Tag Archive: spirituality


Learning to love the life force

Filed under: Atheism, Books — Leave a comment
March 4, 2024

The Answer is Simple ….. Love Yourself, Live Your Spirit’ by Sonia Choquette (Hay House Inc., 2008)

 Sonia Choquette is a globally celebrated spiritual teacher, intuitive consultant, storyteller and visionary guide. In this admirable and persuasive self-help guide she advises we readers to stop dwelling on past errors and start to “live as Divine Beings.” 

She views problems as opportunities which offer the path to true wisdom and warns against the trickery and self-deception of the ego.  She advocates choosing self-love in order to “embrace the authentic you.” These are laudable aims and there’s plenty of truth in what she says.

Choquette’s daunting CV challenges mere mortals like myself to suggest that anything she writes could possibly be wrong.  However,  I venture to part company with her in the manner in which she merges the concepts of the ‘Divine Spirit’ with that of ‘God the Creator’ as if these concepts were one of the same thing.

She writes confidently that  “Your Spirit after death simply returns to the great Creator, the Holy Mother/Father God, and resumes being the light it is made of.” There is of course no fact-based evidence for such an assertion. As with all religious beliefs, faith and mystery stand in for objective proof.

Choquette goes on to revere the Creator as the source for “the fulfilment of all your needs.”  She argues that since this great Woman/Man looks after all our interests all that remains is to keep the heart open and clear. This is all fine and dandy if you are prepared to take on trust the notion that  “God has a plan and positive things are always in store for you.”

Confusingly, she also maintains that “we, as Spirit, are the creative writers, directors, and actors in every scene.” In saying that we and God have the power to steer our lives towards peace, love and understanding is surely a contradiction in terms. Either we open our hearts up for celestial guidance or we set about doing the guiding ourselves. Who’s in control here?   

As I non-believer, I believe that placing trust in a mystical (and unprovable) creator is to deny the power we have within ourselves. As a result, every time Choquette introduced the word Spirit (always with a capital letter) I mentally substituted the term ‘life force’ (in lower case).  After all, the book title urges us not to love your spirit but to live it. 

In short. I think a better title for this book would have been  ‘Love yourself, Love your life force.’  

What’s God got to do with it?

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SOIL AND SOUL

Filed under: Books, Politics — Leave a comment
October 24, 2008

It has taken me a while to finally finish ‘Soil and Soul -people versus corporate power ‘ by Alastair McIntosh.

McIntosh is a Scottish writer, campaigner and fellow of the Centre for Human Ecology. He grew up on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides and draws upon his experience in this simple, tightly knit community to make wider observations about the technologically advanced but spiritually destitute modern world.

He is at pains to stress that this book is not an autobiography although he concedes that at times ,with its parochial style, it may read like one. Rather, the personalised slant is intended to “engage the particular to illustrate the general” ; the particular in this case being the battle to seize control of the Scottish Isle of Eigg (pronounced ‘egg’) from the lairds. The aim of this action was to enable this small community to gain control over its own destiny without fear of corporate intervention.

In the telling of this story, he talks a lot about the need for a kind of poetic interconnection with community, seeing mutual dependency as a healthy alternative to the fragmented, egoistic values of capitalism. Frequent references are made to peoples’ “spiritual poverty” at a time when we are materially richer.

His writing in the book’s first part (‘Indigenous Childhood; Colonial World’) is full of passion, self deprecating humour and the need to inspire hope. The best passages are where he combines philosophical reflections with a shamanic slant on the activist’s role, well exemplified in these lines:

“The great disease of our times is meaningless. If fresh wellsprings of hope are to be found, we must first cut through the collective hallucination that there is no alternative to nihilism. We must dig where we stand. We must get beneath the grassroots of popular culture and down to the eternal taproot. Here new life can grow from ancient stock”

Pretty good stuff, and if he’d continued in this vein I’d have raced through part two in no time.

The trouble is that, in the second part, the philosophical insights are undermined by pseudo-mystical ramblings or else gets bogged down in a tedious blow by blow account of the Eigg campaign.

While making clear his reservations about institutionalised religion McIntosh freely admits to being hugely influenced by the liberation theologian Walter Wink. This prompts a lot of assertions about the need for inner freedom and clarity of mind in combating oppression.

This would be tolerable if it wasn’t accompanied by tortuous sentences like : “We pass back through the flaming sword at the gateway to Eden with which the angel guards the Tree of Life”.

At one point McIntosh quotes a friend who observed that the more excited he becomes, the longer the words get, and it’s obvious that this also means that he occasionally loses the capacity to write in plain English. A more rigorous editor might have helped to keep the worst excesses in check and would also have avoided the need for the reader to endure clunkers like “land comprises the natural nature in which human nature comes to know itself” .

In the concluding chapter McIntosh writes that “In telling this story I have drawn deeply upon spirituality. I have drawn upon the magic inherent in all miracles with which theology concerns itself”.

While I can go along with his ideas of the need for building communal values to counter corporate greed, I part company with him when he maintains that the strength to achieve this “comes not from the ego but from that of God (or the Goddess) within”.

In arguing for a greater awareness of our responsibility to other people he is in effect advocating the need for classic humanistic principles which most definitely do not depend on belief in religious abstractions or reliance on superstition.

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