Reading Archives (Author)
Radical Amazement
The surest way to suppress our ability to understand the meaning of God and the importance of worship is to take things for granted....
Sit Under The Tree
One of the most important things that humanity has to learn for its survival is that the choice between self and other, between...
Comparisons
A person can potentially use comparisons to mess up his life. For example, a person can go to the most elegant restaurant which...
Praying With The News
The 17th of the Hebrew month Tammuz initiates a three-week period of mourning that leads to Tisha b’Av, which is the day that...
"I"
The color of my consciousness made the emerald green, and the ruby red. I gazed at the sky, and the light dazzled in the east and the...
Centuries of Culture
Once there was an occasion for me to motor down to Calcutta from a place a hundred miles away. Something wrong with the mechanism made it...
The Message
I see a light, but no fire. Is this what my life is to be like? Better to head for the grave. A messenger comes, the...
What is Goodness?
The question will be asked, "What is goodness? What does our moral nature mean?" My answer is that when a man...
Opening Thy Palm
I had gone a-begging from door to door in the village path when thy golden chariot appeared in the distance like a gorgeous dream and I...
An Undying Faith of the Infinite in Us
When we watch a child trying to walk, we see its countless failures; its successes are but few. If we had to limit our observation...
Freedom Manifests in Action
The more man acts and makes actual what was latent in him, the nearer does he bring the distant Yet-to-be. In that actualisation,...
Beauty Harmonizes Law and Liberty
A great poem, when analyzed, is a set of detached sounds. The reader who finds out the meaning, which is the inner medium that connects...
Search Inside or Outside?
A famous Sufi mystic, Rabiya, was searching for something on the street outsider her small hut. The sun was setting and darkness was...
The Difference Between Education and Training
For me, the process of education is intimately related to the process of healing. The root word of education -- educare -- means to lead...
The Gift of New Eyes
Many years ago, I had just given a talk on the messages, both positive and negative, that we convey to our patients without our...
Only Service Heals
If helping is an experience of strength, fixing is an experience of mastery and expertise. Service, on the other hand, is an experience...
Serving Is Different From Helping And Fixing
In recent years the question how can I help? has become meaningful to many people. But perhaps there is a deeper question we might...
An Unusual Gift From My Grandfather
Often, when he came to visit, my grandfather would bring me a present. These were never the sorts of things that other people brought,...
Stepping Over The Bag Of Gold
My patient, a physician who has cancer, comes to his session enormously pleased with himself. Knowing my love of stories, he says that he...
Life May Itself Be A Koan
Consider the Zen practice of the koan, the question or problem proposed by Zen masters to each other or by masters to students. The koan...
Impermanence is Not Fragility
Perhaps survival was not only a question of the skillful use of state-of-the-art technology, perhaps there was something innate, some...
Power of Blessing
We bless the life around us far more than we realize. Many simple, ordinary things that we do can affect those around us in profound...
Helping, Fixing, Serving
Service is not the same as helping. Helping is based on inequality, it's not a relationship between equals. When you help, you use your...
Cultivation of that Dormant Love
Mother Nature is always speaking. She speaks in a language understood within the peaceful mind of the sincere observer. Leopards, cobras,...
We Move in Infinite Space
It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished...
Live the Questions Now
In the great silence of these distances, I am touched by your beautiful anxiety about life, even more than I was in Paris, where...
Trust in the Difficult
It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished...
Meaning of Success
To earn the respect of intelligent people and to win the affection of children; To appreciate the beauty in nature and all that...
Be Love Now
Imagine feeling more love from someone than you have ever known. You’re being loved even more than your mother loved you when you...
The Witness
George Gurdjieff, a Russian philosopher-mystic noted that if you set an alarm clock at night in order to get up early to get some work...
Untested Simplicity of the Villages
Is the vision of simple living provided by this village in the East the answer? Is this an example of a primitive simplicity of the...
The Emerging Game
As chaos increases - and there's a lot of inertia in the system that seems to suggest that is the direction we're going in - it behooves...
When Skills Meet Demand
For surfers it is the moment when they come into equilibrium with the incredible force of the wave. For skiers it is when the balance is...
Compassion in Action
I'm explicitly making my life a teaching, by expressing the lessons that I've learned through it so it can become a map for other people....
Suffering Leads to Grace
For most people, when you say that suffering is Grace it seems off the wall to them. And we’ve got to deal now with our own...
The Game Is To Be Where You Are
When I was born I donned a spacesuit for living on this plane, it was this body, my spacesuit, and it had a steering mechanism which is...
Unconditional Love Really Exists
Unconditional love really exists in each of us. It is part of our deep inner being. It is not so much an active emotion as a state of...
The Opportunity Aging Offers
One of the best parts of aging is entering the "don't know," learning to be someone who can rest comfortably in uncertainty. There are as...
Beyond Content Of Thought
Instead of trying so hard to get out of the shadow, the dark, which I think actually reinforces the shadow and its reality, just do your...
Compassion in Action
When we look at the vast sadness and suffering in the world, we often experience intense pain in our hearts. The suffering so often...
Travel Light
You read the Spiritual guidebooks. God on $25 a Day. You are inspired. You can't wait to see All the sights So eloquently...
The Salt Doll
A salt doll journeyed for thousands of miles over land, until it finally came to the sea. It was fascinated by this strange moving...
Error Of Perception
Q: Are names and forms real? Ramana Maharshi: You won’t find them separate from [reality]. When you try to get at name...
From Theory To Practice
Q: Sankara says that we are all free, not bound, and that we shall all return to God from whom we came, like sparks from a fire. If that...
Fear of Death
It was about six weeks before I left Madura for good that the great change in my life took place. It was quite sudden. I was sitting...
Let Life Flow
It is a curious fact that we are usually ready enough to be aware of the moment in times of happiness and pleasure, and to 'forget...
The Quantum Matrix
Although doctors might disagree on this or that cure, they all agreed on one thing: the patient's own consciousness was irrelevant. What...
Why Busyness Is Actually Modern Laziness
Action addiction is an advanced sort of laziness. It keeps us busily occupied with tasks. The busier we keep ourselves, the more we avoid...
Inter-faith To Inter-Pilgrim
I have wished to engage in what may be called an inter-pilgrim dialogue. In my judgment, there is something wrong with interfaith...
Each Thing's Way
Trouble is caused by people who think they are smart enough to improve things. First they try. When there is resistance, they push. Then...
Everyday Heroes
Nancy Rivard lost her 54-year-old father suddenly to bladder cancer on Christmas Eve 1983. "I wondered what life was about that it...
Faith Is Different Than Beliefs
Where there is faith, there are fewer beliefs. We use beliefs to shore up opinions, rather than a relationship with the cosmos. Faith is...
The Endless Fertility of Walking
Walking, ideally, is a state in which the mind, the body, and the world are aligned, as though they were three characters finally in...
If Sameness Is A Demand We Make
When I lived in Hawaii, if the temperature dropped to 65 degrees Fahrenheit, we felt we had been hit with serious winter. In...
Fighting Inside-Wars Outside
I turn everything into a contest and a game; everyone becomes an opponent and rival. Driving the freeway, getting the best deal, always...
Let Us Be One
May all humanity be one, and we be one with them. And may we feel our kinship now with all living things, as well: with the creatures of...
Radical Optimism
Radical optimism is a big view of the moment that does not include outcome. Another way of saying this is that the radical optimist is...
Two Kinds Of Resistance
The light begins its slow return to places in the North, and today a new year begins. Some people are saying it is already “too...
Your Job -- A Manifestation of Your Spirit
[At your job], just as with prayer, any attempt to change the outer circumstances without making a change within the consciousness is...
Tired of Clinging
Once there lived a village of creatures along the bottom of a great crystal river. The current of the river swept silently over them...
Letting Go Of The Glory
There is something magical that happens to the human spirit, a sense of calm that comes over you, when you cease needing all the...
New Atoms Doing the Same Dance
I stand at the seashore, alone, and start to think. There are the rushing waves ... mountains of molecules, each stupidly minding...
Suffering Is Never Alone But Shared
I feel and see the flow of life and death inside and outside me. Sometimes, I resist in despair, saying — why should this be, all...
The Face Game
Learning to play “the Face Game”, as Douglas Harding calls it, is not seen as being a mistake or trap, but actually an...
Doorways To Creativity
Question: You have said that feelings such as fear, anxiety, and depression are beginnings, not ends, and in fact, that these...
Honoring Complexity, Being Rooted in Simplicity
The complexity of life can mask its poignancy. The web of daily tasks and events can seem so manifold, so knotty and tangled, that the...
Secret Kinship With The Other
Perhaps genes aren’t the only thing that we’ve been shaped to try and save. Maybe altruism evolves to recognize affinity,...
Opposite Of Meditation Is Not Action, It's Reaction
It seems like our society is at a low point in terms of how we talk about challenging, controversial topics within our political...
A Fixed Place To Stand
Archimedes (c. 287–c. 212 BCE), a Greek philosopher and mathematician, noticed that if a lever was balanced in the correct place,...
You Cannot Capture Silence, It Captures You
For me, the two correctives of all spirituality are silence and service. If either of those is missing, it is not true, healthy...
From Being Driven To Being Drawn
When I was a young man, I liked ideas and books quite a lot, and I still read a great deal. But each time I come back from a long...
Search Itself Changes You
"This whole planet is fiction," he said. "A picture show. Sometimes it can be a rather engrossing picture show, but that doesn't make it...
The Softening
Softness is one of the great secrets of all spiritual practice. When we become soft, we become like water. We let life...
Asleep To Our Own Nature
Right now we humans are asleep to our own nature, the sages tell us. Each of us is ensconced in the dream (or perhaps the nightmare)...
Come Home to Love
Take a breath right now, and notice how abundant the air is, full of life-giving oxygen offered freely by trees and other green growing...
Unconditioned Stillness
Stillness, a sense of the unchanging, is all around. For example, it’s not the ultimate stillness, but there is that...
Living from the Heart
When we are envious of somebody, it is because they are mirroring a place in us that does not feel abundant. After all, if you feel...
The Vessel And The Filter
Each of us has a container within. It is constantly being filled with data. It holds the sum total of our thoughts, feelings, dreams, and...
The Grandest Vision For Humanity
The universe is complex and beautiful. When we listen to stories of humanity, life and death, we can’t fathom the complexity of...
To Pray Without Ceasing
On the twenty-fourth Sunday after Pentecost I went to church to say my prayers there during the liturgy. The first Epistle of St. Paul to...
The False Dichotomy Between Being And Doing
One believes that "being" and "doing" are different. Often, "just being" is regarded as preferable or...
Pay Attention To A Sense Of Space
Whenever there is any grasping or aversion towards something, indeed whenever any hindrances are present, the mind is, to some degree or...
This I Believe
I am not going to talk about religious beliefs but about matters so obvious that it has gone out of style to mention them. I believe in...
A Relentless Search For Greater Understanding
There are no provable certainties. That is the view of modern science and much of modern philosophy. And, this view — that there are no...
What Is Mu?
“What is mu?” By contemplating such zen koans, students sometimes have deep existential insights, and it was this question...
Ninety Six Words for Love
The first difficulty we meet in discussing anything concerning our feelings is that we have no adequate vocabulary to use. Where there is...
The Art of the Skilled Mechanic
Not moving, not really thinking about anything, not really caring about anything either, seems to draw out the inner tensions and...
The Japanese Word, Mu
Yes and no…this or that…one or zero. In the basis of this elementary two-term discrimination, all human knowledge is built...
Futility of Discrimination
"All the time we are aware of millions of things around us--these changing shapes, these burning hills, the sound of the engine, the...
Selfless Climbing versus Ego Climbing
Phaedrus wrote a letter from India about a pilgrimage to holy Mount Kailas, the source of the Ganges and the abode of Shiva, high in the...
Bringing the Vacation Spirit into Daily Life
Our definition of value was that a thing was good if it fulfills its definition. The definition of a human being is in himself. Hence,...
Ambiguity Of Violence
It is the ambiguity of violence, that we can pull a trigger as an act of hideous aggression or of self-sacrificing love, that is so...
To Find Something, Don't Look For It
Between takeoff and landing, we are each in suspended animation, a pause between chapters of our lives. When we stare out the window into...
Gratitude Is More Than Thank You
Gratitude is so much more than a polite “thank you.” It is the thread that connects us in a deep relationship, simultaneously...
Uniform Corn-Rows In High-Tech Isolation
I live in the lush green farm country of upstate New York, in a town that likely has more cows than people. Most everyone I know grows...
Planting Twin Trees
There was a custom in the mid-eighteen hundreds of planting twin trees to celebrate a marriage and the starting of a home. The stance of...
Returning the Gift
In the teachings of my Potawatomi ancestors, responsibilities and gifts are understood as two sides of the same coin. The possession of a...
Attachments Are Not Set in Stone
Attachment is such a simple word, but it’s multi-faceted. At the most fundamental level it’s that feeling of neediness deep...
You Gotta Wobble Before You Stand
Hokusai says look carefully. He says pay attention, notice. He says keep looking, stay curious. He says there is no end to seeing....
Indulge an Attachment
One of my meditation teachers was a man who had devoted many years to spiritual practice. He had studied many spiritual texts,...
Seven People Cutting Stones
For several weeks strange sounds had drifted over the mountains from the neighboring valley. There was much talk in the village about...
Beauty of the Mosaic
For as long as I recall having memory, I've found mosaic incredibly mesmerising. Alongside the increasing presence of grey hair on my...
Conscious Completion
Youth is peppered with conspicuous firsts. And unless we’re really trying, life's lasts can tend to sneak past, unnoticed. Your...
Past and Future: Two Streams of the Soul
Thus there are two streams, one from the past and one from the future, which come together in the soul -- will anyone who observes...
Mercy
She asks me to kill the spider. Instead, I get the most peaceful weapons I can find. I take a cup and a napkin. I catch the spider,...
If ...
IF ... If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you; If you can trust yourself when all men...
Let Them Sleep
Those who don't feel this Love pulling them like a river, those who don't drink dawn like a cup of spring water or take in sunset like...
Guest House
This being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival. A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes...
One Sip of An Answer
All day I think about it, then at night I say it. Where did I come from, and What am I supposed to be doing? I have no idea. My soul...
The Root Of The Root Of Your Self
Don’t go away, come near. Don’t be faithless, be faithful. Find the antidote in the venom. Come to the root of the root of...
Guest House
This being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival. A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes...
The Tavern
All day I think about it, then at night I say it. Where did I come from, and what am I supposed to be doing? I have no idea. My soul is...
Seven Stages Of The Ego
The first stage is the Depraved Ego (Nafs), the most primitive and common state of being, when the soul is entrapped in worldly pursuits....
The Reality of the Illusory World
Well over a hundred years ago the painter Paul Cézanne said, “A time is coming when a carrot, freshly observed, will trigger...
What Is Prayer?
And what is prayer? Again, I would like to remain silent, for silence is the closest we come to God before losing ourself in that. Prayer...
Cognitive Bypassing
I am a physician, neuroscientist, and anxiety expert. Many people I speak with have anxiety because they are trapped in their...
Between Knowing And Not Knowing
Ezra Klein: I sometimes play with the idea — and recognizing that I know nothing in these areas — that a lot of what is being...
Everyday Creativity
I’m rather good at maps. I’m also good at using a GPS device. But I forgot the maps and here we were, late afternoon, last...
What Is Wealth?
What is wealth? It’s having plenty, right? The variables in the equation are pretty simple. What you have, what you’ve got...
Feel Free To Set A Better Example
At the core of legal theory is this idea that there are essentially two forms of liberty—positive and negative. Positive liberty is...