A playlist I put together for my birthday in 2010. Finally put together into a mix!
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Music Mix: ‘Roll In Rock’ (2010)
Author: Dave Underwood
I write the blog Oblivion With Bells - an enquiry into life and death, and what we believe.
Music Mix: ‘Groove Is In The Heart’ (2025)
Music Mix: ‘Life Affirming’ (2025)
Dedicated to my children. I will always be in front of you.
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Let’s talk about the climate emergency
Who wants to talk about the climate emergency? Who is excited to talk about the climate emergency? A show of hands? Maybe if I was at a Green Party meeting I might get an enthusiastic response, but I’ve found in general most people would rather not talk about it.
I think we all exist in one of two groups about climate: we must take action, or we don’t need to do anything about it. I would guess that most of us, but not all of us, are members of the We Must Take Action group.
But what does it mean to be part of this group? Are we all actually taking action, and if so, what does this action look like? And if most of us agree We Must Take Action, why don’t we want to talk about it?
Let me ask you another question: have you read Seth Wynes and Kimberly A. Nicholas’ letter to the Institute of Physics from 2017? My guess is you probably haven’t. There’s a small chance you may have read the article about it The Guardian published the same year. Helpfully The Guardian summarises the key finding of the letter with this graphic:
As you can see, when it comes to individual decisions we each can make when it comes to taking action to reduce our CO2 footprint, having one fewer child is the most significant step we can take, by some distance. The next most significant step is going car-free.
I personally think about this graphic at least once a week. I am still not sure if that is too much, about the right amount, or not enough. What I find particularly jarring is the disconnect being part of the We Must Take Action and the top five steps: Have one fewer child than you are planning to, go car-free, fly less, buy green energy, and eat a plant-based diet. After all, ask yourself this question: when was the last time you had a meaningful conversation with someone about these top five steps?
What it makes you realise is, while most of us might be part of We Must Take Action, there seems to be much less agreement about What & How we must take the aforementioned action. What one starts to conclude is that what actually really matters is how many members of the We Must Take Action group choose to actually take action. And if you think about this long enough you start to wonder: is it really a majority of us that belong to the We Must Take Action group? Because if we are not doing the most effective steps then what is the point?
You may, at this point, be wanting to say to me: “But Dave, 70% of emissions come from 100 corporations.” True, but I’ve never understood this argument. One, shouldn’t we be trying to reduce emissions everywhere we can? And two, aren’t we the ones ultimately buying from these corporations? It’s not like these corporations are just making stuff for the fun of it.
Back in 2022, enthused by what I thought was critical climate information that was easy to communicate, I made my own Top 5 graphic for the top five steps. But I found it wasn’t a huge engagement driver, in fact the only place where people engaged with it in any serious capacity was on Mastodon (“the fediverse”) but even there a lot of the comments I got amounted to “what do you want from me!” It was strange, it was like at best what I was sharing was an inconvenience but at worst actively offensive. Weren’t we all in this together as part of Team Must Take Action?
In my own life I’ve tried my best to take the top five steps. My partner and I are vegetarians, we buy green energy, and we haven’t been on a plane in over a decade. But we haven’t gone car-free yet, and most importantly we’ve decided to have both the children we were planning to have. I have no good excuse for this. My partner and I simply decided what we wanted was more important than the increase to greenhouse gases it would cause. This is a hard thing for me to acknowledge.
But maybe this offers a clue to why many of us might agree in theory that We Must Take Action but actually when it comes to the hard work of taking the most important steps we are unwilling to change our lifestyles. We would rather not talk about it, or be reminded about it, because our selfish hearts are at war with our rational minds.
Recently I read a post that was talking about how some of the things we will need to do this century to adapt to sea level rises will include getting better at growing our own food, and setting up our homes to handle regular energy blackouts. The difference between this future that is coming and a present where we prioritise buying LED lightbulbs can feel dizzying. My question is not how can we motivate people to take action about the climate emergency, but how to get people to take the right action? Let me know in the comments 👍⬇️
Quote Post: George Orwell
Fear of no longer existing anymore
“What feeling do you have when you wake up in the morning, when your feet touch the floor? Or before that when you’re lying there, thinking about your feet hitting the floor? What feeling do you have, what does that feel like for you?” – The Rover (2014)
A long time ago I watched a Grand Designs episode where the man who was building a house said that he woke up each morning thinking “Still alive! I get to do this living thing for another day.” I think about him often. I envy his comfort with his mortality and his openness to living or dying. I do not have that – I have fear of death.
Perhaps more specifically I have fear of no longer existing any more. While dying in my sleep somewhat appeals as a less scary way to go, more scary for me is the thought of my life ending in the blink of an eye. No waking up. No reflection. No existing. No more Dave.
As I’ve talked about before, perhaps being an ex-Christian makes it harder for me to face no longer existing. As a Christian you anticipate living forever, when you give that up suddenly you have to reckon with your mortality and what, in comparison to forever, feels like a very short life. I am in awe of how people just go on with their daily lives knowing death awaits them. I’ve asked a lot of people how they do it and the answer seems to be mostly distraction; ignore the feeling and eventually it goes away.
In his book This Life: Why Mortality Makes Us Free, philosopher Martin Hägglund posits our lives are meaningful, precious, and interesting precisely because they are limited. I have to be honest and say that this perspective does not bring me relief or consolation. I would rather have immortality with the option to die if I want to than the burden of mortality with no options.
Ultimately I can pontificate as much as I like but it’s not going to change the fact I am mortal and will not live to be 200 years old. Maybe better is to find what relief and consolation from death that I can find while I am still alive. I tell my therapist that my hope is if I get to live to be old enough, eventually I might be that kind of Very Old where you feel so very tired and start to think that you would like things to stop at some point. That is what I hope anyway, that one day instead of trying to find distraction I will actually welcome the end.
Quote Post: Emily Wilson
Quote Post: Hannah Arendt
“Thoughts & prayers” is really just “thoughts”
Recently I found myself watching a documentary about Shawn Mendes, a Canadian pop singer/song-writer. During the documentary we learn about Shawn’s ambition to not just play at but to sell out a stadium in Toronto called the Rogers Center. Part of the film showing us this journey is seeing a journal where Shawn has written the same thing again and again: ‘I will sell out the Rogers Center’. What was he doing, and why was he doing it?
Apparently, this is something called manifesting, which has recently been given a boost thanks to the pandemic and the Tiktokification of information. Manifesting has become a very broad term and means different things to people. On one hand you have the concept of “if you believe in it enough it will happen”, the “law of attraction” and books like The Secret. But more recently the definition of manifesting has expanded to include such things as CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy), planning, visualising, and positive thinking. For this reason I think a better term for the pernicious type of manifesting is “magical thinking“.
Given this, where does Shawn Mendes writing the same thing again & again sit on the manifesting spectrum? I’m not sure to be honest, probably somewhere in the middle. Pretty harmless but best not indulged too seriously. Because as others have written, magical thinking has a risky downward spiral built into it which is: if your dreams don’t happen for you, maybe you didn’t want them/believe in them enough. But at the same time, Shawn Mendes combines his manifesting with action, and in the film does end up selling out the Rogers Center. Good for him I suppose.
When I was a Christian there was a thing called a “testimony”, this was your story of “how you became a Christian” and was often used in recruitment, trying to get other people to become Christians. Part of my testimony when I was a Christian was how on my very first day when I started working for the Church of England we had a guy called John Mumford speak at staff meeting and he prayed for the entire staff. And while he was doing that he said “now some of you your hands or your top lip will be tingling right now” and if that was you you were to come forward to get prayed for. Now my top lip was tingling which I thought was amazing, and later on I used to tell this story as part of my testimony & highlight how God had got my attention by causing my top lip to tingle. Then one day a Christian friend heard that story and said “oh the tingling lip thing, yeah John’s been doing that for years”. And it turns out getting pins and needles or tingling sensations in your body, especially during moments of high emotion is not uncommon. And I remember feeling like a sucker, and later on when I deconverted realising that this guy had just been using normal body reactions but putting a Christian veneer over them.
Really, with a sufficient understanding of confirmation bias most secular people would understand that prayer is just magical thinking with a different name. There is a specific type of groupthink that goes on that allows prayer (the kind of prayer that the Christian God supposedly answers) to persist. I’m stealing this from a very good YouTube video that I haven’t been able to find, but it goes like this: if you pray to God, and he answers your prayer, God is real and good; if you pray to God, and he doesn’t answer your prayer, then either God is real and there is a good reason he hasn’t answered your prayer, or God is real and you need to Wait and there is a good reason you need to wait. So you see if you submit to this idea of prayer God is real and he never fails.
I don’t know how many Christians know that they have tested empirically whether prayer works and the results were incredibly underwhelming. But then I suppose Christians would argue that the Bible says “do not test the Lord your God” (Deuteronomy 6:16), which is convenient. But then the Bible also says to “test everything” (1 Thessalonians 5:21) so who knows.
In the world I see one day we will be post-religion and we will use the phrase “I’m thinking of you” instead of “I’m praying for you”. And we will back up our words with caring action when we can, instead of petitioning a deity we have created in our minds.
Book review: The Denial of Death, Escape From Evil
My background for wanting to read these books is deconverting from my Fundamentalist Christian beliefs in 2017. I knew I wasn’t going to Heaven, so suddenly death was final & more scary. When I first read The best books on Fear of Death recommended by Sheldon Solomon from Five Books I felt some encouragement that there were people out there thinking about death & wrestling with what it means.
From the Five Books article it is clear Sheldon Solomon thinks Becker is an important stop on the road to understanding fear of death. I tried to read Escape From Evil first but because I had done so little reading on this topic I lacked the background to understand it easily, so reading Denial first seemed mandatory. Denial of Death comes first chronologically and is the one he completed before he died (his widow published Escape). Denial of Death I think lays the platform for Escape. Escape From Evil is the better, more concise book, but I think Denial is essential reading to get the most out of it.
In Denial of Death Becker makes his case for fear of death affecting all areas of our lives. He sees the major breakthrough in understanding this as being Freud’s, but, writing in the 1970s, he thought Otto Rank (a disciple of Freud) had built the most on Freud’s work on existentialism. Becker makes a compelling case but stops short in Denial of suggesting a way forward. You get the feeling he felt compelled to have a go, and Escape was probably going to be his attempt.
Denial of Death is over 50 years old now. The stuff in there about mental health feels very outdated. I don’t know where he was coming from about homosexuality & transvestism. The attempt to psychoanalyse Freud’s two known fainting spells feels too long. The summaries of Kierkegaard and Rank’s bodies of work are fascinating; as is his conclusion that those two thinkers thought that the cosmic heroism embedded in religion was the best treatment for the fear of death. Indeed, Becker goes as far as to say ‘The urge to cosmic heroism, then, is sacred and mysterious and not to be neatly ordered and rationalized by science and secularism. Science, after all, is a credo that has attempted to absorb into itself and to deny the fear of life and death; and it is only one more competitor in the spectrum of roles for cosmic heroics.’
Combined together, Denial of Death & Escape From Evil are the most important books I have read in the last 10 years. They are still massively relevant today and our reckoning with their questions & challenges as a species is way overdue. Chapters 1 and 2 of Escape From Evil seemed to me to be mostly an attempt to provide the reader with some of the background he covered in Denial. Readers of Denial of Death can probably pick up from chapter 3 onwards. Becker takes as his starting point that fear of death shrouds & affects all our waking moments, and goes on to show how inequality, status, genocide, the accumulation of capital/possessions/power are all symptoms of our failure to ultimately reckon with death-terror. Reading the last chapter, Becker seems caught between humility and honesty. He says ‘No one mind can pose as an authority on the future; the manifold of events is so complex that it is fraud for the intellectual to want to be taken seriously as a prophet, either in his fantasies or in his realities.’ But then on the same page he says ‘Yet I think that there is a solid minimum achievement’. Becker’s prescription? Progressive politics and a “science of society”. I was underwhelmed by this but I was probably expecting too much.
Losing my religion
![A scan of the painting 'Agony in the Garden' by Corregio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agony_in_the_Garden_%28Correggio%29.
"[T]he painting was admired by Vasari in Reggio Emilia - he described it as:
a small painting one foot tall, the rarest and most beautiful thing, in which can be seen his small figures and Christ in the garden - the painting is set at night, with the angel appearing and by the light of his splendor illuminating Christ, who is shown so real and so true that it is impossible to imagine him being expressed better. At the foot of the mountain, on level ground, are three sleeping apostles, above whom he shows Christ praying, which gives an impossible strength to the figures; and even more so, in the background, he shows dawn rising and soldiers coming with Judas from one side of the painting: and in such smallness and with such intensity does he show this story, there is no work that is its parallel for patience and hard work."](https://oblivionwithbells.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/oracion_en_el_huerto_correggio.jpg?w=944)
I identified as a Christian for my whole life until two weeks in 2017 changed all that. In the subsequent seven years since then I’ve been trying to work out whether I really deconverted then or if that train had been a long time coming. I still don’t really know, but it’s probably more the latter than the former.
As I’ve blogged about before, I was indoctrinated into Christianity from birth. The particular version of Christianity I grew up in was what I call Fundamentalist Evangelical Christianity. The way I define this is it was Fundamentalist in that we believed the Bible was the literal “Word of God”. And Evangelical in that the type of church my family attended was of the Evangelical tradition, meaning it was different to say Baptist or Presbyterian traditions.
What that means is that I grew up under the eye of God. I understood that God knew everything, that everything came from Him, and He had a plan for my life. And although I might stray from this plan, and naturally rebel at times, I should expect to always find myself coming back to Him, apologising for straying, and recommitting myself to His plan for me. Looking back now, I wonder why I didn’t leave Christianity as I got older and could think more for myself. Some days I tell myself it was because I wasn’t equipped with the critical thinking skills necessary to do that. But other days I think I may have wanted the things Christianity promised me too.
Doubt in God is built into the Christian system. You are taught, even expected in a way, that you will have doubt about your faith from time to time. But you will always find your way back to God, along with a stronger faith because you’ve learnt that God was there all along. No doubt you’ve heard or seen about the classic Christian poster of two sets of footprints in the sand. So in 2016 when I started having doubts about my Christian faith, a part of me assumed I was just suffering a classic seasonal bout of the doubting blues.
Christian belief, in the Fundamentalist form, is a completely different interpretation and understanding of reality. God created the universe, he created all living things, he created humans with free will, but his humans chose to use this free will to live differently to the way God intended – they were living in sin. So God sent Jesus Christ to allow his humans to apologise for being sinful; Christians are taught that Jesus takes their sins so God “sees” Christians as being free from sin. Why is this important? Well the stakes are eternal, live in sin and when you die you are separated from God for eternity, but repent of your sin through Jesus Christ and when you die you live with God & Jesus Christ in Heaven for eternity.
As I’ve gotten older, and particularly since I deconverted from Christianity, I’ve learnt that some Christians didn’t have eternal stakes on their mind much at all. Some Christians were focused on just trying to live how God wanted them to, to get to Sunday feeling like they were mostly doing their best. But growing up I was a conscientious, intellectual young man whose mild OCD manifested in a strong, often overwhelming, desire to be right with God and to play my part in the eternal battle of good and evil. God had sent Jesus to share the Good News, the Devil wanted to deceive people, how was I going to make sure people heard the Good News? How should I serve God with my life?
So early in my 2016 season of doubt I didn’t anticipate I was going to abandon my faith at all. I reassured my Christian wife I was just going through a period of doubt, nothing to worry about. I talked to Christian friends, I prayed, I saw my pastor who recommended some books to read.
But the books didn’t serve their intended purpose. The tone of my concerns began to get more panicky. I can remember evenings outlining my issues with a certain fact of Christian theology and my wife’s worried face looking back at me. My therapist wasn’t any help either, although since he wasn’t a believer I didn’t expect him to understand or be able to help me.
What I found myself saying was that I was starting to believe the whole thing was made up. When Christians talked about the “still small voice of God” they were talking about the sound of their own mind talking back to them. For me the bottom had fallen out of my faith. I thought that if the foundation of it, whether there was actually a God who really existed, was false I didn’t see how I could continue believing.
As I wrote that last paragraph I got a warning from my Apple Watch that my resting heart rate had risen above 100 bpm. And that’s what it was like at the time: sweating bullets while well-meaning Christians tried to tell me I just needed to see the present darkness through. But it’s one thing to overcome your present troubles, it’s another thing to look back upon your life and start asking yourself “What was that? Could I have been raised with an illusion? And then taught how to produce the illusion for myself?”
After all, we convince ourselves of things all the time. That democracy is good. The government is in control. That she loves you. That things are going to get better. But time passes and we see things differently. Democracy is imperfect. Our governments lie. If she did love you, she doesn’t anymore. And I thought, if the question is do I want to believe in something because of the benefits it gives me, regardless of whether or not it’s real, then for me the answer was becoming clearer & clearer. The same young man that grew up a zealous Christian wasn’t going to be zealous when something that wasn’t real, wasn’t true.
My wife and I were living at the time in a place called Worcester Park in London in the UK. Because of my chronic illness I wasn’t well enough to work so I found myself going for long walks at the park and through the local woods, looking at the treetops and thinking about cosmology. One day, walking on a cloudy day, I thought to myself “What if I got onto my knees and prayed right now, would that be a sufficient act of devotion and desperation for God to reveal Himself to me?” Right then I knew that there would be no point. God couldn’t reveal himself if he didn’t exist.
I showed up at my next therapy session freaking out. What if I didn’t believe? What would that do to my marriage? My relationships with my parents? My brother and sister? I had never shown up to therapy that desperate or emotional before, it felt like the sky was falling and I was powerless to stop it. Looking back, that was the high water mark. The next therapist session I showed up still stressed but also still alive & breathing. The sky was still kind of falling, but on some level I was also happy to be finally acknowledging where I was at. I wasn’t pretending anymore and that felt good.
Eventually I settled on a kind of trial break. Maybe for a week or two, I wouldn’t be anything, not Christian, or non-Christian, I would just exist with my current beliefs and doubts and not force myself to believe in anything. Incredibly, those two weeks passed without incident. More weeks passed. Eventually I would realise in fact I had been on a long journey towards not believing and I had finally arrived. It was a strange kind of peace. I felt like I had been believing impossible things for so long because my marriage, my relationship with my parents, my whole life was based on it. It felt very uncomfortable but at least it didn’t feel insane anymore.
Much later on with distance, time, therapy, and healing I was able to take the well-meaning things Christians were saying to me. I now found myself on the other side of Christian culture and felt ashamed that once upon a time I had said those same well-meaning things. There was a feeling of fresh evangelism for my new (non)beliefs and a desire to convert Christians to them. In time I have found this desire has faded a little too. While I wish Christians didn’t believe the things they do, and didn’t raise their children in those beliefs without giving them the choice, I also understand these are not easy decisions to make. After all, if you feel powerfully that your beliefs are true and life affirming and transformative, why wouldn’t you share them with your children? I find myself looking at fundamentalist Christians these days and thinking, I guess you need Christianity, and maybe one day, like me, you won’t.
Quote Post: Eric Fromm
Fiction Post: The Scientist
He knew straight away.
He was returning from a walk with his wife when he heard it. He looked up to see it passing overhead.
It was heading west.
Years of experience kicked in. Numbers. Probabilities. Knowns and unknowns. The scientist couldn’t be certain. But he knew that what he had seen was probably about 20 megatonnes. It was probably Russian. It was heading towards Birmingham. They would be in the blast radius.
His brain had already worked out much of what would happen and how soon it would happen. The rocket scientist didn’t know what to tell his wife. He turned to look at her, she was looking closely at his face.
“So it’s begun,” she said.
8 changes for reducing your carbon footprint
Source: ‘The Climate Super 8’ https://giki.earth/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/TheClimateSuper8_final.pdf
Great Watching: Being 97
This touching short documentary looks at themes of death & meaning through the eyes of a 97-year-old man. A great watch.
“As I sit out now on my deck of the house, I look at the trees blowing a little in the breeze.
And I’ve seen them innumerable times but somehow, seeing the trees this time is a transcendent experience.
I see how marvellous it is, and I think to myself: I’ve had these here all along but have I really appreciated them?
And the fact is I have not, until now.”
Watch the short documentary on vimeo.com >>
Quote Post: Salman Rushdie
The best short-form practical guide to getting comfortable with death that I have read
This great practical guide to getting comfortable with death was written by Rachel Menzies, who wrote a book about mortality awareness called Mortals with her father, Ross Menzies.
It’s a great article, but that doesn’t mean the advice in it is necessarily easy to follow! Here’s the link:
https://psyche.co/guides/how-to-deal-with-death-anxiety-with-the-help-of-cbt
Quote Post: Wilhem Stekel
The sea of spirituality
If you had asked me when I was a Christian what spirituality was, I would have told you it was God & us interacting in the spiritual realm. I would have seen this on purely Christian terms; so my perception was other religions weren’t interacting with God, they were interacting with evil spirits or demons.
After I deconverted my perception of spirituality changed almost overnight. I felt my experience of Christianity was something that I had been indoctrinated into, and I was now convinced my “relationship with God” had been imagined in my head.
The Fundamentalist Christians I grew up with probably believe I have been deceived by Satan, and that God is very much real. But there are also people out there, while not believers, that aren’t as cynical as I am, that don’t see my time praying & obeying as completely wasted. Lately I find myself standing on the shore of the sea of spirituality wanting to be open-minded, but not foolish.
What do we mean when we talk about spirituality? Is it the supernatural? What about things like yoga and meditation, are they still spiritual? The Cambridge Online Dictionary defines spirituality as:
‘[T]he quality that involves deep feelings and beliefs of a religious nature, rather than the physical parts of life’
Which is an interesting definition especially the part about ‘beliefs of a religious nature’.
The Merriam-Webster dictionary includes ‘religious values’ as part of one of its definitions, defining spirituality as:
‘[S]omething that in ecclesiastical law belongs to the church or to a cleric as such;
sensitivity or attachment to religious values;
the quality or state of being spiritual’
In the 2008 paper ‘Neurobiology of Spirituality‘ [nih.gov], Dr E. Mohandas defines spirituality and modifies the word religious with the words awe and reverence:
‘Spirituality involves as its central tenet a connection to something greater than oneself, which includes an emotional experience of religious awe and reverence. Spirituality is therefore an individual’s experience of and relationship with a fundamental, nonmaterial aspect of the universe that may be referred to in many ways – God, Higher Power, the Force, Mystery and the Transcendent and forms the way by which an individual finds meaning and relates to life, the universe and everything.’
Philip Perry’s definition on bigthink.com from 2018 goes even further by separating out spiritual experience from religion:
‘[A] spiritual experience is one that transcends the self and connects the person to the universe in a profound and meaningful way. This is separate from religion which often includes dogma, religious texts, and some sort of institution.’
The different definitions of spirituality above requires us, I think, to acknowledge spirituality means different things to different people. And obviously this is what is going on with language all the time.
I feel like once upon a time religion and spirituality used to be like this:
And is now going in this direction:
In the writing of this blog post, I’ve begun to think that in the future spirituality will encompass religion, with the possibility over time the religion circle will grow smaller as more and more people identify as “spiritual but not religious” [wikipedia.org]:
For me the elephant in the room is whether all spiritual experience is simply manifested in the brain and then acted out in the world.
There is plenty that has been written about parts of the brain that seem to be involved with spiritual experience, see: that same paper from 2008, that article on bigthink.com in 2018 by Philip Perry, or Alison Escalante writing on Forbes.com in 2021. In the Forbes article Escalante writes about how researchers have published a study where they report that ‘they have located a specific brain circuit for spirituality, found in the periaqueductal gray (PAG).’ Escalante goes on to say the PAG has been ‘associated with a wide range of functions: fear conditioning, pain modulation, altruistic behaviors and unconditional love.’ One of the authors of the study, Michael Ferguson, PhD, said: “Our results suggest that spirituality and religiosity are rooted in fundamental, neurobiological dynamics and deeply woven into our neuro-fabric,” and goes on to say “we were astonished to find that this brain circuit for spirituality is centered in one of the most evolutionarily preserved structures in the brain.”
A recent video from the U.S.’ National Endowment for the Humanities, and Wireless Philosophy [youtube.com], suggests that a possible future we are heading towards is one where our understanding of neuroscience is such that instead of understanding spirituality in terms of beliefs, fears, desires, and other mental states:
We will understand it in terms of brains, chemistry, physics, and mathematics:
I find it hard to predict what all this will mean for spirituality going forward.
Sometimes I have these moments of quiet despair, when I can feel hopeless, or worry about whether I’ve made the right choices in my life. At times like this I miss the comfort of an invisible power looking out for me. It makes me wonder about the trade-off, believing in something on faith for what it adds to your life versus using critical thinking and following the evidence. On the good days I’m happy to be a rationalist but on the bad days I wonder if a little bit of magical thinking would be so bad.
Standing here next to the sea of spirituality I can actually see a possible future where spirituality is defined without referring to religion except historically. But I also wonder if the parts of “spirituality” I’m adopting, the ones stripped of their mystical roots like mindfulness breathing & yoga poses, is leaving parts of the experience & the benefits of spirituality behind.
Quote Post: Julia Scheeres
Oblivion With Bells 