EDN Themes: Soul & Spirit
Listed below are entries for the Soul & Spirit theme. Related entries can be found through keyword searches. For example, creativity can be found in other themes. Using Google "Search This Site" to do a keyword search for "creativity" reveals related entries in other themes.
Empathy: Five Lessons
Five lessons to make you think about the way we treat people...
Love: Healing & Suffering
Dr. Dean Ornish, founder of The Preventive Medicine Research Institute offers an excellent article entitled Love and Survival. The article gives us a glimpse into his book Love and Survival: 8 Pathways to Intimacy and Health. In a society that seems to have developed a dependency on prescription medication, it is both refreshing and inspiring to read ideas about the importance of connecting mind-body-spirit through love. In addition, love is viewed by Dr. Ornish as a healing power, that is, a powerful intervention and source of resilience that can both cure and promote health and well-being...
Myth: Bliss - Learning as Mythological Transformation
Joseph Campbell contributed a wide variety of valuable that explore the many dimensions of myth and personal transformation. While often left unmentioned with respect to learning, he captures the core of what learning can be. The recent release of Pathways to Bliss: Mythology and Personal Transformation is no exception. If the essence of learning is in some manner about personal growth and transformation, then the role of myth as Campbell describes it speaks to that essence...
Myth: Bliss - The Experience of Myth
Joseph Campbell's introduction to Pathways to Bliss: Mythology and Personal Transformation is abundant with connections that link myth to the experiences of everyday life. The editor, David Kudler, has done has created a fundamental and critically important perspective on Campbell and his ideas.
Campbell has created one of those rare pieces of writing, like Marshall McLuhan's first chapter in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, that, unlike a mere exercise in comprehension, demands intensive reflection and self-examination in order to build meaning and reveal patterns. Campbell's introduction also, it seems to me, provides a profound sense of unification to his life's work. Of course, each of us will build our own sense of meaning from his words by virtue of the experiences and mental attitudes we bring to it...
Myth: The Origins of Learning
In The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of Soul in Corporate America David Whyte (see also Crossing The Unknown Sea) reminds us that, "Learning, partnership and the ability to adapt are at the core of life, at work or at home." And these capacities for living are grounded against the mythic, the place where the soul resides. Throughout this intensely terrifying and yet ultimately compassionate book arises a persepective on learning that is essential to embrace with heart and mind. Many of the entries here in EDN have taken on an orientation toward this mythic energy that drives us. This energy points toward the origins and primal scream of learning itself...
Paranormal: Exorcism - Discerning Psychological Problems and Spiritual Possession
The Vatican University Pontifical Regina Apostolorum University (click here for an English translation)is offering a four-month course for aspiring exorcists called Esorcismo e preghiera di liberazione (Exorcism and the Prayer of Liberation). A fundamental capability that the exorcist must learn is the power of discernment...
Religion: Interpretive Hijacking
In Hijacking Chrisitanity Robert Paterson poses the question, "Is it not time, for the story of Jesus to be talked about more?" He touches on the sensitive issue of how religious interpretation can breed contempt, intolerance, hatred, racism, and violence. This is in stark contrast to the message of Christ. It's interesting that he uses the term "hijacking," a word which has now become closely aligned with terrorism. It's approriate, since terrorism and religion are all too often closely aligned. Robert's perceptions are pointed...
Research Archive: Soul & Spirit
A list of Soul & Spirit resources powered by Furl, Feedburner, and Feed2JS:
Soul: Sting - History Will Teach Us Nothing
What have we learned from history? Of course, the depth and breadth of historical facts and figures about past events continue to proliferate. It seems that there is definitely no shortage of "content" when it comes to history. Similarly, there is no shortage of courses, specialists, programs, books, telelvision programs in the media surround. But the question of what we have learned from history is significantly different.
The title of this entry comes from Sting's History Will Teach Us Nothing [on Nothing Like The Sun] [MP3: History Will Teach Us Nothing]. Sting is an artist, to my sensibilities, that speaks directly from the soul, and it occurred to me while listening to this song that perhaps there is a distinct loss of soul in history itself...
Spirit: The Animating Force of Learning
By Jerry WennstromWhat is the spirit of learning? I use the word spirit in the sense of a vital principle or animating force in living things. The idea of spirit orients us toward exploring the source of energy and therefore the source of authority in learning. The word spirit comes to us via the Latin word spiritus meaning breath. In this sense, spirit is the breath of life. In theological terms, our spirit is the medium through which we connect our souls to the creator. In this context we are invited to consider how our reality is connected to higher sources of creation than is immediately apparent to our physical senses. The idea of spirit is a means to expand our sense perception and intuitive awareness of life. An idea like the Human Spirit evokes the connectedness of all life and forms the basis for considering the essential unity of all things. The paranormal variation of spirit leads us into a world of the daimonic and the theatre of the mercurial. The phenomenon of human learning is intimately connected to the idea of spirit, and therefore can be thought of as an animating force in living things...
Storyliving: The Stories We Live By
Enduring human truths still reside primarily in myth... I do not believe that we learn much about ourselves by discovering that we are of a certain 'type.' Instead, each of us must try to comprehend the specific nature of our unique life course and personal journey if we are to know who we are and how our own life may be made most meaningful.Though we may act out parts of our personal myth in daily life, the story is inside of us.
- McAdams, Dan. The Stories We Live By
Dan McAdams invites us to ask the questions:
- What do we know when we know a person?
- What do we know when we think we know ourselves?