User:Michael
"Most authorities on Indigenous spirituality write about ceremonies and rituals, totems and dreamings and their social implications. It is a materialist view of what spirituality is, and although they speak about 'religion', they do not seem very concerned about the deep innermost feelings which give rise to religion in the first place." [1]
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the Mysterious — the knowledge of the existence of something unfathomable to us, the manifestation of the most profound reason coupled with the most brilliant beauty. I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, or who has a will of the kind we experience in ourselves. I am satisfied with the mystery of life's eternity and with the awareness of — and glimpse into — the marvelous construction of the existing world together with the steadfast determination to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny, of the reason that manifests itself in nature. This is the basics of cosmic religiosity, and it appears to me that the most important function of art and science is to awaken this feeling among the receptive and keep it alive.[2]
Hi there. My name is Mike Sosteric and I, with the some help[3] am the creator of the Lightning Path Human Development Framework, which, if you don't already know, is a modern Human Development Framework (HDF) that I've been slowly piecing together, an hour or two every day, since way back in 2003.
It didn't start out like this of course. I didn't wake up one morning and say "I'm gonna build an HDF." It started with a Connection Experience,[4] which turned into an uninterrupted information stream where "ideas came in an uninterrupted stream and the only difficulty I had was to hold them fast."[5], which continued as a "mystical" ethnographic study, which turned into a more systemic exploration which slowly, over the course of a couple of decades, turned into this still incomplete blob of clay, the Lightning Path Human Development Framework, or just Lightning Path (LP) for short.
It sounds crazy, I know, but I'll explain it in detail over time, probably over at our patreon page. For now it's all laid out in this [[SpiritWiki]. I recommend you start your exploration with the left-hand side menu (mobile menu on smaller devices) and just kinda follow forward from there. I have to admit, there is still a lot of work to be done, but it is here if you want to have a look around. In the meantime, I'm gonna use this page to put in some personal notes. They probably won't be that meaningful to begin with, but I'll build them up over time.
My Qualifications
- PLT
- post-secondary training in psychology and sociology.
- open mind
- discipline and determination to figure "it" out, [6]
- the privilege and fortune to be able to sit down every day for a few hours and read, research, explore, and write. [7]
Personal Challenges
Theoretical Challenges=
- Nomenclature Confusion
- Scholarly dilletants as experts
Professional Challenges
Footnotes
- ↑ Mudrooroo. Us Mob: Australia: Angus & Robertson, 1995. p. 34.
- ↑ Einstein quoted in Kuruvilla, Carol. “Albert Einstein On The Spirituality That Comes From Scientific Inquiry | HuffPost Religion.” HuffPost, March 14, 2016. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/albert-einstein-on-god-and-science_n_56e6f491e4b065e2e3d6a9d9
- ↑ from Gina, my kids, the pets I look after, the nature that surrounds me, and others
- ↑ Sosteric, Mike. Connection 100 – An Auto-Ethnography of My (Mystical) Connection Experiences.” Religions 13, no. 10 (2022). https://doi.org/10.3390/rel13100993
- ↑ Tesla, Nikola. My Inventions. Williston, Vermont: Hart Brothers, 1982.
- ↑ and by "it" I mean the Connection Experience that got this all started. For a brief account, see Mike Sosteric, “Connection 100 – An Auto-Ethnography of My (Mystical) Connection Experiences,” Religions 13, no. 10 (2022), doi:https://doi.org/10.3390/rel13100993.
- ↑ That amazing privilege is really important and I mention it here not only because it is important to acknowledge this, but also to say this shouldn't be a privilege, but a right. We should all have the right to sit down every day and read, research, explore, and create in some way. As I've come to believe after 20+ years of exploitation, it is who we are deep inside.
- ↑ Samuel L. Perry, “Religion Matters (And Doesn’t Go Away When Sociologists Ignore It).,” Sociological Forum 38, no. 4 (December 2023): 1456–63;
- ↑ Typically you are expected to be a mystic outside of science or a scientist outside of mysticism. If you are a scientist and turn mystic, you are expected to leave the academy, like Richard Alpert, who became Ram Dass. Should you try and blend both, you become subjected to ridicule, shaming, and other “boundary maintaining” enforcements of the academy’s Boundary Police
