Browse Topics

Without Fear

Talks With American Students

It is important to be aware of what is, not what should be, because the “what should be” is a fiction, a myth, a romantic notion, which all religions and idealists throughout the ages have nurtured and exploited. What good is the ideal of nonviolence if I am full of violence?

Kindred Spirits

“Anchoring,” going to a secondhand store, watching the boys play pool

Peak Experiences

Two blue herons, a red tail-feather, wild blueberries

Keeping A Short Bridge

Buddhist-Christian Dialogue

For seven years, Buddhist and Christian meditators have met at Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, to understand each other’s religious experience, and to search out what it may have to offer the modern world.

The Heart Of Understanding

If you look into this sheet of paper, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in it. Without a cloud, there can be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either. So we can say that the cloud and the paper inter-are. “Inter-being” is a word that is not in the dictionary yet, but if we combine the prefix “inter-” with the verb “to be,” we have a new verb, “to inter-be.”

Roses On Fire

My mother sang and laughed. She had dark hair that gradually turned silver. She felt that no matter how little the money or how bad the loss, it was OK to have fun.

Practical Enlightenment

An Interview With Charles T. Tart

It takes courage to realize, for instance, that you may have been living a life mostly programmed by other people — a life that has nothing to do with your real needs.

Raising The Sun

The Anxious Wrestler

A Zen Story Of Psychotherapy

Nothing remained in the temple — except the mighty ocean rising and falling, and surging onward in its cycles. This was the sole reality. The temple itself disappeared. There was only the ocean, and the wrestler himself was the ocean.

The Guru

Excerpted From Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism

People always come to the study of spirituality with some ideas already fixed in their minds of what it is they are going to get and how to deal with the person from whom they think they will get it. The very notion that we will get something from a guru — happiness, peace of mind, wisdom, whatever it is we seek — is one of the most difficult preconceptions of all.