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Joshua Boettiger, “Alone, with Others”

Anonymous / African

Retold by Nartana Premachandra

Listening for an answer beyond words

Story editor Betsy Cornwell shares excerpts from the Spring 2021 issue of Parabola, Wellness, including an exploration of the world’s healing water goddesses and a practical guide to awakening awareness. Your thoughts about yourself, experiences, and perceptions continually arise and change, come and go, but awareness remains. Don’t try to grasp or understand awareness; notice…

A recollection of the first moment of being at one.

In mid-August 2015, Viral Mehta, a co-founder of ServiceSpace.org, was diagnosed with an acute form of bone marrow suppression. In the passages below, his wife, Pavithra. “Pavi” Mehta, offers an update on Viral’s condition and speaks with him about his challenges and recovery.

Rare wisdom on “how to see.”

As contemporary life becomes more and more fragmented and unsustainable, many individuals are left perplexed and searching for more complete and sustainable models to understand themselves and their place in the world around them. […]

A Dutch Village, ‘Guernica’, and the power of remembering

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

Looking back, I see my five years in India as the high-point of my diplomatic life, and my most memorable time in India as the four days in January of 1971 before Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s official visit to India. […]

Life lessons from the Bhagavad Gita

Anonymous / Jewish Retold by Maia Zelkha

We urgently need your help to carry on. Parabola is a nonprofit, independent, reader-supported publication. In order to publish each issue, we depend directly upon the generosity of readers like you. Without your support, there would be no Parabola. Parabola brings timeless wisdom to troubled times. As a longtime reader of the magazine has written,…

Virgin and Child in Majesty, 1150–1200, Made in Auvergne, Walnut with paint, gesso, and linen Lord, make us instruments of your peace. Where there is hatred, let us sow love; Where there is injury, pardon; Where there is discord, union; Where there is doubt, faith; Where there is despair, hope; Where…

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

A faithful companion

A review of Ellen Dooling Reynard’s “No Batteries Required”

The annual winners of the Poetry of the Sacred Contest (2021), chosen by the Center for Interfaith Relations.

Kneading bread, baking a soul

Memorable encounters with an extraordinary being

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

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

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

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…

How the Aztec god Tezcatlipoca created a fiesta of music.

The trouble with goats

A meditation teacher loses her voice—and finds her way

New York City At Night, ca. 1935 from Wikimedia Head down, hugging a grocery bag, I hurried past gutted buildings and empty lots, back to my ex-boyfriend’s apartment in Hell’s Kitchen. It seemed like a good idea at some point, having dinner together as friends. But the little Spanish market on…

The word [struggle] is of unknown origin; and although it is presumed to have come from Scandinavian and Germanic roots (there are no clear parallels or roots in Latin) the connections are uncertain […]

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.

“The Verses of the Theri Ambapali,” translated and retold with commentary by Margo McLoughlin

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. […]

Among elephants, it’s a family affair

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

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

A Report on the 2015 Parliament of the World’s Religions.

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 […]

On Adin Steinsaltz and the power of hope

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

Story editor Betsy Cornwell and Parabola intern Surnaí Molloy read excerpts from the Summer 2021 issue, Young & Old, in this episode of our free podcast.

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

learning mindfulness and connection from a dog named George Lucas

A haunted inn inspires deeper questions

Bön monks flee the invaders of Tibet

Readers will find here an expertly assembled narrative—a chronological mosaic of the activities, inner and outer, of Gurdjieff and his followers, pieced together from the records kept by many. …

A story on homelessness, the deep woods, and wonder

Hope not as destination, but as the line we draw along the way.

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

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…

“Give it one week of hard frost,” my new husband says, “and all the green will be gone.” He has slowed the car to let two adolescent does cross the road, and we watch them vanish neatly into the ditch on the other side. […]

The Nobel winner with his muses

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

The trickster, the shape shifter, the god–the coyote

In the beautiful woods of Newtown, Connecticut, a new elementary school is about to open. Pleasing to the eye and soul, this new school replaces the Sandy Hook Elementary School in which, on December 14, 2012, twenty young children and six adults were shot and killed […]

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

When we least expect it, someone may walk up to us on the street and hand us a golden ticket.

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

An anonymous Hindu tale retold by Rama Devagupta.

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

A young woman navigates the roads outside—and within

Laozi, Investiture of the Gods at Ping Sien Si, Pasir Panjang, Perak, Malaysia Photograph from the Ping Sien Si Temple in Perak, Malaysia taken by Anandajoti. My father had many good qualities; unfortunately, equanimity was not one of them. Known for a ferociously bad temper, he once threatened a one-armed theater…

Walking with an Inkling or two

A visitation in the night

From the Christian esoteric tradition, a path beyond the mind

A conversation with African healer and guide Baba Mandaza Augustine Kademwa

In the old days, no one ever stole. Those who were well off always shared what they had. […]

The first issue of Stopinder: A Gurdjieff Journal for Our Time appeared in the year 2000. […]

All it takes is one blue rowboat tied to a buoy,
and its reflection, and this moment
for me to go remembering everything. …

JFK, Ram Dass, and the mystery of Being

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.”

Love and compassion are qualities essential to our stature as true human beings, and jointly might be considered the capacities that most distinguish us from the animals, except that animals sometimes display more kindness towards one another—and towards people—than we do.

A conversation with Brother Satyananda of Self-Realization Fellowship

Imagination itself may be our best resource for experiential recovery of a vibrant, participatory, and wildly sacred Earth.

Inside an Ayahuasca ceremony

This song comes from a place where the angels are present, where light is born, where the future is written.

A childhood memory leads to forgiveness and love

Ever since human beings discovered that we live in an expanding, evolutionary universe with billions of other galaxies, it has become increasingly fashionable to suggest that human existence is essentially meaningless …

What the bees—and the Bushmen—know

“All the world’s a stage.”

Teresa of Avila—and grief—teach a mighty lesson

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. …

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…

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…

Over 2,500 years ago, Peter Kingsley tells us, Parmenides and Empedocles laid the basic foundations for the world and culture we now live in.

A podcast from Parabola Editor, Tracy Cochran’s mindfulness meditation talk at the Rubin Museum of Art on January 6th, 2016.

A hopeful report from the 2021 Parliament of the World’s Religions

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…

A conversation with Sufi master Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

The Golden Rule Tetraflexagon is a magic device created by Steffan Soule in order to teach the Golden Rule.

Inside a cave in a narrow canyon near Tassajara
The vault of rock is painted with hands,
A multitude of hands in the twilight, a cloud of men’s
palms, no more,
No other picture. […]

In April 1976, Mother Teresa spoke before the United Nations. The following day, she was interviewed by spiritual teacher and radio host Lex Hixon. What follows are some of Hixon’s introductory remarks and a brief portion of his rare interview with Mother Teresa.

Learning to love winter’s night

Cooking for the sage king

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.

A remarkable man of old Afghanistan

There are different kinds of realizations. They are not always lightening bolts but sometimes soft and slow, as if snow were quietly falling and settling.

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…

Long, long ago the Bodhisatta was born as a swan…