Meditations

Workers had just painted the lines on the new college track. A podunk little school in California’s agricultural Central Valley, I finally got my undergraduate degree there at 33. I…

Twenty-five years ago, in early January 1990, I was in Moscow on a mission. Driven by the certainty of the simultaneous collapse of the USSR and the US (Americans are…

“60 Minutes,” one of America’s last remaining bulwarks of the status quo, devoted a full fawning hour to Pope Francis Sunday, between Christmas and New Years. Can this media-canonized pope…

Descartes was wrong. He should have said: I think, and therefore I am divided. Then perhaps the world would not be so divided between East and West, North and South,…

For me, the clearest, deepest and I think truest portrait of Jesus came in the form of an elderly Chinese Buddhist woman who had barely escaped the throes and woes…

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,…

I’m glad Barack Obama finally figured out that he can’t compromise with the extremists in Congress, and is doing some things by executive action that he was unable to achieve…

As negation in meditation deepens with effortless diligence, one comes into direct, wordless contact with the infinite and omnipresent fact of death. Rather than react out of fear however, one…