Complete the following sentence with a single word: “My life would be made whole if it always had ____________. Before I impose my response on you, I’ll let you find your own answer while I occupy the space with some old photographs of mine. My word for the sentence above is health. For there are…
Past Writings
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…
Zuccotti Park: A Sacred Space
November 3, 2011 Welcome. Welcome. Welcome. Welcome to the revolution, to the great renewal, to the natural social order. Welcome to the America that you were taught as a child to love, to revere, to treasure, and, if necessary, to die for. Welcome to Democracy… _____________________________________ These are some notes I scribbled down after visiting…
Drinking Water with a Fork
Perhaps you’ve encountered this headline in some of your recent World Weird Web wanderings: Scientists find that consciousness continues after death. If not, click, read, and make of it what you will (or won’t). I have no particular conclusion to draw from that research; first, because it’s founded on the same flawed probability theories that I’ve criticized…
The Rain of Yellow Flowers
April 19, 2014 Alan Watts taught that our consciousness — thoughts, memories, feelings, actions — do not survive our physical deaths. Yet he also taught that something does; the aspect of ourselves that Lao Tzu called “the nameless essence,” the inviolable connection and identity with the All. Therefore, to die well requires the same inner action as…
The Zen of Knowledge Transfer
February 4, 2014 I have some respect for corporate America, based mainly on the utter honesty of much of its language. For example, if you would like to teach something in a corporate environment, you won’t get very far if you tell management that you’d like to teach, and what. No: what you must say…
Open, Release, Receive, Thank, Return: The Way of Unburdening
June 4, 2015 I look far above, into the mask-faces of these old lies — the mandate of pain, the sentence of death, the shoreless ocean of blame and guilt that salts their wounds — and I ask the dark woman beside me to collapse their plastic towers and burn their bodies as they fall. The…
Time, Truth, and the Mind of God
January 25, 2014 Hawking has changed his mind again about black holes (or more specifically, event horizons). He is an example of a great scientist: a probing, inquiring, restless, and ceaselessly open mind. Pure scientists are also seekers — not seekers of government grants or Nobel gold, but of a clearer and deeper understanding. Great teachers of self-realization…
Time and the Business of the Universe
March 11, 2014 Last year’s povertywas not real poverty.This year’s povertyis poverty indeed.(an old Zen poem) I’d like you to stay with this talk (below) by Alan Watts through to the end and try to address his questions within yourself. It is about business, so no matter how you make your living — and even…