Browse Topics
Religion and Philosophy
Beyond Good And Evil
Marshall Rosenberg On Creating A Nonviolent World
Nonviolent Communication focuses on what’s alive in us and what would make life more wonderful. What’s alive in us are our needs, and I’m talking about the universal needs, the ones all living creatures have. Our feelings are simply a manifestation of what is happening with our needs. If our needs are being fulfilled, we feel pleasure. If our needs are not being fulfilled, we feel pain.
February 2003
Sunbeams
February 2003Mabel Pettigrew thought: I can read him like a book. She had not read a book for over forty years, could never concentrate on reading, but this nevertheless was her thought.
Searching For The Soul Of America
An Interview With Jacob Needleman
Human beings are meant to do more than simply live out their physical lives on this earth. They’re meant to do more, even, than be good stewards of the natural environment. Humanity is meant to be a conductor of great forces, passing from above, through humankind, and back. That’s what I mean by the “American soul.” Our society has a unique spiritual function that is all too often forgotten.
December 2002
Sunbeams
October 2002Truth can be found everywhere, even on the lips of drunkards, in the noisiest of taverns.
Seventeen American Zen Stories
Over the years, says O’Hara, “this has emerged as his great teaching for me. . . . He was broken. I am broken. And when we can see that we are all chipped and broken, we begin to see that we are truly perfect and complete, just as we are.”
October 2002
Water From A Deeper Well
Huston Smith On Why Spirituality Without Religion Isn’t Enough
Undoubtedly, the transcendent experience — whatever its source — is the most important experience that a human being can have, because it opens up the certainty that the other world is more real than our quotidian world, in the same way that sunlight is more fundamental than the shadows it casts.
October 2002
Sunbeams
June 2002One can live at a low flame. Most people do. For some, life is an exercise in moderation (best china saved for special occasions), but given something like death, what does it matter if one looks foolish now and then, or tries too hard, or cares too deeply?
May 2002
As long as I’m still trying to curry favor — with my dead father, with my admiring readers — I’m not writing from the heart, not really. What a busy little gardener I’ve become, pruning these sentences with such care, clippers always at the ready, clip clip. But beyond the rose garden is the meadow and beyond the meadow is the forest and deep inside the forest is the river and the river runs to the sea. I can’t get to the sea by working on my roses, by making them picture perfect.
May 2002
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