Archive

The fiery path from light to light

How the goddess of creation became the goddess of death

A spiritual master on what it takes

Fire Creates. Fire Cooks. Fire Kills. Fire also kisses. It kisses death from life and life from death.

David Steindl-Rast (2004) Wikipedia The only point where one can start to talk about anything, including death, is where one finds oneself. And for me this is as a Benedictine monk. In the rule of St. Benedict, the momenta mori has always been important, because one of what St. Benedict calls…

In his book All and Everything, G.I. Gurdjieff presented what he called the “Obligolnian Strivings,” directives intended to instill in the consciousness of those who practice them—said to be engaged in the “Work”—the “divine function of genuine Conscience.”

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….

A classic quest seen anew

The Nobel winner with his muses

Llewellyn-Vaughan-Lee photographed by Richard Whittaker One August day recently in Northern California, Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee sat down with Parabola in to speak about free will and destiny.  The English-born Vaughan-Lee is a Sufi mystic and lineage holder in the Naqshbandiyya-Mujaddidiyya Sufi Order and the founder of The Golden Sufi Center. Sitting in…

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

Odilon Redon, Flower Clouds, 1903 The root meaning of heal is whole. Illness and mishap and even great tragedy can lead us eventually from the pain of isolation to a greater wholeness. There is such a powerful tendency in our spiritual aspiration to climb up out of the mess of our…

Indigo Animal is original, delightful, and profound. The artist, Rue Harrison, has given us wonderful characters in illustrated books in which she has raised the bar on a certain kind of content. […]

An Interview with Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church from November 4, 2006 until November 1, 2015.

“GURDJIEFF RECONSIDERED: The Life, the Teachings, The Legacy” by Roger Lipsey. Reviewed by Jeff Zaleski

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

Each summer I teach creative writing classes at the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth. It’s a wonderful job for many reasons: my colleagues are uniformly, eccentrically brilliant, I’ve taught at campuses all over the country, from Los Angeles to the U.S. Virgin Islands, and since the program is a sleepaway camp, the mood is…

Four steps to take on the road of life

One bright spring day, Parabola met with Karen Armstrong  in her suite at the Parker Meridian hotel in Manhattan.  The petite, friendly 62-year-old British ex-nun, arguably the most influential commentator on religion in the English-speaking world, was on tour to promote her latest bestselling book.  Lauded by critics as “magisterial” and “magnificent,” The Great Transformation…

Backpacking into deeper Reality

The science and spirit of awareness

An interview with Keith Buzzell

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

Exploring the “hidden face of God”

James George is a retired Canadian diplomat who served with distinction as High Commissioner to India, and Ambassador to Nepal and Iran. Chögyam Trungpa called him “a wise and benevolent man, an ideal statesman,” and the Dalai Lama refers to him as an “old friend.” He has known many important spiritual teachers of the twentieth…

“At the very outset of the journey inwards, there is a crossroads. Signs point in both directions, and I am pulled both ways. I find that I am double. I want something and at the same time I don’t want it; I love and hate the same person. I am light and dark; I aspire…

When two ecologists and biologists, who have spent a year together exploring the wisdom hidden in ancient Egyptian temples, decide to share their discoveries about awakening higher consciousness […]

This was the time in his life that Abd el-Kader had intended to devote to peaceful pursuits such as prayer, teaching, and charitable deeds. He might have turned his back on the growing tensions in Damascus: It would not have been unreasonable. Yet he could not escape the world around him, or the role that…

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

Anonymous / Haida
Retold by Leslie Hebert

If you dream of finding a great Teacher, a Master, the operative advice is, “get real.” Great teachers may appear once in a hundred years. …

A conversation with Mirabai Starr

I have a suitcase
Packed with many things. …

Waken, Wala!
Wala! Awake!
From thy long sleep,
Slumberer, wake at my call! […]

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

Tracy Cochran, “A Shared World”

I would first and foremost like to follow an age-old injunction that every writer, before giving out any advice or critique to anyone else, should obligingly give an honest account of their journey. So before doing an appraisal of the 27th All & Everything International Humanities Conference I offer a short yet pertinent brief. Having…

She,
In the dark,
Found light
Brighter than many ever see. […]

One Autumn day in 1976 a question appeared: if I took a photo of something I’d seen that touched my feelings, would the feeling return later when I looked at the print?

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

A young woman navigates the roads outside—and within

Cinderella slaves for years for her heartless stepfamily; Beauty offers her life to the Beast at her father’s request. […]

To meet her destiny, she needed a miracle

America’s children are being robbed of their childhood. It’s as simple as that.

Born in India in 1918, B.K.S. Iyengar has been teaching yoga since the age of seventeen. An innovative and exacting teacher for more than sixty years, he has guided the establishment of many centers of Iyengar Yoga worldwide. His message is “Yoga is for everyone.”

The simplest and hardest thing to do each day is to be here–fully, completely, without turning away.

Story editor Betsy Cornwell explores our current issue, “Ways of Healing,” in PARABOLA Magazine’s podcast. Learn more about this issue or become a subscriber at parabola.org. This episode also includes Kenneth Lawrence’s retelling of the Japanese tale “Kiyotsune.” Please consider supporting this podcast and Parabola Magazine by purchasing a back issue or becoming a subscriber. This…

Suppose we did our work
like the snow, quietly, quietly.
leaving nothing out.
—Wendell Berry

Connecting with the cosmic through the grace, hardship, and gifts of a garden.

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

“All the world’s a stage.”

One of some seven-hundred current members of Ready Willing & Able, the Doe Fund’s flagship training and sustaining organization, Joe will spend the next few months …

“The Eternal Law: Ancient Greek Philosophy, Modern Physics and Ultimate Reality” by John Spencer. Reviewed by Ocean Malandra.

A visit with the famed nun and art historian

Lynda A. Archer

Making the world her own

Meeting death with dignity

How can we find joy in this suffering world?

“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.”

Recollected talks of Michel de Salzmann at Chandolin

A lively report from the 2023 Parliament of the World’s Religions

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

Tobias and the Angel, detail of painting by Raphael. National Gallery, London. From Peter Lamborn Wilson, Angels (London: Thames and Hudson, 1980). A Hebrew Myth, a potent element in the annals of the bees, tells us that when a child is born an angel takes it under his wing and recites…

Eight traditional ways to wholeheartedness and authenticity

A fresh look at “the mad monk”

This story is so old we don’t know who told it or who it’s about, except that it speaks to all of us. We no longer know if it was a “he” or “she” at the center of the story. […]

Life lessons from the Bhagavad Gita

Silas Hagerty was a young filmmaker in his twenties when I met him at a Servicespace retreat. […]

Jacob Needleman’s voice has been prominent in the conversation about man’s inner possibilities for some forty years.

I don’t know why I was born | with this belief in something | deeper and larger than we can | see. […]

Vincent Van Gogh, Pietà (after Eugène Delacroix). 1889. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam As the following passage begins, Jesus of Nazareth, here called Yeshua, is suffering on the cross, attended by several including his mother, Mary, here known as Maryam, and Elizabeth, cousin to Maryam and mother of John the Baptist. It is Elizabeth who narrates. —The…

To cherish the divine spark

On silent retreat, a woman finds connection from PARABOLA, Vol. 37:2, Summer 2012: Alone and Together.

A powerful remembrance of war and peace

A mother and daughter trace their roots to the Vikings—and to those they conquered

Intelligence is a quality available to choose, as a function of mind that can live itself through us. In this article, I will focus on spiritual intelligence as understood within the Western Monotheistic traditions. Here we will explore five forms of intelligence:  1) moral, 2) analogical, 3) intuitive, 4) imaginal, 5) esoteric. Before proceeding, a…

Inside an Ayahuasca ceremony

This episode shares excerpts from Parabola‘s current issue, “Mercy and Forgiveness.”

“Often I have come across stern pronouncements directed at people like me: One cannot dabble, say the priests and scholars. Spirituality is not a tasting menu. “New Agers” who borrow a bit of this religion and a bit of that, while discarding the parts they don’t like, will never have anything but a shallow and…

A guide to exploring, inner and outer

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

Cooking for the sage king

The photo project “Icon and Mirror” by Pola Rader analyzes the Orthodox woman and her social role in feminist context.

How the Aztec god Tezcatlipoca created a fiesta of music.

Owen Barfield and the history of consciousness

The seasons and the Cosmos

Three Poems by Jane Yolen

Meeting a horse to find peace, war, and the sea

To learn is to be vulnerable. It is to have the courage to say, “I don’t know” and the wisdom to know the difference between knowing and not knowing.

The fluidity of who and what we are reflected in embodied transformation

Story editor Betsy Cornwell shares excerpts from the current issue of Parabola, “Hope,” in this episode of the magazine’s free monthly podcast.

Naming Rumpelstiltskin, and the path to self-knowledge

Story Editor Betsy Cornwell shares Jim White’s moving essay “The Esoteric Shakespeare” and Scottish and Chinese fairy tales, as well as wise advice from Rainer Maria Rilke, in this episode of Parabola magazine’s free monthly podcast.

Hammarskjöld, Havel, Mandela, Thunberg

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…

The Descent offers a chance to look clearly at tired habits of thought and action. A woman may finally admit to an addiction or see how some long-denied pattern of action has failed her time and again. The Return offers a chance for something to be born or recovered. A woman may reclaim a talent…

The Unknown — our beautiful An­glo-Saxon word, intimate, reverberant, profound, not so much to be understood but stood under while it rains upon us — that is something I could well live with and, indeed, have revered, cherished, and tried to serve for many a year and day.P.L. Travers, “The Interviewer,” from Vol. 13 No….

How deeply we fear being nobody. One way to think of the ego is as a defense against pain, particularly the pain of being no one.

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…

Understanding mercy as a force from on High