In this library you can find our book.
We cover a lot in it. And it was written for you.

You will also find some additional articles (at the moment, though,
there is only one).

the book

Person and Identity:
the essence and compass of spirituality
on the road to freedom
(for the believer and for the non-believer)

You can get the book here (in .pdf form): download.

What follows is the Preface of the book.

I wish when I started searching somebody would have pointed me somewhere and said: "This is it. That is what spirituality is about. Focus here. Use this to navigate life."

All the great spiritual teachers, across all spiritual traditions, are essentially talking about one thing: how our minds and hearts are imprisoned in the illusory and limited realm of personhood. (The Christ and the Buddha are talking about it, although they use different terminology, as do the sages and lucid saints of our times.)

And they are all focused on one goal: breaking free from this limited experience and gaining clarity, where clarity is the experience of the deep perception of reality that is available to the human consciousness.

All this may sound too deep, but it is much closer than you think. The aim of this book is to make you understand what is the core message and goal of spirituality, and start you on this side of spiritual practice.

Generally, spiritual teachers focus on practice but forget to give us the big picture and put everything in context. The result is that we feel lost and confused and miss out on the opportunity to navigate spirituality more efficiently. (In a way, they have done this because they did not expect us to understand. However, we are very intellectual nowadays and our, so-called, emotional intelligence is very high. These two skills combined can do wonders for us.) This book aims to bridge this gap.

Moreover, we want all this to become part of your daily life and help you navigate your worldly affairs too.

[download]

articles

the intellect as an organizing faculty

The intellect is an organizing faculty. We can use it to create maps of our patterns and our insights. Specifically, patterns of thought, of emotion, and sense of identity. (Our sense of identity is fluid. Like our thoughts and emotions are fluid and ever-changing, so is our sense of identity. Most of us miss that bit entirely, but it still is the case.)

The intellect is of secondary importance. Spiritual insight is primary. Spiritual insight is not some metaphysical thing. It is something that we find in everyday life. However, being ready to recognize it when we come across it is pivotal, and the intellect can be of immense assistance in this process.

We also create maps of our insights, whether vague or distinct, whether gross or refined. Note, that we do not want to put boundaries around our insights, thus we avoid analyzing them and refining our maps by intellectualizing over them. However, we want to recognize new depths in our perception, and be able to connect the dots. As such, we use our intellects to remember of the insights. We do not remember the insights themselves through the intellect. The intellect cannot recollect the actual insight as we have experienced it, but it can somehow remember something about it. We use that.

Additionally, all those maps bring stability to our process, allow us to retain momentum and keep morale high. The spiritual process is often a difficult one. It is especially difficult for those who tread on it without a map. They do not know where they are going, if they are going anywhere at all, or if they are moving forward or backwards. They often get lost in the way.

We do not wish that to you. Without a map, it is a minefield; a long struggle. It is better to have a sense of what is going on. And possibly even have goals, if the time is right. That is what the masters mean when they say that spirituality does not have to be a struggle. If you have a sense of where you are going the suffering is remarkably reduced.

Some people are afraid of using the intellect. They have knowingly suffered so much from it, that they now are trying to distance themselves from it as much as possible. It can be a good strategy for some time. But, for most people, it is not wise to retain this stance for the long term. The intellect is a force of great might in the human psyche. It cannot be suppressed; it can either be led by wisdom or by ignorance.

Our school is very passionate about bringing spirituality to the people. People ignore spirituality primarily because they do not understand it. We can use the intellect to help alleviate that. We can put the facts together and make sense out of a process that often sounds distant, metaphysical or nonsensical. These terms are not characteristic of spirituality. This is a misguided understanding. (All this does not mean that we are going to understand all of spirituality. But we can often understand enough so that we can navigate it efficiently.)

On the other hand, for many people the intellectual approach will not work. And that can even be a good thing. These people probably have some other talents. For them, we need to let life do the talking. But we can always nudge them to look where the honey is.
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