I could make a very strong argument about the urgency for a new conception of spirituality. Briefly put, it is about making religion promulgate sanity rather than salvation; transforming its mission from saving the soul to healing the psyche. If I am healthy in this life, I will have no fear of what awaits me…
Author: brian
Hexagram 52 and the Return to the Physical Now
Writing on the Internet is like taking a long walk through a great city: You can be visible to millions, and seen by none. Monday, 3AM. It winds down, this chasm of time, these funhouse mirror days of recurrent, spasmodic pandemic lockdown. I was always taught the linear order, and felt — as little as…
About Sextortion
How much of your life is driven by what you do online? It’s a question all of us should perhaps ask ourselves regularly; one I am wishing tonight I had asked myself before. Today, I was a victim of an online criminal phenomenon known as sextortion. I’ll tell the story below, which is basically the…
Maturity: The Way of Leadership
Throughout my life, world leaders with developmentally-challenged minds stuck in toddlerhood, pre-teen, or adolescence have wrought incalculable death and suffering on the people of Earth, and destruction to the planetary body. Western media have mostly cheered for them, repeated their lies as truth, and demonized any who dared to question the cults of violence built…
Tamed By the Small
“…the object of your inquiry is blocked by a small yet permanent influence. Nothing can be done externally. Salvation, if it exists, lies in work on the Self.” — R.L. Wing, The I Ching Workbook It is a personal tradition of mine to cast a yearend I Ching hexagram, and today’s could not have hit…
Alan Watts on Christ
I picked off just over 6 minutes of audio from a ca. 1965 talk by Watts on Jesus as a revolutionary: someone who challenged the monarchical tradition of Judaism and introduced democracy to the kingdom of heaven. But as Watts points out, his revolutionary act was suppressed via a trick of translation on the part…
YouTube and the Elements of Desire
You can learn anything you want in Alphabet-Google’s video labyrinth, YouTube. You can get tips on making Word, Excel, or Powerpoint work better for you, or you can dive into C++ or Java programming. You can learn anything from basic arithmetic to quantum mechanics. You can study office etiquette or political activism. But YouTube can…
A Love Song for Carol
“The master potter leaves no trace.” — Taoist proverb 9/12/2020 The goal of any genuine spiritual practice is the same as that of any effective psychotherapy: to draw unconscious and preconscious content into awareness, through a gradual and naturally measured process of opening, realization, and release. In the literature of psychotherapy, I learned much that…
The Masks of Neurosis
“Who are you?” It’s another of those questions addressed, with varying degrees of urgency, by spiritual practice and psychotherapy. It’s a question that deserves attention before its answer becomes a weak inscription, fading on a stone worn down by decades or centuries of weather, above the debris that was once your physical body on this…
Meditation Practice, Stage One: Listening
February 9, 2014 Forced or manufactured sound is everywhere. Music, traffic, video, phones, web noise, advertising, small talk, argument, television. When sound becomes compulsion or consumption — the expression of some deep-seated but displaced emotional need — it turns into noise. But a life grounded in silence actually makes better use of sound, in the…