An Open Letter on the Holiday Season

To those who, like me, are perpetually recovering from their own assholery,

Over the Thanksgiving break, for the second time in the history of Under the Influence, I stopped writing the post I was working on.  The first time was on June  ...

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Ecclesiology and Ego, Trinity and Transformation

On October 26th, Under the Influence’s post “Christ, Christians and the Body Language of Transformation” defined right belief (orthodoxy), right practice (orthopraxy) and its own term “right transformation” (orthomorphosis.)  For good or ...

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Love, Service Devotion: A reading of Ram Dass and Trungpa Rinpoche

When I was int the monastery, I was guilty of “Spiritual Materialism.”  This is when my ego makes the things of the spirit into little merit badges that I go around collecting.  By and by, I realized that, by doing this, I was ignoring a ...

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Not Two: on the Non-Dual Mind of Christ

In Catholicism, as much as anything else, dualistic thinking is a problem. The Pharisees in Jesus’ time thought some practices holier than others, and felt free to judge those who didn’t behave as they expected. In modern times, to the extent ...

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The Original Child, my First and Latest Teacher

At first, I superimposed my dysfunctional view onto religious characters, pretending it was some kind of supernatural insight.  This was back in the monastery, when I had the mind and emotional life of an addict, but no insight as to why.

Take ...

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