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”
Tag Archives: solitude
The Wheel of Happiness
Let’s play a game. I call it The Wheel of Happiness. The background idea of my game is that the wholeness, integrity, and balance we want in our life is about coordinating our intention across four dimensions. This four-fold typology of human wholeness identifies four distinct dimensions or domains of conscious experience which require aContinue reading “The Wheel of Happiness”
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”
Sophia Perennis 2.0
If we think of religion as a tree, then we can appreciate how its essential nature is rooted in mystical experience, channels this experience into an organizational structure, and expresses it outwardly in the distinctive virtues of ethical life. In a condition of systemic health, religion serves the vital function of integrating these mystical, institutional,Continue reading “Sophia Perennis 2.0”
Spirituality for Everyone
One of my objectives in this blog, to be perfectly honest, is to help others understand spirituality as essentially distinct from orthodox religion and esoteric spiritualism. It is not, as religions commonly are, an establishment of conservative morality and an echo chamber of archaic superstitions. But neither is it a secret tradition of metaphysical revelationsContinue reading “Spirituality for Everyone”
Refresh and Restart
Back in the late 1980s Bill Moyers conducted a long interview with the scholar of world mythology Joseph Campbell, published under the title The Power of Myth. In their conversation Campbell invoked the up-and-coming personal computer as a metaphor for understanding myth and religion. Campbell suggested that we might think of the various religions as differentContinue reading “Refresh and Restart”
The Underground to Community
Today more than ever our planet needs us in community. Our species is so careless and disorderly, so thoughtless and destructive, so self-involved and unconcerned over the catastrophic impact our behavior is having on the larger web of life – upon which our own viability and well-being depend, it seems necessary to point out –Continue reading “The Underground to Community”
Paths Into Reality
Although I spend a good amount of time defending the role of religion as the “system of utilities” that translates our spiritual intuitions into the structures of meaning in everyday life, I don’t want to lose sight of the fact that intuition precedes the structures which translate it, and that meaning is secondary to theContinue reading “Paths Into Reality”
Tracts of Revolution 