The One Spirit Alliance works to promote and provide a forum for spiritually-minded people, organisations and networks to foster connection and collaboration between them.

Our vision

The One Spirit Alliance is founded on a recognition of the One Spirit that underpins all life.  This One Spirit inspires a shared consciousness that takes us beyond all established boundaries. It is underpinned by values and principles that ignite our love for each other and foster care and appreciation of our planetary home and its place in the cosmos. This awareness has grown out of meditation, individual and collective spiritual experience and new approaches to science which have lead to a realisation of the greater whole.

The vision of One Spirit Alliance is to facilitate the coming together of the diverse spiritual paths which draw on a variety of faith, ethical and ecological traditions as well as new explorations. By engaging in conscious conversations and shared silence we can discover the unity that lies at the heart of all paths that seek a harmonious way of life. We believe in the principle of one global family. For more on the background of OSA, click on <About OSA>.

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A selection of inspirational verses and quotations

Preserve in your soul the pure strength of wonder:
all things, after all, whisper of miraculous worlds of spirit.
Herbert Hahn

We sojourn on earth
so the new can arise
out of freedom and love
in the course of aeons
so that what we shape
can at last become
the glad dwelling of gods.
Erika Beltle

May I live this day:
Compassionate of heart
Gentle in word
Gracious in awareness
Courageous in thought
Generous in love.
Morning Prayer, by John O’Donohue

The deepest secrets of the human form I’ve seen
   I know this world and that on which ’tis based,
I know that love, yea, love is what they mean,
   And that to love I here on earth am placed.
I stretch my arms out wide as He had done of old,
   I would that I, like Him, might all the world enfold.
Christian Morgenstern

The true work of art is but a shadow of the Divine Perfection.
Michelangelo

“Love all God’s creation, the whole and every grain of sand in it.
Love every leaf, every ray of God’s light. Love the animals, love the plants,love everything.
If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things.
Once you perceive it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day.
And you will come at last to love the whole world with an all-embracing love.”
Dostoevsky , from The Brothers Karamazov

With every true friendship we build the peace on which the whole world rests.
Mahatma Gandhi

If we are not calm , we can’t listen deeply and understand.
But when our mind is calm, we can see reality more clearly, like still water reflecting the clouds and the blue sky.
Stillness is the foundation of understanding and insight.
Thich Nhat Hanh

In every human being there is sun — only one must let it shine.
Socrates

Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.
Arthur Schopenhauer

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The Autumn Equinox and Michaelmas

Writing this on a Michaelmas day, I reflected on a visit the previous day to Wells in Somerset and the wonderful St. Andrews Cathedral, taking a tour of the cathedral and attending the evensong service. The tour guide spoke of how the church is on the site of two previous churches, dating back to the 8^th century, and all were located on the site of a previous pagan holy site. The simple explanation was given that churches were often built on pagan sites so that the pagan people would more naturally turn to the church and the new religion, which in its carvings, for the same reason, even included many depictions of natural or fantastical elemental beings and also Green Man.

That is the simple material explanation. But it is only the later church which recognised little or no truths in the earlier pagan ‘beliefs’. Early Christian leaders, up through the times of building the Saxon, Romanesque and Gothic churches and cathedrals, also saw that there were special locations in landscapes that carried special spiritual energies, often at converging ley lines. Building on top of pagan sites was an implicit recognition of this, and people sensitive to these elements relate how energies flow upwards and downwards at these places, often through or near the crossing of the transepts with the nave or at the altar point.

Michaelmas follows on the autumn equinox. From a purely material point of view, the equinox is explainable and understandable even to the ‘everyday person’: day and night reach equilibrium in length. After that, day becomes shorter and night longer, or vice versa if you live in the southern hemisphere. Simple! Naturally one can go into more astronomical details, but the general picture is easily grasped. Or so it can be at first glance.

Early cultures ascribed much greater significance to these times in earthly and cosmic cycles. What happens at the time of the autumn equinox in our inner soul life? In the northern hemisphere, the darkening days bring an inward turning side, which on the one hand can be an invigorating time for thought life, for studies and the like, the heat of summer passing. On the other hand this turning inward can be a hard time, the inner world perhaps bringing up difficult emotions and turmoil,  replacing the outer distracting joys of warm summer growth and activities. The realities of outer darkness taking hold are strengthened the more one moves towards winter. The equinox was thus a time of seeing outer darkness taking hold, which if not balanced by inner work could become overwhelming. The inner soul life held its breath, as it were, until the winter solstice.

The Christian festival of Michaelmas builds on this, just as the churches built on the pagan sites…. (click here for continuing text)

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A new page! – Visions of Hope

We have started a new page, Visions of Hope, with contributions from readers, and which will also be featured in ‘newsletters’ during the course of this year to those on the mailing list. If you would like to be added to the mailing list, do fill in the form below, or write us with your details (name, email address – that’s it).

Click here to view our Privacy Policy.

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Some highlights

See our Facebook page! https://www.facebook.com/onespiritalliance/ where we put selected postings about groups, events and inspirations which people have sent in. If you have something which you would like posted, let us know! Send to our email: contact@onespiritalliance.net. We look forward to hearing.

In the Journal – find short articles and inspirations from present and past contributions. 

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Trust Your Heart!

A short inspiring video by Charles Eisenstein

Articles and reports

Hope in the midst of crises –

Facing present challenges and moving into the future, it is important that we see each one of us as creative, spiritual beings, as co-creators and part of the solution to social and environmental crises, rather than simply part of the problem.

In the mainstream media we continually have hammered into us all the dreadful things that we as human beings have wrought, bringing destruction, poverty, extinction, death. Yes, we have that freedom – to succumb to a materialistic way of life that inevitably brings greed and, in its path, destruction. Yet, we also have the freedom to recognise in this a path we do NOT wish to take further and to work instead co-creatively together: in recognition of the spirit that works in all for harmony and regeneration, if we open our hearts to it. An enlightened love, not just for each other as humans but for the earth and all the wonders of life, is an essential ingredient in this.

This renewed creative thinking can be applied to what we see around us… [click on the link below for the full article]

…Merely as one example of this is a creative essay entitled, Breathing with the Climate Crisis (click here to view and download), which we recommend reading. It is a coming together of youth groups and bio-dynamic agriculture, in a document presented to the COP27 conference. Let’s hope the so called ‘world leaders’ were listening, as it was prepared by the real world leaders, which you and I and each one of us are!

A contribution by Richard Brinton

(Click here to view on separate page)

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Our Sacred Story

a contribution by Janice Dolley

To focus on the sacred is to focus on all that is holy and whole and our response to the call of these times requires us to help restore the spiritual dimension of life as an integral aspect of both our own lives and of our society. If we can collectively do this then our future could be very different from our past.

Every society thrives on an underpinning narrative which informs the paradigm, or collective mindset on which our personal and public lives can be based. At the same time evolution does not pause for long and the next pulse takes us forward once again with our current era as merely a ‘chapter’ in the long story of the human species. Whilst indigenous societies have based their lives on holistic ways of living which combine their ideas and daily activities into a coherent whole, western society recently finds itself straddled between two very different narratives.

The narrative of the last few hundred years has been dominated by the rational and materialistic ideas that viewed people and objects as separate and needing to be competitive and conflictual, as possibly Darwin’s principle of natural selection indicated. Industrialisation focussed on the visible material reality and valued the wealth that could be gained by plundering the planetary resources and manufacturing these into goods for human consumption. This encouraged us to see ourselves as separate from other people and from nature.  Religion that had sustained society for so long came to be a helpful involvement for some but even then, its purpose was often to ensure ‘salvation’ for the individual. This former narrative still prevails.

However, following WWI the early shoots of a[i] second narrative began with an upsurge in the west of spiritual ideas with Madame Blavatsky, Alice Bailey, Rudolf Steiner and others beginning to communicate that the  domain of spirit  was important and was not dependent on religion…  (for the full text, click here).

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A focus on Love as a task for human beings and the earth evolution ~

Christ and Love

“Three things will last forever—faith, hope, and love—and the greatest of these is love.”  (First letter of Paul, 1 Corinthians 13:13)

“A new task and aim I give you: Love one another! As I have loved you, so you should love one another.”(Words of Christ, John 13:34)

“Let us love one another, for love is of God, and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love has not recognised God, for God is love.”(1 John 4: 7-8)

THE HYMN TO LOVE

Yet I will show the way which is greater than all others.
If I speak out of the Spirit with the tongues of men and of angels: if I am without love, then my speaking remains as sounding brass or tinkling cymbal. And if i had the gift of prophecy and could speak of all mysteries and could impart all knowledge and, further, had the power of faith which removes mountains; if I am without love, then I am nothing. And if I were to give away everything that is mine, and lastly were to give away even my body for burning, if I am without love, then all is in vain.

Love makes the soul great
Love fills the soul with healing goodness
Love does not know envy,
It knows no boasting,
It does not allow a falseness,
Love does not harm that which is decent,
It drives out self-seeking,
Love does not allow the inner balance to be lost,
It does not bear a grudge,
It does not rejoice over injustice,
It rejoices only in the truth.
Love bears all things,
Is always prepared to have faithful trust,
It may hope for everything and is all-patient.
If love is truly present, it cannot be lost…

   We find permanence which bears all future within it in the exalted triad:
In faith,
In hope,
And in love.
But the greatest of these is love.

(1 Corinthians 13:1-8,13 — J Madsen translation, The New Testament, Floris Books
For the complete Hymn to Love, Click here – as part of the full article, Focus on Love)

Buddha and love – a meditative exercise

When your mind is filled with love, send it in one direction, then a second, a third, and a fourth, then above, and then below. Identify with everything, without hatred, resentment, anger, or enmity. This mind of love is very wide. It grows immeasurably and eventually is able to embrace the whole world. Practise the same way with your mind filled with compassion, then joy, then equanimity. (Madhyama Agama, Sutra 86)

The Greek words for love

The ancient Greek language and the philosophers of ancient Greece recognised eight words for love, reflecting different forms in which it may express itself.

Plato’s dialogue, has love as its topic; Platonic love is a familiar concept, where love is no longer love of the body and its physical beauty but love of the spirit, of the divine, in other human beings. In the speech of Socrates, he speaks of the “ladder of love“: ‘The Ladder of Love is a metaphor that relates each step toward Being as consecutive rungs of a ladder. Each step closer to the truth further distances love from beauty of the body toward love that is more focused on wisdom and the essence of beauty.’ (Wikipedia) Each step of the ladder uses a different word to define it.

‘We have found a path’

I have looked into the deepest depths of man,
I know the world to its foundation stones.
Its meaning, I have learned, is Love alone,
And I am here to love and ever love again.

Christian Morgenstern

Inspiring short texts on Love

from three of Rudolf Steiner’s lectures

“What love is, is something so complex, that no human being should have the pride or audacity to ‘define’ love or to claim to see through it without further ado. Love is complicated. We perceive it, but no definition can possibly express love. There is one picture, a simple sense picture: imagine a glass of water that, the more you pour out from it, the fuller it becomes – that gives us an impression of one of love’s qualities.” (R. Steiner in ‘Spiritual Beings in the Heavenly Bodies and in the Kingdoms of Nature‘, lecture in Helsingfors, 5 April 1912)

“What then is essential for love? What is essential in order that one person love another? It is this – that he be in possession of his full self-consciousness, that he be wholly independent. No one can love another in the full sense of the word if this love be not a free gift of one person to another…
Christ is the bringer of the impulse of freedom from the law, that good may be done, not because of the compulsion of any law, but as an indwelling impulse of love within the soul. This impulse will still need the remainder of the Earth evolution for its full development.” (R. Steiner in ‘The Gospel of John’, lecture in Hamburg, 1908).

“Love is higher than opinion. If people love one another, the most varied opinions can be reconciled… this is one of the most important tasks for humankind today and in the future: that we learn to live together and understand one another. If this human fellowship is not achieved, all talk of esoteric development is empty.” (R. Steiner)

Further texts on love ~

In the realm of the heart of the sun which is Christ,
each person bears the other person’s burden.  True
community is revealed where sin is replaced by forgiveness 
and love.  Forgiveness is not just getting rid of something,
it is also something positive, a gift.  Only those can for-give
who possess inner riches, who can turn evil into good 
through love.
Rudolf Frieling

Egotism erects its center in itself; love places it out of itself in the axis of the universal whole. Love aims at unity, egotism at solitude. Love is the citizen ruler of a flourishing republic, egotism is a despot in a devastated creation. Egotism sows for gratitude, love for the ungrateful. Love gives, egotism lends; and love does this before the throne of judicial truth, indifferent if for the enjoyment of the following moment, or with the view to a martyr’s crown–indifferent whether the reward is in this life or in the next.
Friedrich Schiller

Where there is love and wisdom, there is neither fear nor ignorance.
Francis of Assisi

Love seeketh not itself to please, nor for itself hath any care,
but for another gives its ease, and builds a Heaven in Hell’s despair.
William Blake
From ‘Songs of experience’

Click here for this article, Focus on Love, on a separate page, where it will be amended and added to over time.

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Recently published, May 2020! –

Awakening to a New Reality – 

Conscious Conversations across the Horizon of Death

by Janice Dolley, with Ursula Burton

Awakening to a New Reality: Conscious Conversations across the Horizon of Death is the title of a newly published book by OSA  co-worker , Janice Dolley. These conversations are a personal example of what researchers are now calling ‘After Death Communication’ (ADC). Janice’s best friend and previous co-author Ursula, Lady Burton, passed on in 1993. To Janice’s surprise their new connection began only three hours after her death. read further…

The book is available through Sleepy Lion Publishing (click here).

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“The Coronation” –

A long read by Charles Eisenstein, full of insights and information on the Corona crisis, woven into an inspiring narrative.

Eisenstein’s wrote this essay March 2020 at the start of the Corona crisis, but his insights are as relevant now as they were then. The Corona pandemic raises many question for the individual and for humanity, including the ‘threat’ of death seen from a materialistic side, which can be transformed through inner work to see death as part of life and  greater spiritual processes. A needed step which the pandemic has prodded us to realise in creative ways in order to combat the otherwise isolation of ‘lockdowns’ and social distancing is the human being’s intrinsic need for community and the transforming effect it can have for our inner soul life. Woven into the narrative is consideration of the physical and scientific details surrounding the pandemic, and how through these alone, with often conflicting elements, it is impossible to arrive at a true understanding of the pandemic’s significance. We are called upon to take broader perspectives. Click here for the website link on Charles Eisenstein’s website, which includes translations in other languages and download possibilities. Or Click here for directly viewing a PDF version in English, which you can download.

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Spirituality in Education – countering materialistic trends

(Click on the heading above for a compilation of articles on education, including a video on celebrating 100 years Waldorf Education.)

A very relevant quote from Rudolf Steiner about trust and love – and the importance of this in education…

“It is a question of seeking those forces by which man’s evolution can progress; this is necessary if man is to develop ethical individualism, which holds the community together and fills it with real life.
Such a force is trust — trust between one human being and another. Just as in our inner being we must call upon love for an ethical future, so we must call upon trust in relation to men’s intercourse with each other. We must meet the human being so that we feel him to be a world-riddle, a walking world-riddle. Then we shall learn in the presence of every human being to unfold feelings which draw forth trust from the depths of our soul. Trust in an absolutely real sense, individual, unique trust, is hardest to wring from the human soul. But without a system of education, a cultural pedagogy, which is directed towards trust, civilization can progress no further. In future mankind will have to realize this necessity to build up trust in social life; they will also have to experience the tragedy when this trust cannot develop in the proper way in the human soul.”

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>> Do you have a report to share? <<

on an event or initiative of yours or which you have been involved in?
Send us an email, and any attachments (e.g. write-ups, pictures)

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…from the Nature Spirits –  and the need for humans to act!

(A short extract from the book, Nature Spirits and What they Say: Interviews with Verena Stael von Holstein, new edition Nov 2019, Floris Books)

WW (the interviewer): Can you describe what the most urgent tasks for humans in the immediate future will be?
The High One (an elemental):  Act!
WW: There are lots of things one can do. Can you be a bit more specific?
The High One: Do what your heart tells you!
WW: That says something different to each human.
The High One: Humans have to begin to perceive the elemental beings and the spirit beings and act with them in the same direction. Otherwise the earth will disintegrate… Humans have to learn what beauty is. They have to learn not to just simply act and produce any kind of objects, but that everything has to be beautifully formed.
WW: What’s most important for the personal development of humans in the immediate future?
The High One: Raise your children in beauty and they’ll find their way in life

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DATES FOR YOUR DIARY

See our Places, People & Events page for more information , with links to a selection of centres or groups which hold inspiring events.  

See our Facebook Page for a selection of events taking place which may be of interest for you.

Click here to view our Privacy Policy.

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Science and Spiritual Practices  by Rupert Sheldrake

This book, first published in 2017 in hardback edition, is now out in softback! Well known for his book, The Science Delusion, Sheldrake takes the topic further in this new book, Science and Spiritual Practices, exploring how spiritual practices are now being investigated scientifically by many.

Rupert Sheldrake summarizes the latest scientific research on what happens when we take part in spiritual practices, and suggests ways that readers can explore these fields for themselves. For those who are religious, Science and Spiritual Practices will illuminate the evolutionary origins of their own traditions and give a new appreciation of their power. For the non-religious, this book will show how the core practices of spirituality are accessible to all, even if they do not subscribe to a religious belief system.

For a YouTube video interview with Sheldrake about his book, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBhpfETrRuw

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The Biology of Belief

Some 10 years ago, Bruce Lipton came out with his groundbreaking book, The Biology of Belief. As with Rupert Sheldrake’s books (see above) or Eben Alexander’s book, Proof of Heaven, it especially shook scientists, as here were scientists themselves, not just some spiritually minded mystics, challenging materialistic views of the prevailing science of today and showing how we can apply scientific thoughts and methods to spiritual matters.

New clips keep appearing of Bruce Lipton on the themes of his book, delightful and provocative on various themes. This clipping here appeared on YouTube recently. Enjoy!

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