Meditations

As a practicing contemplative and ‘fallen away Catholic,’ I’m both chagrined and amused by the new pope’s recent statement: “In the Curia, there are also holy people, really, there are…

After a light all-night rain, the clouds cleared and the sun made a welcome appearance in the early afternoon. People got outside and into the parkland in droves, including me.…

Tenzin Tethong is currently a Distinguished Fellow at the Tibetan Studies Institute at Stanford, and President and one of the founding members of the Dalai Lama Foundation, as well as…

Economic vitality is the basis of political power. America’s economic and political dominance is on the wane in the world, while China is waxing everyone with it rapacious, communistic capitalism.…

This is the story of how the teachings of an illumined teacher are turned into groupthink by his followers, which in turn become the basis for another religion. I’m referring…

Is there an intrinsic intent in the universe to evolve brains capable of conscious awareness of Mind? That’s a religious and philosophical question, not one that can be answered by…

In a tour de force of preemptive reductionism, neuroscientist Eric Kandel asserts that the mind is simply “a set of operations carried out by the brain.” Like all reductionism, that…

A neuroscientist named Benjamin Libet made a remarkable discovery at the University of California, San Francisco in the mid-1980’s. After placing electrodes on volunteer’s skulls and forefingers, he asked them…