Applied Spirituality

IDEAS is the "Institute for Development of Effective Applications of Spirituality", a new age look at rationalism, religion and spirituality with a focus on synthesizing them and buildng a one world philosophy.

It believes, as the Universal Life Church does, that we are all children of the same universe.

Religion is a great force - the only real motive force in the world; but what you fellows don't understand is that you must get at a man through his own religion and not through yours.
George Bernard Shaw

I believe that there is a balance between religion and science, spirituality and atheism. God and Man. In 2015, I spent 4 hours choosing the best quotes from wikiquote and made this page on religion. I also, before I started writing poetry, made this list of 128 attributes of the divine. I then spent a few years wrestling with the problem of religion, then turned to writing poeems on spirit, a one world philosophy, more dedicated to the work of Mother Sri Aurobindo, some devotional and finally a series of prose on evolution and the new age of illumination.

Friar Imran, July 2022.

Progress has never been a bargain. You have to pay for it. Sometimes I think there's a man who sits behind a counter and says, "All right, you can have a telephone, but you lose privacy and the charm of distance. Madam, you may vote but at a price: you lose the right to retreat behind the powder puff or your petticoat. Mister, you may conquer the air, but the birds will lose their wonder and the clouds will smell of gasoline."
Henry Drummond, Inherit the Wind

You may call me an agnostic, but I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth. I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our own being. - Albert Einstein

Indian religion has always felt that since the minds, the temperaments and the intellectual affinities of men are unlimited in their variety, a perfect liberty of thought and of worship must be allowed to the individual in his approach to the Infinite.

Christianity taught us love, Buddhism spiritual discipline, Hinduism spiritual democracy and Islam social order.<br/>Shasa

Grant him the understanding that each man is free to choose his religion, that none is superior to the other, that each man understands the will of God according to his own nature and the truth of his being.<br/>Shasa

Dear Theist, I hope someday you'll understand my love for God. It's no different than my love for Life, and all that is in it. My religion is no different from yours - it's just that I can understand yours, but you can't mine. And because you can't understand it, you don't think its the same as yours. And since your so sure your's is correct, you think mine is wrong. Sweetheart, its all the same - religion just means love of life! - <br/>Shasa, 2005

Truth is everywhere and cannot be our sole monopoly; we are beginning to look at other religions and philosophies for the truth and help they contain and no longer merely in order to damn them as false or criticise what we conceive to be their errors. But we are still apt to declare that our truth gives us the supreme knowledge which other religions or philosophies have missed or only imperfectly grasped so that they deal either with subsidiary and inferior aspects of the truth of things or can merely prepare less evolved minds for the heights to which we have arrived. And we are still prone to force upon ourselves or others the whole sacred mass of the book or gospel we admire, insisting that all shall be accepted as eternally valid truth and no iota or underline or diaeresis denied its part of the plenary inspiration. <br/>Essays on the Gita

It is with these thoughts that our programs are designed and which guides our interactions. We believe firmly in a life beyond man, as foreseen as the "Kindgom of Heaven" that the Abrahamic religions proclaim.

Personally, I've been smitten by Sri Aurobindo, his works, his legacy and the proponents of Aurobindonian thought.

In time, Tolkienese philosophy will be expounded here.

Remember, as atheism and rationalism keep gaining ground, that, I believe, as scripture says:

Would Ye measure the distance between the stars and forget He that holds them in the palm of His hand.