Archive

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

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

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

A story on homelessness, the deep woods, and wonder

A conversation with Italian priest and spiritual guide Father Guidalberto Bormolini

Anonymous / Aboriginal

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

What that means and how that feels

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

A visit with the famed nun and art historian

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 […]

These are challenging times for all of us. We at Parabola are offering a free PDF of our “The Search for Meaning” issue from Spring 2017 to anyone who would like one, and we hope you will find comfort in its pages. Click here to access your free PDF. You can also purchase a print…

“SYMBOL OF DIVINE LIGHT: The Lamp in Islamic Culture and Other Traditions” by Nicholas Stone. Reviewed by Samuel Bendeck Sotillos.

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

A remarkable man of old Afghanistan

From the Christian esoteric tradition, a path beyond the mind

Impressions from the land of Rumi

An interview with Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai

Housework as spiritual practice, from a Sufi master

The acclaimed actor, now Zen teacher, remembers

Lee van Laer, Red-Tailed Hawk, Piermont, NY Like the rest of the Parabola readership, I’ve been watching the developments on the borders of Europe — the influx of desperate refugees, the corpses of children — in a mixture of astonishment and horror. We live in what we believe to be an…

How can religious tradition be literally true when language is symbolic, intrinsically?

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

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

The student of seeing has to unlock the mystery first, Eckhart tells us, and it begins—here, now—with the question of who is seeing.

A poem by Walt Whitman in our issue, Happiness.

Mullah Nasr Eddin, or Hodja Nasr Eddin, is a legendary Turkish teller of tales, a sort of wise fool, to whom all sorts of exploits are attributed.

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…

An interview with Keith Buzzell

The dance of wealth among the Yurok tribe

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

A Sufi king seeks a ring of great power.

Homespun advice to a young man in need

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

What the bees—and the Bushmen—know

What makes the Wizard of Oz an iconic American tale that has entered into the language? Some expressions are so well known they need no further explanation, as for example “You’re not in Kansas anymore”.

Seeing the light when it is darkest

Hammarskjöld, Havel, Mandela, Thunberg

Rare wisdom on “how to see.”

How can we find joy in this suffering world?

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

Lucifer is the most compelling character in Milton’s Paradise Lost. He is the most dazzling angel. In Hebrew his name means “to shine” or “to bear light.” In Latin it means “morning star.” […]

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”…

The secret prices of love

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.

The fiery path from light to light

Therefore, Ananda, be islands unto yourselves, refuges unto yourselves….” As he lay dying, the Buddha gave this advice to his beloved cousin and disciple Ananda. I thought of it as I stood in a security line in the Indira Gandhi International Airport in New Delhi, just after a male security guard gestured for me to…

Helen Berger, “A Shift in Vision”

Searching for her place in God’s house

A child visits her ancestral land

Photograph courtesy of Monastero di Bose “There must be monasticism in the twenty-first century!” So said a friend not long ago. Both his implicit protest and his conviction make sense. The landscape of the spirit in the West would be torn and lacking if the monastic way vanished in our time….

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…

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.

Are we the generation that will lose the Earth?

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

Two strangers, vehicles of the miraculous

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;…

A conversation with Brother Satyananda of Self-Realization Fellowship

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…

Kneading bread, baking a soul

Little Gidding has been described as a “thin place” where there is only a slim veil between time and eternity.

Giving and receiving in a Bolivian marketplace

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 stormy voyage into mystery and revelation

Despite acclaim, even adulation, garnered from his theater and film work, including such classic films as The Holy Mountain and El Topo, the author found himself in a state of doubt—of spiritual questioning. …

Rafe Martin offers a retelling of a traditional Buddhist Jataka tale.

Four role models for all who seek the sacred

Teresa of Avila—and grief—teach a mighty lesson

King Salomon seeks paradise with the help of an eagle

Dr. Joseph K. Dixon, A Native American sends smoke signals in Montana, June 1909, National Geographic Creative. The sacred pipe of the Native Americans is a potent symbol of relationship. Through it the human breath sends to all the six directions the purifying smoke that connects the person to the divine and…

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.

Frederick Law Olmsted’s village in the woods

A miraculous visit to Machu Picchu

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

“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.”

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.

A haunted inn inspires deeper questions

That a book on the Pyramid Texts of ancient Egypt has been favorably reviewed by the New Yorker is surely a sign of a significant cultural shift, but if you take the time to read this extraordinary book you will quickly see why. […]

A transformative discovery lights the way

The idea of a “fall of man” is not confined to Christendom. Krishnamurti in his famous dialogues with physicist David Bohm on “The Ending of Time” asked the question: What went wrong in human life? …

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

The mystical heart of silence

Awakening to ourselves and the world

A conversation with visionary philanthropist Nipun Mehta

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…

Exploring yoga with the guru’s granddaughter

Listening for an answer beyond words

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…

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

The Yoga Sutra of Patanjali is the foundational and earliest text on yoga. Dating from about the fifth century BCE, it reflects an oral tradition in existence long before.

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.

Three Poems by Jane Yolen

The Tamils of Sri Lanka called him the Sage of Jaffna.

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

Seeking the divine.

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. […]

What is the weight of wealth? Is it the weight of the money itself or is it the weight of responsibility of having that money?

Brian first studied the history of photography and Black & White printing in 1985 with Teacher and Mentor William Abranowicz at Parsons New York City. …

All movies are an illusion. We think we are seeing motion but in fact we are seeing twenty-four still pictures every second. Half the time the screen is actually black. Yet movies seem so real, and some have the potential to reveal great truth. […]