InnerSelf.com

by Sarah Stillman. What role has religion played in your life up until now? Most of us tend to adhere to the religion of our parents, but some girls choose to venture on their own spiritual paths. I'm not here to advocate any particular faith, but I do think it's important to have a defined set of religious beliefs — even if that means...

Ours is a time of unprecedented change and complexity.  Never before have so many worldviews, belief systems and ways of engaging reality converged. On one hand, there are abundant instances of conflict and intolerance...

by Satya Kalra.

Navratri (Nav-Durga) is a nine-day festival celebrated by Hindus honoring the Mother Goddess. This article answers commonly asked questions about the origins and spiritual significance of this important biannual event including the three stages of an individual's spiritual journey...

by Lex Hixon.

The history of Islam is not free from intolerance, injustice, and other chronic distortions of the human spirit. Neither is Christian history free from such distortions. But these sobering facts cannot dim the wonder of twenty centuries of commitment flowing from the inspired life of Jesus, and fourteen centuries of...

by J. Donald Walters.

Everyone in the world is on the spiritual path. By no means everyone, however, is aware of being on a path at all. Most people see their efforts to avoid sorrow and find happiness as episodic, not as the unchanging motivation behind everything they do...

by Huston Smith.

One hears on all sides that the conflict between science and religion is over. For four centuries the battle has raged: in astronomy over the earth's position in the universe; in geology over the earth's age; in biology over the evolutionary hypothesis; in psychology over Freud's right to "peep and botanize into man's soul." Bitter the struggle has been, and long. Yet (so runs the tale) it has achieved...

My effort is to leave you alone with meditation, with no mediator between you and existence. When you are not in meditation you are separated from existence, and that is your suffering. It's the same as when you take a fish out of the ocean and throw it on the bank — the misery and the suffering and the torture he goes through..

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I remember as a child that when evening would come and I would see the first star, I would happily intone the little rhyme: "Star Light, Star Bright, First star I see tonight, I wish I may, I wish I might, Have the wish I wish tonight."  And then the child that I was would always...

I was taught when I was a little boy that it was good to be unselfish and loving, and I used to think that I should grow up to serve other people. But after a while I found out that unless one has something to give people, there is nothing one can do to help them..