One evening this week, I visited a loft in downtown Manhattan for an event called “Turning Back the Tide: the Sacred Dimension of Compassionate Action.” It was the inaugural event of Buddhist Global Relief, an organization founded by Bhikkhu Bodhi. It was beautiful hearing Ven. Bodhi express what he has called “a distinctly Buddhist sense [...]
Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Conscience Flowing Into the World
Posted in Uncategorized on November 6, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
The Truth Behind The Truth
Posted in Uncategorized on October 28, 2009 | 4 Comments »
Is there a Truth greater than any particular tradition or way? Is it possible that a kind of guide rope was/is given to us that isn’t invented by us, that precedes human beings? I once asked this of John Daido Loori, the founder abbot of Zen Mountain Monastery. Tall and imposing in black robes, [...]
Inhaling and Exhaling
Posted in Uncategorized on October 18, 2009 | 2 Comments »
“Give yourself permission to be yourself, and don’t be frightened by the unknown,” wrote John Daido Loori in The Zen of Creativity. The photographer, Zen master, and founder of Zen Mountain Monastery, who died on October 9, wrote in that book that he first had a glimpse of the spontaneity and naturalness that can shine [...]
Lascaux and Lost Knowledge
Posted in Uncategorized on October 8, 2009 | 8 Comments »
A few months before his death, G.I. Gurdjieff drove with a group of students from Paris to a recently opened series of interconnected caves in Lascaux in southwestern France. His student J.G. Bennett told him about extraordinary Paleolithic paintings that had been discovered by accident in 1940, by four teenagers and a dog. In [...]
The Gifts of Madame de Salzmann and G.I. Gurdjieff
Posted in Uncategorized on September 30, 2009 | 7 Comments »
G.I. Gurdjieff once told some of his early students in Russia to consider the origin of things. Where did this cup, this coffee, this food on my plate come from? How did all these things that touch me come to be made? Years later in America, Martin Luther King Jr. offered a similar example in [...]
Wild Mind
Posted in Uncategorized on September 22, 2009 | 3 Comments »
In my last post, I wrote of my visit to a faux New Amsterdam which was briefly set up in downtown Manhattan. Since then, a few friends have asked me why I care about connecting with distant ancestors. Why not just be the contemporary American that I am? I think this periodic yearning to know [...]
New Spamsterdam
Posted in Uncategorized on September 13, 2009 | 4 Comments »
“Is this the Dutch Village?” my friend Liz asked the big New York City cop standing by a turning windmill in Bowling Green Park in Manhattan. “This is New Amsterdam,” said the cop with deadpan irony. We had come all the way down from Northern Westchester in the rain and gloom, so that I could [...]
May All Beings Be Free From Suffering
Posted in Uncategorized on September 11, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Eight years ago this morning, I was riding a Metro North train down to Manhattan when a conductor ran through the train with the terrible and surreal news that the World Trade Center towers had collapsed and that the Pentagon had been hit. I knew about the two planes going in when I boarded the [...]
Heroic Labors
Posted in Uncategorized on September 5, 2009 | 2 Comments »
On this Labor Day weekend, I am thinking about work and about what elevates some work to the level of the heroic, the mythic, the stuff of art, legend, and inspiration for us all. Usually, my days are filled with work and information. It’s not all unpleasant but there is an endless but unmemorable quality [...]
Pay Attention!
Posted in Uncategorized on September 2, 2009 | 3 Comments »
How to close the gap between what we think and what we feel? How do we come to know our deepest aspirations and intentions in the midst of welter of large and small actions and reactions that fill an ordinary day? A little while ago, I received a comment from someone (who was clearly familiar [...]
