Pilgrimage to Belief and Spirituality

Spiritual tourism is to travel to find purpose and meaning to your life. It elevates your physical, mental, and emotional energies. It develops, maintains, and improves your body, mind, and spirit. Spiritual tourism is not connected with any specific religion. It is different from religious tourism.

Pilgrimage is a journey, often into an unknown or foreign place, where a person goes in search of a new or expanded meaning about their self, others, nature, or higher good, through the experience. It can lead to a personal transformation, after which the pilgrim returns to their daily life. | More Info…

What makes a trip a pilgrimage is the intention behind it and the presence you bring, that and the three elements required for any pilgrimage; A Journey, Engagement with True Self, and Sacred Encounter.

Related Prayer
These are the gifts I ask of Thee, Spirit Serene.
Strength for the daily task,
Courage to face the road,
Good cheer to help me
Bear the traveler’s load,
And for the hours that come in between,
Inward joy in all things heard and seen.

DEFINITIONS 

belief;
1, An acceptance that something exists or is true, especially one without proof.
2, Belief is the psychological state in which an individual holds a conjecture or premise to be true

Suggestion
1, Suggestion is the psychological process by which one person guides the thoughts, feelings, or behaviour of another
2, NLP claims a connection between the neurological processes (“neuro”), language (“linguistic”) and behavioral patterns learned through experience (“programming”)

 Faith
1, Faith is confidence or the trust in a person, thing, deity, or in the doctrines or teachings of a religion or view.
2, The word faith is often used as a synonym for hope, trust or belief.

Religion
1, Religion is an organized collection of beliefs, cultural systems, and world views that relate humanity to an order of existence
2, According to some estimates, there are roughly 4,200 religions in the world

Spirituality
1, The search for the sacred, for that which is set apart from the ordinary and worthy of veneration.
2, A transcendent dimension within human experience…discovered in moments in which the individual attempts to place the self within a broader ontological context.

Spiritual experience
1, Can include being connected to a larger reality, yielding a more comprehensive self; joining with the human community or the cosmos or with the divine realm.
2, A subtle, bodily feeling with vague meanings that brings new, clearer meanings involving a transcendent growth process, and/or ‘A belief in the existence of realities beyond perceptual or intellectual apprehension that are central to being and directly accessible by subjective experience’

Believing…
By really believing in the 12 Steps we let them become part of us –Keep it Simple

Quotes:
Believe that your life is worth living
And your belief will help create the fact. –William James

To believe means to put aside our doubts
To believe means to have hope
Believing makes the road a little smoother
Believing lets healing happen a little faster
All of this is how we get ready to let in the care of a God of our choice/Higher Power. –Keep it Simple

To Be Prayer
O Lord I ain’t what I ought to be,
And I ain’t what I want to be,
And I ain’t what I’m going to be,
But O Lord, I thank you
That I ain’t what I used to be.

How beliefs are formed:
Belief is the psychological state in which an individual holds a conjecture or premise to be true.
Psychologists study belief formation and the relationship between beliefs and actions.

Beliefs form in a variety of ways:
1, We tend to internalise the beliefs of the people around us during childhood. Albert Einstein is often quoted as having said that “Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.” Political beliefs depend most strongly on the political beliefs most common in the community where we live. Most individuals believe the religion they were taught in childhood.

2,People may adopt the beliefs of a charismatic leader, even if those beliefs fly in the face of all previous beliefs, and produce actions that are clearly not in their own self-interest. Is belief voluntary? Rational individuals need to reconcile their direct reality with any said belief; therefore, if belief is not present or possible, it reflects the fact that contradictions were necessarily overcome using cognitive dissonance.

3, Advertising can form or change beliefs through repetition, shock, and association with images of sex, love, beauty, and other strong positive emotions

4, Physical trauma, especially to the head, can radically alter a person’s beliefs. However, even educated people, well aware of the process by which beliefs form, still strongly cling to their beliefs, and act on those beliefs even against their own self-interest. In Anna Rowley’s book, ‘Leadership Therapy’, she states “You want your beliefs to change. It’s proof that you are keeping your eyes open, living fully, and welcoming everything that the world and people around you can teach you.” This means that peoples’ beliefs should evolve as they gain new experiences.

More About SUGGESTION – More on Spiritual experience below….

Suggestion is the psychological process by which one person guides the thoughts, feelings, or behaviour of another.

Early scientific studies of hypnosis by Clark Leonard Hull and others extended the meaning of these words in a special and technical sense. The original neuro-psychological theory of hypnotic suggestion was based upon the ideo-motor reflex response of William B. Carpenter and James Braid.

NLP: Neuro-linguistic programming is an approach to communication, personal development, and psychotherapy created by Richard Bandler and John Grinder in California, USA in the 1970s. Its creators claim a connection between the neurological processes (“neuro”), language (“linguistic”) and behavioural patterns learned through experience (“programming”) and that these can be changed to achieve specific goals in life. It is claimed that the skills of exceptional people can be “modeled” using NLP methodology, then those skills can be acquired by anyone.

More About FAITH  – More on Spiritual experience below

Faith is confidence or trust in a person, thing, deity, or in the doctrines or teachings of a religion or view (e.g. having strong political faith). The word faith is often used as a synonym for hope, trust or belief.

In religion, faith often involves accepting claims about the character of a deity, nature, or the universe. While some have argued that faith is opposed to reason, proponents of faith argue that the proper domain of faith concerns questions which cannot be settled by evidence.

Other examples of faith may include empirical reasoning, statistics, past experience, and other more concrete factors, such as faith in an aircraft, bridge, spouse, or pet, and so on.

The English word faith is thought to date from 1200–50, from the Middle English feith, via Anglo-French fed, Old French feid, feit from Latin fidem, accusative of fidēs (trust), akin to fīdere (to trust).

Where there is evidence, no one speaks of ‘faith’. We do not speak of faith that two and two are four or that the earth is round. We only speak of faith when we wish to substitute emotion for evidence.

Faith has been described as mere belief without evidence; a process of active non-thinking, and is a practice that only degrades our understanding of the natural world by allowing anyone to make a claim about nature that is based solely on their personal thoughts.

More About RELIGION  – More on Spiritual experience below

There are numerous definitions of religion. The typical dictionary definition of religion refers to a “belief in, or the worship of, a god or gods” or the “service and worship of God or the supernatural”. However, writers and scholars have expanded upon the “belief in god” definitions as insufficient to capture the diversity of religious thought and experience.

Edward Burnett Tylor defined religion as “the belief in spiritual beings”. He argued that narrowing the definition to mean the belief in a supreme deity or judgment after death or idolatry and so on, would exclude many peoples from the category of religious, and thus “has the fault of identifying religion rather with particular developments than with the deeper motive which underlies them”. He also argued that the belief in spiritual beings exists in all known societies.

Anthropologist Clifford Geertz defined religion as a “system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.” Alluding perhaps to Tylor’s “deeper motive”, Geertz remarked that “we have very little idea of how, in empirical terms, this particular miracle is accomplished. We just know that it is done, annually, weekly, daily, for some people almost hourly; and we have an enormous ethnographic literature to demonstrate it”.

Theologian Antoine Vergote also emphasized the “cultural reality” of religion, which he defined as “the entirety of the linguistic expressions, emotions and, actions and signs that refer to a supernatural being or supernatural beings”; he took the term “supernatural” simply to mean whatever transcends the powers of nature or human agency.

Sociologist Durkheim, in his seminal book The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, defined religion as a “unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things”. By sacred things he meant things “set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them”. Sacred things are not, however, limited to gods or spirits. On the contrary, a sacred thing can be “a rock, a tree, a spring, a pebble, a piece of wood, a house, in a word, anything can be sacred”. Religious beliefs, myths, dogmas and legends are the representations that express the nature of these sacred things, and the virtues and powers which are attributed to them.

In his book ‪The Varieties of Religious Experience, the psychologist William James defined religion as “the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine”. By the term “divine” James meant “any object that is godlike, whether it be a concrete deity or not” to which the individual feels impelled to respond with solemnity and gravity.

Echoes of James’ and Durkheim’s definitions are to be found in the writings of Frederick Ferré who defined religion as “one’s way of valuing most comprehensively and intensively”. Similarly, for the theologian Paul Tillich, faith is “the state of being ultimately concerned”, which “is itself religion. Religion is the substance, the ground, and the depth of man’s spiritual life.” Friedrich Schleiermacher in the late 18th century defined religion as das schlechthinnige Abhängigkeitsgefühl, commonly translated as “a feeling of absolute dependence”. His contemporary Hegel disagreed thoroughly, defining religion as “the Divine Spirit becoming conscious of Himself through the finite spirit.”

When religion is seen in terms of “sacred”, “divine”, intensive “valuing”, or “ultimate concern”, then it is possible to understand why scientific findings and philosophical criticisms do not necessarily disturb its adherents.

More About SPIRITUALITY  – More on Spiritual experience below

There is no single, widely-agreed definition of spirituality. Social scientists have defined spirituality as the search for the sacred, for that which is set apart from the ordinary and worthy of veneration, “a transcendent dimension within human experience…discovered in moments in which the individual questions the meaning of personal existence and attempts to place the self within a broader ontological context.”

According to Waaijman, the traditional meaning of spirituality is a process of re-formation which “aims to recover the original shape of man, the image of God. To accomplish this, the re-formation is oriented at a mold, which represents the original shape: in Judaism the Torah, in Christianity Christ, in Buddhism Buddha, in the Islam Muhammad.” In modern times spirituality has come to mean the internal experience of the individual. It still denotes a process of transformation, but in a context separate from organized religious institutions: “spiritual but not religious.” Houtman and Aupers suggest that modern spirituality is a blend of humanistic psychology, mystical and esoteric traditions and eastern religions.

Waaijman points out that “spirituality” is only one term of a range of words which denote the praxis of spirituality. Some other terms are “Hasidism, contemplation, kabbala, asceticism, mysticism, perfection, devotion and piety”.

Spirituality can be sought not only through traditional organized religions, but also through movements such as liberalism, feminist theology, and green politics. Spirituality is also now associated with mental health, managing substance abuse, marital functioning, parenting, and coping. It has been suggested that spirituality also leads to finding purpose and meaning in life.

More About SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE

‘Spiritual experience’ plays a central role in modern spirituality in both western and Asian cultures.

William James popularized the use of the term “religious experience” in his The Varieties of Religious Experience. It has also influenced the understanding of mysticism as a distinctive experience which supplies knowledge.

Wayne Proudfoot traces the roots of the notion of “religious experience” further back to the German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), who argued that religion is based on a feeling of the infinite. The notion of “religious experience” was used by Schleiermacher to defend religion against the growing scientific and secular critique. It was adopted by many scholars of religion, of which William James was the most influential.

Major Asian influences were Vivekananda and D.T. Suzuki. Swami Vivekananda popularised a modern syncretistic Hinduism, in which the authority of the scriptures was replaced by an emphasis on personal experience. D.T. Suzuki had a major influence on the popularisation of Zen in the west and popularized the idea of enlightenment as insight into a timeless, transcendent reality. Another example can be seen in Paul Brunton’s A Search in Secret India, which introduced Ramana Maharshi to a western audience.

Spiritual experiences can include being connected to a larger reality, yielding a more comprehensive self; joining with other individuals or the human community; with nature or the cosmos; or with the divine realm.

Others define Spiritual experience as a subtle, bodily feeling with vague meanings that brings new, clearer meanings involving a transcendent growth process, and/or ‘A belief in the existence of realities beyond perceptual or intellectual apprehension that are central to being and directly accessible by subjective experience’

Most 12 Step Program experiences are what the psychologist William James calls the “educational variety” because they develop slowly over a period of time. Quite often friends of the newcomer are aware of the difference long before he is himself. He finally realizes that he has undergone a profound alteration in his reaction to life; that such a change could hardly have been brought about by himself alone. What often takes place in a few months could seldom have been accomplished by years of self-discipline.

With few exceptions 12 Step Program find that they have tapped an unsuspected inner resource which they presently identify with their own conception of a Power greater than themselves. Most of us think this awareness of a Power greater than ourselves is the essence of spiritual experience. Our more religious members call it “God-consciousness.”

Resume
We find that no one need have difficulty with spirituality. Willingness, honesty and open mindedness are the essentials. But these are indispensable. “There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance—that principle is contempt prior to investigation.” ~Herbert Spencer

Carl Jung believed that spiritual transformation is at the mystical heart of all religions. It is to meet the self and at the same time to meet the Divine. Unlike Sigmund Freud’s objectivist worldview, Jung’s pantheism may have led him to believe that spiritual experience was essential to our well-being, as he specifically identifies individual human life with the universe as a whole. Jung’s idea of religion as a practical road to individuation has been quite popular, and is still treated in modern textbooks on the psychology of religion.

His most notable contributions include his concept of the psychological archetype, the collective unconscious, and his theory of synchronicity. Jung emphasized the importance of balance and harmony.

Jung recommended spirituality as a cure for alcoholism and he is considered to have had an indirect role in establishing Alcoholics Anonymous. Jung once treated an American patient (Rowland Hazard III), suffering from chronic alcoholism. After working with the patient for some time and achieving no significant progress, Jung told the man that his alcoholic condition was near to hopeless, save only the possibility of a spiritual experience. Jung noted that occasionally such experiences had been known to reform alcoholics where all else had failed.

Hazard took Jung’s advice seriously and set about seeking a personal spiritual experience. He returned home to the United States and joined a First-Century Christian evangelical movement known as the Oxford Group (later known as Moral Re-Armament). He also told other alcoholics what Jung had told him about the importance of a spiritual experience. One of the alcoholics he brought into the Oxford Group was Ebby Thacher, a long-time friend and drinking buddy of Bill Wilson, later co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). Thacher told Wilson about the Oxford Group, and through them Wilson became aware of Hazard’s experience with Jung. The influence of Jung thus indirectly found its way into the formation of Alcoholics Anonymous, the original twelve-step program, and from there into the whole twelve-step recovery movement, although AA as a whole is not Jungian and Jung had no role in the formation of that approach or the twelve steps.

The above claims are documented in the letters of Jung and Bill W. (i.e., Bill Wilson), excerpts of which can be found in Pass It On, published by Alcoholics Anonymous. Although the detail of this story is disputed by some historians, Jung himself discussed an Oxford Group member, who may have been the same person, in talks given around 1940. The remarks were distributed privately in transcript form, from shorthand taken by an attender (Jung reportedly approved the transcript), and later recorded in Volume 18 of his Collected Works, The Symbolic Life (“For instance, when a member of the Oxford Group comes to me in order to get treatment, I say, ‘You are in the Oxford Group; so long as you are there, you settle your affair with the Oxford Group. I can’t do it better than Jesus.'” Jung goes on to state that he has seen similar cures among Roman Catholics.

Contact with a HP
Being takes precedence over doing –Different Drummer
God is limited by what you believe. God is not limited by your Faith. –Joel Osteen

Believe; Let GOD do the work;
Joyce Meyer – All Things Are Possible With God. | Listen here

We must believe the things we tell our children –Woodrow Wilson

Meet God in the Morning

I met God in the morning
When my day was at its best,
And His Presence came like sunrise
Like a glory in my breast.

All day long the Presence lingered,
All day long He stayed with me,
And we sailed in perfect calmness
O’er a very troubled sea.

Other ships were blown and battered,
Other ships were sore distressed,
But the winds that seemed to drive them
Brought to us a peace and rest.

When I thought of other mornings,
With a keen remorse of mind,
When I, too, had loosed the moorings
With the presence left behind.

So I think I’ve found the secret,
Learned through many a troubled way;
You must meet God in the morning
If you want Him through the day.

Oneness with God and heir to His riches – Invisible Supply –Joel Goldsmith

The principle of supply is that in our oneness with God, we already have all that the Father has because ‘I and the Father are one, and all that the Father has is mine’ If we are experiencing a lack, it is not because of any actual lack. It is because of our inability to make contact with our supply. As a ‘child of God’ we are joint heirs with Christ in all the heavenly riches of the Father. This is a spiritual truth given to human consciousness.

Invisible Supply  — Joel Goldsmith
The world seeks its good in the external realm IE peace, joy, satisfaction, home, companionship, or supply from the outer world of people and things. But the Master said ‘My Kingdom is not of this world’

When we turn to the spiritual path we learn the world’s weapons will not do for us. When considering the statement ‘The Kingdom of God is within you’ it immediately becomes clear that going outside to find our good will not work. The place to seek is within. Spiritual revelators of all time agree on this.. 

Spiritual living is based on the ability to contact God. God is at hand, our mystical poet tells us ‘He is closer than breathing nearer than hands or feet.

Righteous can mean having the ‘right idea’ of supply, or God. Our lack of understanding of God is responsible for any difficulties in our current situation. What we know of God are Truth and answers of our own knowledge. Frequently we quote ideas of God that are quotes of others and not of our own knowledge.

God is the I of my being, the I am – not my personal mind or power or understanding – the I am of me, the very I or spiritual selfhood of me. God is part of each human being. All of God’s spirit is the human spirit. All of God’s supply is the human supply. All fo God’s love is human love.

Why?… Because I ant he Father are one, and all that the Father has is mine. It is that oneness that constitutes the infinity of our being. This ‘Allness’ constitutes individual being, our good does not come to us from outside; it has to be contacted from inside.

Supply is Spirit
Supply is spirit and it is within you. Outwardly supply takes the form of money, food, clothing, housing, transportation, business capital etc. Spiritual discernment will tell you this is true. Later you will see the proof of it – not by ever seeing supply but by seeing the forms supply assumes.

Truth like supply is invisible is inaudible. You will never see Truth, nor will you ever hear Truth. Truth is within you. Truth is spirit, and Truth is God.  

Tangibles and intangibles of supply

Fruit of trees, crops in fields, are symbols of supply. They are not supply itself, because supply is invisible and it is within you. So it is with poets, authors, sculptors, painters, composers. Their invisible talents are the substance of what becomes poems, books, paintings, teachings, or other forms of art. Their supply is their inner light, their inspiration.   

We are not held in bondage by God
Even the smallest measure of understanding on the nature if God would heal half of the diseases and discords of the world, because about half of the people of the world believe that god is punishing them for their sins. It is a theological belief that we are being punished for our sins – either of commission or omission – for which God is holding us in bondage.

Anyone holding such beliefs has not even the faintest concept of the nature of God…   Why?…
God is Spirit, God is love, God is Infinite, GOD IS Universal. Can an Infinite, Universal Love withhold itself? No more so than the law of gravity. If you drop an object the law of gravity operates regardless of the value of the object. The law of gravity is no respecter f value. It operates for all. So it is with the Grace of god. THE Grace of God has no more power to discriminate saint from sinner than the law of gravity can discriminate a one-dollar object from a thousand-dollar object

God cannot be deceived – spiritual principal
The Spirit is closer to you than breathing. You cannot deceive It, because It is yourself, It is your intelligence, It is your wisdom, It is the very guiding instinct of your being. Therefore, for example; you cannot steal something and think god will not see you. God is right at the center of your being, and the moment you violate a spiritual principal, you are out of tune with it. 

Acknowledging the presence of God
We have not/do not become separated from God. There is therefore no need to seek or find God (he is not lost/has not departed). Our (bad/negative) experiences have us believe we become separated from God.

We become victims of that (our) belief because entertaining a sense of separation from God can be as disastrous and devastating as actual separation. In other words, the moment we accept the sense of separation from God, it is as if we had not God 

The thing to overcome is the sense of separation, not the actual separation.