Money, Money, Money

(c) stock.xchng

I should probably have posted this a few months ago, but delaying a thought can easily lead into a few months. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed running Urban Mystic but it takes up too much time and doesn’t pay enough of the bills. So this year I’m spending my time on business ventures, specifically Africa on Paper and The Typesetter. Both are great businesses I’d like more established.

I’m going to hold on the blog and website for Urban Mystic for now. Who know what the future will yield.

Introducing “The Good News According to Matthew Version 0.1″

DFV Front Cover

The image we have of Godde plays a significant role not only in our religion but also in our spirituality. Christians predominantly picture Godde as male and masculine … which often results in a curtailing of women’s gifting, those they’re born with and those the Spirit imparts, and their career opportunities in professional ministry. Yet, biblically speaking, both men and women were created in the image of Godde. As such, Godde is fully masculine and fully feminine. In keeping with the Genesis narrative both Testaments feature women in ways that are culturally progressive–often placing women on parr with men. The Bible therefore stands as an ongoing corrective to the way situational texts, especially Paul’s writing, gets used in culturally regressive ways today.

This Study Bible is being created by a small team of men and women. A number of translations have embraced gender-inclusive language in reference to generic persons (to replace to generic masculine). The Divine Feminine Version or DFV is, however, the first translation of the New Testament to go beyond this and feature only feminine language in reference to Godde.

For those looking to explore the Feminine in Godde, and therewith transform their own spirituality, this text is a must! Head on over to http://godde.wordpress.com to grab a copy of the PDF. A print-on-demand version will soon be available too.

I’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback.

Busy, busy, busy

I had a crazy runup to the end of the year and, sadly, had my laptop and backup drive got stolen … so I’ve been quiet. The loss of my laptop also means losing all the material I’ve produced over the last couple of years including courses I’ve written, a book on The Problem of Godde, and all of my correspondence.

This year is opening up with a ton of work for The Typesetter and Africa on Paper. Projects for the first quarter of 2011 are going to monopolize my time, so Urban Mystic will be quiet on the blogging front. I’m moving up to Johannesburg for the first half of the year, so Urban Mystic is like to be dormant, at least in Cape Town, as far as groups and courses go.

Hopefully we can reconnect and reconvene around the middle of the year.

Connected again

www.sxc.hu

I’m finally reconnected again! This means I should be back to posting regularly.

Disconnected…

I’m busy moving and my new home isn’t set up with ADSL yet. Turns out I’m also in a 3G dead zone and have to switch over to EDGE which functions unreliably there too. So for the meantime I’m going to be quiet on the posting and commenting fronts. Hopefully I’ll be connected soon and active online again.

In the meantime I’m discovering that half my brain lives on the internet along with half my community. Yikes that scary!

Meditation as Gateway Spirituality

Gateway/Door

Though meditation varies from person to person, context to context, and tradition to tradition people unanimously agree that this simple practice serves as a gateway to deeper spiritual experience.

• A western secularist may use meditation to attain a state of deep mental and emotional clarity, brining back deeper insight into living a stress and pain free life
• A Hindu mystic may use meditation to attain Self-Realisation, bringing back the insight into how connected everything is
• A Buddhist mystic may use meditation to view and reach out to Emptiness, bringing back insight into the conditional nature of everything
• A Christian mystic may use meditation to gaze lovingly into Godde, bringing back insight into living a life centered around love for Godde and other persons who are the image of Godde

As such meditation may be considered a spiritual technology enabling personal experience with the object, source or goal of our respective faiths. By understanding how others use meditation the range of spiritual experience, insight and wisdom for living available to us is broadened exponentially.

Mindfulness Meditation

The notion of mindfulness is borrowed from Buddhism, where the “calm awareness of one’s body functions, feelings, content of consciousness, or consciousness itself” is key (reference). In mindfulness meditation one focuses the mind on the present, most often taking the time to observe our breathing. The goal is to do this non-judgementally, simply observing and embracing the present as it is.

To benefit from mindfulness meditation you’ll have to make it a regular part of your practice of meditation. Set aside three ten-minute appointments a week on your schedule for a month, say on Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings. Set a timer and use those ten minutes to:

1. Take a comfortable seated position, whether cross-legged on the ground or open-legged on a chair.
2. Try to keep your mind from drifting to remembering and analyzing past events or from drifting to the future, whether particular events or specific concerns.
3. Become aware of your breathing. Without controlling it, simply observe your in-breath and out-breath along with the way the breath feels coming in and going out of your nostrils. Observe the rising and falling of your belly and the expanding and contracting of your chest. Simply appreciate being present.
4. When thoughts, hopes, fears, expectations, memories, etc. intrude simply take note of them. Don’t judge them, don’t analyze them, simply embrace them as they are. Observe them and use your breathing as an anchor to bring you back to the present.
5. When you find yourself getting dragged away by your thoughts, don’t judge yourself. Gently return to the present, embracing the simplicity of breathing as your anchor. If your able, gain a third-person perspective on these intrusions and observe them, non-judgementally, seeing where they come from and where they go.

During the rest of the day, whenever you find yourself getting emotional or stressed return to that feeling of mindfulness by simply becoming present. Use your breathing as an anchor to return you to the present. Take note of how your thinking and feeling shifts when doing so.

The more you practice mindfulness meditation the greater potential you have for remaining in the present.

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Urban Mystic uses a variety of meditation techniques as the foundation for an urban spirituality. We focus on those who consider themselves spiritual not religious, who’re interested in pursuing their spiritual journey but want to do so without the pressure to convert to an established faith such as Buddhism, Hinduism or Christianity.

100 Benefits of Meditation

I’ve been working on a post on the benefits of meditation. There’s a lot of scientific research and subjective responses covering the benefits. Rather than re-inventing a post I luckily came across a post by another who put together 100 Benefits of Meditation.* This is over at www.ineedmotivation.com and you may want to visit them and read the complete article there.

Regular Meditation

Flyer for Regular Meditation

Meditation is a private activity, but practicing it together with others offers a number of benefits. Some benefits include:

• Assistance: Wisdom is to be shared. Anyone who hits an internal block when meditating experiences a significant hindrance to their personal development. Connecting with others gives you the opportunity to learn from another’s experience, contribute to their experience, or encourage someone in their practice.
• Connections: Sharing our story with others is an integral part of being human. We don’t journey alone or practice meditation simply for own benefit. Practicing meditation with others helps overcome any tendency to become overly introspective and self-absorbed, which ultimately stunts our spiritual development.
• Enrichment: Exposure to different approaches to meditation and styles of facilitation will enrich your practice as you gain a broader perspective.

The first Sunday of every month we’ll facilitate a guided meditation session. For this series, from September to December, we’ll draw strongly on Stephen Bodian’s guided meditations found on the iPhone apps by Mental Workout LLC. I’ve reviewed these apps in a previous post.

Moving past religion

Modernisation

Those seeking to be spiritual not religious need to re-appropriate and re-imagine faith, distinguishing it from belief and religion.

Every nation, and almost every people group, has been significantly changed by modernization. The West modernized, secularized and globalized which resulted in:

1. A generation that no longer believed in traditional Western religion but continued to practice it
2. A second generation, one that neither believed nor practiced
3. A third generation, rejecting the “empty religion” (beliefs and practices devoid of corresponding personal experience) of their forebears and enabled, through education and technology, to visit and explore other places (notably the East and Africa) in search of true and authentic spirituality (where people actually experienced, through their traditions and practices, what they believed).