Religion & Spirituality Blogs (1,491)

In my opinion, everybody prays.
In all religions. Of all beliefs. Whether proclaimed atheists or non believers, all pray.
Spiritually prayer is from the heart and so most times it’s private, but it also is manifested publicly, aloud and as a congregation, invoking or pleading or asking or thanking God, or Allah, or Buddha, or the Sun, the Moon.....
Praying is a powerful emotion which can be both physical and mental, and even if for the briefest of time, can be a reliever of worry, stress, mental and physical pain, and a support in time of need.
I believe in the power of prayer.
You ?

The night has not yet given way to the dawn, and the sky is still studded with departing stars.

The river looks like a thin stream of silver. The sand is cool with dewdrops, and the winds is bitter with cold. A deep stillness prevails, and the sound of birds every now and then only deepens it.
Taking a friend with me, I have come to this solitary place rather early. The friend says that he feels fear in solitude, and the stillness feels biting. If he keeps himself occupied somehow then it is fine; otherwise a strange kind of anguish and sadness overtakes him.

This anguish comes to everybody. Nobody wants to face himself. Looking within oneself, one feels puzzled. And because solitude leaves one alone with oneself, it is frightening. If you are entangled in the other, the self is forgotten. That is a kind of unconsciousness and an escape. Man keeps himself busy his whole life in this escape. But this escape is temporary. There is no way man can escape from his own self! All his efforts to escape are futile, because he himself is the one from whom he is trying to escape. How can one escape from oneself, and how can one run away from oneself? We can run away from everything but not from our own selves. Having run throughout our whole life we will find that we have not reached anywhere. Hence those who are intelligent do not run away from their own self; rather they face it.
If man looks inward he experiences an emptiness. There is an infinite nothingness within. Hence, becoming puzzled, he runs outwards. He makes endless efforts to fill this emptiness. He wants to fill it up in the world, in relationships. But it cannot be filled in any way – it is impossible to fill it up – and this is his anguish and the failure of his life. Death shows this anguish very clearly. Death throws him into this very emptiness from which he has been escaping his whole life. And that is why the fear of death is uppermost.
I say, fleeing from one’s emptiness is ignorance. It is through facing it, entering it, that life is attained. Reaching to this nothingness, we realize our nature.
Religion is an entry into the emptiness. What man experiences in himself in utter aloneness is religiousness.

It seems like the rest of the European countries are feeling the burden of Islamization.

Blame it on Merkel, she was the one who invited them in the first place and now trying so hard to get rid of them.

First the burqa and now this. There are now 8 countries that completely ban the burqa.

I would say it is about time.

I stood on the banked shoreline, silently gazing across the sea at the evening sky. The sun was still well above the horizon. The clouds around it were beginning to darken with their edges highlighted by the sunlight. In the foreground, seagulls and pelicans sat quietly on the fishing boats anchored close to the shoreline. It was very peaceful and serene.

As I watched, the sun edged closer to the horizon and the sky around it started to take on a faint pinkish glow. As the sun sank deeper, the pinkish tint turned to orange. This acted as backlighting for the clouds, darkening them to a shade of blue. By then, the sun was sitting just above the horizon, creating a magnificent sunset.

It painted a wide straight band of reddish orange, from where it was setting, on the surface of the water right to the water's edge at the banked shoreline where I was standing. The water's surface, painted by the setting sun, seemed to come alive. The sky surrounding the setting sun was filled with infinite shades of red and orange merging into each other. The setting sun backlighting the clouds from underneath highlighted their edges with a glowing reddish orange tint, imbuing them with a life of their own.

I was caught up in the glory and majesty of the spectacle playing out before me. It was a direct realization of some unique and unusual dimension of consciousness that transcended the ordinary day-to-day reality; it was so beautiful that I cannot find words to describe it. It was a sheer feeling of ecstasy - a state of pure feeling and joyous emotion. I felt as if I was transported to another world where Time appeared to stand still. My thought activity was suspended and the feeling of ecstasy reigned supreme. At that moment, there was no awareness of any connection with the idea of God as espoused by religion.

After a while, I cannot say for how long, whether moments or minutes, due to timeless nature of the experience, I wilfully and consciously began to think of the idea of God as espoused by Christianity It is important to note that this did not emanate form the mystical nature of the experience itself but it was something that I deliberately and wilfully imposed on the situation. In particular, I began to think one-third of this experience was linked with Jesus in keeping with the idea of the Trinity in Christianity. In so doing, I became disconnected from the mystery and ecstasy of the experience but the general feeling evoked in me from the experience persisted for quite some time afterwards.

The most amazing and enjoyable part of the experience was the deep feeling of ecstasy that I felt.


I view this experience as my personal insight into the difference between spirituality and religion.

Request to all Muslims..............

Forget relationships and learn how to relate. Once you are in a relationship you start taking each other for granted – that’s what destroys all love affairs. The woman thinks she knows the man, the man thinks he knows the woman. Nobody knows either! It is impossible to know the other, the other remains a mystery. And to take the other for granted is insulting, disrespectful. To think that you know your wife is very, very ungrateful. How can you know the woman? How can you know the man? They are processes, they are not things. The woman that you knew yesterday is not there today. So much water has gone down the Ganges; she is somebody else, totally different. Relate again, start again, don’t take it for granted. And the man that you slept with last night, look at his face again in the morning. He is no more the same person, so much has changed. So much, incalculably much has changed. That is the difference between a thing and a person. The furniture in the room is the same, but the man and the woman, they are no more the same. Explore again, start again. That’s what I mean by relating

It starts at the beginning there was nothing, then there appeared a youth farm where 2 people lived:
Moses and Alibaba
but they had eaten from the poisonous apple and then they fell asleep
when suddenly it started to rain very hard and then Noah stood there with his speedboat and with his animals
do you know why noah only took 2 pieces of each animal species?
he was not insured against third parties
but by the rain everybody was drowned
except Jesus who once again went to hang out
and that had turned the water into red wine and then came Jonas the Baptist who had already drunk the water so Moses there could continue with his Jews
but Jonas the Baptist was so fed up that he started to throw people wet with water
and of course the people did not like it so they nailed his head to a cross,
but then just in time 3 women came from the east and they had bread
crumbles scattered to get rid of the road, but Jesus got back there and he had those crumbs in fish and he said ... STAY ON AND LOOP ... and then those fish were gone ... and those bitches did not know where they came from so they had to go to Maria in the stable to sleep
but Mary was pregnant but not Josel but the merciful American because they always sang "Maria ver stop saying Maria" and da came from the Musical "Jesus Christ superman"and then that Baby came over there and they did not know where to bring the scream, so they threw him into the ditch with pitch and feathers,
and those cows were so shocked that they could not give milk for 7 years
and the Romans thought "now are we going to take a good hold of it, we'll take that flat out of the house "
but they had misjudged because there was a small village that kept on fighting bravely because they had a potion and da had made prof. barrabas
but that was in prison and everyone was calling "BARABAS FREE, BARABAS FREE"
and Emperor Pilato who was then just washing his hands while Jesus there with his filthy feet running across the water was when they nailed him to a cross

Very interesting.

Are they really at each other?

Why and who will win.

Note: Assad was killing a lot of his people, it was found out, he's killing them because they're not from his faction.

What an idiot you are.

I'm the one who's laughing.

Why would I make the suggestion of killing you all, when your muslim story says you're already killing each other.

You should have read the whole context of the post before you present your moronic opinion.

My thread reads like this: why Shias and Sunnis are killing each other.

Gnomes.............. Why believe in a God that you do not see and can not prove? The 'smart man' is God himself in a makeable world. Haha, you do not believe gnomes either? No, believers are suckers who have let themselves indoctrinated by their parents. A belief that is based on a book of thousands of years old - originated in the context of a primitive traveling desert people in the Middle East. What in the world does that have to do with us?