Sitting on the beach last week, watching the waves rise and fall, rise and fall. The tide rolling in, receding. Clouds building, abating. Birds (and humans) coming, going. Any or all of it a perfect metaphor for life, for existence itself. Little wonder that the mystics so often use the ocean and its waves to explain the IDEA of a self. My infinitely patient teachers are forever reminding me that I am OF the ocean, not separate or apart from it.…
“Die Religion … ist das Opium des Volkes.” – Karl Marx Karl Marx’s famous dictum that “religion is the opiate of the masses” is based on the idea that we humans, haunted by fears of our own mortality and apparent insignificance, need some kind…
Some years ago I had a remarkable dream. In it I was a raindrop tumbling from a great, gray cloud and I felt ecstatically free the way one can in flying dreams. Then, suddenly, the clouds parted and below me stretched a vast and…
In the spring of 1999 I and another member of the American Red Cross boarded a flight bound for the Balkan conflict in Kosovo. A veteran of many humanitarian assignments, I felt no particular concern about the trip. But on the evening of my…
During the holidays my wife received word that a favorite cousin had been hospitalized with advanced brain cancer. He is young, handsome, charismatic, a business owner, a newly minted husband and father of a child not yet one. Family and friends are stunned, praying…
Every human being has a favorite subject: him or herself. This is only natural since it is the “I” who experiences the world and there is no subject that any of us know so well as ourselves. Right? But what if this conceit is,…