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”
Tag Archives: presence
Make Your Home a COVID Monastery
Amidst the chaotic disruption of daily life, an increasing number of us are feeling the strain on our mental health. The economic shakeup has altered the way we work, how we shop, where we go, and what company we keep. Spending more time at home, whether in quarantine or out of caution over catching andContinue reading “Make Your Home a COVID Monastery”
Seduction of the Mindless Life
The exact age at which we begin making intentional choices in life is up for debate, but there are good reasons for putting it somewhere between three and five. This is about the time when language acquisition has provided us with a lens for organizing the world around us, and with a mirror for reflectingContinue reading “Seduction of the Mindless Life”
Now and Again
Sequestering at home, I was sitting with my wife under the gazebo in our backyard just the other morning as the sun was coming through the trees. The sweet smell of burning piñon wood from our chiminea and birdsong in the tree overhead made for an enchanted experience. There were other things we could beContinue reading “Now and Again”
Dropping Into Reality
In More Than You Think I offered a theory that regards mind as more than what’s going on inside your head. Western culture, particularly, has tended to equate consciousness (or spirit) with mind, mind with the brain, and the brain with the body as the central ganglion of its physical nervous system. Granting such exclusiveContinue reading “Dropping Into Reality”
The Gospel According to The Eagles
So often times it happens that we live our lives in chains and we never even know we have the key. The Eagles, “Already Gone” I have been developing a theory that explains our human experience as the consilience of four distinct threads of intelligence, in what I name Quadratic Intelligence. While the threads themselves were identifiedContinue reading “The Gospel According to The Eagles”
Thinking About Religion
Recently in the Wisdom Circle I attend we engaged a discussion on the difference between “inflexible” and “flexible” knowledge. Inflexible knowledge is when our understanding of something is fused to the particular example by which it was first introduced. We are not yet able to think of it abstractly – or in other words, apartContinue reading “Thinking About Religion”
The Filters of Illusion
Constructivism is a philosophy that regards the mind as not merely active in our experience of reality (as opposed to some early modern theories which regarded it as a ‘blank slate’ written upon by experience), but creatively active in the way it constructs the mental models we take as our reality. In the course of ordinaryContinue reading “The Filters of Illusion”
Spirituality Basics 3: The Liberated Life
As the third in my trilogy of posts on Spirituality Basics, this one will move our focus to the question of what the liberated life looks like. We grappled with the predicament of our human condition as off-center and caught in the delusion of separateness; and then spent some time on salvation as the breakthroughContinue reading “Spirituality Basics 3: The Liberated Life”
A Father’s Heart
My present relationship with my father began a little more than two years ago, when we lost my mother. Since then we have talked on the phone morning and evening, just about every day. I suppose the combination of my being more temperamentally similar to my mother, and my father’s steady fulfillment of his family role as providerContinue reading “A Father’s Heart”
Tracts of Revolution 