Being And Being Like Scrooge

Is it possible to develop greater being and not become a more loving and generous human being?   Some esoteric paths don’t concern themselves much with conventional morality.  According to Gurdjieff and Madame de Salzmann the Fourth Way is a demanding and exacting work.    “The level of being is determined by what enters into one’s Presence [...]

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The Gift of Giving

Happy Thanksgiving!  I recently learned that when the Puritans landed in Massachusetts,  they discovered that the Indians had a strange feeling about the giving and receiving of gifts.   Having experienced nothing like it, they misunderstood it, ran it down.   In 1764,  when Thomas Hutchinson wrote his history of the colony, he explained that the already [...]

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The Angel and the Animal

“At the beginning of the third millennium, the human race is in the process of forgetting what it means to be human,” writes Charles Upton in a vivid, chilling essay in the current “Future” issue of Parabola.  “We don’t know who or what we are; we don’t know what we are supposed to be doing [...]

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Woodenfish

Pock! Pock! Pock! Pock!  The Japanese “woodenfish” drum makes a sharp, hollow  sound, like a huge, deliberate woodpecker in still air.    In Zen monasteries it is used to establish a tempo so that an assembly of people can chant in unison.   Last weekend, I heard it used to call a group to meditation, to [...]

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Conscience Flowing Into the World

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 [...]

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The Truth Behind The Truth

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, [...]

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Inhaling and Exhaling

“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 [...]

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Lascaux and Lost Knowledge

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 [...]

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The Gifts of Madame de Salzmann and G.I. Gurdjieff

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 [...]

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Wild Mind

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 [...]

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