Meditations

In the early 1980’s, after 15 years of intensive philosophical inquiry into the question of how human disorder could evolve out of the natural order, I had a shattering experience…

The words paradox and contradiction are used interchangeably these days. They aren’t synonymous however, and point to very different phenomena. In the following examples, which is a paradox, and which…

Sometimes I’m asked what I do to awaken a meditative state. This is what I do: I sit and watch the movement of thought and emotion in the mirror of…

A strange, featherless flying dinosaur, humorously named Yi qi (“ee chee”), has been discovered in China. “It was one of presumably many experiments in early flight that failed the test…

A reader asks, “Can the people who have a natural talent to quiet their thoughts and clean their mind, not by effort and struggling, but only through insight, point the…

Forty-five years ago, while protesting the invasion of Cambodia ten days after President Nixon said he was winding down the war in Vietnam, my generation played at revolution, and got…

Last night we had an unexpected storm. There wasn’t much rain, which California desperately needs, but there was a lot of lightening and thunder. Sitting on the patio, I watched…

It’s Earth Day 2015, and leading scientists are urgently proposing keeping 75% of fossil fuels in the ground. There’s a macabre symmetry to that, since other scientists predict that by…