Collie's Bestiary

My school emphasizes various forms of psychology, and this weekend there's a small conference on transpersonal psychology. Sitting in the student lounge at school, I happen to be listening to two enthusiastic and excited fellow students discussing at what moment in human history "true consciousness" emerged. They were not deeply familiar with human evolution, so [...]

Source material that is simply bad To be fair to Armstrong, I would assume much of her previously mentioned double standards arose from her source material. I do not know why she chose to lean so heavily on such dated and inaccurate material for a book written in 2006. I do not refer here to [...]

This darkly pessimistic view on goddesses is most exemplified in Armstrong's version of the myths of Inanna. I've had the pleasure of reading some rather good translations of these myths, translations which scholars themselves laud. Inanna, the Queen of Heaven and Earth, Love and War, is clearly a goddess of life, death, and rebirth, moving [...]

Blatant and inaccurate double standards As I've previously noted, I was not happy with how the second chapter was progressing. To my increasing dismay, things only got worse: we are introduced to the so-called original "High God" or "Sky God" of the "ancient Mesopotamians, Vedic Indians, Greeks and Canaanites," which is a "primitive monotheism" Armstrong [...]

The first book by Karen Armstrong which I read was A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. It was absolutely amazing to me — chock-full of new ideas, fascinating religious philosophy, and beautiful writing. Since then I have read a few others as well by Armstrong, and I was delighted [...]

(another of the very short papers for the class on the spirituality of creativity) I know of several works of art with a mythic element which I find inspiring — I even created some of them. For this assignment, however, I picked the one I've known and loved the longest: Wagner's Flight of the Valkyries. [...]

This was a quick one-page paper written for one of my classes, which has a wonderful name: "Tree of Brilliant Fruit: Finding Spiritual Wisdom Through the Arts." I'm sharing the paper here because the book was interesting, I'm open to other folks' interpretations, it's fun, and I like sharing writing. I can probably come up [...]

Not being much for pranks, I'm cheerfully indulging myself in yet more gorgeous weather and pleasant mental ramblings: I think I've discovered the three things which help me stay happiest with my life. Curiously, I'd not previously mentally verbalized them, and it wasn't until I read someone else speaking of them that I realized this [...]

Random thoughts as I sit cozily in the warm house, sipping hot tea and listening to the rain slashing down madly outside: I'm halfway through my first semester and so far the doctoral program has been… excitingly scary. Or scarily exciting — one of those. Both. Maybe. ;-j Anyway, out of four classes so far, [...]

So my master's diploma finally arrived in the mail today, and it looks absolutely gorgimous! Fantabulous! Tongue-twisting-excitimus!I m seriously squeeeeeing over this one! :) Add to that lovely arrival the fact that the PhD program I applied for at CIIS has accepted me for the upcoming semester — and I'm bouncing along on cloud nine [...]