User:Michael
An Avatar.Global Resource
Hi there. My name is Mike Sosteric and I, with some help[1] 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,[2] way back in 2003 or so, 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."[3], 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 (LPHDF) or just Lightning Path (LP) for short.
I know it sounds crazy, but there it is. The LPHDF is still in development, and probably will be for another twenty years, but a substantial chunk exists as concepts, ideas, notes, and theory in this SpiritWiki, and I'm developing curriculum to put it all together over here at the LP Patreon.
If you want, you can explore the SW, but there's a lot here and it might be overwhelming to start. If so, head over to the LP Patreon and go through the Introduction to the Lightning Path and Foundational unit. That will give you a base of understanding from which you can launch your metaphorical ascent.
My Qualifications
If you want to know why I'm qualified to do this.
- Close to 30 years experience in post-secondary education
- Close to 20 years of regular, daily Connection Practice
- The privilege and good fortune to be able to sit down every day for a few hours and read, research, explore, and write. [4]
- The discipline and determination to figure "it" out, [5]
Personal Challenges
Theoretical Challenges
- Nomenclature Confusion
- Scholarly dilletants as experts
Professional Challenges
Citation and Legal
Treat the SpiritWiki as an open-access online monograph or structured textbook. You may freely use information in the SpiritWiki; however, attribution, citation, and/or direct linking are ethically required.
Footnotes
- ↑ from Gina, Niko, Tristan Vayda, Stephen, the pets I look after, the nature that surrounds me, and so on.
- ↑ 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.
- ↑ 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.
- ↑ 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.
- ↑ 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