SL202:
Beyond Believing:
Why Belief in God and Being Good Won't Get You into "Heaven"
OVERVIEW: This course examines
the differences between conventional religion and genuine spiritual
practice.
A
recent Gallup poll reported that 86% of all American adults believed
in God. "Belief in God" is the primary way many of us
describe our relationship to the Greater Reality. But why settle
for believing in God, or even for some "spiritual experiences"
now and then, when the tangible, ego-melting, suffering-dissolving
Revelation of Real God, pervading, washing, and dissolving "you"
again and again (through a lifetime of Spiritual practice), would
utterly transform your life, and fulfill your heart's otherwise
unendingly unfulfilled desire for perfect happiness?
The
intention of this course is to help awaken the heart-longing for
true religion, "re-ligio", the lifetime practice of genuinely
"re-connecting" with God moment to moment. Such a practice
necessarily depends on a steady, unrelenting and very potent source
of Divine Revelation. The
result of such steady and genuine practice is Spiritual Realization,
the fundamental and permanent shift in one's sense of (and conclusions
about) Reality and self, in which God is completely and tangibly
obvious in every moment as Divine Presence and ultimately Realized
as our True Self.
 REQUIRED
READINGS:
OPTIONAL
READINGS:
- Sigmund
Freud and James Strachey (editor), The
Future of an Illusion, W. W. Norton Co., 1989.
- William
James, The
Varieties of Religious Experience, Touchstone Books,
1997.
- Adi Da
Samraj, The
Divine Physics of Evolution (online), 1978.
- Sam Harris,
The
End of Faith, 2004.
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