Monday, March 18, 2024

Evolution: one joined path of inner growth

 


Lectures Universal Wisdom


newsletter TSPL March 2024
Lectures
Evolution: one joined path for inner growth

Evolution means development, but development of what exactly? The change of form we perceive with our physical senses is a fact, but what causes this physical change? What is the driving force we recognize to be innate in all life?

In the first lecture we discuss the essence of life and evolution. The second lecture we will focus on our future: what role technology plays in the progress of human evolution?

 

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Lectures LIVE on Sunday March 17 and March 31 at 19.30 CE(S)T. Convert to your timezone. Related study meetings on Sunday March 24 and April 7 at 19.30 CE(S)T via Zoom.

 

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How free are you really? Mystically, mentally, socially

What is the nature and power of our free will, mystically, mentally and socially? Are we defined by our heredity, our upbringing and our current environment? Or do we choose our own path in life, building our own future?

 

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Video past lecture
Magazine Lucifer the Lightbringer
Lucifer No. 4 - 2023

In this issue:

Symposium 2023: The Religion of the Future
  • Introduction

  • One Life

  • Religion is a workout

  • The religion of the future

Other articles
  • The soul of an ideal

  • Impartiality: guarantee of peace

  • Q&A about symbols

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Our purpose is to form a core of Universal Brotherhood, by spreading the knowledge regarding the spiritual structure of man and the cosmos, free of dogmas. 
All our activities are carried out on voluntary basis. The organization has no paid officials. If you are willing to support our work you can contribute by making a donation using the button below.

Saturday, March 16, 2024

Letting Go of Perfection

 


03.15.2024

Letting Go of Perfection


Last year, I took my first pottery class. The serene sight of a clay vessel gracefully twirling on the pottery wheel mesmerized me like no other art form ever had. After my first class, I was hooked, enrolling in more classes and workshops and eventually setting up a home studio with my own tiny wheel.

When I first started learning how to throw pottery on the wheel, I was thrilled. It felt magical to turn a lump of clay into… something! Anything! But as with any skill, I soon started to feel the weight of my own expectations. I wanted things to be exact – my shapes to be tall, uniform, and smooth. I soon found myself squashing the clay and starting again whenever something didn't turn out as I’d envisioned. I knew I was still learning and growing, but my perfectionism and self-criticism were getting in the way of truly enjoying myself and the process.

When these thoughts start to creep in, I try to remind myself of the Zen philosophy of wabi-sabi. Wabi-sabi has many translations, but is often characterized by the beauty of imperfection. Embracing the essence of wabi-sabi, I recognized that my art, like myself, was inherently flawed. My aim was never to produce something perfect, but rather to just enjoy the journey of exploration and creativity. I’ve since learned to appreciate the imperfections of the clay in my hands — the unique bend of a slightly wonky mug handle, the fingerprints in my pinch pots.

The three pieces below highlight the concept of wabi-sabi in art and how it can translate into our daily lives. Whether in our artistic endeavors, homes, workplaces, or relationships, I invite you to embrace the wisdom of wabi-sabi this weekend, allowing imperfections to be celebrated rather than criticized.

—Martine Panzica, Assistant Digital Editor, Lion’s Roar

Wabi-Sabi For Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers


An excerpt from Leonard Koren’s gem, Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets and Philosophers, considered a class statement on this Japanese aesthetic.

 
Like many of my contemporaries, I first learned of wabi-sabi during my youthful spiritual quest in the late 1960’s. At that time, the traditional culture of Japan beckoned with profound “answers” to life’s toughest questions. Wabi-sabi seemed to me a nature-based aesthetic paradigm that restored a measure of sanity and proportion to the art of living.

Wabi-sabi resolved my artistic dilemma about how to create beautiful things without getting caught up in the dispiriting materialism that usually surrounds such creative acts. Wabi-sabi—deep, multidimensional, elusive—appeared the perfect antidote to the pervasively slick, saccharine, corporate style of beauty that I felt was desensitizing American society.

 


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Wabi Sabi Is Imperfect Beauty

 

Wabi sabi — a philosophy with roots in Zen tea ceremonies — posits that beauty lies in what is flawed.
 

Yet wabi sabi is still somewhat countercultural. In promoting the humble, the irregular, the accidental, the timeworn, the ambiguous, and the awkward, wabi sabi prizes qualities that many, even now, consider ugly. Like modernism, wabi sabi values use, but its take on use is wholly different.

Where modernism employs a mechanistic view of utility—the house is a machine for living, the library a machine for storing books—wabi sabi takes a more open-hearted view, where “use” means accommodating the whole human, body and dreaming soul. And where modernism imposes the perverse demand that form should both follow function and remain untouched by it, wabi sabi values the wear, aging, and deterioration that attend use.

 

Who Was Otagaki Rengetsu?


Grace Schireson on the life, art, and poetics of the Zen nun Otagaki Rengetsu, a woman “humbled by life’s blows as well as its beauty.” Watch Grace Schierson in Lion’s Roar’s upcoming free online event, “The Women of Wisdom Summit.”

 
Her pottery, inscribed with her poems, has a down-to-earth appeal coupled with a sublime beauty. Her elegant calligraphy, done in the curvaceous women’s script known as hiragana—more emotionally accessible than classical Chinese characters—touches us through its simplicity. But it is Rengetsu herself, her vulnerability and ability to express her enlightenment in very human terms, that has kept people connected to her art, and her dharma, for more than one hundred and fifty years.

LION’S ROAR PROMOTION