Archive

Two strangers, vehicles of the miraculous

Odilon Redon, Buddha Walking Among the Flowers, 1905. “Most of us are like a fish caught in a hook. The Buddha is trying to reel us in; the hook holding us is our deep spiritual longing. We spend most of the time struggling, not wanting to be reeled in, not wanting…

Seeing the light when it is darkest

Mike Licht, Cydippe with Acontius’s Apple iPhone, after Paulus Bor The toy company Mattel has announced the release in Fall 2015 of “Hello Barbie,” the first Barbie doll to feature artificial intelligence. Through the toy’s wireless transmission of a child’s voice (“Hello, Barbie!”) to offsite computers, which will wire back a…

The Gurdjieff Foundation of Illinois has generously assembled a free searchable index for Parabola magazine readers.

Inside an Ayahuasca ceremony

They say the legendary hitter Ted Williams could see the seams of the ball as it came out of the pitcher’s hand. …

Researches into the source of megalithic culture.

A conversation with Sufi master Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

A Sufi master on finding balance in an unstable world

Tracking J.R.R. Tolkien’s Keeper of the Forest

A journalist and a monk exchange revelatory letters

This episode of Parabola’s free monthly podcast includes an excerpt from David Ulrich’s Zen Camera on the joys of mindful photography and drawing, as well as Alexandra Haven’s essay on the wonders of ancient Egypt […]

The secret prices of love

Photograph: Girls exploring rock pools, Cameron Bay by State Library of Victoria Collections, 1909 “Religion isn’t for me,” announced my eight-year-old daughter, Alexandra, as we ate dinner together one January night. “I think of it like an old spider on the wall. I know that it’s there but I try to…

Story Editor Betsy Cornwell shares excerpts from the current issue of PARABOLA: The Wild.

Reflections from a Death Row inmate; inspired thoughts from a Sikh guide

A white rose opens in a quiet arbour
Where I sit reading Dante, Paradise
unfolding in me, opens hour by hour […]

A Trappist monk’s sojourn at Thomas Merton’s hermitage

A child retells the legend of the Sumerian goddess Inanna and her descent to the Nether World.

Four role models for all who seek the sacred

The extraordinary inner life of a great public figure.

Amma, 2009 The Hindu spiritual teacher known as Amma (“Mother”), or Mata Amritanandamayi, was born to a family of fishermen in southern India in 1953. Today she is popularly known as the “hugging saint” for her practice of embracing all who approach her as she gives darshan, or an “auspicious sight”…

Reconnecting to the sacred, from a Sufi teacher

Stephanie Unger is a writer who lives in Buffalo, NY. She has studied poetry at workshops led by Martha Heyneman and others at the Rochester Folk Art Guild in the Finger Lakes Region of New York State.

King David, Leonard Cohen and the Search for Meaning

A human, an orangutan, a heart-to-heart communion

Memorable encounters with an extraordinary being

Mindfulness and the roots of war

A trail toward a Golden Rule, a Land Ethic, and real magic

What we need is right at hand

Newton’s inward search for hidden truth

Rabbi Douglas Goldhamer, with Peggy Bagley, “Spiritual Laws: The Hidden Wisdom of Kabbalah”

Institutions can give the money, but they don’t dispense the compassion. That’s up to us. We need, as individuals and as a society, to take a long hard look this question. We should begin now, because the question is being forced upon us with an urgency that will only become apparent later, after the excitement…

“Today we have gathered and see that the cycles of life continue.”

Mary Oliver was an astonishing poet beloved by many and also a frequent contributor to PARABOLA over the years.

The Desert Fathers and Mothers— and their culture of search

A spiritual master on what it takes

Four Sacred Guardians

A poem by Walt Whitman in our issue, Happiness.

A review of John Teasdale’s “What Happens in Mindfulness” by Cynthia Bourgeault

Four steps to take on the road of life

Travers in the role of Titania in a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, c. 1924 (Wikipedia) It is not ignorance. Rather, one could say, a particular process of cognition that has little or no use for words. It is part of our heritage at birth, the infant’s first primer. And the…

Making the world her own

A young woman navigates the roads outside—and within

Photograph by Peter Cunningham The rain was coming down in sheets as I drove down a wooded road in rural Montague, Massachusetts, towards the opening ceremony of the Maezumi Institute, the new training center of the Zen Peacemakers Order. “The End” by the Doors was playing on the car stereo. “The…

Welcoming the end of the journey

“All the world’s a stage.”

The long encounter of Thomas Merton and his Abbott, James Fox.

Despite a growing awareness of the Divine Feminine, women remain ineligible to head many major religious groups and institutions […]

In the Middle Ages people were well aware of the inexhaustible power that arises simply from sitting still. After that time, knowledge of the purifying power of stillness and its practice was, in the West, largely lost.

The Nobel winner with his muses

The science and spirit of awareness

A powerful remembrance of war and peace

Going to the movies, mindfully

With a gaze of majestic power, the master electrified me with a glimpse of his cosmic consciousness.

Από τη στιγμή που ιδρύθηκε, πενήντα χρόνια πριν, η κοινότητα του Bose ήταν προορισμένη να λειτουργήσει ως οδοδείκτης […]

From the Christian esoteric tradition, a path beyond the mind

Parabola’s first issue, Winter 1976, included the magazine’s first interview. Conducted by then-editor John Loudon, it questioned religion scholar Huston Smith, author of the bestseller The Religions of Man, whom Loudon described as “a man who has traveled widely, but deeply, learning the many languages for what is primordially true.”

Homespun advice to a young man in need

An encounter to last a lifetime

Reflections on the 2020 All and Everything International Humanities Conference and beyond

Meeting death with dignity

When I was young the silk
of my mind
hard as a peony head […]

Kuzunoha is a popular figure in Japanese folklore

Continuing Orthodox monasticism’s oldest unbroken tradition, Sinai monks still liturgize, shoeless, over the roots of the Burning Bush. On the holy ground where Moses was commanded to remove his sandals—together with all earthly logic—monks turn diversity’s polarizing forces to unity: some of the ways St. Catherine’s Monastery at Mount Sinai (Egypt) brings Byzantium’s patristic spirit…

Story Editor Betsy Cornwell shares excerpts from PARABOLA’s forty-three year archive on the theme of remembering.

Julian Nyca, Golden Temple, Amritsar, India, Wikimedia Commons The night Nimo, Jay, and I arrived in Amritsar, India, we made a cursory survey of the Sikh Golden Temple, wandering around the outer area and meditating at its river banks. The next morning, we woke up at 3:00 A.M. to get there…

In contrast to our modern situation, traditional and indigenous peoples had extensive spiritually and communally based warrior medicine, practices and lineages. […]

Within the chaos, a door to “the inexhaustible Now”

Parabola Magazine · Parabola Podcast Episode 47 The Golden Rule Story Editor Betsy Cornwell shares excerpts from the Winter 2021-2022 issue of Parabola, “The Golden Rule,” including this year’s grand prize winner of the Poetry of the Sacred contest from the Center for Interfaith Relations.

A conversation with intuitive and healer Laura Day Ivisited Laura Day in her apartment in Tribeca in lower Manhattan to talk about intuition. Since her early twenties, Day has been internationally famous for her uncanny ability to know things immediately, without the aid of research or reasoning, accurately seeing the outcome of even arcane events….

Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849), Tea house at Koishikawa. The morning after a snowfall We sit on our heels on the tatami, the Japanese woman and myself, telling the stories of our lives. One can do this with a stranger. Too near, and the perspective is lost. Only the far can be near….

The dance of wealth among the Yurok tribe

Within a Mayan burial cave, understanding comes

Story Editor Betsy Cornwell reflects on the spiritual value of education in this new episode of Parabola’s free monthly podcast.

Story editor Betsy Cornwell shares Margaret Delaney’s “The Anonymous Ones” and “Gastronomy in Ancient China” by Donald Haper in the latest episode of our free monthly podcast.

Story editor Betsy Cornwell shares excerpts from the current issue of Parabola, BALANCE.

In the autumn of 1971, John G. Bennett inaugurated the International Academy for Continuous Education at Sherborne House, Gloucestershire, England. …

Cezanne, Fruit and Jug on Table, Detail (1890-94). “Before she could speak, my daughter taught me the language of silent things: fruits, flowers, an oaken chair. I came to understand, through my relationship to this small being, why the word adult forms the root of adulteration and adultery. Watching her, it became…

What our arboreal friends can teach us

Anonymous / Haida
Retold by Leslie Hebert

Tasting the forbidden fruit

Marion Woodman “The true feminine is the receptacle of love. The true masculine is the spirit that goes into the eternal unknown in search of meaning. The great container, the Self, is paradoxically both male and female and contains both. If these are projected onto the outside world, transcendence ceases to…

LETTERS FROM HELL by Valdemar Adolph Thisted. Preface by George MacDonald. Reviewed by Jan Cheripko

Hammarskjöld, Havel, Mandela, Thunberg

I have a suitcase
Packed with many things. …

Bonfire, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons “After great pain, a formal feeling comes,” writes Emily Dickinson.  “The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs.” After a great shock or loss or change, a stillness comes. We sit still and receive life without leaning forward to grasp at it or commenting on it—think of the…

The nature of wisdom is necessarily esoteric, because it subsists on a level which both transcends and is internal to, anything we can directly observe. …

There is a middle ground, a basic Reality embracing self and Self. It may be called my true nature. To discover what
prevents me from the experience of it, I have only to look at myself, just as I am. […]

Hamada, Leach and Yanagi in the United States, probably Hawaii, in 1952 “The institution of Living National Treasures was started in the fifties–when Japan’s machine culture was preparing to overtake ours–barely a hundred years after the West had forced the opening up of its insular, agricultural society. The title “Living National…

“We have been thrown into this world without knowing why or how. As people sometimes say, “I didn’t ask to be born.” And you didn’t (at least as far as you can remember). But you are here, and you have to deal with it.”

Anonymous, “Nomad Girl” retold by Barbara H. Berger

A stormy voyage into mystery and revelation

On true seeing

A leap of faith into an “intentional” community

“The Divine Dance: The Trinity and Your Transformation” by Richard Rohr with Mike Morrell. Reviewed by Patty de Llosa

Was she “first among the apostles” of Jesus Christ?

A transformative discovery lights the way

A conversation with physicist Leo Piilonen