School of Meditation Weekly Teachings

Weekly Teachings 6/11/2011

Gregory of Nyssa

Indian philosophy includes the doctrine of ‘advaita’ or non-duality. We are not one with ultimate reality but we are not just dualistically related to it either.  As with all ideas this one has spawned many versions. There are strong and weak forms of ‘advaita’.

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Weekly Teachings 30/10/2011

Origen

When Origen’s father was martyred his mother only prevented him from offering himself for the same fate by hiding his clothes. One of his great works is The Exhortation to Martyrdom where he sees this witness to faith as a sign of total discipleship.

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Weekly Teachings 23/10/2011

Clement of Alexandria: Jesus, the Divine Physician

Perhaps all identity is born from conflict. Heraclitus, the pre-Socratic philosopher, thought everything came out of conflict. Christian identity in its infancy also had to engage with and separate from strong religious and philosophical forces in Judaism, Greek thought and Gnosticism.

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Weekly Teachings 16/10/2011

Gnosticism

The occasion for the first great divide in the history of Christian spirituality was an esoteric and eclectic form of mysticism that is still with us and erupts from time to time in Hollywood blockbusters.

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Weekly Teachings 09/10/2011

St Paul

St Paul is often credited with founding Christianity. Certainly it would not have developed as it did without him. Nor would he have developed it as he did, if he had not been thrown from his horse on the road to Damascus and in a blinding light had seen Jesus and had his life utterly changed.

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Weekly Teachings 02/10/2011

The Mystical Experience of Jesus

Last week we saw that mystical consciousness is as old as the hills. Most of the great scientists of our own age also came to see the world this way – unitively and reverentially. The roots of what we call the Christian mystical tradition, therefore, predate the historical Jesus.

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Weekly Teachings 25/09/2011

The Roots of Christian Mysticism

In a neolithic burial mound built five thousand years ago in County Meath we can observe a decisive stage in the development of human consciousness.

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Weekly Teachings 18/09/2011

Meditation – a different way of learning

Learning to meditate and learning what meditation has to teach us are both different kinds of learning from what we are used to. We are not learning anything ‘new’ in our usual understanding of novelty. We are relearning something known in childhood and lost before we could maturely integrate it .

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Weekly Teachings 11/09/2011

It is simple, but not easy

“Therefore I bid you put away anxious thoughts about food and drink to keep you alive, and clothes to cover your body. Surely life is more than food and the body more than clothes” (Matthew 6:25). Read more »

Weekly Teachings 04/09/2011

Our interior senses

With increasing detachment from our conditioning and from the need to use the world and other people as emotional props, we at times leave behind the things that hinder.

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