I guess I write a lot about what I feel is most urgently needing our attention these days. Current events are interesting because they’re in the news and on our minds, but popular engagement with the news of the day tends to skim the surface of what’s really going on. It’s not nuclear proliferation, terroristContinue reading “Unfinished Business”
Category Archives: The Creative Life & Leadership
Mental Bypass in Religion
How did something with its origins in a mystical intuition of reality’s essential oneness become such a violent force of division in the world? If religion began as a system of symbols, rites, and sacred stories with the purpose of linking the business of daily life back to the grounding mystery of being, where didContinue reading “Mental Bypass in Religion”
Reality Shift
A somewhat naive understanding of human evolution and individual development assumes that with each advancing stage, former ones are simply outgrown and left behind. We know, however, that this is not how nature evolves. Earlier and more primitive structures are not abandoned, and neither do they merely lie inert beneath the exciting progress higher up. InsteadContinue reading “Reality Shift”
The Examined Life
It was Socrates who said that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” He is a key figure in the history of Western consciousness and its growing fascination with the self. At that time, Socrates and others were searching out the individual’s place in the comic and moral orders; only later did the obsession collapse into theContinue reading “The Examined Life”
Easter Without Miracles
Jesus of Nazareth went into the tomb, and Christ the Lord came out. Jesus was crucified by a conspiracy of Ego, Orthodoxy, and Empire. His message was about the ‘good news’ (gospel) of human liberation and the invitation to life in community. The opposition he confronted on the political, religious, and personal levels was not interestedContinue reading “Easter Without Miracles”
Opening the Present
Spirituality is about living mindfully in the here-and-now. Of course, there is nowhere else we can be, but we all know how easy it is to live mindlessly in the present. Most of us are less quick to admit how much we prefer to live outside the present moment – rummaging through the past or chasing after theContinue reading “Opening the Present”
The Consilient Leader
Reality is not a thing, but a process comprised of three interacting forces which are universal throughout the Great Process we call ‘the universe’. Consilient leaders understand this process, working with rather than against it. Not long ago I made a case for taking a little-known term out of seclusion and applying it in a fresh way to theContinue reading “The Consilient Leader”
A Culture of Dependency
As I see it, the ultimate aim of human self-actualization is not some godlike state of disembodied transcendence, but a mode of consciousness and active life that I call creative authority. This mode of existence is, in fact, one of the outstanding powers attributed to, and glorified in, our numerous representations of god through the millenniums.Continue reading “A Culture of Dependency”
Inside-Out
The Great Machine of consumerism is always at work, spinning the gauzy web of illusion that enthralls much of modern consciousness. It persuades us to look outward for the secret to happiness, which today might be contained in a new-and-improved formula of this, tomorrow as an upgraded model of that, next year in some revolutionary medicine coming to market,Continue reading “Inside-Out”
The Paradox of Education and the Search for Its Soul
Civilization is a race between education and catastrophe. – H.G. Wells A paradox is something that seems self-contradictory or absurd but in reality expresses a possible truth. Its apparent self-contradiction can generate a tension so strong that it snaps and collapses into a dualism of either this or that, this versus that, this but notContinue reading “The Paradox of Education and the Search for Its Soul”
Tracts of Revolution 