Hold It All
In [Proust’s] work we come across an absolute absence of bias, a willingness to know and to understand as many opposing states of the human soul as possible, a capacity for discovering in the lowest…
Category: Wisdom Traditions
The Irresistible Power of Natural Powers
Having recently perused Jim Forest’s biography and memoir of Dan Berrigan (Playing in the Lions’ Den), I returned to Berrigan’s collection of poems, And the Risen Bread. If I can find five poems in such…
Share the Wealth with Maggie Needham: From Treating Harry Potter as Sacred to Treating Each Other as Sacred
Last January, I started a discussion group based on one of my favorite podcasts, Harry Potter and the Sacred Text. This January, I was hired on by the podcast to help manage dozens of local…
Finding One’s Lost Mind
Julia Ching, The Philosophical Letters of Wang Yang-ming University of South Carolina Press, 1972 I previously studied with delight Julia Ching’s To Acquire Wisdom: The Way of Wang Yang-ming. Wang was the towering philosophical figure…
An Introduction to Simone Weil: Concentration Is Consecration–Spring Class 2019
Humanity is divided into two categories—the people who count for something and the people who count for nothing. To believe in God is not a decision that we can make. All we can do is…
Concentration Is Consecration
Sri Eknath Easwaran distinguishes two kinds of spiritual reading: that of instruction and that of inspiration. Simone Weil’s book, Waiting for God, is an example of the latter, as it is fecund with material for…
“Show Me Your American Buddha”
Thich Nhat Hanh’s Being Peace was published 31 years years ago, and it remains fresh, challenging, and practical. While there are thousands of books on Buddhism, this short text of 115 pages, graced with the…
Old, Learned, Respectable Bald Heads
I saw this book on my shelf, opened to a page, and found this– But that is the sort of thing we can expect from the Abstract Owl, the dried-up Western descendant of the Confucianist…
Be Here Now: American Sadhana and the Search for the Real
If you’ve ever … put your faith in a guru traveled to India and were blown away and never took a single drug recited a mantra throughout the day met your future wife at a…
Her Vivacity Gladdened Life
James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, Knopf: Everyman’s Library, 1992 I’ve acknowledged previously the importance of Reinaldo Arenas and Eduardo Galeano during the late 1990s into 2000 as I was trying to figure out…