Howard Jay Rubin

The Word Gets Around

An Interview With Pete Seeger From The Sun’s Archives

We know that the big job is to save the world, but where do you start? I’m convinced that if we are unable to work in our home communities, the job is not going to be done. The world is going to be saved by people who fight for their homes, whether they’re fighting for the block where they live in the city or a stretch of mountain or river. But unless they can fight within their own communities, I think they’re kidding themselves.

Visions Of The Possible

An Interview With Jean Houston

For many years, I’ve been doing basic research into the nature of human capacities — neurological, psychological, psycho-physical, creative capacities — and after twenty years and three thousand research subjects, and perhaps several hundred thousand seminar participants, we feel that we have some perspective on what human beings can be. This leads us to believe that we have barely begun to use our capacities and in fact could not have begun to use them before today, except in very isolated, remarkable instances.

Cosmic Blues

A Reluctant Interview With Emmanuel

Death is the most pleasant thing that will happen to you, though it is very hard to convince people of that.

The Magic And The Power

An Interview With Odetta

I’m shy about writing, about exposing myself, but songs have come through me. Once, I was in Israel and had a hard night — an argument that was so unimportant I don’t even remember what it was about — and I decided I’d go to sleep. In those days that was the way I handled my problems. There’s a Chinese proverb that says if you have a big problem, and you need to solve it, go to sleep. The problem won’t disappear, but you’ll wake up in another position. (Chuckles.) Well, I got back to the hotel, and I couldn’t go to sleep. So I took pencil and paper in hand and out came a song. The kind of writing I admire involves yourself right out there, like Joni Mitchell. Her songs are about what she did or didn’t do or what she’s feeling. It’s almost like an exorcism. But I haven’t gotten there yet.

Don’t Blame Nature

An Interview With Frances Moore Lappé

There is no correlation between scarcity of resources, density of population, and hunger. Hunger exists where there is a small minority of people who control the resources and use them for their benefit.

Worth Fighting For

An Interview With Holly Near

I just got back from Nicaragua. I hadn’t known much at all about this country that the United States has been involved with for many years. The Marines were in Nicaragua as long ago as the Thirties. How can you live in a country and not know about a place where your Marines have been for that long?

Judaism’s Mystical Heart

An Interview With Dovid Din

The unity that Judaism is looking for is the point at which, without losing this brain, a corridor of correspondence is opened between this brain — the individual identity — and the transcendent identity. But it isn’t that I become annihilated and flow into the great river; it’s that I am maintained in a scale model relationship to the transcendent. I stay here, but I grow outward. I stay here, but I use my here only to be positioned onto there.

Low As The Sand, High As The Sky: What Is A Jew?

These people have been compared to sand and stars. When they fall, they fall as low as the sand, and when they rise, they rise as high as the sky.

The Talmud

Returning To Beauty

An Interview With James Applewhite

Building the pyramids or Chartres cathedral are not totally reasonable endeavors — to spend all this money and time and effort and lives in some cases, piling up beautifully cut stone, and yet it’s what gives the grandeur to human existence. It makes humanity in society have something of the brilliance of the light shafting down from the stars.

Good News

An Interview With Michael Toms

Underlying New Dimensions is a spiritual dimension. If there’s a focus it’s that we’re all connected. The scientists, the spiritual teachers, the psychologists, the educators — they’re all saying the same thing in different ways: everything is interconnected. If we’re consuming a third of the world’s resources that affects the rest of the world in a very direct way. If the space program did nothing else it did show us the earth hanging out there in space, it gave us a sense of being part of the same planet. We’re all using the same environment; spiritually we’re all connected as well.