Meditations

A reader in the Middle East wrote giving voice to a central concern of this column. “There is indeed an evolutionary process taking place with consciousness, but that process takes…

Though I’m not a Buddhist, Buddhist philosophy and poetry (as opposed to the arcane intricacies of various Buddhist traditions) speak to me. The quieting and emptying of the mind and…

An academic philosopher raises an academic question: “How is it possible to regain one’s footing once the sources of rational belief have been radically called into question?” Clearly, not by…

Contemplatives usually want nothing to do with political activism, and activists usually want nothing to do with the contemplative life.

In her famous poem, “The brain is wider than the sky,” Emily Dickinson provides a powerful counter to the premises and presumptions of neuroscience. We would do well to consider…

The dam is breaking. There’s a phrase with two diametrically opposite meanings. In the negative sense, nearly 200,000 people locally were given less than an hour to evacuate their homes,…

Is the “arc of the moral universe” an illusion, or does “it bend toward justice” as Martin Luther King famously said, and Barack Obama maintained to his last day in…

The hillsides and banks of the streams are at their greenest now, just before spring in the Central Valley. A few trees are already in bloom, and the first smells…