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Six Gateways to Spiritual Practice
Aug. 5th, 2020 12:22 pm***Yes, yet another 'listicle'***
The following is a basic concept I've been working on in my head, the working title as this moment is:
"The Six Gateways to Spiritual Practice"
1. Mind Cultivation - cultivation of insight via contemplation and meditation methodologies.
2. Knowledge Acquisition - Scholarly study of various Natural Law sciences, doctrines, scriptures, teachings, ect.
3. Good Works - Selflessly putting spiritual knowledge and insights to practice in the material world, for the benefit of the community, and sentient beings in general.
4. Devotion - Veneration of higher beings, and the taking of vows, precepts, and/or initiation.
5. Wellness and Purification - On the mundane level, this is the various methods of conditioning of the physical body for optimum fitness, and on the higher levels, this is the various methods of energetic purification of the subtle bodies and its energy centers.
6. Austerity and Renunciation - The process and methodology of withdrawing oneself from the hustle and bustle of worldly life. At the more rudimentary level, this is simply the various practices of moderation in daily living and the cessation of bad habits.
My basic thesis here is that any well-rounded tradition is going to include at promote all of the above approaches, at least to some degree. And that 'unbalanced traditions' can said to be those which overemphasize just one or two of these approaches, almost always at the expense of the others, via neglect or outright denigration.
And that when popular religions degrade over time, they tend to do just this; they become too fixated on just one or two of these, and the worst sink into what I call 'monolatry' which is the single-minded, myopic fixation on just one of the methods. I suspect that in many cases, overspecialization happens when religions become dominated by specialists who have mastered just one or two of the approaches and through their tunnel vision, see the other approaches as either irrelevant or even a hostile distraction from their own approach. We see the same phenomenon at play within modern-day secular institutions, particularly in academia, whereby entrenched specialists promote the idea that each field should operate as a fiefdom unto itself, and thus multi-disciplinarians who commit the grave sin of connecting the dots between different fields (and thus apprehending the forbidden big picture!), are seen as grave threat#1. Broadly speaking, when the Divine Hierarchy of Perennial Metaphysics is decapitated then all we're left with in the institutions is a technocratic anarcho-tyranny of arrogant and myopic specialists.
I'll likely be following up on this concept in subsequent posts.
The following is a basic concept I've been working on in my head, the working title as this moment is:
"The Six Gateways to Spiritual Practice"
1. Mind Cultivation - cultivation of insight via contemplation and meditation methodologies.
2. Knowledge Acquisition - Scholarly study of various Natural Law sciences, doctrines, scriptures, teachings, ect.
3. Good Works - Selflessly putting spiritual knowledge and insights to practice in the material world, for the benefit of the community, and sentient beings in general.
4. Devotion - Veneration of higher beings, and the taking of vows, precepts, and/or initiation.
5. Wellness and Purification - On the mundane level, this is the various methods of conditioning of the physical body for optimum fitness, and on the higher levels, this is the various methods of energetic purification of the subtle bodies and its energy centers.
6. Austerity and Renunciation - The process and methodology of withdrawing oneself from the hustle and bustle of worldly life. At the more rudimentary level, this is simply the various practices of moderation in daily living and the cessation of bad habits.
My basic thesis here is that any well-rounded tradition is going to include at promote all of the above approaches, at least to some degree. And that 'unbalanced traditions' can said to be those which overemphasize just one or two of these approaches, almost always at the expense of the others, via neglect or outright denigration.
And that when popular religions degrade over time, they tend to do just this; they become too fixated on just one or two of these, and the worst sink into what I call 'monolatry' which is the single-minded, myopic fixation on just one of the methods. I suspect that in many cases, overspecialization happens when religions become dominated by specialists who have mastered just one or two of the approaches and through their tunnel vision, see the other approaches as either irrelevant or even a hostile distraction from their own approach. We see the same phenomenon at play within modern-day secular institutions, particularly in academia, whereby entrenched specialists promote the idea that each field should operate as a fiefdom unto itself, and thus multi-disciplinarians who commit the grave sin of connecting the dots between different fields (and thus apprehending the forbidden big picture!), are seen as grave threat#1. Broadly speaking, when the Divine Hierarchy of Perennial Metaphysics is decapitated then all we're left with in the institutions is a technocratic anarcho-tyranny of arrogant and myopic specialists.
I'll likely be following up on this concept in subsequent posts.
