talking to a silent listener whom we know / believe understands us and cares for us. In that light, prayer is undoubtedly therapeutic. In that light, within the silence of the ‘unknown’ listener we can find answers. Whether they be answers from deep within ourselves, or answers from deep within the Silence of God, hardly matters.
In meditation – in listening – we are also undoubtedly engaged, undoubtedly aware. Now, though, the silent listener is ourselves, and within our silence we can reach equally deep and equally therapeutic understanding. Do we touch the infinite universe beyond ourselves? Or is the infinite universe forever within us? It hardly matters.
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Thesis, antithesis, synthesis. There is the given situation – thesis – which, from within its own contradictions can result in a reaction in a vaguely, sometimes violently, opposite direction -antithesis – which can ultimately result in a ‘blending’ of the two resulting in a restored equilibrium – synthesis – which provides a new and for a time sustainable way forward – a new thesis.
It is possible to see this happening with regards to our own soul journeys, if we take into account the ‘mechanism,’ of reincarnation – which may or may not be true, but which makes spiritual and practical sense to me. It might be said that between incarnations we are in a state of a newly forged ‘thesis – forged from the trials, tribulations and experiences of all our previous incarnations. But in order to progress spiritually we must be tested, we must, it is tempting to say be taken into the fire of a new incarnation, in which we shall experience the sometimes gentle, sometimes excessive trials and tribulations of the antithesis. It is only through that testing that we can forge for ourselves newer and higher levels of strength and understanding; it is only through that testing that we can forge for ourselves newer and higher soul synthesise – incarnation after incarnation until the physical plane has nothing more it can teach us, until we are at last One with whom we always should have been, and One with the ALL, One with GOD.
33.
We know that war must be avoided. We probably recognise that it is not necessarily the case that war should be avoided at all costs. One of the tragedies of human existence is that sometimes the alternative to going to war is more dangerous, or more heinous, than the war itself. Within war, we can be led into perpetrating dreadful acts. Within war, we can be tested in ways we never would have been tested if there had been no war. Within war we can find ourselves being tested to the point of extreme bravery and extraordinary nobility. War is life writ larger and more fearsome than most of us would ever want. We can incur considerable karma when at war. We can also be ‘paying off’ karma when at war. Also, and we forget this at our peril, the events and deeds that lead us to war are rarely the prime movers – the essential causes – of war. War that can lead us into heightened bouts of karmic shifting, is itself the karmic consequence of past, and sometimes even long-forgotten, acts and thoughts.34.
Within Christianity, we have, for all but two thousand years, been bound to some extent by the story of St Thomas the doubter. After Thomas put his hands in Christ’s wounds, Christ said ‘have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.’ With these words, faith was raised onto its pedestal and, as a consequence, faith became the litmus test of the true believer. But we need to note that Christ did not condemn Thomas. We need to note that Thomas was not thrown into the abyss. And we need to note that scepticism is not a ‘sin’. We also need to note that blind faith can never be a spiritual virtue, and that the sceptic who seeks actually does have faith: faith that there is something to seek. Most important of all, we need to be aware that it is not faith or belief that is spiritually important; it is how we conduct ourselves, how we behave and think, how we care for others and for our world (‘we shall know them by their fruits’ Matthew 7:16). Must we condemn the most virtuous possible Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Taoists, atheists etc etc, because they do not have the sort of faith that some Christians might claim as being essential for salvation? We might also want to note that the doubting Thomases of our world have probably done more for us than those who act by faith alone.
35.
There can be no one moment of ‘surrender’ to God. There can be that initiating, exploratory moment of surrender to the path, to the dream, but that can only be the beginning of our journey to God, not the end. In fact, once on the path we do not put our struggles behind us, we in fact face greater struggles, of greater import. We face the tempering and the refining of our inner spirit. The path is a quest, of Grail-like proportions. The path is steep and tortuous. Our adversaries are terrible and are entirely of our own making. We face truths with regards to ourselves, and those are the truths most horrible to contemplate. But the path that is constituted by our surrender to God is the only path that does not lead endlessly to nowhere. It is a path with a destination of wonder that we all shall one day take. Name God how we will. The path is there for us all. The Quest is for us all. God has no name, but God is the ONENESS that we are always part of and shall one day know.
SPIRITUAL INSIGHTS IN A THOUSAND TWEETS 36 - 40 (slide show)
Spiritual Insights condensed into aphorisms maintaining the original twitter format of 140 characters. These first five insights cover:
36.
The scientific and philosophical revolution that occurred around the 16th and 17th centuries, saw the triumph of the principle of the first cause, or efficient causality. In other words explanations regarding how the world worked and indeed what the world was, were essentially grounded on the principle that ‘D’ was caused by a prior event ‘C’, and that both ‘D’ and ‘C’ could ultimately be explained by prior event ‘B’ and so on. This was, without a doubt, a powerful and profound insight, that has led to a previously unimaginable awareness of how things work, and of course has led to our scientific and technological progress that has transformed the world and indeed for many people has transformed lives for the better. It is possible, however, that we are nearing a tipping point in which we become aware that although efficient causality is a crucial factor in the universe and indeed in our lives, it does not explain everything about us and our world. So long as we see some sort of purpose in what we do, in other words that not all that we do can be explained through efficient causality, or more to the point through machine-like mechanisms, then suddenly we begin to grasp something fundamental about ourselves, and indeed about the very world and universe in which we live. The natural world, which must be seen as including ourselves, may no longer be viewed as belonging to the realms of magic, but it and we have to be viewed as being ‘magical’. It is not difficult for us to accept that the animal kingdom – which includes us – is sentient, is conscious, is aware and often self-aware. As we delve ever deeper into the so-called mechanisms of the vegetable kingdom, it is not even that difficult for us to sense some sort of consciousness in plants and fungi. Sentience and purpose – in philosophical speak that is teleological processes; in other words the concept of the final cause in what happens rather than just the efficient cause in philosophy speak – not only offers insights into ourselves and our world and how we and all of it works, but it also points us to the higher purpose of us and our world. If we and our world are essentially mechanistic, then there is no purpose. But if we and the world in which we live are as much moved by purpose as we are by what happens to us, and if we can accept that and be aware of that, then we stand at last upon the threshold, the tipping point, of a greater awareness of what we and all of creation is. Our very sentience is the key. Our purpose is to become mindful of, and embrace, and become ONE with the sentience of everything, the sentience of the ALL.
37.
Having a monarch as head of state might well appear anachronistic in our modern world. But the reason why it does appear anachronistic, even blatantly so, throws a spotlight on something about our modern world that is profoundly out of kilter with what our world should be. Monarchy appears so anachronistic because our modern world, our modern nation-state, the way we do things in our modern world, is essentially materialistic and mechanistic. Clearly monarchy can have no place in our modern world if that monarchy is about power and privilege, as so often in the past it was. The monarchy that actually can have a place in our modern world is that monarchy that manages to represent the spiritual aspect of a people, a spiritual aspect that is too often lacking in our modern times. The overly materialistic and mechanistic societies that we have created are ill fitted to meet the needs of a people that might overtly respond to the materialistic and mechanistic, but which in its hearts senses an unease, a profound loss, even an existential emptiness. We as people need to recognise that loss in ourselves, and our monarchies need to recognise that it is that spiritual need that they must relate to and respond to.
It is possible to see this happening with regards to our own soul journeys, if we take into account the ‘mechanism,’ of reincarnation – which may or may not be true, but which makes spiritual and practical sense to me. It might be said that between incarnations we are in a state of a newly forged ‘thesis – forged from the trials, tribulations and experiences of all our previous incarnations. But in order to progress spiritually we must be tested, we must, it is tempting to say be taken into the fire of a new incarnation, in which we shall experience the sometimes gentle, sometimes excessive trials and tribulations of the antithesis. It is only through that testing that we can forge for ourselves newer and higher levels of strength and understanding; it is only through that testing that we can forge for ourselves newer and higher soul synthesise – incarnation after incarnation until the physical plane has nothing more it can teach us, until we are at last One with whom we always should have been, and One with the ALL, One with GOD.
38.
The scientific revolution of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, and of course subsequently, led to an undermining of long held religious beliefs, as the scientific methodology and its extraordinary consequences in terms of understanding our world and then manipulating our world through scientifically based technologies, seemed to make a mockery of long-held and long-cherished religious beliefs such as communion wine actually turning into Christ’s blood, or heaven being a real place that existed just above the clouds, and hell being a real place somewhere deep underground. Accidents were invariably seen as divine retribution. Pagan superstitions were still rife. Complementing the scientific revolution was the protestant revolution. With the old certainties gone, faith and trust were invariably placed in the ‘so-called’ Word of God. The great swathe of traditional church teachings, that were not grounded in the Word of the Bible, even though they might actually have touched on deep spiritual truths, were swept away. There was only the Word. The Word was the Truth, regardless of whether it actually was true, and truths that were not contained in the Word were seen as irrelevant at best and at worst as quite simply untrue. Perhaps it was only with the 18th Century Romantic movement, itself a reaction to soulless science and a stifling Word, that spiritually inclined ‘adventurers’ began to look for spiritual inspiration in the experience of nature rather than in the dissection of nature or the dissection of the Word. An overly mechanistic view of the universe, linked with an overly literal view of the divine, gradually began to give way to an appreciation of a universe that was in some way sentient and thereby actually more human.
39.
The Heart of the Cosmos is Love. For love is the expression of absolute and unconditional ONENESS. The heart of ourselves, is the heart. And the heart is love. We are not always ONE with our own being, but to be ONE with our own being is a vital step in our journey into the heavens. We can walk no profound steps if we cannot love ourselves. Only when we love ourselves, only when we fully experience the heart centre of ourselves, can we at last learn to love the extraordinary and love-generated and love-suffused world and universe in which we dwell. And when, at last, we love ourselves and our love-generated and love-suffused world and universe in which we dwell, can we be ONE with the ALL, ONE with God, complete and the heart centre of ALL.
40.
It is only through the struggles of being tested that we can make spiritual progress. The quest for the Grail, the Holy Path to God is not an analytic progression, it is not obtained through the learning of our mind. The Grail Quest, the Pathway to God, the entering into communion with the ALL of Creation which is then communion with God, is an existential happening, it is a transcendence of mere mind and thought and logic and understanding. To be ONE with the ALL is to enter the realms of wonder and bliss and compassion and empathy etc. which forever exist beyond any words. This learning is of the soul and of the spirit and is existential to the utmost degree. These learnings must be EXPERIENCED, and only through descent into the realms of matter, into the domains of gravity, into the polarities of thesis, antithesis, synthesis, the polarities of struggle, can we experience in the very guts and bowels of our souls the lessons we must duly learn. They MUST be learnt, for only then can we duly give of ourselves to others. And only then can we know God and be ONE with God.
SPIRITUAL INSIGHTS IN A THOUSAND TWEETS 41 - 45 (slide show)
Spiritual Insights condensed into aphorisms maintaining the original twitter format of 140 characters. These first five insights cover:
41.
A key question is this. Why should we give, whether of ourselves or of things we might possess, when it is apparently more to our advantage to take? After all, we would appear to gain so much by taking, and in a real sense actually lose so much by ‘indulging’ in giving. Certainly there can be advantage in giving when we are linked with others in some sort of mutual arrangement. But what of altruistic giving. Must it always be to some extent sacrificial? There is an answer to this, and it is a profound one. Perhaps the words ‘advantage’ and ‘disadvantage’ do not sit easily with the concept of altruistic giving, but rather we should consider the actual effects – the spiritual effects – of either taking or giving. When we take in any sort of selfish or self-serving way, we actually close ourselves down, close ourselves up, cut ourselves off from others, and from our own spiritual and true selves. When we give altruistically, we instead open ourselves up, open up our souls. In fact, when we selfishly take, we darken ourselves and diminish ourselves. When we give in any sort of altruistic way we open ourselves up to spiritual nourishment and growth. Giving is an explosion of energy. Taking is an implosion of energy. There might even be cases when individuals can be so addicted and dedicated to taking that they become spiritual ‘blackholes’. To give, on the other hand, is to be a radiant sun.
There is no obvious answer to this. But in actual fact, there is a profound reason. When we give ourselves, we open out our souls and auras, and by giving we actually grow. When we are selfish, we are actually closing in on ourselves. It is a difference between explosions and implosion. I suppose those people who are powerful in terms of evil are like black holes.
42.
The story of humanity is primarily the story of the evolution of our consciousness, of the evolution of our mind and thereby of our reasoning powers; and also, though we may not always realise it, the evolution of our faculties for empathy and intuition. We have invariably used the development of our powers of reason to further ourselves in terms of our ability to survive and be comfortable. Sadly, we have also employed those reasoning powers to achieve dominance over other reasoning threats to ourselves, as well of course dominance over the Earth and all the creatures of the Earth. Genesis I:26 and beyond is prescient when it says: ‘And God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.” And it was so. And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, a sixth day.’ But this was written at a time when the seeds of our reasoning powers had not yet born fruit. However, as the centuries have passed, so have our powers so increased, indeed become so powerful, that we can no longer afford to assume that we have unbridled dominion over the very Earth that nurtures us and harbours us. If we are to fulfil the true destiny of our awakening powers, we must emphasis to a much greater degree our power of empathy and intuition. Our destiny is to cherish, nurture and indeed harbour our planet and all its creatures thereof as once our planet cherished and nurtured and harboured us. Unless we can break through into a new evolutionary level of consciousness, we might have little evolution left for us to enjoy and use.
43.
Between the wars, when hyperinflation wracked Germany, the Berlin government was congratulated on its ability to speedily print higher and higher denominations of banknotes. To some extent they were forced into this. No-one chose for there to be such a catastrophic devaluation of the currency. But there was certainly nothing new in praise being heaped on people or organisations that could fashion such extreme achievements. And there is certainly nothing wrong in having ambitions to achieve new ‘heights’ and in actually achieving those new heights. But that being said, we do need to take stock of some of our ambitions and endeavours. It is laudable to run faster without the aid of performance enhancing drugs; laudable too to create a plane that can fly faster and higher than any other; or for that matter a car or train that can travel faster than any other. But what of our everyday lives? Is it really sensible to create trains that go fast, only to create new trains that go faster and so on? Do we need to motor along a highway at seventy, eighty or a hundred miles an hour, when it is probably safer and more relaxing and more environmentally appropriate to travel at some slower speed? Is an increasingly hectic world a boon for humanity? Is a noisier world to our advantage? Speeds and size and noise seem to dominate our national and world agendas. We have certainly improved when it comes to safety, but there seems to be very little room these days for matters such as beauty or elegance. Where are we in this brave new world we are creating?
44.A key question is this. Why should we give, whether of ourselves or of things we might possess, when it is apparently more to our advantage to take? After all, we would appear to gain so much by taking, and in a real sense actually lose so much by ‘indulging’ in giving. Certainly there can be advantage in giving when we are linked with others in some sort of mutual arrangement. But what of altruistic giving. Must it always be to some extent sacrificial? There is an answer to this, and it is a profound one. Perhaps the words ‘advantage’ and ‘disadvantage’ do not sit easily with the concept of altruistic giving, but rather we should consider the actual effects – the spiritual effects – of either taking or giving. When we take in any sort of selfish or self-serving way, we actually close ourselves down, close ourselves up, cut ourselves off from others, and from our own spiritual and true selves. When we give altruistically, we instead open ourselves up, open up our souls. In fact, when we selfishly take, we darken ourselves and diminish ourselves. When we give in any sort of altruistic way we open ourselves up to spiritual nourishment and growth. Giving is an explosion of energy. Taking is an implosion of energy. There might even be cases when individuals can be so addicted and dedicated to taking that they become spiritual ‘blackholes’. To give, on the other hand, is to be a radiant sun.
There is no obvious answer to this. But in actual fact, there is a profound reason. When we give ourselves, we open out our souls and auras, and by giving we actually grow. When we are selfish, we are actually closing in on ourselves. It is a difference between explosions and implosion. I suppose those people who are powerful in terms of evil are like black holes.
45.
Schisms are the great crises of the church. Schisms lead to schisms that become the great crises of the churches. In Christianity alone we have seen numerous breakups, as the once all but monolithic Church split between east and west – between Constantinople and Rome – and leaving aside other minor breaks, we eventually saw the split in the west between Rome and Lutheranism, then Luther’s Protestantism splitting into many different factions, and the Roman Church then splitting off the Anglican persuasion. These are the great schisms. There have been many minor ones. Many evangelical churches have broken into house churches, which themselves have invariably broken into ‘rival’ factions or groups. Each split is invariably seen as a crisis for the ‘mother’ group. But as the churches fracture, two possibilities arise. The first is that co-religionists, even though adhering to rival factions, might begin to release that the details of their beliefs are unimportant compared to how they actually live their lives in terms of the spiritual and moral teachings of Jesus the ultimate founder of their religion. Too often it is doctrine – the understanding of what various overly charged terms mean that lead to splits. It is rare for split to occur over issues of morality and ethics and life-styles. The second possibility that might at last arise is that the breaking of the churches, at one level, though not at the most important level of moral and ethical behaviour, diminishes the churches in term of their power. The greatest threat to all religions organisations is not the threat of rival teachings, or rival interpretations of teachings, it is the threat of the what the possession of power can do to the holders of power. Power does invariably corrupt, does invariably lead the adherents of a church away from the true core of Christ’s teach which had absolutely nothing to do with pomp and circumstance and everything to do with humility and love and compassion. Even a church of great pomp and circumstance and wealth can find its true or original hearty when shaken by schisms of its own making.
FASTER BIGGER BETTER (video)
A film-illustrated reading by Richard Dell of his poem FASTER, BIGGER, BETTER: nothing necessarily better. This is No. 33 in his book STARS IN OUR SOULS: a new look at our perennial religious and spiritual questions.
Everything faster, everything bigger, nothing necessarily better.
That has become the 'poisoned-chalice' mantra of our modern world. This poem, which is number 33 in Richard Dell's STARS IN OUR SOULS, is not just a description of where we are now. It is also a warning. The corona virus pandemic is our chance to emerge from the other side of the pandemic and readjust our lives and thereby our world. But will we?
Between the wars, when hyperinflation wracked Germany, the Berlin government was congratulated on its ability to speedily print higher and higher denominations of banknotes. To some extent they were forced into this. No-one chose for there to be such a catastrophic devaluation of the currency. But there was certainly nothing new in praise being heaped on people or organisations that could fashion such extreme achievements. And there is certainly nothing wrong in having ambitions to achieve new ‘heights’ and in actually achieving those new heights. But that being said, we do need to take stock of some of our ambitions and endeavours. It is laudable to run faster without the aid of performance enhancing drugs; laudable too to create a plane that can fly faster and higher than any other; or for that matter a car or train that can travel faster than any other. But what of our everyday lives? Is it really sensible to create trains that go fast, only to create new trains that go faster and so on? Do we need to motor along a highway at seventy, eighty or a hundred miles an hour, when it is probably safer and more relaxing and more environmentally appropriate to travel at some slower speed? Is an increasingly hectic world a boon for humanity? Is a noisier world to our advantage? Speeds and size and noise seem to dominate our national and world agendas. We have certainly improved when it comes to safety, but there seems to be very little room these days for matters such as beauty or elegance. Where are we in this brave new world we are creating?
In Richard Dell’s ‘STARS IN OUR SOULS’, poem 33 addresses this very point:
33
FASTER, BIGGER, BETTER
Everything faster, everything bigger; nothing necessarily better.Everything to be loud.
Everything to be allowed.
Everything to be fast.
Everything to avoid being last.
Everything beyond compare.
Everything beyond repair.
Noise upon noise.
Hype upon hype.
This better than that.
That better than this.
Me better than you.
Us better than them.You race me.
I’ll race you.
We’ll race each other,
We’ll race the other.
The race to be bigger.
The race to be faster.
The race to be louder.
The race to be zanier.
The race to be cleverer,
The race to be racier.The race against time:
***
Before time runs out.SPIRITUAL INSIGHTS IN A THOUSAND TWEETS 46-50 (slide show)
Spiritual Insights condensed into aphorisms maintaining the original twitter format of 140 characters. The next five insights cover:
46. The spiritual quest is driven by self. At the door that guards the quest’s end, self must be transcended. The door’s key is always selfless love for ALL.
The old myths give clear signals about the path of test and ordeal towards initiation and ultimate spiritual fulfilment. The importance of Christ is that he showed that at the heart of this process, alongside bravery and virtue etc. is selfless love. Christ demonstrated through His crucifixion, the key, the final key, to the mysteries. We need the ancient virtues as we set out on our quest, but the final door, the final test can only be opened or won when the whole purpose of the quest is turned in on itself, when the pursuit almost becomes meaningless as the seeker stands at the door and no longer desires to pass, other than through his or her selfless love for all creation, as something done for them alone. The original purposes and desires of the seeker are necessarily lost at the very moment of triumph. But it is in that moment of loss, invariably felt as a soul-shattering and cataclysmic tragedy, that everything is gained.
47. Adherents to so many of our world’s faiths see part of their duty being the proselytising of their faith. Such was the underlying motivation underpinning all the great missionary drives. To teach the faith, to proclaim the faith, to bring new adherents into the faith, was seen as a fundamental duty by so many. Certainly, it was believed by such missionaries that those they hoped to convert would languish spiritually, and indeed would be deprived of eternal salvation unless they were brought into the faith. Certainly, also, it was the case that huge numbers of ‘non-believers’ were drawn into faiths such as Christianity and Islam by both prodigious efforts on the part of missionaries, and also of course by the prodigious wielding of a prodigious number of swords. In our present times, many adherents of the world’s faith believe that their particular religions need to rediscover their missionary, even messianic, zeal. However, a point that needs to be understood, is that the earlier waves of missionary activity, although visibly wielded by the missionaries or the bearers of swords, were merely reflecting the hidden, even occult, divine energies of the time. Our present time may well be responding to such divine but hidden energies in new ways. The ways of God are not for us to entirely understand. We are all caught in a blessed unfolding of the Divine itself. ‘We cannot enter the same river twice’. We can re-enter the flow of Diving unfoldment, but what it should be called, and where it might take us, is beyond our knowing. ‘Trust in the Lord’.
48. The new faiths of around one and two millennia ago, along with the extraordinary spiritual and religious impetus of the Axial Age between the eighth and the third centuries BCE saw profound impulses of thinking that eased humanity away from an apparent need to propitiate seemingly indifferent deities into a sense of personal involvement and responsibility for the individual’s relationship with any deities, along with the individual’s relationship with his or her society, culture and world. With Christianity we see another profound insight with regards to our relationship with the Divine. For the original Christian message proclaimed the love that the Deity had for all ‘His’ creation. This was a profound moment in human history. And yet it did not take long for the new freedom from fear of the Deity to be subsumed by an ever more intense fear of the Deity through the ever more present and ever more vivid teachings of Divine retribution and subsequent eternal suffering. The great moment in human history, where we humans could sense the presence of the Divine as being as complete and perfect and loving as the love our mothers have for us, was overturned. The Divine became masculine, patriarchal, and vengeful: unremittingly and dreadfully so. The Divine’s love was all but lost to us, and it is only now that we seek and fashion new ways to reconnect what should always have been our loving, eternal birthright. Our old religions are not so much under threat of redundancy or irrelevance, as we are on the brink of realising a future with all that is good and wholesome in them, and without all that is dark and limiting about them. A new world!
49. Our new times, which mark our coming of age, which mark our ceasing to be petitioners of God, but instead becoming more and more partners with God, will make little sense, and will have only a meagre and even an ineffectual affect upon the world, unless we can create meaning in ourselves. This will have to be the nurturing of an inner reality, rather than something ‘outside’ that we can all wait around for it to happen. Also, it will consist at first of a small step forward in our inner lives, in our spiritual lives. Evolution is not a theory that is a mere human construct to explain seeming riddles in nature. Evolution is an integral Truth, embedded into the Cosmic Construct. Evolution is the process set within the unfoldment of the Cosmos and thereby the unfoldment of us all. Thus, when we create meaning in ourselves, what we create will only be the first stage of a new mind and soul-driven unfoldment of ourselves. The meaning we must create in these new times will be part of that universal unfolding of everything towards ONENESS, towards wholeness. All will ultimately become ONE in the ALL.
50. One of the great problems in world history is the clash of religious beliefs. We know that religions generate fervent, even fevered, passions, and these passions can so often spill over into hatred, persecution and all-out war. Religious wars have darkened our world history and indeed have darkened the lives and souls of so many who have been caught up in religious wars. And this is not just history. The clash of religions, and more to the point the clash of the various adherents of the various religions of the world are ongoing problems. Does a day ever go by when someone somewhere in the world is not suffering as a consequence of their being perceived to be in the wrong religion? One world religion, when religious persecutions and religious wars can cease to make sense, will too often seem to be an impossible dream. But in fact that is not the case. Indeed, we could have one world religion in seconds, if we truly wanted it. And in the process, no religion would have to be given up by any of the worlds religious adherents. It takes just a simple trick to achieve this. But although at one level it is a mere trick of the mind, in another and much more profound sense it would be the most important, beautiful and spiritual moment in our world’s history. All we have to do to achieve one world religion is remain an adherent of our own particular religion – should we so choose – but at the same time not only accept everyone else’s religion, but in fact rejoice in every one else’s religion. Yes, rejoice. For we are all on the same path. We are all reaching towards the divine. Just rejoice – which goes far beyond mere acceptance. Do that, and we shall all bring ourselves so much closer to the Divine we all aspire to. Do not do that, and the Divine shall continue to be beyond our reach. Rejoice!!!
SPIRITUAL INSIGHTS IN A THOUSAND TWEETS 51-55 (slide show)
Spiritual Insights condensed into aphorisms maintaining the original twitter format of 140 characters. The next five insights cover:
56. Our achievements in science and engineering and technology, and indeed in our ability to improve the lives of an increasing percentage of our world’s population, has been extraordinary. At the same time, however, we have seen our awareness and appreciation of religion, of the sacred and mystical, of the spiritual path, slip away from us. We must celebrate the physical achievements of our world, but we must not lose sight of our ultimate purpose and destiny. We are, at the very least, thinking creatures, creatures of mind; and at the best we are spiritual entities seeking our way back to the divine, to being ONE with the ALL of the cosmos. We are ALL connected. That has been the message and the sacred secret buried deep within all spiritual and religious texts. The meaning of our lives – our destinies – is our awakening to the ONENESS of all our souls. Our coming awakening is NOT mechanical. It is mystical. Materialist souls must understand that, and so must all religious souls.
57. Personal development might be seen as self-indulgent if we assume that we are separate from everyone and everything. Of course it isn’t self-indulgent. We all, at different times, seek to enhance our awareness, and we are all correct in thinking that as we become more aware, we become more able to help others. But as we realise that we are all inter-linked and connected, then we see that it is our duty to enhance our own consciousness, as it enhances every aspect of the entire universe, including everyone around us. To seek the spirit of the ONE, to embark upon the mystical quest, to seek spiritual meaning, to yearn for spiritual awakening, is to seek and yearn for those things for everyone. To seek the holistic is to understand that all the cosmos is already holistic because ALL is ONE. We must reach out to our Mother Earth, our Gaia, by working to enhance the environment. We do that also through our spiritual awakening, because everything awakes a little more as we awake.
58. The Holistic approach is part of the consciousness of the whole. It is a symbiotic relationship. By becoming aware of consciousness in everything, we are ‘compelled’ to be Holistic. The one determines the other. This is the profound spiritual transformation that our planet is at present deep-set in. As we become aware of the rationale of holism, so we begin to yearn for the holistic way. For the holistic way is the Way of ONENESS. This transcends mere religion, and embraces and lives pure and ultimately mystical spirituality. ONENESS with our planet, our awareness of our place within the nurturing orbit of Gaia. ONENESS with our environment, loving it and caring for it as we should. ONENESS with the divine, with all the cosmos, with God. None of these can be separated from the others. ALL must be ONE. Such is the wonder of our spiritual path, of our ultimate spiritual awakening. Such is the meaning of our spiritual lives, of our very existence and purpose. Such is our destiny.
59. When we attempt to be at one with ourselves, with God, and with the world or nature, we are entering all levels of consciousness. We are being Holistic. This is our spiritual destiny: to be ONE with the ALL, to be ONE with ALL that is sacred, which is indeed ALL. Too often the religions of are fractured world have preached exclusivity and have thereby opened up the fissures in our hearts and our lives. There is no love in exclusivity. There is no spiritual path, no mystical quest, no spiritual awakening in exclusivity. We cannot heal ourselves or heal our world when we seek to fracture ourselves and our world with exclusivity. To be a pilgrim upon the sacred way is to lose self and embrace Oneness. We are not separate from the flora and fauna of our beautiful Mother Earth, our sacred Gaia. We are ONE with these things. To think otherwise and to act otherwise is to damage all that in the end we have held most dear. We must seek true spiritual meaning not in ourselves alone, but in our oneness with everything.
60. Alternative approaches in medicine aim to help the body to heal itself. Orthodox medicine introduces external agencies to do the job for the body; often with side-effects. This links in with the distinction between the Mystical approach against ‘orthodox’ religion. Orthodox religion looks for a God transcendent (external) who like a Dues ex Machina, can ease our sins. The Mystical approach is to seek salvation within, to seek the God imminent, to heal ourselves and our own souls. No wonder those on the spiritual and mystical path gravitate to health stores and vegetarianism, and evangelical orthodoxy will gravitate towards orthodox medicine, and even orthodox, non-healing remedies for our ecological problems. The spiritual and mystical path reaches for the stars by finding the stars within us. We are awakening to this, recognising Gaia and Her environment as a part of ourselves. The meaning of our spiritual destiny is the inclusivity of our whole being.
I AM US (video)
A film-illustrated reading by Richard Dell of his poem I AM US:
the fundamentalist notion that only one religion is true, reflects the notion that only one culture or nation or people have worth. It is a lingering manifestation of a complex that within its overt superiority, conceals a corrosive insecurity. This is No. 16 in Richard's book STARS IN OUR SOULS: a new look at our perennial religious and spiritual questions.
The fundamentalist notion that only one religion is true, reflects the notion that only one culture or nation or people have worth. It is a lingering manifestation of a complex that within its overt superiority, conceals a corrosive insecurity.
Here is a great truth that we forget at our peril. Many are the paths to God; many are the spiritual and mystical ways; many are the sacred and holy ways: but ALL when undertaken in the spirit of inclusivity and love, in the spirit of ONENESS with ALL, in the humility of the true spiritual pilgrim, are true and holy and sacred ways. This is the great lesson of our times. ALL is ONE, and ALL travel together when we ALL rejoice in each other’s ways. There is no true spirituality, no mystical touching of the most sacred, no spiritual awakening into the true meaning of our awareness of God, where there is no inclusivity. As the spiritual history of our planet Earth unfolds, as the sacred story of all our lives unfolds, there will be a folding-in of our spiritual and sacred and mystical selves as we truly become ONE. Oneness is the key to our inner spiritual healing, to the spiritual healing of our communities and nations, and indeed to the spiritual healing of all the flora and fauna, of our Planet Earth, of our Gaia.
We have to understand this if there is to be any hope for us as individual humans, and us as human society on Earth. We have to understand that no religion holds an exclusive monopoly on the Truth of God and the heavens. The spiritual, mystical and sacred ways have always understood this. They have always known that the path to God is not paved with the bones of martyrs to any particular religion, nor carpeted with the ancient texts of any particular religion. The sacred and spiritual path has no signposts and is different for every pilgrim. Deep in our hearts we know this, yet our times and our past times are riven with claims for one religion or another against all other religions. Thus is one of the terrible fault lines in our lives.
We also have to understand that there is no hope for us if we cannot see that we are all humans, that we all walk this planet and we can only walk this planet in peace and with heads held high if we accept that we all walk our planet together as brothers and sisters.
Racialism and religious bigotry are manifestations of a corrosive insecurity that can eat like a cancer into our souls. We can only be proud and cherished members of our races if we embrace and hold dear all members of all other races. Likewise, we cannot take the sacred path to God unless we embrace and hold dear everyone else’s pathways to God. It has been said that ‘by their fruits ye shall know them’. That is all that needs to be said. We ‘judge others by what they do, not by what racial or religious label they might bear.
These are profound times for us. The mood-song of humanity is shifting slowly and at times painfully towards inclusivity, thereby towards a living recognition of the ONENESS of ALL. The fault line across the social, political and religious arena of our present time, is the fault line between inclusivity and exclusivity. At times violent and vicious battles are being fought over these fault lines. But the terrible wounds of division between societies, countries, races and religions are in the process of being healed. Our social, political, racial and spiritual destiny awaits us within our liberation from the divisions that so fracture us. The important thing is that these divisions are healed, that the ONENESS of ALL can be made manifest in our lives. What many will not realise is that this will be a key moment in our spiritual journey, our spiritual pilgrimage. We can call these things with many different words: but as we enter at last into a living inclusivity, so shall we surge forward in our sacred and mystical and spiritual journey to ONENESS with the entire Creation. That is our destiny. This is where we are: on the threshold of ’God with Us’, on the threshold of the ultimate spiritual healing of ourselves, our societies, our nations, our races, and our religions.
Our destiny was always meant to be a holistic destiny. Our destiny was always to be a spiritual awakening. It has been our divisions that have held us back from that destiny. We can see this with how we at last reach out to the flora and fauna of our planet, of our Holy Gaia. We recognise our interdependence with nature and the environment. In other words, we recognise and seek to live and make manifest our ONENESS with nature and the environment.
Our troubled time presages an age of true spiritual enlightenment. We join together in healing; we recognise in our religions and races our true ONENESS. The old world of exclusivity is in its long-drawn-out death throes. Our being ONE with each other in every sense, is all but upon us.
RICHARD DELL
Drawing on a lifetime's contemplation of the world physical and the world spiritual:
an overview of Richard Dell's life journey as teacher, school principal, parent, grandparent, and spiritual thinker.
RICHARD DELL
Richard Dell MA (Oxon.) is a retired headmaster in his sixties. He was born in Dorset and brought up in Southampton. Leaving school at sixteen, he did a variety of jobs, including cleaning lavatories, drawing maps and working underground. Discovering books and his spiritual journey when he was twenty-one, he eventually attended Coleg Harlech in North Wales, before going on to St. John’s College, Oxford to read philosophy, politics and economics. Richard then taught history, philosophy and sport, and was subsequently a headmaster for over twenty years. He has appeared on television and radio and has published a number of articles. Richard describes himself as being, in this incarnation, an Anglican. But it is the mystical path, rather than organised religion that is the centre of his life.
In his school’s last inspection (2002) the inspectors reported on the ‘visionary leadership of the headmaster’. When he retired (2006) the chairman of his school wrote: ‘Richard’s warm personality and subtle sense of humour, his ethical principles and trust in people … are just a few of the qualities that describe the philosopher, thinker and communicator whose soul, heart and humour have shaped our school with its unique atmosphere where children are happy and learning is a joy.’
These are also the qualities that Richard hopes he brings to his books. They are very much the qualities he brings to his talks.Richard and his wife have four grown up children, and five grandchildren.
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Stars in our Souls
Spiritual and religious insights
The website devoted to Richard Dell's book 'Stars in our Souls', and associated spiritual and religious issues.
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- THE ORIGINAL INSIGHTSRichard Dell's original spiritual and religious insights from 1991 through to the present day. New universal thoughts for all who seek that which lies beyond us.
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INSIGHTS (a sample)
4
The creation of our universe was not one single moment. It is a continuing and ongoing moment, an eternal unfolding that encompasses ourselves. 25.02.91
5
This new age, this threshold age, marks our coming of age. Now, we sons and daughters of God withdraw from being petitioners of God. At last we become partners with God.
01.03.91
6
The true artist and the mystic have much in common. For both delve deep into their inner being, and the deeper they delve – the more focussed they become within their own being – the more they touch and embrace and connect with the deep and never-ending vastness of the ALL.
15.03.91
8
Is it possible to achieve salvation with a deathbed conversion after a life given to what might be called sin? If the conversion is genuine, then yes, it is – in a sense. The state of our soul at death will determine the state of our existence beyond our withdrawal from our body. So, if we have finally broken through passion and anger and greed and other such ‘sins’, then we shall indeed achieve a serene level beyond the grave. However, we must still ultimately face the consequences of our formerly ‘sinful’ deeds, through karma in later incarnations.
23.03.91
10
Our past, and our people’s past, must always be with us. But to remember the past with resentment, anger and hatred, is to be forever bound to that past, and is to forever bind the future. That is true for us as individuals, and is true for us as communities and nations.
04.04.91
11
True free will only exists in how we react and feel about those events external to ourselves. Reality lies within, both in mystic terms, and in terms of true and intimate knowing. What goes on external to ourselves, we can to some extent affect, and to a very great extent can question. It is our inner life that is our Truth, and it is our inner life that determines how we try to affect that outside of ourselves.
10.04.91
12
One reason the Church grew in its early days, but is not growing now, is not because people then relied on the scriptures, but do not now. It is actually because the spirit of God and the needs of those earlier times required it to expand. Now, however, we are entering a ‘new time’, and this ‘new time’ is not the Church’s time. But it is always God’s time. And always the Breath of God, folded within the undulating patterns of the time, is forever awakening, proclaiming, manifesting the boundless, immeasurable seasons of the heavens.
14.04.91
13
Undisciplined thoughts affect everything. Undisciplined bodies affect little. Even beyond the realms of this physical earth, our thoughts are not lost; our thoughts endure. Thus, are we accountable beyond imagining. Thus must we forever be mindful of our minds. It is only our minds that make sense of, and give meaning to, the entire universe of matter. We can taint the world we live in with our darker thoughts. Likewise, though we do not realise it, we can taint the higher realms, the very realms of God with our darker selves. We must always take care. We owe nothing less to all of creation itself.
21.04.91
14
Scriptures must be reinterpreted, because humanities consciousness evolves. As we evolve and learn, so do we enter new depths of understanding. With new depths of understanding, our scriptures must be known anew.
30.04.91
16
There are many paths to God, so there is just one path to God. Pentecostalism and emotional healing are close to shamanism, whilst the more established church is cerebral. There are the quiet paths, the reflective paths, the rhythmic paths of ritual, the unadorned paths of the ascetics, the ecstatic paths, and yes, the wild paths of the shamans. All are paths leading ultimately to God.
05.05.91
18
This is a key question. Supposing it could be shown without a shadow of a doubt that the Bible told us to hate people and commit murder. Would we obey? If not, then clearly there is an inner sense of what is right that transcends the Bible and indeed, that transcends all scriptures.
08.05.91
26
Eating food is not a moral issue. How our eating affects others, who need to eat, is. Sex is not a moral issue. How we handle our relationships, is.
19.06.91
27
A key question for every Christian since the beginning of the Christian Era, is whether he or she would recognise Christ at the Second Coming. Well, the Second Coming is upon us. Christ is here, working through all those souls who see religion as an inner path or journey. The amazing growth of new spirituality, of religions beginning to recognise the validity of other religions, is the manifestation of Christ coming once again upon our shores. This is a Second Coming Christ who is not One, but who is Everyone.
27.07.91
28
Our utilitarian buildings are a true reflection of our present view of ourselves. All that matters is that our physical needs are met. The spirit is of no consequence at all. There is, though, a trend now back to harmony and spirit. Prince Charles has been involved in this. We cannot hope to become spiritually fulfilled and spiritually at peace with each other until the buildings we create and the towns and cities we live in reflect that harmony and spirit, until they reflect ourselves.
30.07.91
29
The prophets of Israel continually made the point that if the people of Israel lived by the Law, in other words, lived ethically, then they would prosper under God. If they did not, then there would ultimately be calamity. This had to be so, because of the bad karma that would inevitably be generated. Now we are in the same situation as was ancient Israel on so many occasions. People now so often do not behave ethically. Oh, they do not always break the law, but you always hear people boasting about how they pulled off this deal or other. People no longer live honourably. Hence the decline of our nation. Until we restore honour and ethics to our everyday dealings, we shall not come out of our present-day morass. In the 19th century there were undoubtedly unscrupulous people who made fortunes, but nonetheless people were expected to be honourable, and indeed there was a real code of ethics that the aristocracy and the middle classes so often tried to operate by. Deals were made, but when made, a gentleman did not go back on his word. That was the code, even if it was not always adhered to. Do we have any sort of underlying code of ethics these days?
02.08.91
30
It is not just the physical environment that has to be redressed. It is the ethical as well. The physical environment is the world in which we live and upon which we depend. The ethical arena is actually us ourselves.
02.08.91
31
The fundamentalist notion that only Christianity is correct, is a latter-day aspect of the notion that only the white European’s culture etc is any good. It is a lingering manifestation of that awful superiority complex that has so bedevilled the world for so long. And not just unique to the Western world. It is a notion that is all but universal in our world.
13.08.92
32
The higher planes, to which we are all connected, wax and wane with rhythmic seasons of feeling, import and purpose. We will always be remotely affected by these seasons. This is really the heart to which astrology should reach; if it possibly could.
20.08.91
33
Whether astrology works or not, and I suspect that it is all far more complicated and is intimately linked with the Oneness of the All, in other words everything is connected and so everything affects everything else to a greater or lesser degree. But we must also take into account the rhythms of Gaia, of the planet that is our home.
23.08.91
37
What is the difference between trusting a psychic about the world, and trusting a scientist who tells us what weird flickers on a monitor screen mean?
16.6.91
39
The New Age approach to religion does mean an end to feelings of guilt. But it does not mean an end to responsibility. Indeed, because the approach comes from within each individual, the responsibility of the individual for himself and for the environment around him or her is immense.
01.10.91
41
The holistic approach is a healing process in all sorts of ways. It is a healing of the intellectual fragmentation of Western society that has been so extraordinary, yet also so damaging.
10.10.91
45
A mark of this new threshold age is people taking responsibility for their own lives and for each other.
18.10.91
46
Symptoms, be they medical, social or political, are symbols of underlying and fundamental truths about ourselves. Our task, as always, is to unravel their meaning, to get into the truth that they are displaying for us.
20.10.91
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