May 01 2008
Sociology
Well, as I say in my “about me” page, I’m a professional sociologist. I have a PhD in sociology and work in regular university. It’s true that since I began my “awakening” several years ago, I haven’t been much of a sociologist. The problem, as I note in my booklet My Mystical Big Toe: A Strong Theory of Consciousness and Creation, is that I couldn’t find a way to blend the mystical work I was doing when I talked about chakras, kundalini, awakening, ascension, god, consciousness, and so on with what a traditional sociologist might do. The two careers did not appear to be immediately compatible especially when you consider that sociologists, as a rule, tend to be critical of things religion and spirituality. Karl Marx, widely considered to be one of the founding fathers of sociology, called religion the “opiate of the masses.” Goodness but boy would my face be red if my colleagues ever found out what I was doing.
But then one day I started to rev-vise the sociology 100 class of my university and that’s when I realized that nothing really had changed for me. After six years of mystical writing and an expansion of consciousness that I think qualifies as dramatic and life changing, I came back to sociology to write pretty much the same course I would have written eight years. As I write the course, I find myself using all the traditional sociological concepts in exactly the same way I might have before but with one difference, I seemed to understand sociology much better now. You could say I had a wider perspective on traditional sociological concepts like “social class” and “institution” and “The System.” What’s more, I seemed to understand how it all fit together better. I saw the “big picture” like never before and I got to say, as I write the course, it’s exciting. For me it’s great to be able to take my two passions, mysticism and sociology (well really my three passions, mysticism, sociology, and psychology - but that’s another story), and blend them in such a seamless and elegant way.
So, I’m gonna share the course with you. The course itself is a distance education course and when I’m done the course, I’ll post a web link to it. In the mean time, I’ll post sections from the student manual which (since this is a distance education course and I do not meet face to face with the young brains) I use to address the students. The student manual (which contains my “sociological address to the masses”) is written with a sociology text book in mind, Sociology: A Critical Canadian Introduction, but I’ll try to write the manual so you don’t need it and I’ll try and post definitions in the SpiritWiki where necessary. If you want to get a text book to learn more, just about any recent sociological textbook will do (I do not, however, recommend the Sociology textbook at Wikibooks at the moment).
Anyway, I’ve said enough. I will close by saying this. Those of you who are familiar with the Lightning PathTM materials will find added dimension to the discussions not visible to your average sociology student. And oh yes, if you want to follow along with the discussion here (and in the associated forum), you’ll need subscriber access.
Namaste
ms
