The Power of the Human Being
The Power of the Human Being
WELCOME BACK NIC DA SILVA
Nic is a psychotherapy and spiritual care student at Emmanuel College at the University of Toronto. Nic is a former Roman Catholic seminarian and now a religious pluralist and universalist.
His professional areas of interest are esoteric thought and studies, existential psychotherapy, and the spiritual and therapeutic theme of "finding one's power." Nic engages with Buddhist Vajrayana practices and is a member of the Freemason's fraternity.
Nic has also been producing hip hop instrumentation for 14 years.
He hopes to draw from his own lived experiences and deep learning to be one of many voices for the personal and social flourishing of the human community.
At the end of the readings, we customarily add the phrase: “offered as wisdom for the journey” and we invite you to respond with the phrase: “may we walk inþ its light”. This is simply an invitation to participate if you wish to do so.
First Reading
An Excerpt from Deep is the Hunger, by Civil Rights Theologian Howard Thurman
He is just a lawyer with a breezy, “free wheeling” manner. Why he studied law remains his secret. His interest is not primarily in making money, but he manages to carry his end of the stick without too much difficulty. Watching him function in a committee meeting, or heeding the salty quality of his speech, one would not think of him as being religious in the conventional sense.
On first encounter, one is struck by his apparent lack of inhibitions. His mind is like well-honed steel, vibrant, sharp, strong. His face is that of a man who has seen much, understood even more, and remains completely unafraid. There is no piety here. One hardly imagines seeing him kneel before an altar (though he does), because he prays best on the wing. The most deeply moving characteristic which he possesses is an authentic interest in people who are being harassed by life, and the discriminating use to which he puts his intelligent and informed good will. He is never too busy to counsel those who find their way to him, even though what they are able to give in terms of dollars is negligible or even nonexistent.
When he is faced with a complicated social problem concern which the law is at variance with his high sense of decency and human dignity, an exhilaration is apparent in the quickened tempo of speech and the telltale flash of the eyes. Life seems to him to be a fascinating and ever eventful adventure.When he has been most helpful by putting at one’s disposal the results of his legal training and his fruitful years, he gives the impression that to be of service is a privilege and a joy.
Second Reading
Man and His Symbols by Carl Jung
Imagination and intuition are vital to our understanding. And though the usual popular opinion is that they are chiefly valuable to poets and artists (that in “sensible” matters one should mistrust them), they are in fact equally vital in all the higher grades of science. Here they play an increasingly important role, which supplements that of the “rational” intellect and its application to a specific problem. Even physics, the strictest of all applied sciences, depends to an astonishing degree upon intuition, which works by way of the unconscious (although it is possible to demonstrate afterward the logical procedures that could have led one to the same result as intuition).