Heart in Heaven, I Sit on the Ground

… Moreover, I no longer believe that we can adopt Eastern spiritual traditions in the West without changing them in many important ways to adapt them to our culture. My belief has been enforced by my encounters with many Eastern spiritual teachers who have been unable to understand some crucial aspects of the new paradigm that is now emerging in the West.
    On the other hand, I also believe that our own spiritual traditions will have to undergo some radical changes in order to be in harmony with the values of the new paradigm. The spirituality corresponding to the new vision of reality I have been outlining here is likely to be an ecological, earth-oriented, post-patriarchal spirituality. This kind of new spirituality is now being developed by many groups and movements, both within and outside the churches.

The Tao of Physics:

The Future of the

New Physics, p. 340

Fritjof Capra 

& 

More important than having the right; guru, yogi, priest, minister, sponsor, religious credo, or prayer that gets the name and gender of God right, is the simple application of meditation, universal principles and faith in whatever one chooses to call a transcendent power. Not so much an earth-bound but an earth-oriented reality is the focus here. It helps to drop the male gender from our comprehension of God but it need not be stricken from all our prayers. There seems to be both a male as well as a female character traits of God implied in the West… after all, which is higher; God, or Mother of God? The Tao explains it as yin and yang. It must be just as stressful and difficult to adhere to a faith that denies the discoveries of science as it can be an incomprehensible emptiness to have no faith at all. One of the greatest teachers of Eastern t traditions, Thich Nhat Hanh, suggests that his followers in the West return to their churches in order to practice in the same spirit that Thomas Merton applied looking to the East for inspiration. In other words, I sit on the ground while my heart is in the heavens.... the Tao of physics... I quote Tracy Chapman, "Heaven's here on earth."

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