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Below are links to our previous Feature
Articles by Paul Hourihan on various aspects of spirituality from an
Universal and
Eastern philosophical perspective:
APRIL, THE
CRUELEST MONTH?
AS
WITHIN, SO WITHOUT
Attachment in Work & Meditation:
SOURCE OF BONDAGE AND LIBERATION
AWAKENING TO RESURRECTION
BENEDICT LABRE: SAINT BY
ACCLAMATION
THE BODHISATTVA
BRAHMAN: THE ABSOLUTE
BUDDHA:
THE COMPASSIONATE ONE
CATHERINE OF
GENOA: SAINT OF LOVE
CHARACTER IS DESTINY
CHRIST AND VEDANTA
CHRISTMAS: BIRTH OF THE SAVIOR
CHRISTMAS REFLECTIONS
CHRIST'S TEACHINGS IN A DIFFERENT LIGHT
Concentration: The Key to Success
DISSATISFACTION: THE PREREQUISITE FOR SPIRITUAL LIFE
Easter and the Law of Being
EVERY DAY IS A NEW YEAR DAY
FACING
THE SPIRITUAL CHALLENGES OF THE IRON AGE
GOD IN THE HERE
AND NOW
going beyond the SURROGATES
FOR THE SELF
INDIVIDUALITY AND Mystical EXPERIENCE
IS MYSTICISM ESCAPISM?
KARMA YOGA – Enlightenment on the Installment Plan
THE LIGHT OF THE SELF
THE LIVING
WATER
MAINTAINING THE LOVE RELATIONSHIP WITH Meditation
MEDITATION - THE ULTIMATE ESCAPE
Meditation: The Way to Transformation and the Glory of Our True Self
mostly, we Talk toO much - thoughts on Right SpEeCh
MOTHERHOOD, THE MOST DRAMATIC SCHOOL
THE MOTHER'S UNIQUE OPPORTUNITY
my quarrel with myself by
Shirley T. Lewis, Selected Poems
THE
MYSTICAL STATE VS. THE DREAM STATE
NO ONE
CAN BE LOST
NO PROGRESSION WITHOUT CONTRARIES
OM,
HANDLE FOR THE DIVINE
THE PERSONAL VS IMPERSONAL AND THE TRUTH IN
ALL
PRAYER: ITS OWN
REWARD
THE PSYCHIC
VS. THE SPIRITUAL
Questions FROM
Spiritual seekers
QUESTIONS ON THE PATH
QUESTIONS ON THE PATH - SPEAKING THE
TRUTH
FROM REINCARNATION TO RESURRECTION, PART 1
From
reincarnation to resurrection, PARt 2
STUDY THE
WORD
Thoughts on Detachment
Thoughts
on Right Livelihood
TIGERS OF
WRATH: ANGER AS A SPIRITUAL TOOL
THE TRUE NATURE OF THE WORLD
TRUTH: THE HIGHEST PRINCIPLE
VEDANTA:
ANCIENT WISDOM FOR MODERN TIMES
WE HAVE IT ALL NOW
WORK AND Resistance - A PATH TO Freedom
GOD IN THE HERE
AND NOW
Men esteem truth remote .… But … God
himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine
in the lapse of all the ages. - Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Why should God be found anywhere else but
here? Why should the center of the universe be anywhere but in yourself?
Why shouldn’t it be where you are? This would also be the center of the
godhead, since the godhead is not an anthropomorphic deity located in one
place in time, it is pure spirit, pure being—why would the center of that
be any one place in particular? God, says Christ, is a spirit to be
worshiped in truth and in spirit. The center of that spirit could be with
you as much as anywhere, and it is mysticism that discovers this.
Mysticism unveils this grandest of truths,
which we’re hearing more and more about in the present day. The center of
things is not to be found outside of us, but within. We cannot hear this
too often. We hear it, read it, meditate on it, and then go on and act as
if we haven’t heard it at all. We have to continually reinforce this idea
by meditation and reading over and over again until it becomes part of our
very being. Hearing about it once will not do. We have to hear about it
for years.
See also
Words of Wisdom:
Mysticism and
Spiritual Life
and feature article,
WE HAVE IT ALL NOW.
going beyond the SURROGATES
FOR THE SELF
By
Paul Hourihan,
edited by
Anna Hourihan
Until we discover and experience our true Self, we are occupied with
surrogates for that Self. Where is this Self? As
Christ tells us, “the kingdom of heaven is within you,”
 but
instead of looking within we
look without.
In our search, we get some sense of it through substitutes
such as the beauty of Nature, addictions, crowds, passionate causes,
family gatherings…. These occasions make us feel stronger and
happier—temporarily at least— because they free us from our self-sense or
self-absorption. But these activities don’t advance us; they return us to
where we were and to what we were. And sooner or later, they all fail us
and are meant to fail us. Although we cannot help but resort to them by
the Divine will’s own design and by our inner necessity, we also cannot
help but be betrayed by them and left abandoned and desolate at the end.
Thou shalt have no other gods before me.
Even Nature fails us as we see in the lives of William Wordsworth, and
Henry David Thoreau who spent much time in Nature and wrote so beautifully
about its glories, but weren’t fulfilled thereby.
If we put our trust in anything for too long for its own sake, we cannot
end happily. Nothing is to be loved for its own sake, nothing
whatever. In the Upanishads, the sage Yagnavalkya, before renouncing the
world, gives the following instruction to his wife, Maitreyi:
“A wife loves her
husband not for his own sake, dear, but because the Self lives in him.
“A husband loves his
wife not for her own sake, dear, but because the Self lives in her …
“Everything is loved
not for its own sake but because the Self lives in it....
”
“Let all ignore him,” concludes Yagnavalkya, “who thinks that anything
whatever is different from the Self.”
Humanity’s heroes are those who have this sense of unity with others. We
are aware of their oneness and attunement with them. We recognize that
that is the thing in them we would most desire, not their power or fortune
but that quality.
How do we dissolve the separateness we feel in life and get past the
surrogates for the Self in order to reach the Self? By living a
spiritual life there is a systematic erosion of ego consciousness
and its replacement by spiritual consciousness, then the One, the
Self, the Blissful Presence Within is glimpsed as real.
The scriptures of the world are roadmaps that lead us to the hidden
kingdom within. Read them closely, they are pathways to Self-realization.
And meditation is the vehicle that will carry you to that kingdom of Light
that is within you, that is part of you … and is you.
See also
Words of Wisdom:
Meditation and
Spiritual Life and
articles
MEDITATION - THE ULTIMATE ESCAPE
and
DISSATISFACTION: THE PREREQUISITE FOR SPIRITUAL LIFE.
MAINTAINING THE LOVE RELATIONSHIP WITH Meditation
By
Paul Hourihan
Many
of us know from experience that the beauty and intensity of a love relationship when it’s in full flower will gradually fade away. We lose control of it
subject to mysterious forces
that
 seemed
so absent at the beginning—forces that slowly
undermine
the splendor of
what was
there originally. How, then, can we maintain our love, which we
want
to preserve and protect more than
anything else in the world?
Meditation will rejuvenate it and restore the grace that was there when
the light of love rested on your life initially. The transforming power of
meditation on your personality will
enable you to recapture the quality
that attracted the love in the first place—and more—for what you
achieve, what
comes by knowledge and development, is
deeper
and truer than what was given you for the brief season at the beginning.
Meditation will transform you—what must happen if your love is to
be retained, renewed, and preserved. You may say, “… but I don't want to
be transformed—after all, it was me, as I am, that he or she loved in the
first place; it was with this self, this personality that I loved
as well. Why do you talk of changing that which served so
successfully at the outset?” Because it wasn't your ordinary self that
experienced love—but that part of you in touch with your true Essence. The
self that you are now is the egoistic, selfish,
unripe
personality that you were before the grace of love ascended on you
and made you, for a
while,
into the ideal person you were with your beloved—the same process taking
place with him or her as well.
Love
transformed
you during that all-too-brief period. Then, like all grace, it was
withdrawn and it was left up to you
to re-achieve
the
quality of grace on your own so that the revelation would become
permanently established in you.
Through meditation and the way of life it engenders, we can connect to the
source of love itself,
which as the mystic
discovers,
is within our hearts. Meditation gives us the opportunity to perfect
the wonderful thing we discovered long before to become once again
mystics of love.
See also
Words of Wisdom:
Meditation and
Spiritual Life and
article
MEDITATION - THE ULTIMATE ESCAPE.
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FAcing
the Spiritual Challenges of the iRON AGE
By
Paul Hourihan,
edited by
Anna Hourihan
According to Hindu mythology, the duration
of the world is divided into four Yugas,*
or ages, each lasting thousands of years. The Kali Yuga or Iron
Age—the current age we are deeply entangled in—comes at the end
of the cycle and is historically a time of materialism, sensuality and
godlessness. How, then, do we maintain
our
spiritual lives and values to
meet
the challenges of the Kali Yuga?
 Knowledge
is power. It is only through knowledge that we can acquire the proper
tools to counteract and survive the pervasive and compelling power of this
age of conflict.
What's needed is a commitment to something abiding—something beyond the
temporal and changing nature of this world—and that is Spiritual
Truth. By making such a commitment, we gain power over the forces in the
Kali Yuga that are trying to bring us down. Then only will it dawn
on us that we must live with extreme wakefulness, vigilance, and
simplicity, as though we are on a perpetual battlefield. As Christ in the
Bible commands his disciples: “Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the
midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.”**
How do
we make this commitment? Since
we are dealing with the fundamental nature of an era that is opposed to
the Spirit, we need to seek power at the deepest level of which we are
capable. This is accomplished through the discipline of spiritual
practice, which chiefly involves meditation—the operation of the mind in quest of
itself. Commitment to meditation gradually
deepens our intuitive powers, gives knowledge, strengthens us and brings
the wisdom needed to deal with the dark powers of the age.
The
Kali Yuga is the triumph of the external forces over the inner life.
Therefore, the inward spirit must be made strong through meditation until it becomes
more powerful than the outer; then we are able to confront and
overcome
the ominous mindset of the Kali Yuga, and be victorious.
See also Words of Wisdom:
Meditation,
Spiritual Life,
Mysticism.
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THE TRUE NATURE OF THE WORLD
by
Paul Hourihan,
edited by Anna Hourihan
 What
is the nature of the manifested world? It would have to be like its
Creator: Divine.
One without a Second ... according to Vedanta.
An
artist may conceive evil, wickedness, etc., in his creations, because of
his own still unregenerate nature. But an all-loving, all-perfect Being
can only create, even conceive, a world like itself –“of purer eyes than
to behold iniquity.”*
Compare, for example, some great saint or God-Man being entrusted with the
creation of the world, what would the result be like? Would it not be a
reflection of his own nature—would it not be like him?... And yet, it
would be a world of conflicts, struggles, opposition, obstacle courses of
various kinds, as John Keats had intuited in his “value of Soul-making”
letter.** This world
is precisely made for the purpose of our spiritual development. With only
benign, beautiful and welcome experiences in it, we would never attain to
perfection, which the Saint or God-Man would know more than anyone—would
know what was necessary in the way of resistance and conflict to have
produced the kind of consciousness that he now has. Therefore the world,
though apparently containing negative elements, will actually contain
nothing that does not play a role—direct or indirect—in bringing us to our
spiritual destiny.
Thus,
we may appropriately conclude that everything that is is a
reflection of the Divine, including evil, including ego … without which we
would not initiate the struggle to begin with—the struggle by virtue of
which enlightenment may come.
If
this is true of the God-man, how much more true will it be of the Supreme
itself? In other words, how much more inevitable it will be that the
Supreme create a world that reflects its own nature, which is in effect a
mirror of itself: Divine in every part.
*
Holy Bible, Habakkuk 1: 13
** From a letter
sent to his brother and sister in April 1819:
"The common cognomen [epithet] of this world among the misguided and
superstitious is 'a vale of tears' from which we are to be redeemed by a
certain arbitrary interposition of God and taken to Heaven—What a little
circumscribed straightened notion! Call the world if you please “The value
of Soul-making” … Do you not see … how necessary a World of Pains and
troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a Soul…" - The
Letters of John Keats, 4th edn (London: Oxford University
Press, 1952), pp 334-5.
See also
What is Vedanta?
and
No Progression
Without Contraries: Death, Life's Glorifier
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STUDY THE WORD
by
Paul Hourihan,
edited by Anna Hourihan
Study of the scriptures is an important aspect of spiritual life. An
intense, creative, engaged reflection and a searching, earnest
examination of the law, the Word, the universal wisdom as it may be
found in scriptures,* will help to illuminate us into commitment and
conviction.
How will this kind of scriptural
analysis, and the special
way of life the scriptures enjoin on us, help us to have a
life-transforming mystical experience?
-
By helping us to collect our energy, fuse our
strength, concenter our power of will. We are scattered; this
will make us whole. We are many; this will make us one. Then with that
united force of integrated inner strength we will plunge deep into the
center of the mind and storm the gates of heaven that are hidden there.
Do you think we can do that with our ordinary, everyday strength?
-
Through the practice of nonattachment, however
difficult it may be at first. A life of cultivation of this virtue of
discrimination, enlightened dispassion—what we call nonattachment—will
reward us with the gift of deep peace, freedom from cravings and from
restlessness during the time of meditation itself. In that condition it
will be easy for us to dive deep within… the world of sense attraction
and attachment having been stilled for us by our daily cultivation of
spiritual virtues over a long period.
-
By spiritual direction in our lives leading to a life
of moral and ethical orientation. By thinking of others and by curbing
our self-love and natural egocentrism, we discover that the great
obstacle to mystical experience, to the experience of Truth and
Enlightenment, namely, egoism, is gradually being reduced. In other
words, a nonegoistic life is being set forth.
-
Finally, the Great Law—the Law of Universal
Oneness—will be reflected more and more in our lives and consequently in
our meditations; for as we live, so shall we meditate… and likewise as
we meditate, so shall we live, and so shall we be. Meditation, the
chamber where Truth resonates, if Truth we have found, will be
strengthened and reinforced for us by our obedience to and increasing
reflection of the Great Law of Unity, of Universal Oneness.
For all these reasons, as well as others that will occur as
we proceed, mystical experience and the life being recommended to us in
the scriptures interact upon each other intimately and directly.
However, the scriptures are not the end. Though they are
our highest production, they offer only the basic introduction to the
realities of spiritual life in the mystical ascent. In the meantime, they
help us to understand, check, curb, and control the lower nature and
establish ourselves on a new path—that achievement, alone, will be
monumental.
_______________________
*
Mystical writings in particular, such as:
"The Sermon on the Mount" in the Holy Bible, the Upanishads, and
the Tao Te Ching.
Please note: Our latest title,
Children of Immortal Bliss: A New Perspective on our True Identity Based
on the Ancient Vedanta Philosophy of India
includes a study of the Upanishads.
See also:
Thoughts on
Detachment, Words of Wisdom: Spiritual Life
and
Meditation.
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every DAY IS A NEW YEAR DAY
by
Paul Hourihan,
edited by Anna Hourihan -
(Excerpt from a
taped lecture)
The New Year is here. We hope you’re starting some
resolutions to become even better than what you are and have been. But we
don’t need a New Year’s Day for that, do we?
Every day is a New Year Day; every day is Christmas.
In our spiritual lives, every day is Christmas
because we celebrate the sense of joy and oneness that Christmas brings to
ordinary people during the holiday season. We
also celebrate New Year’s Day and every day of our
lives by the resolution we make when we wake
up i n
the morning, such as “this day let me be better; let me practice change in
myself today” and similar resolutions we state at the start of each day.
New Year’s Day is for those who are not practicing
spiritual life but need
the benefit of a few days or a week or two to give them extra motivation
to change their lives—this
is all to the good and we wish them well.
Meanwhile, as the Christmas season passes and a new
year is upon us
we realize that these celebrations with others that we enjoy are, in a
sense, symbols of what we are
doing
in spiritual life. Christmas is a symbol not only of Christ’s birth but
the ever-renewed birth
of something in us each day. We may not know what to call it, but we think
it is the beginning of what might eventually be a rebirth of spirit; New
Year’s Day is a symbol of that rebirth in our will and resolution to turn
over a new leaf.
We have 365 New Year days to be authentic spiritual
aspirants!
See also:
CHRISTMAS
REFLECTIONS,
Words of Wisdom: Spiritual Life
and
Words of
Wisdom: Christ.
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Dissatisfaction - The Prerequisite for Spiritual Life
By
Paul Hourihan
Why are some drawn to the spiritual search, and not others?
Dissatisfaction—discontent with the world and with oneself. We must
disintegrate (break down our conditioned thinking and behavior) before we
can integrate. We must know great conflict before peace, great passion
before serenity. We must want and need the Truth. Otherwise
we do not find it.
Truth belongs to the discontented.
Dissatisfaction with oneself and with Life, as well as a great inner,
ongoing discontent is what is needful.
From the viewpoint of reincarnation, it is when we have lived many
lives, passed through all the experiences, then the discontent arises
because all that we have gone through does not satisfy or fulfill. We are
ripe for something else. The fruit of our readiness, our ripeness, hangs
heavy on the bough. The slightest stimulus may loosen it—some book, some
meeting, some moment, some dream, some tragedy.
In other words, we have to work our way through the basic experiences
that Life has to offer, that the world provides, before we are ready for
that which the world does not provide, or that Life does not conceive—the
world of spiritual enlightenment, of mystical realization.
Another prerequisite—a kind of hopelessness … like a land bird that
finds itself on the mast of a ship that has gone out sea.… Us, too. What
else can we do?
But from this condition springs grit and determination, which are so
essential. But isn’t mildness and quietness always recommended? Yes,
but an achieved mildness at depth, where the Truth is. Congenital mildness
lies on the surface and is perhaps not the best ideal because the drive,
the determination is not there. But the mildness we achieve through
effort—that is different.
Our strong resolution to go forward, in turn, is fed by desire,
passion, and energy that is not necessarily visible to others: passion of
soul, and energy of will.
A more purely spiritual prerequisite: guilelessness … absence of
calculation … simplicity.
All the prerequisites are really geared to enable us to weather, and
eventually supplant the psychological pattern of our past conditioning that provides
resistance to spiritual life.
See also Words of Wisdom:
Spiritual Life and
Reincarnation.
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Meditation - The
Ultimate Escape
By Paul Hourihan/ed.
Anna Hourihan
Going away on vacation is wonderful! There is only one fault with it—we
bring ourselves along. We can get away from our jobs, but we can’t get
away from ourselves—that is, the ego self, the compulsive self, the
ordinary self.
 One reason we drink and take drugs is so that we can temporarily escape
from the limited self we normally identify with. Sexual adventure serves
the same purpose, since sexual excitement pushes the ordinary
consciousness out of the central place in our life for a little while and
we seem to become
someone new.
Hence, also, our constant need of novelty—new sensations, new things!
But still we can’t escape ourselves! What is the solution to this? We
should make ourselves such that we won’t want to escape! The spiritually
evolved individual, for example, is absorbed in his or her own Presence
and is quite content. A great deep opens up within and he or she discovers at
last what the rest of us are foolishly seeking to uncover through novelty,
travel, sex, addictions and losing ourselves in work.
To
reach this state we have to control, renew and transform the mind. How do
we do this? Through the practice
of meditation. With meditation we escape from the ego self; we push this
aside because we’re seeking something else. We immobilize it for five
minutes, ten minutes, half an hour, or whatever we can manage without
strain. During this time we give the mind a respite from its
usual restless, ego-driven self. We infuse the mind with different
vibrations, such as peace, love, devotion, and acceptance, which are
coming from a higher level of the mind. Otherwise it experiences its usual
self … and thus is continually bored.
Knowingly or unknowingly, we are aiming for the mystical state so that the
mind will experience another consciousness than its own habitual
consciousness: namely, the Self, the charisma of the Divine Presence
within us.
Behold, the kingdom of heaven is within you. (Luke
18: 21)
The true vacation is meditation—we absent ourselves from the
familiar limited self to reveal the Unlimited Self within.
See also
Words of Wisdom:
Meditation and
Spiritual Life and Articles:
IS
MYSTICISM ESCAPISM? and
GOING BEYOND THE SURROGATES FOR THE SELF.
Back to Top
WE have It ALL NOW!
by Paul Hourihan
We seek fulfillment in
so many things—love, marriage, parenthood, art, wealth, power—and fail to
find it in any.
What will fulfill us?
There is something:
namely, the knowledge that nothing will fulfill us, that we need no
fulfilling, that we have it all now!
Spiritual meditation
reinforces this idea by turning our attention inward. The answer we seek
is to be discovered by solitude, prayer, meditation, inner analysis; in
other words, by cultivating a life of introspection even as we continue to
live in the world. But long practice is necessary, as it is necessary in
mastering any difficult art. Here the task is to discover that there was
nothing to learn, nothing to do, nothing to be discovered! Yet … we
need practice to arrive at this conclusion.
Yes, we have it all
now. Just as we are, we are fully equipped for enlightenment. Everything
needed is at hand if we would but use it, and continue to use it and faint
not. God, heaven, immortality, eternity, all of life, all of the universe
are there, ready at hand.
See also
What is Vedanta? and Words of Wisdom:
Mysticism
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