So many heartbreaking conditions are taking place in the world today: environmental destruction, massive inequality, violence and oppression, income inequality, extreme polarization, and a vast tearing of our social fabric. As world citizens, we must not be silent. We must speak out and protest all forms of injustice to each other and to the environment by any and all means possible. That is our necessity and our responsibility. But we […]
Gurdjieff
Healing a Broken World
“We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake … I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavour. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium […]
Spiritual Practice for a New Generation: Part Three
Finding our way homeOn many levels spiritual work relates to coming home. As human beings we are meant to serve, and our work consists of realigning ourselves from following the dictates of the ego and lower self to serving something more essential and much higher — an order of energies on a cosmic scale — so that we may find our place within the immense heavens. When the image of […]
Spiritual Practice for a New Generation: Part Two
The Path of the RoninWe can look to the teachings themselves as a means of shedding light on our exploration of spiritual practice for a new generation. Certain standards or measures exist to insure fidelity of transmission from one person to another. Most teachings employ a means of discriminating one’s level of understanding and delineating one’s role within a teaching. A seeker is one who wishes to know, who enters […]
Spiritual Practice for a New Generation
Part OneAs a spiritual seeker, and as a guide and mentor for some, I hold many questions about the state of spiritual practice in today’s world. Many authors and teachers have shared acute observations about the “flatlining” of modern society — that many don’t acknowledge any reality higher than what can be perceived directly by our senses or by the means of scientific inquiry. Myth and magic, religion and the […]
Into the Heart of Vision
I recently completed a memoir/essay, Longing for Light: Into the Heart of Vision, about learning to see, a process necessitated by losing my right dominant eye to an impact injury in 1983. As a photographer, the experience was painful and traumatic — like nothing else I have experienced — and a profound learning experience. Many years of inner work preceded the injury allowing me to treat the suffering as part […]
Dreaming
I recently returned to Hawai‘i after helping Laura move to Boulder for Graduate School at Naropa University, dedicated to contemplative education and founded by Tibetan Buddhist Lama Chögyam Trungpa. Laura is studying comparative religion with an emphasis on Sanskrit and, during the orientation week, we eagerly sought to get a sense of the school and its community. During one of the orientation sessions, poet and writer Reed Bye spoke on […]
Art and Consciousness
The Search for Clarity and WisdomIn the last five minutes of a free public critique of photographs, a person asked me about whether we can trust the responses of others. We come (especially in Hawai‘i) from differing cultural backgrounds, experiences, and circumstances. Don’t we bring our own baggage to a response, any response? Can we actually believe that someone is talking about the work, or merely themselves? I answered him […]