The earth needs healing. Now. As we enter the New Year, perhaps it is time to think beyond our own prosperity, our own happiness, our own success, and look at the pleas of mother earth. No longer can we naively view nature as a virgin, pristine presence—as generations have done in the past. We must look ahead and witness the legacy of our consumption and inattention on the generations to […]
Art and Spiritual Practice
The 50 Most Influential Spiritual Books of Our Time
“Books are to be called for and supplied on the assumption that the process of reading is not a half-sleep; but in the highest sense an exercise, a gymnastic struggle; that the reader is to do something for himself.” —Walt Whitman A list compiled from our own thought and experience. This is not meant to be objective or universal, but merely the books that we perceive as being useful and important. […]
To Question . . .
Poet Rainer Maria Rilke writes: “Try to love the questions themselves. … Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.” To question is life itself. I wrote this ten years ago. And understand it more clearly now, as I likely will find greater clarity ten years from now. Our insights are evolving—always—if we seek […]
Entering the Body
How might we find—and strengthen—those slender threads that link heaven and earth, that relate our two natures, the earthly and the divine? If we wish to deepen into ourselves, transcend the ordinary mind, and come into contact with whispers of the greater intelligence and larger awareness that reside within ourselves, how do we proceed? What is the key? These are the questions we explored in our recent classes in creativity […]
The Yoga of Creativity
Among the first four Yoga Sutras, attributed to Patanjali and translated by Barbara Stoler Miller are: This is the teaching of yoga. Yoga is the cessation of the turnings of thought. When thought ceases, the spirit stands in its true identity as the observer to the world. Otherwise, the observer identifies with the turnings of thought. Perhaps one of the purposes of the sutras, like creativity, is to get us […]
Authenticity: Seeing the Truth
“Know Thyself.” Socrates words, derived from the Delphic Oracle of ancient Greece,resound with an inner force as clear and direct as their first utterance over twenty-five centuries ago. These two simple words lie at the heart of the world’s great teachings and have had a profound impact on the thought and inquiry of western civilization. Who am I? Why am I here? What is my own — my path, my […]
What Serves What?
One of my teachers, Dorothea Dooling, founding editor of Parabola Magazine, spoke often about the idea of levels, that there are larger dimensions that cannot be understood by the rational mind alone. Further, she claimed that one of the chief maladies of modernity is found in not acknowledging the existence of levels; that everything is on the same plane, that hierarchies of quality and being no longer exist. In relation […]
The Artist and the Yogini
“It is an audacious notion to put forth in this age of science and willful determination that one’s existence is somehow inspired, guided, and even managed by unseen forces outside our control. Whether called fate, destiny, or the hand of God, slender threads are at work bringing coherence and continuity to our lives. Over time they weave a remarkable tapestry. … These are the mysterious forces that guide us and […]