We see ourselves as part of trim-tabbing consciousness. We are out here on the edge, with everyone else who is attempting to make ourselves greater vehicles of love.
The transformation we seek isn't going to come from institutions but from ordinary people sharing their search for meaning, community, and deep spiritual experiences.
Holy Rascals dvds and conversation guides encourage this transformation by inviting people to gather in living rooms, libraries, and community centers around the world to "meet with" and explore the ideas of some of the world's great sages. Our materials are catalysts to personal and communal exploration, inviting questions and conversation rather than providing answers and formal organization. Holy Rascals are not merely trying to help their respective traditions fit into a globalist framework, but are actively working to create a new spiritual paradigm, one that essentially transcends religion and embraces, as Sister Jose Hobday put it, the Mystery.
While all religions say this, few actually do it. They fill the mystery with teachings that make embracing it safe. Rascals pull the rug of safety out from under people helping them to experience that which cannot be articulated.
Spirituality is a sense of transcendence, knowing there is something greater than ourselves and all nature, interconnected, ...not rules, what is behind the rules and dogma. Religion is container for spirituality. It anchors experience and gives it a language.
Inter-Spirituality encourages people from different spiritual traditions to sit and meditate together, to enter into a deep dialogue of sound and silence, and to articulate the shared practices and experiences that are the foundations of their respective traditions. This is not only in an attempt to understand, but to learn deeply from one another, and to create a core of spiritual intimacy based upon shared experience. Mystics connect at a very visceral level that has little to do with the dogmas of their particular faiths, but everything to do with discerning the divinity in each other and all of life.
"We are living through one of the most fundamental shifts in history-a change in the actual belief structure of Western society. No economic, political, or military power can compare with the power of a change of mind. By deliberately changing their images of reality, people are changing the world" --Willis Harman, Global Mind Change
"History shows how kings, despots, and hierarchical elites get swept away in the tidal shifts of democracy, how great empires fall prey to events at their periphery, and how a few people of conscience and moral persuasion can change the course of an entire nation." --James O'Dea, Introduction to The 2007 Shift Report: Evidence of A World Transforming
While people of all faiths claim to worship a God of peace, in the 21st century we’re seeing religious conviction increasingly breed extreme violence, threatening our very survival. This is a time of great hope and great horror. We live in a time when unity—the recognition of the interconnectedness of God, woman, man, and nature—drives many to open their arms to embrace the other, and many others to take up arms against the other. We live in a time when religion, once a catalyst for justice, is devolving into a catalyst for war. Our time demands great courage if we are to prevent the world from imploding under the weight of human arrogance, anger, ignorance, and fear. Will we allow our religions to shut our hearts down, or demand that they open them wider? Will we stand idle while the most frightened among us spread fear and foment hatred in the name of Truth and Love, or will we opt for fearlessness and courageous compassion? Will we allow the world to spin into chaos and cruelty or will we turn toward love and kindness? Most of us will do nothing. Most of us will affirm powerlessness and blame the hell we will inherit on fate or God’s will. But some of us—perhaps enough of us—will act. These actors we call Holy Rascals, spiritual subversives working within their respective systems of faith and philosophy to free the faithful from complacency and arrogance, and unleash the creative power of the divine spirit to reinvent what it is to be human in the 21st century.
I cherry pick my religion. I take what I like and leave the rest.
What we should be are atheologists, people who refuse to reduce God to a god that we might worship or reject. --Rabbi Rami Shapiro
To draw on more than one faith is enriching and enlivening, not threatening. It is not enough to be versed in only one religion. You are heir to the entire spectrum of human spirituality. According to religious historian, Karen Armstrong during the first Axial age from 800 to 200 BCE the spiritual foundations of humanity were laid simultaneously and independently around the world. Socrates Plato and Aristotle in Greece. Isaiah Jerimiah and Ezekiel in the Holy Land, Zarathustra in Iran, Buddha in India, Confucius and Laotzu in China. Today what is emerging in the spiritual arena parallels other sorts of movements including ecology and globalization. People are discovering or rediscovering the divine feminine, seeing ourselves as organically connected to everyone and everything and integral to Mother earth. It is time to turn inward to free ourselves from the conditioning of narrow mind, the conditioning of nationality, tribe, culture, religion parental influence and see the world as God wishes us to see it.
