Archive

A conversation with Frankl’s grandson and a Frankl family champion.

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

A stormy voyage into mystery and revelation

Es difícil para la mayoría de nosotros creer que ambos ángeles y demonios se mezclan con los humanos en la Tierra […]

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

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…

The soul, like the moon,
is new, and always new again. …

In February 2003, I went to Laura Rothenberg’s apartment to talk about her book, “Breathing for a Living,” which she wouldn’t live to see published. Laura was dying at age twenty-two. …

A transformative discovery lights the way

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…

Exploring the “hidden face of God”

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. […]

JFK, Ram Dass, and the mystery of Being

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 …

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

The ultimate practice?

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.”

A visit with the famed nun and art historian

Life lessons from the Bhagavad Gita

Eight traditional ways to wholeheartedness and authenticity

In my mid-thirties I found myself in Dante’s dark wood, where my way was entirely lost.  My marriage was falling apart.  My primary mentor, Reynolds Price, seemed to be dying of a weird spinal cancer that was slowly paralyzing him.  My visits to him brought up visits I’d paid to my father in the hospital…

When most of us think of determination, we think first of imposing our will on the world, insisting on a particular outcome, our vision. Yet real determination appears when we keep going, surrendering what the ego wants, which is always to look good, to sound good, to win. Real perseverance is willingness, not will. […]

How do you get people to trust life? You have to trick them. They won’t jump into the water, so you have to throw them in.Alan Watts, “How to Reach Where You Already Are” Story editor Betsy Cornwell shares excerpts from Parabola Magazine’s “The Search for Meaning” issue, which is available as a free PDF…

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…

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

Anonymous / Jewish Retold by Maia Zelkha

How the goddess of creation became the goddess of death

A tale of snake handlers, faith healers, and speakers in tongues.

The Very Rev. James Parks Morton (1930-2020). Photo: stjohndivine.org Parabola regrets the passing of James Parks Morton. He served for many years on the Board of the Society for the Study of Myth and Tradition, which publishes the magazine, and so was a great friend to us as well as to the…

A conversation with visionary philanthropist Nipun Mehta

Researches into the source of megalithic culture.

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

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…

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…

Story editor Betsy Cornwell shares PL Travers’ stunning essay “Walking the Maze” and William Segal’s wise poem “The Middle Ground” in this episode of Parabola Magazine’s free podcast.

Many people may be surprised to learn that the surface of our brain is actually dark and that this darkness has consequences for our experience of consciousness and transformation itself, including our ultimate transformation at death. It also has consequences for the most subtle form of light we know, the light we associate with religious…

Story editor Betsy Cornwell shares Ursula K. Le Guin’s “A Parabola Bestiary: Bear” and Eleanor O’Hanlon’s “Remarkable Beings” in this episode of Parabola magazine’s free monthly podcast

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

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

Backpacking into deeper Reality

Rare wisdom on “how to see.”

Exploring yoga with the guru’s granddaughter

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.

Lynda A. Archer

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…

Anonymous, “Krishna and Radha,” retold with commentary by Laura Simms

Learning to love winter’s night

There must be more to me than this. Have you ever thought this? It’s a little moment of awakening rather than an ordinary thought—a clearing in the clouds, a a distant memory, a knowing that there is more. More to life. More to me. This realization can feel like hitting bottom.

Memorable encounters with an extraordinary being

A life-changing encounter with spiritual authority

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

Bonding among the Juggalos

As my prayer become more attentive and inward
I had less and less to say.
I finally became completely silent. […]

A rapturous elegy to love

Inside an Ayahuasca ceremony

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….

More than three-quarters of the way through this extraordinary biography (though that label barely captures this book’s breadth and richness) of the scholar of religion Huston Smith …

Finding the true king in his cage

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

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.

Vincent Van Gogh, The Red Vineyard at Arles, 1888, oil, on canvas (Puskin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow)One morning last October, I experienced a moment of grace. It happened as I was walking my black Labrador retriever, Shadow, on one of those warm autumn days when everything looks edged in gold….

Kneading bread, baking a soul

THE BHAGAVAD GITA: A Guide to Navigating the Battle of Life by Ravi Ravindra. Reviewed by Vinita Kaushik Kapur.

The secret prices of love

A conversation with civic visionary Jonathan F.P. Rose

From the Christian esoteric tradition, a path beyond the mind

Are we the generation that will lose the Earth?

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…

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…

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.

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

A childhood memory leads to forgiveness and love

From slavery to the priesthood

Among the tasks or “yogi jobs” a participant can volunteer for during silent retreats at the Insight Meditation Society, a Buddhist meditation center in rural Massachusetts, the most resonant in every sense is that of bell ringer.

Teresa of Avila—and grief—teach a mighty lesson

Tsunemasa, Attributed to Zeami Motokiyo / Japanese Noh. Retold by Kenneth E. Lawrence, translated by Edward Kai Lawrence. Art by Kumiko Lawrence

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.

Story editor Betsy Cornwell looks at our Summer 2014 Issue, EMBODIMENT, in Parabola Magazine’s monthly podcast.

To meet her destiny, she needed a miracle

Many things in the Philokalia are said about “passions.” This word has not quite the same meaning as it has in ordinary language […]

The most powerful teachings and teachers are those that bring us back to ourselves, as we are now, helping us see our true nature: vulnerable and exposed, along with both our nascent strengths and formidable obstacles. […]

Nassreddin Hodja was a real person, a Turkish Sufi, who died in the thirteenth century.

A  Palestinian rapper and the music of hope

Although it felt like flight, I knew the fall was wrong: body upended, working to right itself even as it spiralled head-first, it seemed, down. I’d gone over the tiniest cliff, from darkened footpath to an unseen recessed lawn. On my back, I looked up at faces—my husband Christopher, my step-daughter Miriam, a nurse who’d…

“For it seemed to me certain, and I still think so today, that one can never wrestle enough with God if one does so out of pure regard for the truth. Christ likes us to prefer truth to him because, before being Christ, he is truth. If one turns aside from him to go toward…

The spiritual awakening of a world-class drunk

A conversation with Kabbalah expert Rabbi Dr. Raphael Shuchat

Naming Rumpelstiltskin, and the path to self-knowledge

A conversation with Italian priest and spiritual guide Father Guidalberto Bormolini

Every word I pick here | Is the wrong one, one | I’ve used too often, | Touched by thought | Until it’s worn and tired.

Advice and exercises from a Qigong master

In Vesali, in ancient India, at the time of the Buddha, a baby girl was born spontaneously at the foot of a mango tree in the royal garden. She was given the name Ambapali.

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 Sufi master on meeting the inner and outer challenges of our time

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…

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.

The seasons and the Cosmos

Two strangers, vehicles of the miraculous

“Some men believe in the power and value of suffering,” writes Thomas Merton. “But their belief is an illusion. Suffering has no power, no value of its own.”

Part of an Ancient Story: A Conversation with Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee