Death, the Dark Brain and Transformations in Light, by Edward Bruce Bynum
Many people may be surprised to learn that the surface of our brain is actually dark and that this darkness has consequences for our experience of consciousness and transformation itself, including our ultimate transformation at death. It also has consequences…
A Welcome Oasis: The 27th All & Everything International Humanities Conference, by Keith Badger
I would first and foremost like to follow an age-old injunction that every writer, before giving out any advice or critique to anyone else, should obligingly give an honest account of their journey. So before doing an appraisal of the…
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. …
Parabola Podcast Episode 50: FIRE
Story editor Betsy Cornwell shares excerpts from the Fall 2021 issue of Parabola Magazine, Fire, including the lead essay by Sufi master Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, “Fire Season.” Read the full issue by subscribing to Parabola. Parabola Magazine · Parabola Podcast Episode…
Parabola Podcast Episode 49: Young & Old
Our younger selves seed what we become and, as we age, we carry our earlier years with us. A sage elderly woman once told me, “some things you can only understand when you’re old”; yet equally true is that the…
Parabola Podcast Episode 42: Goddess
The Descent offers a chance to look clearly at tired habits of thought and action. A woman may finally admit to an addiction or see how some long-denied pattern of…
“What Dreams May Come”: Ancient holistic healing at the Asklepion, by Seraphim Winslow
The word “holistic” is rooted in the ancient Greek word ὅλος (holos), meaning “all, whole, entire.” It is cognate with the English adjective “whole,” a concept which, before modernity, had…
In and Out of Sight, by Padma Hejmadi
By age twelve I’ve learned umpteen natural methods to combat my nearsightedness. These include the dictates of the Bates method via Aldous Huxley: eye exercises, palming, imagining a darkness against…
Growing a Cross-Cultural Garden, by Padma Hejmadi
Some time ago—after a peripatetic existence across the U.S., my native soil of India, and a few points in between—I get to put down roots for a while in a…