I'm in constant amazement of some religiously spiritual institutions that endlessly claim to seek the divine in all of existence, while yet adamantly working to segregate certain family members of humankind into disparate groups. Some sitting in the top echelons of what are considered the closest to divination and the outcast others remaining degraded to the spiritual sewers of existence. In all of my lifetime and through the better part of my life I have never, and probably will never truly grasp the human tendency to need to place some choice others below oneself if truly for a group below "the" community.

To think of oneself as being special, of being beneficial of the divine in existence is truly a core spiritual principle to BE-ING of and by itself as existence is. What isn't and in my own personal view, what will never be regardless of whatever ring, cloak, collar or degree sets to any verse or writ of any kind, is the right or the virtue of defining others as being below oneself simply because some aspect of their life seems or is played out differently than ones own is. If one thinks closely upon this theme upon societies of the world it shouldn't take too long to come up with the inevitable results of such thinking in the past.

We all have heard, read, and some have even witnessed the portent results of this sort of thinking and witnessed its results. Hatred, anger and violence, and imprisonment, chastisement, degradation, indignation, and yes even inquisition are only a mere beginning to the thoughts of what can result from this inflicted separation between the "we's" and the "they's" in this world. It has always had only one result in the end, and that is the literal degradation of any true spiritual connection with who we all are. There is no place for any of it in the context of ones self-definition or any spiritual or religious community!

Its not as much how one chooses to endear themselves of some sense of spirituality as much as the context and the definition one sets to his or her own life through that sense of spirituality.

Many religious and spiritual ways of being have been used as excuses for terrible and loathsome thoughts, words and acts, while those same religious or spiritual identities for others have led to great magnanimity and selfless service to others doing great good. Instead of thinking of one or another way of spiritual thought as being better or worse than your own, why not begin to think of how you yourself express your own spiritual context of being in your own life and of how you influence and affect those around you through this context of being?

As Always,

WD Allan