Democracy at (the) Stake

The foreperson on the grand jury for Georgia’s State prosecution of election interference by Donald Trump and others is recently in the news, giving interviews to whomever will listen (and it seems everyone is) over her excitement for having the privilege to serve in that capacity. When asked, she confessed that she did not voteContinue reading “Democracy at (the) Stake”

All the Way Through

Treatment for anxiety will be a multi-billion dollar enterprise this year, up from previous years and expected to continue its rise for the foreseeable future. We want the inner peace of a relaxed body and calm mind, but we settle – actually we pay a lot – for feeling a little less anxious, if itContinue reading “All the Way Through”

The Garden of Intention

A significant consequence of our fast-paced, distracted, and unsustainable way of life is that our brief glimpses into the enduring truths of existence are almost as quickly forgotten. It’s not that we’re any less intelligent than our ancestors were. We certainly know a lot more; or maybe I should say that we have a lotContinue reading “The Garden of Intention”

Meditation on a Tree

Sometimes it’s easier to understand ourselves by using something else as our lens. Let’s take that tree outside your window. As an analogy, this particular example is especially helpful given that a tree is rooted in the ground, growing up and out to participate in its local and regional ecosystem. Lots of fascinating connotations attachContinue reading “Meditation on a Tree”

Waiting in Line

The human journey through life has only recently been a topic of psychological study. For thousands of years before that, its exploration was mythological, carried out not by objective research but subjective experience. Our modern tools of psychology have made possible a rational precision that was not available all those centuries and millenniums, but evenContinue reading “Waiting in Line”

Full-Circle Spirituality

The ultimate aim of human evolution is the formation of spiritual community, by which is meant nothing supernatural or esoteric, but rather a kind of “breathing” (spiritus) “together as one” (communitas). In this higher state of consciousness, individual egos act as creative agents of communal wellbeing, serving not an impersonal system or their own selfishContinue reading “Full-Circle Spirituality”

Waking Up As You

Let’s see how far you are willing to go with me here. Proposition 1: The physical universe emerged abruptly out of a singularity of quantum energy, in an event that cosmological science names the “Big Bang.” Proposition 2: After approximately 10 billion years, on a planet thrown into orbit around a medium sized yellow star,Continue reading “Waking Up As You”

Arriving at Last in the Kindom of Spirit

Depending on whether you query conventional religion about the way of salvation, or ask your question of the Sophia Perennis (the transcultural tradition of spiritual wisdom), you’re likely to get very different answers. Religion will speak in dogmatic terms of what you need to believe and what you need to do in order to qualifyContinue reading “Arriving at Last in the Kindom of Spirit”

Dangerous Passage

There is a dangerous passage in human development, where the individual must traverse a kind of psychic wilderness on his or her way to becoming an adult. Not all of us make the journey successfully. For any number of reasons, the challenge of separating ourselves from Mother (and all she represents archetypally) proves too much,Continue reading “Dangerous Passage”

Becoming Whole

In his important work The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Friedrich Nietzsche interpreted the dynamism of ancient Greece as a tension between two principles, which he saw represented in the gods Apollo and Dionysus. Apollo, the celebrated solar god of light, logic, and the visual arts, stood in mythologic opposition to Dionysus, the equally celebrated (butContinue reading “Becoming Whole”