Browse Topics

What Went Wrong

What The Body Longs For

Prisons (All Kinds)

A subway ride, a military prison, a 1950s chain gang

My Time

I can’t understand why things don’t suddenly turn into other things. Why doesn’t my knife turn into a candle, my toaster into a snake? Why don’t the lightbulbs turn into women?

Skin-Bearing Animal

Many days Ann took the coat out of the front closet, placed it over her arm and stroked the white fur. She imagined herself standing at the North Pole surrounded by clean white snow as far as the eye could see in all directions, snow sifting from the colorful flickering sky and falling softly around her in the antiseptic cold, falling and collecting smooth and without footprint to the horizon. In the frozen wastes of her imagination, under the aurora borealis of her wounded central nervous system, she could achieve numbness.

Understanding Pain

(Part Two)

We just happen to be participating in a peculiar local distortion of reality. The planet Earth is as near to a mistake as the law will allow.

Peak Experience

The problem has to do with our senses, and with the curiously impoverished view of reality that we hold. . . . Wine, mescalin, pot — all these chemical ways of solving the problem tend to let us down half the time

Discipline

Acceptance, obediance, rote movements

More Words . . .

Meditation is the root, the plant, the flower and the fruit. It is words that divide the fruit, the flower, the plant, and the root. In this separation action does not bring about goodness: virtue is the total perception.

The Sacred Path Of The Warrior

Warriorship here does not refer to making war on others. Aggression is the source of our problems, not the solution. Here the word “warrior” is taken from the Tibetan pawo, which literally means “one who is brave.” Warriorship in this context is the tradition of human bravery, or the tradition of fearlessness.