Meditations

Memory doesn’t just permeate our consciousness; it is our consciousness. And when the movement of psychological memory stops, consciousness has a completely different quality.

One of the best studies of good and evil by an American writer is Herman Melville’s “Billy Budd.” I highly recommend the novella, as well as an excellent 1962 film…

The first tool use by hominids—the progenitors of modern humans—has been pushed back from 2.6 million years ago to 3.2 million years. We humans are now living in the pridefully…

Auschwitz, a name synonymous with evil, was liberated 70 years ago, on January 27, 1945. It’s fitting to reflect not only on the industrialized slaughter of 11 million people under…

Like many streams flowing into one huge, polluted river, personal and national problems are now merging together as globalization intensifies. Yet the egocentric and nationalistic mentality, to one degree or…

“We are all Greeks,” the saying goes. It means that the Western mind was stamped in ancient Athens, and we cannot escape our heritage. Only by understanding its present movement…

You probably have to stand in the meadow and look up at El Capitan to have some sense of how incredible the feat of free climbing the Dawn Wall is.…

It was a very windy day, with gusts approaching 75 kilometers per hour. You would think the hummingbirds would be hunkered down somewhere. But a small fleet of them put…