Photo: ‘Fruits of Time’ by Pezibear – Pixabay
https://tinyurl.com/y5478u78
TSK…
When I was in grade school, a devoted choir boy, I wanted to be a priest, among other things. I was raised with 16 years of Catholic education, and perhaps because of that faith-based dogmatic approach to religion, I eventually pushed it away in favor of an approach more experiential in nature, NOT so based on faith. I am not Buddhist per say, but I do love the philosophy, and some of the people I admire most ARE practicing Buddhists. For about 25 years I’ve studied a non-religious… in fact, a SECULAR approach to spiritual growth that does not involve belief in dogma. [Many Buddhists study it too, a long side their Buddhists studies.] Opinions are necessary, of course, to live productively in today’s society, but if they are frozen, fixed, set in stone, stubborn, beyond doubt… there is stunted growth, slow maturing, no flowering, little enrichment… What you often get are emotional hot buttons, obsessions, fixations, suffering, self-soothing, myopic pursuits, and so on…
An open approach to spirituality actually involves inquiry and questioning everything without arriving at ‘fixed’ or final opinions, beliefs, or conclusions. It even means examining ideas and beliefs that feed into or align with a cherished narrative… like listening only to news that aligns with one’s predisposed mindset.
The very nature of this approach is about opening closed and conditioned structures of the mind. The approach I’ve been studying invites a focus on the SPACE we think with, and the unfolding of everything in it, the constant changing… as TIME… not simply the linear unfolding of one moment and thing after another… but the more fundamental dynamic of time, THE ALIVENESS WITHIN ALL EXPERIENCE. This aliveness can be touched, opened, and dwelled within as being. Through out my studies, I’ve written about or attempted to describe many ‘humble moments’, expanding the experience of a moment… opening time and space. And that has been my spiritual approach… the study and practice of the TIME, SPACE, KNOWLEDGE VISION created by a Tibetan Buddhist master, Tarthang Tulku… an approach that is NOT Buddhist, but secular. An approach, in my opinion, I could never master, but can ever study… It’s the study and practice, which is the journey… the path that is no path that you become… or come to realize you are…
