Meditations

Dusk brings mystery, with a tinge of primal fear. For tens of thousands of years, before the first villages or cities appeared, people huddled together at dusk to fend off…

Is life lived from the inside out, or from the outside in? This seems like an obvious question, but many supposedly educated people believe that “we construct ourselves inwardly by…

To a philosopher, a statement like the following is a gold mine: “According to quantum mechanics, particles do not take on formal properties until they are measured or observed in…

Despite the recent floods in southern California that may foretell a hellacious El Nino winter, traveling from a state where water has become scarce to a state where rain is…

A long line at the security check in the Sacramento airport snaked around the cloth barricades even before the first glint of dawn had appeared. Hundreds of frequent or infrequent…

Questioner 1: Time is one of the most difficult problems in philosophy, science and psychology. What is time, and why do we live by it, rather than in the present,…

Sometimes I wonder how anyone inwardly survives in this world without meditating. But when I hear people talk about their ‘practice,’ I realize we’re not talking about the same thing…

Recently I heard a hospice chaplain, who has counseled many dying people, say that he’s seeing many more “bad deaths.” I used to think that most people came to terms…