Thumotic Spirituality IS for...

Those who -

   - Wonder at, value, love and celebrate, both alone and with others, the mere fact and mystery of

     being alive

   - Think highly of and respect all living beings and everything that exists

   - Ask the hard questions about life and do the harder work of answering their own questions

   - Blaze their own path of life

   - Live their life on their own terms and give others the space to do the same

   - Fully embrace being alive, enjoy its pleasures, and willingly rise to face its challenges

   - Welcome change and growth as evidence of being alive

   - Work to live well with all others and add value to other's lives

   - Protect and nurture the living

   - Honor those on whom their lives depend: their ancestors and all who die that they might live

   - Live fully until they die

Thumotic Spirituality is Not for...

Those who-

   - Ask their hard questions about life and expect others to do the harder work of answering them

   - Need a map drawn by someone else

   - Want to live by other's rules

   - Turn inward to pray, meditate, or just be and thereby avoid investing themselves in their own life and 

      the lives of others 

   - Seek ways of escaping from this world

   - Prefer Heaven, Nirvana, Summerland, Cosmic Bliss, Mystic Oneness with God, Brahma, Spirit, the

     Universe or some other disembodied metaphysical paradise to fully enjoying the pleasures of life

     and rising up to meet its challenges with dignity 

   - Are Westerners but prefer to pick and choose from Eastern religious beliefs and practices

   - Practice blind faith, poverty, chastity, celibacy, obedience, fasting, living off unearned contributions

     from others, and other life-denying practices and call them virtues

   - Who hold low, disparaging opinions of human beings

   - Cynics

   - Strict materialists

   - Hyper-rationalists

   - Insist that their way is the only right and true way and force it on others

   - Just want to get by until they die

Thumotic spirituality is not for everyone and doesn't try to be.

I'll share my view of who thumotic spirituality is for in my next post.

  

Two Basic Questions of Thumotics, Part Two

"How are you spirited?" is the qualitative question. Our spirit admits different qualities. For example, our spirit can be sweet or bitter, loving or mean, cold, cool, warm, hot, free or inhibited, expansive or constrained. Our spirit can be troubled, angry, frustrated, grieving, calm, joyful, sad, passionate, erotic, aloof, proud, and of a wide range of other qualities that we could identify.

Like the quantity of our spirit, the quality of our spirit can change from one moment to the next. It can be changed by either internal or external factors. Internally, our own thoughts, self-talk,  imaginings, interpretations, choices, and actions can change the quality of our spirit. Externally, what others say and do, our circumstances, and the events of our life can change the quality of our spirit.

It is the work of thumology to study and increase our knowledge and understanding of the many different qualities of spirit. It is the work of thumotherapy to provide the therapeutic care and healing of the qualities of spirit that hinder living a full and healthy life.  

Two Basic Questions of Thumotics, Part One

How spirited are you?

How are you spirited?

These are the two basic questions of Thumotics. 

"How spirited are you?" is the quantitative question. We can be more or less spirited. The less spirited we are, the less alive we are. The more spirited we are, the more alive we are.

The degree of our spiritedness can  range from "0" (dead) to "10" (yet to be determined). We do not know enough about our spirit to know how spirited we can be.

The quantity of our spirt can change from moment to moment. Both internal  and external factors can change the degree of our spiritedness. 

For example, we can change the quantity of our spirit by changing our intention, object of attention, breathing, and/or self talk. Physical, emotional, mental, and social exertion can also change our spiritedness.

External factors can change or spirit. For example, receiving praise or blame from another person, being loved or hated, being helped or harmed, illness, injury, our circumstances, and a wide range of actions of others can change the degree of of spiritedness.

It is the work of thumology to study and increase our knowledge and understanding of the qualitative aspects of spirit. It is the work of thumotherapy to learn the therapeutic care and healing of spirit.

In my next post I will address the second question: "How are you spirited?" 

Thumotics and Religion, Part Four

Thumotics trusts that we humans are as we are. We are not flawed. We are limited but not insufficient. Neither are we superior to others living on this planet. 

Rather than devaluing life, the thumotic perspective values life, all life. It loves, enjoys,and celebrates life. 

It sees life as a creative endeavor. We are autonomous, self-ruling, self-directing beings. By our own actions, we co-create our world. We create our individual lives. With all other living beings, we co-create our communal life together. It's up to us. Together we create the world in which we live.

Thumotics recognizes that, in fact, many of us already live satisfying, productive, and fulfilling lives without the special revealed knowledge claimed by religious and spiritual authorities and their believers.

Thumotics and Religion, Part Three

Unlike religion, Thumotics is a nature-based view. It's the new science, therapy and spirituality of spirit. 

Like other bodies of knowledge, it is empirically-based. As such it emphasizes all of our senses, especially our ability to see. 

Based on our own experience, Thumotics concludes that we humans can trust our instincts, senses, reason, and intuition to gather information about the world, interpret it, and make decisions for ourselves about how best to live our lives. 

It allows for many ways of knowing and for there to be more to existence than what we can perceive with our physical senses.

It also allows for some of us to know more about some things than others.

In the thumotic perspective, there is no reason to believe that we humans fell from some higher physical or spiritual state to which we need to return in order to fully be who we are. There is no Golden Age, no Paradise, Higher Realm in our past or future. There is the universe, all of nature, in all its glory and wonder.  This, what is, all of nature, is our true home. 

Thumotics and Religion, Part Two

Even though the cultural dominance of Christianity is waning, its influence can still be seen in the post-Christian Western religious landscape. For example, many New Age spiritualites operate with the same assumption that we humans are insufficient (unaware, in the dark, unenlightened) when it comes to knowing the truth about reality. Instead of prophets, messiahs, and teachers many New Agers depend on celebrity authors and teachers, some who channel information from supposedly ancient, wiser beings. 

The celebrities, teachers, and channelers function in the same way as prophets, Jesus, and his apostles and teachers. There is no way to verify what they say. We either believe them or we don't. If we believe them and do what they say, we will live in peace, love, and light. If we don't, we will live in pain, suffering and unawareness until we learn the lessons we need to learn in order to advance and ultimately escape the cycles of reincarnation. When we escape reincarnation we merge into ultimate being, like a drop of water merging into the ocean.

The two key features of this religious view have to do with us humans: insufficient in ourselves and necessarily dependent on others with special knowledge.

It is a faith-based view because it requires faith in unverifiable, revealed assertions.

As such it emphasizes our ear and sense of hearing over all of our other senses.

Thumotics and Religion, Part One

This is part one of series of posts that contrast Thumotics and religion in Western civilization.

In my view, at the heart of religion in Western civilization since the rise to dominance of Christianity, is an extremely low and devaluing view of human beings. The view assumes that we human beings are so deeply flawed (fallen, sinful, lost in the dark) that we are incapable of knowing and understanding the world and making decisions for ourselves about how best to live our lives. 

We must depend on Jewish prophets like Moses and Isaiah and most of all on the messiah and savior, Jesus of Nazareth, and his apostles and teachers to know the truth about the world and how best to live. They have special knowledge, revealed to them by God, written in books, that we must hear and believe in order to know the truth about the world and how best to live.

In this religious view, that remains dominant to this day, we humans are insufficient and must  depend on religious authorities and their divinely inspired writings to know the truth about the world and how to live. We must simply believe what they say because there is no way for us to verify the truthfulness of revealed knowledge. 

We either believe them or not. They promise that if we believe, we will live in peace, love, and light for all eternity after we die. If we do not, we will live in unimaginable pain and suffering in hell for all eternity.

Thumology and Psychology Contrasted

Psychology attends to the human mind and its cognitive functions: attention, memory, language, learning, reasoning, problem solving, and decision making. Historically, psychology also included the study of human emotion.

Thumology attends to spirit defined in terms of thumos, "that which makes alive." Its field of study is broader than psychology's because it attends to thumos in all living beings, not just humans.

The primary function of thumos is to animate and enliven. It is prior to cognitive functions and makes cognitive functions possible.

In thumology, thumos and emotions are very closely related if not the same. Emotions are viewed as direct expressions of the thumos.

While thumos has a unique cognitive function in human beings, specifically inner deliberation, the cognitive function is of less importance in thumology than in psychology.

Object of study:

- Psychology: human mind

- Thumology: spirit in all living beings

Functions studied:

- Psychology is primarily the study of the cognitive functions of the human mind

- Thumology is primarily the study of the animating, enlivening function of spirit

Scope:

- The scope of psychology is primarily human beings

- The scope of thumology is all living beings

Emotions:

- Psychology: emotions are caused by cognitive functions of the mind

- Thumology: emotions are direct expressions of spirit

Cognition:

- Psychology: cognition is limited to the mind

- Thumology: there is a type of cognition associated with the thumos, deliberation

Ontological status:

- Mind must be spirited, alive, to exist

- Spirit does not have to be cognitive to exist. Being spirited precedes being cognitive.

Thumotics is a Perspective

It's one lens through which to view the world, including ourselves.

It's attending to spirit, that which makes alive.

When we attend to the spirit of another human being, for example, we attend the whole person. 

Her spirit animates her mind. No spirit, no mind.

Her spirit animates her body. No spirit, no body.

Her emotions are her spirit. No spirit, no emotions.

In addition to attending to the whole person, we also attend to how the person is interconnected with everything else. Her spirit influences not only everyone and everything in her immediate surroundings but in concentric circles out to the entire universe.

Attending to all through the lens of spirit is integrating. The integration includes us as well. 

Thumotic Living, Part 8: One-of-a-Kind

Thumotic living, living from our heart, is living a unique, one-of-a-kind life. There is only one of each one of us. Our life story, composed of our choices, is like no other. What we create and share no one else does. No one else can. 

We can enrich the lives of others with what only we can create or we can withhold it and keep it to ourselves. The choice is ours.

Let's support each other in living our one-of-a-kind lives. Let's support each other in creating what only we can. Let's fulfill the life-affirming desires of our hearts and enrich the world.

Thumotic Living, Part 7: Creativity

Thumotic living is creative and productive. Living beings create in a variety of ways. We create more living beings. We create safe places to bring forth more living beings, nurture them, and add to the rich tapestry of living beings. We help nurture the offspring of others. 

We produce abundantly. Look at how many seeds one dandelion produces, how many acorns one oak tree produces, and how many mice one mouse produces. Look at how much honey one hive of honey bees produces. Look at how many eggs a human female produces and how many sperm the human male produces. Abundance is natural.

Spirited beings cannot not produce and create. It's what spirited beings do. We do not have to try to produce. It's natural. Rose bushes do not try to produce blooms. They just do it. It's what they do.

We humans also work in cooperation with other living beings to produce language, tools, food, clothing, shelter, jewelry, paintings, flower gardens, statues, musical instruments, music, dances, imaginative stories and songs, countless machines, and so much more.

We do not create and produce just to survive. We do it to thrive and enjoy living. We often strive to create beauty, that which gives pleasure and delights ourselves and others.

Only those who, for whatever reason, do not value life produce life-denying creations. They suppress, hinder, and destroy their own lives and those of others. They rob life and the world of its value. 

Until they can make life-affirming contributions, they forfeit the privilege of having significant influence in the world.

We all need them to do better.

Thumotic Living, Part 6: Living With Others

Thumotic living is living with others who also have life-affirming desires to fulfill. It's living respectfully of others living their lives. 

When we live respectfully with others we allow space for others to live from their spirits and hearts and fulfill their life-affirming desires.

Not only do we allow space for others to live their lives, we help them fulfill the life-affirming desires of their hearts.

Thumitic living is pro-life in the true rather than political sense of the word.

6000 Page Views- Thank you!

I see that my blog is quickly approaching 6000 page views with readers from 18 different countries.

Welcome to my newest readers in Sweden, a country I want to visit one day.

That folks are even finding my blog continues to amaze me. I've done nothing to promote it or boost it's visibility on search engines.

I just want to thank you, my readers, for finding and reading my blog.

Feel free to comment or not as your own spirit moves you.

From my heart to yours, thank you!

Thumotic Living, Part 5: Integrity

Thumotic living is living with integrity. 

When we fulfill the life-affirming desires of our heart, our spiritmindbody acts as a harmonious, integrated whole: our spirit enlivens, our mind chooses, and our body moves to manifest our heart's life-affirming desires.

As a result, we bear fruit and improve the world.