Much of the perennial wisdom urges us to shift our perspective on events we ordinarily take for granted. Take the wee-hours wake up call that, for so many of us, feels like a curse that must be gotten through or avoided. Rare is the individual who accepts the 3am wakeup and inquires into it. Which [...]

Read enough stories on the topic of spiritual awakening and you'll discover a common vein running through all of them: the eradication of the one doing the seeking. Spiritual awakening, writes David Carse, is letting go of "this constant propping up of the belief in yourself as a separate individual self, and in so doing [...]

The journey inward, if earnestly pursued, begins to reveal a hideous truth: that I, and all others, are one and the same thing. There, just at the edge of my perception, I begin to see that aside from the window dressing each of us calls 'my life,' there is nothing. All of the characters and [...]

I believe now that consciousness reveals itself in stages not unlike a painter or sculptor who reveals his art over time. The more we attend to the task of revealing our true nature, the more consciousness obliges and the secrets to our being revealed. I know this to be true for the simple reason that, more than [...]

"In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning." - F. Scott Fitzgerald It's easy to blame the loneliness of the spiritual path on the reluctance (or refusal) of others to join in the journey. But it's more than that. It's lonely in part because it's so damned difficult [...]

“I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” – Jesus At the age of 13 something unimaginably humiliating happened to me in front of my entire military school cadet class. Racing back that night to my empty barrack’s room, certain my life [...]

The motorist in front of me driving 10mph under the speed limit. An angst-ridden friend on the phone wondering how to increase his company’s sales. The blog post of a young woman bemoaning the absence of a man in her life on Valentine’s Day. A child’s psychosomatic illness because he has again forgotten his homework. [...]

In the late 1800s Swiss geologist Albert Heim was enjoying a climb in the Alps when a powerful gust of wind lifted him from the mountain and sent him plummeting to almost certain death. But a peculiar thing happened during his fall: instead of terror Heim experienced an overriding sense of love, joy, peace. “I [...]

The 4 a.m. anxiety wake-up call. Shit, not again. The mental engine sparks to life and like that the mind is a whirl of anxious thoughts and fears about this person or that, regrets about the past, apprehension about the future, money, kids, health. It's as if they've been waiting there in the darker corners [...]

Some years ago I had a remarkable dream. In it I was a raindrop tumbling from a great, gray cloud and I felt ecstatically free the way one can in flying dreams. Then, suddenly, the clouds parted and below me stretched a vast and endless blue ocean and to my horror I realized I was [...]