Sometime ago, Psychology--as a field--moved in the direction of including spirituality as an important dimension of peoples' lives, and away from the longstanding position that God [and religion] was an unimportant concept...Now there are trainings, books, college courses on addressing the spiritual concerns of clients in therapy. As I was attending one lecture on this subject It got me to reflecting on the Essentials concept...it would be foolish to reject out of hand "any good thing," such as the concept of energy meridians or recent scientific discoveries about how the body [and brain] process pain signals, or the nuances of someone's culture and how it affects their viewpoint--that having been said, I propose that holding to a set of Essential beliefs and behaviors, while helping to define a spiritual position, should not be allowed to create an unassailable, Monolithic viewpoint...there is always diversity in religion [even within denominations]...this is probab...
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The problem western Christians have with meditation is cultural, not religious. They've unthinkingly bought into the modernist point of
view which is totally materialistic. When I taught at Messiah, at least once the parents of a student complained to the Dean about some
imagining exercises I did with Acting students. I was using "meditation," which was clearly not Christian. Such is the stupidity of certain evangelical Christians who don't even realize that it's THEIR viewpoint that's not Christian.