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Two angels singing. Benjamin West, nineteenth century? Pen, ink, watercolor. Denver Art Museum. Wikimedia Commons



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The Gurdjieff Foundation of Illinois has generously assembled a free searchable index for Parabola magazine readers. The index will allow rapid and in-depth access to any topic/author/title covered by over 40 years of Parabola‘s publications.


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Satish Kumar

Intelligence and Service

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…

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Barney Taxel

Portfolio: Barney Taxel, Lake View Cemetery, Cleveland

From the Photographer: I began to seriously consider a project about Lake View Cemetery shortly after I finished my book about Stan Hywet Hall and Gardens (Akron, Ohio), in 1999. Within walking distance of where I live in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, and rich in manmade and natural beauty, the cemetery was…
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Edward Robert Hughes, The Valkyrie's Vigil, 1906

Agencies, by Anthony Blake

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? …

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Learning to Die, by Brother David Steindl-Rast

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…

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Parabola Podcast Episode 45: Presence

The miracle is that the practice of presence not only enlivens ourselves, but allows us to share that new life with others and also to receive the presence of the Divine. It is the foundation for truth, and it is the genesis of hope. With practice, presence can, in the words of John G. Bennett,…

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Volume 40 No. 2, Fall 2015: Intelligence

Determination, by Tracy Cochran

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. […]

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My Ancestor, by David Guy

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…

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George-Adie
Amanda Means

Portfolio: Amanda Means

Memory of Loss I grew up in a rural environment, close to nature, observing the changes of seasons and weather, the changes of light on the fields, and in the woods. I remember walking through my father’s apple orchards in spring — the trees full of blossoms, the hum of bees,…
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David Ulrich

Portfolio: David Ulrich

Can my inner work towards stillness and consciousness be reflected in images? Perhaps the moments of presence I, at times, experience can be extended outward to you, the viewer.

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Photo by IB Wira Dyatmika on Unsplash
McKay Savage, Close-up of the Buddha head in the banyan tree at Wat Mahathat, Wikimedia
Dürckheim on a morning walk with Swami Prabhupada in Frankfurt in June 1974 (Wikipedia)

The Compassionate Warrior, by Elsa Marston

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…

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Becoming Part of It, by Joseph Epes Brown

Roland W. Reed, Alone With the Past, The Life and Photographic Art of Roland W. Reed, Afton, MN: Afton Press. In terms of interconnections, a dominant theme in all Native American cultures is that of relationship, or a series of relationships that are always reaching further and further out; relationships within…

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Seeking Verity

Seeking Verity, by Tracy Cochran

Verity climbed down from the scaffold and stood with me, looking up at his work. I murmured something about how otherworldly the statue looked. “I look for something other when I carve them,” he said. “They’re not connected to this world. They’re in another place, in their heavenly robes.” I was wearing the clothes of…

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The Meaning of Tradition: A Conversation with Huston Smith

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.”

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Snap-the-Whip,-1872.-Winslow-Homer.-Metropolitan-Museum-of-Art

The Very Rev. James Parks Morton (1930-2020)

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…

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Gifts for Gifted Children

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…

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The Wheel of Konark. The Sun Temple at Konark, Orissa built in the 13th century, is one of the most famous monuments of stone sculpture in the world.

Golden Temple, by Neil Patel

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…

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On Unknowing, by Pamela Travers

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…

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Margaret Macdonald, The Pool of Silence, 1913, National Gallery of Canada
Bosch Decoded: The Esoteric Bosch, Vol. II

Beyond Words, by William Segal

How, indeed, could it be possible for a man, who is limited on six sides—by east, west, south, north, deep, and sky—to understand a matter which is above the skies, which is beneath the deep, which stretches beyond north and south, and which is present in every place, and fills all vacuity? —St. Gregory the…

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Madame White Snake

Huston Smith: Wisdomkeeper

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 …

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Parabola Fall 2017, The Sacred