If you’d like to help, buy a We Are Nashville t-shirt from Cool People Care (and read the “We Are Nashville” article that inspired the shirt). All $20 of the purchase price goes to Nashville disaster relief, and the t-shirt is 100% organic cotton.

Click the pictures to make them larger, see their descriptions, and view them in a slideshow.

Imagine – John Lennon

“Imagine there’s no Heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today

Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace

You may say that I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will be as one

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world

You may say that I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will live as one”

Mmm, a quintessential question of human existence…yet one often muddled by foolishness of many varieties.

Time for some audience participation, b/c these questions are NOT rhetorical.

• Is Truth something that you come to know intellectually?
• If it is, can one person come to an understanding of Truth in its fullness?
• If not, why would a person seek it?
• What if Truth were something that we are all expressions of?
• What if it it wasn’t represented more fully in one person than another, but all energy, realms, and created things make up it’s totality?

The aphorism “Know thyself” has been attributed to a host of great Greek thinkers, from Heraclitus to Socrates.

If Truth were something that we are all an expression of, how could we come to view that saying?

Know Thyself…you are an expression of Truth.

Would that change anyone but me?

philosophy, spirituality, Truth, Jeffrey Davis

Here’s a pic from a great time last night on a full moon lit greenway bike ride downtown for some dinner in East Nashville and pool shooting at Buffalo Billiards.

Fun stuff.

Unfortunately, as with all language and words, these things will mean something different to each individual.

What do they mean to you?

Here in the south people seem to have a harder time differentiating between the two.

Just last Sunday one of our customers called the house and illustrated this fact. Being a new customer and not having any previous personal connection to us, one would think that no assumptions would be made.

One would be wrong.

At the very first part of the message (before she said what she was calling for), this person did 2 things:

1. assumed we were “at church” and not at home
2. explained why she was NOT “at church” and hence leaving the message

One of my new clients at the gym (who is from California) had a similar experience. The very first day at her new job here in Nashville nearly everyone in her office asked her, “so where do you go to church?”.

When she responded, “no where, I’m more spiritual than religious”, they looked at her with bewilderment and then tried to “sell her on their church”, as she put it.

Do you assume someone goes to church when you meet them?

How would you respond to someone who says their spiritual, not religious?

Technorati Tags: God, religion, spirituality

3 MONTHS!?!

That’s a long time to have a tune stuck in your head. I’ve just been randomly breaking into song with (and in my best British accent–for some reason):

“If you want to view paradise, simply look around and view it…[forgotten line]…there’s nothing to it.”

Yesterday, however, FINALLY brought some insight into this madness. I was pondering some recent conversations I’ve had with some friends just before the wife and I headed for lunch at Cinco de Mayo when it hit me like a ton of bricks.

Here’s what I realized…and it’s not all that dissimilar from the actual lyrics themselves.

Everything in life is a choice. No, scratch that. While many things are not choices…like cancer, death, etc…the way in which we react to them is always a choice.

That said, “If you want to view paradise, simply look around and view it…there’s nothing to it”.

In reality, there is one thing to it…a decision. A decision to not let our well-being, self-worth, identity, etc be wrapped up in our circumstance. At any moment, at any given time, in any given circumstance, we can choose to be in paradise.

Maybe more on that later…

Technorati Tags: willy wonka, jeffrey davis, reality, philosophy, spirituality