Month: October 2022
What Two Women Think
A roshi is a person who has actualized that perfect freedom which is the potentiality for all human beings. He exists freely in the fullness of his whole being. The flow of his consciousness is…
Reckoning with Ourselves
I recently finished a course with my friends Dianne Lee and Martín Antonio Zaldívar-Barragán, “Reckoning with Russia, War, and Ourselves.” We read and discussed Tolstoy, Kuznetsov, Alexievich, and Politkovskaya. I invite you to check out…
Dostoevsky
Dostoevsky’s art is literally prophetic. He is not prophetic in the sense of predicting the future, but in a truly biblical sense, for he untiringly denounces the fall of the people of God back into…
The Will to Surmount Mountain-high Obstructions
Living at the Source: Yoga Teachings of Vivekananda, edited by Ann Myren & Dorothy Madison, Shambhala, 1993 Sri Ramakrishna had several impressive students. The most renowned of them was Swami Vivekananda. Although he died…
Dylan’s Tweets
Yesterday I had lunch and spent some time with Andrew Ivers, a gentleman and a scholar, at Courtesy Diner on Hampton. Of course, we eventually came around to Bob Dylan, after Andrew gave me a…
The One Thing That Is Important
Christopher Isherwood, My Guru and His Disciple, New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1980. I’ve been imagining coming up with a class in which we’d explore Chris Isherwood, Ram Dass, and especially The Gospel of Sri…
When Life Starts to Improve
Leo Tolstoy, Spiritual Writings, edited by Charles E. Moore Prophetic witness consists of human deeds of justice and kindness that attend to the unjust sources of human hurt and misery. It calls attention to the…
A Year of Reading Marcel Proust (& Sri Ramakrishna)
Cami Kasmerchak just gave me the idea of a reading group (like the one we did in 2021 of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov) of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Who’s been wanting to…