Tea Time: Alternate Paths

• Pathological Narcissism–A Spiritual Disorder

• The Secret: The Spirituality of Narcissism Stuart Davis makes a good case for why The Secret may worsen narcissistic behavior and suffering. It’s not that the Law of Attraction doesn’t work, but that many abusing it for materialistic and egoistic purposes are falling into another ego trap.

Any time you find a discipline which FOCUSES on a particular domain (which is good) you find it is tempted or seduced into claiming that ONE quadrant is the only “real” one, or the only “true” one, or the only important one (which is bad). That is another of The Secret’s defects.. It takes one realm, one perspective (The Interior of an Individual) and claims it creates all the others. Wow. YOU, your thoughts, create your body. And the biosphere, and the entire culture, and history of the planet, origin of species, all the cities you could visit, all the planets in the Galaxy, all the Galaxies, all the… and so on. And its wrong. Sorry. Your thoughts, your feelings, while being important and valuable, are but two coordinates in one Quadrant.

Your thoughts and feelings are not the Source of Reality, but two of its features. You do not “create” your reality, you participate in it, and in certain circumstances, under particular conditions, you can influence it. And it is good and useful to cultivate that influence, to positively nurture those portions as much as possible, in the interest of love.

• ‘Mind-Mapping’: How We Manipulate the People We Love I like this therapist’s explanation on how manipulative people work, and how he deals with it in marriage counselling. This was fascinating for me because I would have liked this approach better than what I experienced. (Personally, I feel that if two parties value authenticity differently, nothing’s going to help them. The example in this article has a happy ending, however.)

• The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck Mark Manson at his best.

• Differentiating between Dreams from Allah, Shaitan, and Nafs Doing some research on different types of dreaming, I found the Islamic perspective an interesting read.

• Air crashes predicted The one coming in Sept 2016 will be kinda in my neighbourhood. Thought I’d stuff this link in here to keep it somewhere for future reference, whatever happens.

• Male ballet dancer takes on Hozier’s “Take Me to Church” A non-traditional ballet take on a song with iconoclastic lyrics. I loved it.

News closer to home: The Magic & Meditation blog menu has been tweaked a bit, and will see more tweaking in the near future. The Truth & Love Labs are a meet-up group I set up when feeling inspired to share discussions and information on my pet topics “live”. You can also find the next two events on FaceBook here and here.