2011-06-20

Changing the metaphor for spiritual practice

A changing metaphor (from ATPII03: A Trackless Path II (retreat) 00:02:04.00 - 00:03:58.06)

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Since last year I’ve made a point of having conversations with a number of people on different aspects of Buddhist practice, and actually more generally on religion, and even more generally how people think of their experience of life. And another avenue of exploration of that has been a certain amount of reading. And one of the things that I’ve become aware of through this is that there is a very significant shift taking place globally in all of the major religions, and probably all of the religions, but it’s evident in the major ones because of the level of resistance to it.
And the shift is in a fundamentally different conception of what religious practice or spiritual practice is--and I’m not going to get into the making the distinction between religion and spiritual practice for our purposes--between transcending the human condition, which has been the defining metaphor for spiritual practice for two or three thousand years at least, to embracing the human condition.