Archive

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.

The filmmaker writes about forgiveness and acceptance

There once lived, in Fanti-land, a man named Father Anansi. He possessed all the wisdom in the world. People came to him daily for advice and help.

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

A free PDF of our ALONE & TOGETHER issue from summer 2012 to read in these challenging times.

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

Tracy Cochran, “A Shared World”

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

Opening ceremonies, Cherokee pow-wow, North Carolina, 2011 Reading about Black Elk, Sitting Bull, Geronimo and countless other Indian tribal elders and chiefs made me regret that I would never know them. They had vanished and with them a way of relating to others we can call emotional intelligence. Not the intelligence…

One August day recently in northern California, Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee sat down with Parabola to speak about free will and destiny.

Seeing the light when it is darkest

TIMELESS IN TIME: Sri Ramana Maharshi. Reviewed by Samuel Bendeck Sotillos.

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

Detail from The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch, The Prado, Madrid I think we tend to create inward forms of our own — adopted, that is, from things we encounter outwardly — and then stalk each other with them. This process is writ large on the social and political landscape;…

Anonymous / Aboriginal

A conversation with Brother Satyananda of Self-Realization Fellowship

Remembering Harold Bloom and Jacob Needleman

In the Summer of 1987, Parabola sat down for an exchange with Marion Woodman on the subject of addiction.

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…

“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. […]

Are we the generation that will lose the Earth?

Helen Berger, “A Shift in Vision”

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….

Being “old” in Bali

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 […]

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…

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…

cultivation of the integrity and soundness of body, mind, soul, and spirit in the ancient Mediterranean world

A young woman finds her way.

Anonymous / Haida
Retold by Leslie Hebert

Elie Wiesel died Saturday, July 2, 2016 at his home in Manhattan. The Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize winner was 87. In May of 1985, we interviewed Elie Wiesel for our “Exile” Issue.

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…

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 […]

A transformative discovery lights the way

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

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…

In a world on fire, finding the light that guides

“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.”

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. …

The Desert Fathers and Mothers— and their culture of search

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…

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

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

How the First People learned to cry.

Training the body, training the mind

Sick of what it is called
Sick of the names
I dedicate every pore
To what’s here.
—Ikkyu

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

“Does mind exist?” asks neuroscientist Daniel Siegel, as he opens a two-day conference on his favorite subject […]

“We shall not cease from exploration,” wrote the Catholic poet T.S. Eliot. “And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

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

Beautiful, mysterious, deadly: mermaids of Russian folklore

Sleeping. Louis Sussman-Hellborn (1828–1908) I’ve had quite a tumultuous relationship with fairy tales. The Little Mermaid was always my favorite as a child. Not just the Disney version, where everyone lives happily-ever-after, but the original, where the mermaid feels like she’s walking on a thousand knives and almost stabs the prince to…

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

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

Betsy Cornwell shares Ram Dass and Mirabai Bush’s “Going Home” and Emily Dickinson’s poem “Our Journey Had Advanced” in this episode of our free monthly podcast.

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 …

Xharije’s wedding, 1970 “Who you marry and when you die was written on your forehead the day you were born,” my mother told me when I was young. I was relieved. It was lucky that God, the Infinite, the All Powerful had things under control. They were much  too important to…

Two strangers, vehicles of the miraculous

Why God is a verb, not a noun

Newton’s inward search for hidden truth

Shamanic memories from an Indian visionary

On the night of Thanksgiving 2015, our family got into a conversation about the nature of Grace and Mercy. Having written about these subjects recently, it occurred to me that it might be worth collecting the essays into a small booklet.

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

Hammarskjöld, Havel, Mandela, Thunberg

Story editor Betsy Cornwell shares essays from Parabola’s extensive archives on the theme of “Renewal” in this episode of Parabola magazine’s free podcast.

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.

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

When you accept the state of being a stranger, you are no longer a stranger. […]

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

The Sufi Doctrine of Rumi: Illustrated Edition by William C. Chittick. Foreword by Seyyed Hossein Nasr. Reviewed by Samuel Bendeck Sotillos.

A fresh look at “the mad monk”

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.

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. […]

Yeshua said: Whoever lives the interpretation of these words shall no longer taste death.

Meeting death with dignity

How the Aztec god Tezcatlipoca created a fiesta of music.

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…

Learning to love winter’s night

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…

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.”

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

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

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

Walking with an Inkling or two

Inside an Ayahuasca ceremony

The science and spirit of awareness

Discovering the divine in her own backyard

Exploring the “hidden face of God”

A faithful companion

Come join the circle of we who pray

A review of “George Adie: A Gurdjieff Pupil in Australia” by Jeff Zaleski

Anonymous / African

Retold by Nartana Premachandra

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.

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…

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

The gift of fear and awe from a beast cold as the earth

A visit with the famed nun and art historian

A young woman navigates the roads outside—and within

Chatting with America’s favorite saint