The Soul Salons: Exploring Our Spiritual Heritage

Being a peacemaker and practicing humility will get you further in the long run advises a short, but influential work called the Tao Te Ching. 

“She does not show herself, and therefore is apparent.
She does not affirm herself, and therefore is acknowledged.
She does not boast and therefore has merit.
She does not strive and is therefore successful.
It is exactly because she does not contend, that nobody can contend with her.”
Lao Tzu

One of the central figures of the Bahá’í Faith puts humanity’s current peril – and ultimately brighter destiny – into a bigger context.

“Adversity, prolonged, worldwide, afflictive, allied to chaos and universal destruction, must needs convulse the nations, stir the conscience of the world, disillusion the masses, precipitate a radical change in the very conception of society, and coalesce ultimately the disjointed, the bleeding limbs of mankind into one body, single, organically united, and indivisible.”
Shoghi Effendi 

Sharing a core concept from the Old Testament and Jewish mysticism that can inform how we might gather sparks of the divine.

“The Holy Ancient One is a spiritual flame, concealed beyond all that is hidden, knowable solely through these lights that emanate from Its essence only to reveal themselves momentarily and then immediately conceal themselves again. And these lights are known as the Sacred Names of God, and this [is] how all is ultimately one.”
Sefer Ha’Zohar

An update on format changes – and a brief bit of inspiration – for the end of Season 2.

Psychoanalyst Carl Jung’s insights into how we have lost our soul in a modern world and how, if we face our shadows, we can rediscover a path of purpose and meaning. 

“The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.”
Carl Gustav Jung

A quick summary of the Hindu organizational chart, followed by a deeper dive into the wisdom of the Upanishads.

“That which cannot be thought by mind, but by which, they say, mind is able to think: know that alone to be the Brahman, not this which people worship here.  
That which is not seen by the eye, but by which the eye is able to see: know that alone to be the Brahman, not this which people worship here.”
Kena Upanishad

What an anonymous monk from the medieval age has to say about distracting thoughts, sacred words, and your life’s calling.  

“Every person’s spiritual journey will be different because, as God carries out his divine plan, he takes into consideration the unique spiritual talents of each person to whom grace has given the gift of contemplation and its practice.”
The Cloud of Unknowing 

Exploring the Mayan creation stories in the Popol Vuh. 

“So their knowledge was lost, the wisdom of those first four people. It was lost there at its beginning, at the very root of their planting. This was the framing and shaping of our first grandfathers and fathers by Heart of Sky and Heart of Earth.”
The Popol Vuh 

Contemplation's on death, pain, and grief by one of Rome's greatest statesman and philosophers. (It's not as depressing as it sounds.)

“But she [nature] has only lent you life, as she might lend you money, without fixing any certain time for its repayment. Have you any grounds of complaint, then, that she recalls it at her pleasure?”
Marcus Tullius Cicero

Do plants, animals, and humans have different spirits? ‘Abdu'l-Baha – one of the central figures of the Baha’i Faith – explains these distinctive realms, and what holds them all together. 

“Man is the possessor of a degree of attraction which is conscious and spiritual. Here is an immeasurable advance. In the human kingdom spiritual susceptibilities come into view, love exercises its superlative degree, and this is the cause of human life.”
‘Abdu'l-Baha