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 […]
Gurdjieff
Awakening to What Is
Conscious living in the postmodern worldWhat might it mean to live consciously? On a daily basis and from a variety of sources—articles, books, websites, personal conversations, even media and advertising—we come face to face with evocative yet misleading phrases like conscious eating, conscious relationships, conscious sex, conscious art, conscious work, and more. We have even heard the phrase, conscious consumption. And often, these particular strivings towards consciousness are referred to […]
Living in the Light
Social Engagement in Spiritual Practice, Art … and LifeAs soon as a plant breaks the surface of the earth, it begins to live in the light, to participate—receive and contribute to and from the complex eco-system that surrounds it. Organic life both gives and takes from its environment. Are we any different? Personal evolution—in the form of contemplative disciplines, creative development, and the search for awakening—takes place in context, in […]
I Am Not My Body
My body feels good. My body does not feel good. My body looks good. My body does not look good. Why all the fuss? We don’t realize this most of the time, but what is real in us is our awareness, which resides behind, above, and within the body. It is paradoxical. The body is our field of activity; everything we experience takes place in and through our bodies. Even […]
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 […]
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 […]