Let's Not Simplistically Stereotype Spiritual Philosophies

charleslb

New Member
Jun 11, 2010
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:lol: Hello! ¡Hola! Benvenuto! I’d like to introduce myself with a few general thoughts. It seems as though everything, soon after its conception, finds itself crammed into a convenient category, sorted into some snug stereotype, dropped into a handy pigeonhole. I suppose that in our “Information Age” pegging everything as belonging in this or that familiar niche is a necessary evil, something we have to do to rapidly process all the info that our brains are constantly being barraged by. Unfortunately this can lead to the jaded attitude that everything reduces to some cliché or another, that just about everything can be summed up and dismissed with a sketchy label. Sadly, this means that the specialness, depth, and excellence of things often goes unappreciated.

This certainly applies in the area of religion. Thanks to our various modern forms of communication and transportation anyone interested in spirituality and religious thought today is blessed or bewildered by a bounty of the world’s belief systems. Everything from the shinshūkyō religions of Japan, to the Santería style faiths of Latin America, are available for us to study and sample, so naturally our minds resort to their superficial tendency to stereotype the different items on the globe’s smorgasbord of spiritualities, and to inappropriately lump some of them together.

The serious and deplorable drawback of this is that it can and does leave many people with the false impression that religious philosophies all fit perfectly into certain genres, you know, Abrahamic, Dharmic, New Age, traditional, Pagan, Theosophical, etc., and that all the creeds and communions in these genres just have the same interchangeable, unoriginal, platitudinous take on the deep questions of existence.

Well, this is by no means really the case. Every religion is not necessarily brilliant of course, the racist, hatemongering church that calls itself Christian Identity, and the homicidal little cult formed by Charles Manson in the 60s are far from brilliant, however, every religion is a product of our creativity, of the human mind channeling the creativity of the cosmos, and sometimes the spiritual genius of our species to boot. That is, every religion has something special and interesting to contribute to the diversity and richness of human spirituality, and deserves some of our attention.
Apropos of this, I’ve recently created a website to bring one more new and distinctive approach to spirituality to any and everyone looking for an unbeaten path to explore “ultimate concerns” by.

But if you decide to visit my site you’ll probably quickly note that much of the language I use has a somewhat familiar ring, and is associated with certain popular schools of spiritual thought, so please don’t fall prey to the easy mistake of shoving the ideas being expressed with this language into the usual slots. Remember that the sometimes necessary evil of generalizing and stereotyping doesn’t always serve us well.

My site genuinely seeks to promote a fairly fresh form of spiritual thought and practice, one that definitely doesn’t quite conform to any other religious movement’s mold. But at the same time it’s not radically divergent from certain established spiritual worldviews either, it shares and builds on some fundamental “old-time” notions that other traditions have possessed but inadequately appreciated. I’ve already been wordy enough for now, so I won’t touch upon these notions here, I’ll just invite you to visit my site and discover for yourself if it has anything of value to offer your spirituality. The name of my site is Spiritual Solutions Now.com, and you’re welcome to explore its pages. Just use the following address www.spiritualsolutionsnow.com

Thank you.