“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, […]
Verbum Ineffabilis, by Anita Doyle
“Before she could speak, my daughter taught me the language of silent things: fruits, flowers, an oaken chair. I came to understand, through my relationship to this small being, why the word adult forms the […]
Golden Temple, by Neil Patel
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 […]
The Pipe of Reconciliation, by Joseph Epes Brown
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 […]
Keep Nothing
“When the Lakota leader Sitting Bull was asked by a white reporter why his people loved and respected him, Sitting Bull replied by asking if it was not true that among white people a man […]
The Edges Must Be Even: Lessons from a Native American pow-wow, by Lillian Firestone
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 […]
The Fellowship, by Philip Zaleski and Carol Zaleski
During the hectic middle decades of the twentieth century, from the end of the Great Depression through World War II and into the 1950s, a small circle of intellectuals gathered on a weekly basis in […]
The Challenge of Artificial Intelligence, by Jeff Zaleski
The toy company Mattel has announced the release in Fall 2015 of “Hello Barbie,” the first Barbie doll to feature artificial intelligence. Through the toy’s wireless transmission of a child’s voice (“Hello, Barbie!”) to offsite […]
Not Knowing, Non-Being, and the Power of Nothingness, By Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, with Hilary Hart
Desert and void. The Uncreated is waste and emptiness to the creature. Not even sand. Not even stone. Not even darkness and night. A burning wilderness would at least be “something.” It burns and is […]
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, […]