A Soldier’s Prayer
A SOLDIER’S PRAYER I’m asking You God, to give me what You have left. Give me those things which others never ask of You. I don’t ask You for rest, or tranquility.
Ahaṃkāra
Ahaṃkāra (अहंकार) is a Sanskrit term that is related to the ego and egoism - that is, the identification or attachment of one’s ego. The term “ahamkara” comes from an approximately 3,000 year-old Vedic philosophy, where Ahaṃ refers to the concept of the Self or “I” and kāra refers to the concept of “any created thing” or “to do”.
Bardo
“Bardo” (བར་དོ, Sanskrit: antarabhāva) refers to an “intermediate state” between death and rebirth, a concept which supposedly arose shortly after the Buddha’s death. According to Tibetan tradition, after death and before one’s next birth, when one’s consciousness is not connected with a physical body, one experiences a variety of phenomena.
Diogenes
“Diogenes the Cynic” (Διογένης ὁ Κυνικός, Diogenēs ho Kynikos) was a Greek philosopher, contemporary and critic of Plato and founder of ‘cynic’ philosophy. Banished from his birth town (Sinope)1, Diogenes moved to Athens and became a critic of “modern life” there, describing himself as a “citizen of the world” (cosmopolites) and living as a beggar.
Epistemology
Epistemology (from Greek ἐπιστήμη (epistēmē), meaning “knowledge, science”, and λόγος (logos), meaning “the study of”) is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature and scope (limitations) of knowledge itself:
Gaia
Gaea (pronounced /ˈɡeɪ.ə/ or /ˈɡaɪ.ə/; from Ancient Greek Γαῖα “land” or “earth”; also Gæa, Gaia or Gea, from Koine and Modern Greek Γῆ) is the primal Greek goddess personifying the Earth, the Greek version of “Mother Nature” or the Earth Mother, of which the earliest reference to the term is the Mycenaean Greek ma-ka (transliterated as ma-ga), “Mother Gaia”, written in Linear B syllabic script.
Gas Lighting
The term “gaslighting” refers to when someone manipulates you into questioning and second-guessing your reality. It derives from a 1944 movie – and the play and another film that preceded it – in which this happens to the heroine.
God
In religion, a powerful, immortal entity that may exist outside of space-time (but still have an effect on “reality”). Different religions may have one or many gods and goddesses: in a monotheistic religion (like Judaism, Christianity to a degree and Islam) they will not acknowledge foreign gods as “real”, and are likely to instead associate them with the devil.
Mesopotamian Religion
Mesopotamian religion refers to the religious beliefs and practices of the civilizations of ancient Mesopotamia, particularly Sumer, Akkad, Assyria and Babylonia between circa 3500 BC and 400 AD, after which they largely gave way to Syriac Christianity.
Metaphysics
Metaphysics (from the Greek words μετά (metá) (“beyond” or “after”) and φυσικά (physiká) (“physics”)) is philosophy or philosophic thought about the nature of reality: what IS, and its properties.
For example: the world appears to contain many “things” – physical objects (like apples) are called particulars, and possess properties (or universals).
Panpsychism
Panpsychism is the idea that consciousness is a fundamental property of the physical universe, ubiquitous and all the way down to the subatomic level.
Religion
Religion appears to be a philosophy and a social construct; a memeplex that promulgates and prolongs itself by the structures, edicts and forms it mandates (or less often “recommends”). Religious or spiritual behaviour (ritual, spirituality, mythology and magical thinking or animism) may be as old as the Paleolithic era – between 300,000 and 30,000 years ago i.
Saṃsāra
Saṅsāra or Saṃsāra (sanskrit: संसार), literally meaning “continuous flow”, is the cycle of birth, life, death, rebirth or reincarnation) within Buddhism, Hinduism, Bön, Jainism, Sikhism, and other Indian religions.
In Buddhism, the consciousness (consciousness of the different senses, such as eye consciousness, ear consciousness etc.
Saṅkhāra
Saṅkhāra (Pali; Devanagari: सङ्खार) or saṃskāra (Sanskrit; Devanagari: संस्कार) is a word meaning ‘that which has been put together’ and ‘that which puts together’. In the first (passive) sense, saṅkhāra refers to conditioned phenomena generally but specifically to all mental “dispositions”.
Sheol
Sheol (pronounced “Sheh-ol”), in Hebrew שְׁאוֹל (She’ol), is the “grave”, or “pit” or “abyss”.
In Judaism She'ol is the earliest conception of the afterlife in the Jewish scriptures: a place of darkness to which all dead go, regardless of the moral choices made in life, and where they are "
Tanakh
The Hebrew Bible (also Hebrew Scriptures, Latin Biblia Hebraica) is a term used by biblical scholars to refer to the Jewish Bible (Hebrew: תנ"ך Tanakh). It takes its name from the fact that the Jewish Bible is composed mostly in Biblical Hebrew, with a few passages in Biblical Aramaic (about half of the Book of Daniel, some parts of the Book of Ezra and a few other passages).
Zarathustra
Zarathustra Spitama (زرتشت Zartosht or زردشت Zardosht in Persian; Ζωροάστρης in Greek; and in Avestan) was an Avestan-speaking Persian who (if he actually existed?) was the author of the Yasna Haptanghaiti and the Gathas, and the spiritual founder of what became known as Zoroastrianism.