The LP itself is built founded upon the Jain principle of Ahimsa, the commitment to non-violence and harm reduction and harm elimination.  The following affirmation confirms your commitment to this principle in all areas of your life. This doesn't mean you have to be perfect out of the gate. Perfection is hard in the current global environment characterized, as it is, by anger, hatred, frustration, suffering, consumerism, and endless attempts to divide for the purpose of conquer and control. However this doesn't mean you cannot strive towards this goal. Entrance requires only that you commit, not that you are perfect.  

The following is a draft "Entrance Rite." If you are serious about the LP, affirm (to yourself) your commitment to harm reduction and non violence. If you plan on participating in these forums, consider repeating this affirmation before participation, at least until you're in the habit of it. 

If you can think of a better design, or ways to improve this affirmation, feel free to suggest. 

If this sort of formality is not your thing, a simple "I affirm to reduce and eliminate harm" is a sufficient reminder.  If you are an academic or student of higher education, a useful exercise for you is to examine the rites and rituals of academia before casting judgment in this direction. They are important, even to you. 

LP Entrance Rite

Standing with intention, I enter the Lightning Path through the door of Ahimsa.

I commit myself to the reduction of harm in all its forms — physical, emotional, psychological, institutional, and spiritual — toward all beings without exception: to human beings, to animals, and even to insects and the seemingly insignificant, and to the ecosystems that sustain us all.

I will not strike. I will not kill. I will not diminish.

Where harm cannot be avoided, I will reduce it.

Where I have caused harm, I will acknowledge it and make amends.

In my home, my work, and my social life, I will tolerate no violence toward any being.

Let my thoughts be right, my actions be right, and my environments be right.

Let my intrinsic conscience govern my conduct, that my bodily self may come into alignment with my highest self.

In this commitment, I open the way to healing, to alignment, and to connection — and I take up my aligned responsibility to uplift all of creation.

So I affirm. So I begin

The Eight Elements

View the full size graphic by visiting its link

https://repo.lightningpath.org/resources/seven-plus-one-substantive-elements-of-religion.jpeg

But what is religion? Sadly, it's not a very easy question to answer. Sociologists alone have come up with dozens of definitions trying to sort it all out. You can download the archive of definitions below. 

The LP Book Rocket Scientists' Guide to Religion (RSGR) is an attempt to sort it out. You can use this forum here to discuss religion, your personally or just religion in general, but only after you've read the RSGR, if you please. This will give us a base level of understanding which we can build from. Students can download the draft below.

Note that the book link below is to the complete draft. It may be rough in points. This draft is available only to LP students.

 Downloads 

• Sociological Definitions of Religion 
• The Rocket Scientists' Guide to Religion

The name was not my idea.

The name itself comes from a life-changing vision Abraham Maslow had just a day after the Pearl Harbour attack.

On that day, as he shed tears over humanity's lack of understanding and all the unnecessary suffering that ensued , Maslow envisioned a peace table: a place where he saw people sitting around and talking about "human nature and hatred and war and peace and brotherhood…" and all the things needed to truly understand human beings and finally make real progress forward. Unfortunately, he died before he could establish that table.

In this space, I want us to run with his idea—to talk about the things mentioned above and more. The goal is to provide concepts, ideas, theories, explanations, and guidance on what we need to do so we can fully understand Human Development and Human Potential, and so we can reverse this planet's accelerating downward spiral.

If you want to contribute, you can. Help us with intelligent, grounded discussions, do some research, promote us on social media, subscribe and become a student—maybe even a teacher. Really, we're open to whatever you think can help us achieve our vision: a sustainable world of abundance, empowerment, and expanded creativity, free of suffering, poverty, hierarchy, power, and control. And our mission: the development and implementation of new theoretical and pedagogical paradigms capable of shifting our thinking, raising our individual and collective consciousness, and ushering in what psychologist Abraham Maslow referred to as Eupsychia, or the good society.

Mike

Initially, the thing was premised on the startling experiences I had. Since I was trained as a scholar. You can read a bit about my experiences here in my article "Connection 100—An Auto-Ethnography of My (Mystical) Connection Experiences" The experiences were transformative. I recognized the fact immediately that if enough people could be induced to have these experiences, we could easily transform, even save, the planet.

Upon inception, the goal of Lightning Path was to create a "fast path" towards what I came to call Connection Experience but others would refer to as mystical or peak experience.  Since then, the goal of the LP has evolved not just solely as a path towards better connection, but towards a Human Development Framework. As defined in the SpiritWiki,  a Human Development Framework (HDF) is a framework devoted to understanding the human species, supporting Human Development and actuating full Human Potential. The goal of such a framework is to help create what Abraham Maslow called Eupsychia, or the Good Society.

I've done a lot of writing over the years on this. It has been a challenge not only because the scope of this thing is huge, but also because it requires a new theoretical language, new frameworks, and new ways of understanding that are not only carefully integrated, logical, consistent, and complete, but free of (we might say emancipated from) status quo understandings. That’s a big challenge, particularly when you also have to make this accessible to all.

I’m not going to claim to have accomplished this. Really, any successful move in this direction is a collective effort more than a one-person show. I am confident in saying, however, that I have built a solid theoretical foundation upon which we can build and empirical and practical structure. Right now things are a bit scattered. My goal on these forums is to start piecing it together into a coherent framework from which we can develop, ground, and spread the new paradigm.

Rogers, C. R. (1957). A note on the "nature of man." Journal of Counseling Psychology, 4(3), 199–203. 

This article by Carl Rogers discusses his view of human nature, empirically grounded in his experiences as a therapist and humanistic psychologist. For Rogers, individuals are "a basically trustworthy member of the human species, whose deepest characteristics tend toward development, differentiation, cooperative relationships; whose life tends fundamentally
to move from dependence to independence; whose impulses tend naturally to harmonize into a complex and changing pattern of self-regulation; whose total character is such as to tend to preserve and enhance himself and his species, and perhaps to move it toward its further evolution." (p. 24)

Download PDF

Download PDF

Tucker, J. B. (2005). Life before life: A scientific investigation of children’s memories of previous lives. St. Martin’s Press.

Stevenson’s successor at the University of Virginia offers a readable synthesis of more than forty years of case research for a general audience. Tucker presents representative cases in detail—including American cases, which undermine the objection that the phenomenon occurs only in reincarnation-believing cultures—and summarizes the database’s recurring patterns: the young age of onset, the high proportion of cases involving violent death, the fading of memories by middle childhood, and the concordance of birthmarks with verified wounds. The book’s distinctive contribution is theoretical: Tucker engages materialist objections directly and argues that the accumulated data are best accommodated within a framework in which consciousness can exist independently of the brain, sketching parallels with the nonlocal character of quantum phenomena. Life before life thus functions as the contemporary bridge between the case literature and the philosophy-of-mind debates treated in the final section of this bibliography.

Download PDF or EPUB

When you ask this question you basically get one of two answers.

1. Humans are intrinsically bad. They are violent, greedy, sinful, awful, fallen angels/greedy apes.

2. Human are intrinsically good. They are altruistic, loving, compassionate, caring and good.

Everybody is familiar with the first answer because that's basically the answer you are taught in church and school. Humans are violent apes. Humans are inherently sinful. Humans are bad little children who can’t listen and behave and are in need of constant tutelage and correction. Humans like to be powerful and in control. There's lots of iterations.

Many people are familiar the second answer. This answer is taught by mystics like Jesus philosophers like Aristotle, authors, and musicians who suggest that deep inside we are good, possibly glorious, maybe even divine.

This might seem like an easy question to answer, but it's not. It is difficult and can be confusing. That’s because if you look you will find lots of evidence for both sides. There's lots of examples of people acting incredibly vile and disgusting and lots of examples of people acting with compassion and love, even to the point of self-sacrifice.

It's confusing, right?

Not really. It's only confusing if you ignore the half of the evidence that doesn't fit your side. If you don't ignore evidence, the answer is right there. Are humans good or bad? The answer is both. They can be incredibly evil and vile but also incredibly wonderful, even divine. Satanic and angelic.

The question at this point becomes what determines which side? What determines whether we act good or bad?

Based on evidence we have an answer to that question as well and the answer is, it depends. What does it depend on? It's not genetics if that's what you think. Rather, it depends entirely on your environment and, more specifically, the environment as provided by your relations (your mom, dad, siblings, community, teachers, etc.). As soon as you are born you are born into an environment provided to you by all your relations. That environment has a powerful influence on your development.  

If you have a good environment you grow up up loving, compassionate, empowered, calm and connected. You express yourself and your talents. You are a fully functioning human being. OTOH if you have a bad environment, you grow up the opposite; desperate, greedy, aggressive, defensive, mentally and physically ill, dysfunction, and not expressing your full potential. 

Any serious discussion of utopia/Eupsychia/The Good Society must start with this basic truth of human nature which is that it is context dependent. That this is true doesn't negate the fact that there may be aspects of our humanity that we might call essential or natural, that we might have an essence of that genetics might play an influence. It is just to say environment is critical and we must start our discussions with that.