Come Gather ’round, Scholars, Whatever You Tweet…
M. had yet to learn the distinction between knowledge and ignorance. Up to this time his conception had been that one got knowledge from books and schools. Later on he gave up that false conception….
Category: Wisdom Traditions
Ginsberg’s Gratitude
And I never realized that [the cornices of the buildings] meant spiritual labor, to anyone—that somebody had labored to make a curve in a piece of tin—to make a cornucopia out of a piece of…
Autumn Merton Hour with Rocco Erker: Love, War, and a Vocation
Join us for our fourth Zoom gathering this year to explore the work of Thomas Merton—Sunday 20 November7 p.m. Central TimeEmail me for URL: markjchmiel@gmail.com Rocco Erker has been a lifelong reader and student of Thomas…
Notice What You Notice
Primo Levi: I never stopped recording the world and people around me, so much that I still have an unbelievably detailed image of them. I had an intense wish to understand, I was constantly pervaded…
Sri Anandamayi Ma
In the last eleven yearsI’ve read whatever books I could get my hands onWhose subject is Sri Anandamayi Ma (Her parents gave her the nameNirmala SundariWhich means “One of Taintless Beauty”) Some say this Bengali…
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…
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…
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…