Polychromatic Mysticism: A Visit to Little Gidding, by J. M. White

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

The Poet and the Shepherd, by Joshua Boettiger

King David, Leonard Cohen and the Search for Meaning

Encountering the Teachings of Gurdjieff: A Young Man’s Search, by David Ulrich

On my college campus in the late Spring of 1970, I witnessed the events surrounding the deaths of four Kent State students from National Guardsmen’s bullets. Something changed in me.

THE NEW SCIENCE: Changing Ourselves by Changing the Brain, by Patty de Llosa

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

Already Broken, by Joyce Kornblatt

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…

Part of an Ancient Story: A Conversation with Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee (Full Version)

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 a big, sun filled room, surrounded by people from…

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…

An Intelligence That Bypasses Thought: On Retreat with Michel de Salzmann, by Fran Shaw

Recollected talks of Michel de Salzmann at Chandolin

Spiritual Intelligence, by Gerald Epstein

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…

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? …