Browse Topics

Quilt On My Bed

Money Versus People

The power that transforms our lives into money is lethal. The whales and redwoods, for example, were gone before the harpoon struck or the ax fell, from the moment they became money. . . . The same with ideas, memories, history, child care, healing, silence, and peace of mind. Capital looked their way; they became dollars and cents.

Acts Of Courage

An Interview With David Schiffman

Time changes a lot of things. And certain struggles develop and then subside if you’re only willing to sit back and not be too eager to correct them. There is a value in not being so interested in striving, but rather in developing a more intrinsic feeling of appreciation for the flow of events. I’ve spent a lot of time cultivating that because it’s clear to me I’ve done a lot of unnecessary suffering, been too interested in the shadings of my own pain.

The Path Of Compassion

Thoughts On Spiritual Practice And Social Action

I could make a very convincing case to you for the practice of sitting meditation — just to do that and nothing else — and an equally convincing case for going out and serving the world.

Selected Poems

Understanding, silent, they stand near. / Their patience is our shield. Beyond desire / their touch steadies us, and where fear / would make us turn they guide our feet, fire / like an emptiness burning them to love.

—from “In The Keeping Of Angels”

Dreams Without End

An Interview With Robert Anton Wilson

When you look at history, you find that we’ve become a lot more merciful as individuals. There’s a paradox in that governments are becoming a lot more destructive, but ordinary individuals nowadays are much more compassionate than they were even a century ago. We have developed more delicate, more ethical sensibilities.

Sunbeams

Great mother of big apples it is a pretty world.

Kenneth Patchen

Meeting The Woman Within

Four Dreams And Prayers To Follow

When I wanted a simple cure, I got complicated dreams instead. When I wanted reassurance, I got shards of enlightenment — and what am I supposed to do with that?

The Light From Different Windows

As a Westerner turning Buddhist in 1982, I was concerned about abandoning my “Christian heritage” for a foreign culture. I had never felt completely at home with that heritage: church seemed like a sterile routine, and any form of dogma affected me like one more arrogant know-it-all telling me how I should live.

This Isn’t Richard

Aikido And The New Warrior

In the eye of the storm, stripped of the certainty he had always deemed necessary for survival, denied the support of his teacher, divested even of his name, Richard found the deliverance he had not known he was searching for.