Browse Topics

Notes On Sex And Love

Love is an energy. It is not something you can force. Love energy is something you can become receptive to, because it is always there underneath the surface. Love energy is joyous, and joy is always linked to sexual feelings. What we call sex is a small part of love energy.

The Politics Of Radical Clarity

Helen Palmer And The Enneagram

I need to get clearer and clearer with my clients, and train as many people as I can to look at their projections and eliminate them. All I can really do is keep my corner of the world clean, and teach others. Good political work is not concerned with the consequence or the outcome; you pay attention to the process, to the quality of your work at every step of the way. That’s very different from trying to take out the top man by assassination. The problem is that a new top man will always succeed the one you get rid of, if the root psychological problems of the society remain unchanged.

The Evolutionary Leap

An Interview With Patricia Sun

I think we’re in the middle of an evolutionary leap, a leap predicted by religions all over the world. . . . We’re in the middle of a leap in our consciousness and capacity to perceive; the way we think and the way we take in information is changing. Psychic phenomena, intuitive ability, healing, and creativity are all a part of this leap.

Back To The Real World

Reflections On A Course In Miracles

In retrospect I have realized that I could not have been more ready for the first section of the Course workbook, described in its introduction as “dealing with the undoing of the way you see now. . . .” Because my life had not been working, the way I saw things was quite ready to be undone.

Depression As A Loss Of Heart

Our materialistic culture breeds depression by promoting distorted and unattainable goals for human life. And our commonly held psychological theories make it hard for people to make direct contact with depression as a living experience, by framing it as an objective “mental disorder” to be quickly eliminated.

Hunches On Childhood

(Or Everything I Want To Say About World Peace)

The way we hold our children is the way we hold our future.

On The Poverty Of Affluence

An Interview With Paul Wachtel

When I look back on the Sixties, I realize it would have been absolutely and utterly inconceivable to me then that the world would be the way it is: that Ronald Reagan would be President, that our society would be so increasingly acquisitive, that the growth of the underclass would have proceeded the way it has. I really thought twenty years ago that today we would look back on the kind of race relations we had in the Sixties as a remnant of some dark age — like slavery and the era of Jim Crow — and that full integration and equality would have been achieved. Obviously, I was extremely wrong, which can be grounds for pessimism. But I do think that something radical and powerful and extraordinary happened in the Sixties. We just didn’t know how to consolidate it, to keep it going.

When Work Is Play

Writing is like psychotherapy, or a spiritual discipline. It is a way of encountering reality. It teaches me about myself and the world around me. I’m not sure how it does that, just as I’m not sure how the revelations of religion and psychotherapy happen. People who don’t “believe” in writing don’t know what I’m talking about. To them I call it my work, putting it in a context they can understand.

The Anxious Wrestler

A Zen Story Of Psychotherapy

Nothing remained in the temple — except the mighty ocean rising and falling, and surging onward in its cycles. This was the sole reality. The temple itself disappeared. There was only the ocean, and the wrestler himself was the ocean.

Suffering

“Suffering” is a word used to express so many kinds of experience that its precision of meaning has been lost. The Latin verb ferre means “to bear” or “to carry,” and “suffer” derives from it, with the prefix “sub” meaning “under.”