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Ordinary Mind

An Interview With Allen Ginsberg

It could be said that sympathy is our most powerful tool, because nothing stops it, except disaster, but disaster’s impermanent. Hell is impermanent as well as heaven. Therefore there’s nothing to stop sympathy; even in the middle of deepest illusion you can be aware that something else is possible when you see things as outside of yourself and can bear with them.

Seth On Suicide

Seth’s oceanic desire is to remind us that no death comes unbidden, that death is as spontaneous a creation as our own lives, engineered by our beliefs, which, no matter how distorted, cannot destroy in some final deed of discipline the impulse to be.

Selected Poems

The Most Important Influence On My Life

Grandmom, a therapist, Yancey

Learning To Die

In every spiritual tradition life is not something that you automatically have, it is something that you must choose, and what makes you choose life is the challenge of death — learning to die, not eventually, but here and now.

Going To The Movies

To set aside the myriad differences which separate us from others, even those we love, and for a moment actually feel their consciousness is unparalleled as an evolutionary tool. It carries us far beyond our fortresses of pride and certainty.

Transfiguring The Ordinary

An Interview With Roger Corless

If the Christian God exists, the plurality of religions is not a problem in his mind. His mind functions in some other way. So it’s only a problem for us. If Mahayana Buddhism is right and the universe is neither One nor Many nor both nor neither but emptiness, unqualifiedness, then it’s not a problem that there are two religions or one or both or neither.

Call Them By Their Names With Passion

“Name and form” the rishis call it. “Function and form,” biologists reply. Parallels accumulate. Coincidence perhaps, but I am forced to wonder. How much power is in a word, and can I make it mine?

Time After Pentecost

Stories

Along the banks of the river Sharaim hang silver bells that dance in the wind. The bells have always been there, and man has always heard their gentle melodies while travelling upon that river. No man knows who fashioned the bells and arranged them along the banks, for the bells existed before man’s curiosity came to be.