One allegedly violent 19-year-old boy pretty much shut down our fine city of Boston last Friday. Not to mention the terrible damage he and another are believed to have wrought on innocent lives near the marathon finish line on Monday. Now four young people are dead and scores injured as...

Yesterday was a day of tears and prayers here in Boston, and in widening concentric circles around the country and world. So many were involved in the tragic events. Personally, I can't get over the thought of 8-year-old Martin Richard, who was killed while standing in the sunshine...

I watched the inauguration on Monday and thought about how desperately our county needs visionary enlightened leadership. As President Obama takes on the next four years, I pray for the safety and flourishing of his young family and for an era of self-control as well as gun control, to help...

Happy holydays! May every day be a good one, just being alive as the sun dawns.

Every morning I wake and take a moment to appreciate the lovely view from my bedroom window. And every day, as I take in the stillness and beauty of my little pond and...

Twenty years ago, when there was quite a bit of troubling public news concerning dangerous cults among spiritual groups, I co-authored a white paper called "Spiritual Responsibility" with my Boston neighbor, cult deprogramming expert Steve Hassan. At that time the guru Bhagwan Rajneesh was deported from this country,...

Blessed are the flexible, for they shall not get bent out of shape.
Blessed are the patient, for they shall be waited on and attended to.
Blessed are the generous, for they shall receive abundantly.
Blessed are the grateful, for their life shall always be bountiful.
...

Many people have been asking me of late if Steve Jobs really was a Buddhist. The answer is yes, and for many years.

He was a Zen Buddhist, which inspired his simple, informal, monkish black dress code and the meticulously minimalist yet elegant consumer products he so...

Last week I sat in front of the Dalai Lama of Tibet at the Verizon Center in Washington, D.C., where he was leading the 2011 Kalachakra for World Peace and heard him talk about the union of wisdom and compassionate action, and how being an honest and caring...

Among all the substances we misuse and abuse, the greatest is time. Time is life; we squander it at our peril. Killing time deadens ourselves.

Almost everyone I encounter complains that they don't have enough. But where did it all go? Why aren't our labor-saving devices and faster means of...

The 14th-century Christian theologian and mystic, Meister Eckhart, said: "To reach the now, where one is present to oneself and to God therein, I say to you, be awake."

It's so simple that it's complicated.

People often ask me: How can I make time for meditation, yoga, prayer and...

President Obama was in the Far East not long ago, which reminded me of my decades there and how much things have changed in what we used to call the Third World and developing countries. And yet, change is the rule. The more things change, the more they stay the...

Watching the recent election results, I've certainly noticed that the pendulum of public opinion seems to swing back and forth in much shorter cycles than it used to -- just like in so many other areas of life in this hurried age. A single party used to control the House...

Last week someone told me that in his eighty-odd years he had never seen such pervasive levels of fear and anger. This observation gave me pause to wonder: how do we restore ourselves, heal our spirit and revitalize the earth too? What is true healing, anyway, and can it be...

Can you tell me What is Wisdom while standing on one leg? This was the challenge put to a rabbi of old.

King Solomon said that wisdom was the knowledge and judgment to know right from wrong. He received his vaunted wisdom from God in a dream; would that we...

Last night PBS aired The Buddha, a new TV special about the sage's life, impact, and particular relevance to our own bewildering times of violent change and spiritual confusion. By filmmaker David Grubin, the documentary features the work of some of the world's greatest artists and sculptors, who across two...

The pithy can be powerful. Consider the comedian's one-liner, a haiku poem or the once-revolutionary telegram. Similarly, one of the most useful tools within Buddhism is the use of short statements that potentially transport the listener or reader. Here's an example from the Zen tradition: "The finger pointing at the...

Should humanity have been created? This has long been a debate among learned Jews.

In fact, long ago in the holy land, several centuries after Jesus' time, the most learned rabbis of the two rival schools of philosophy, Hillel and Shammai, met together to discuss this critical issue.

"My soul, where are you? Do you hear me? I speak, I call you----are you there?"

Don't these simple questions somehow resonate deeply? Aren't they timeless, evergreen, universal?

These poetic lines were written by Carl Jung, the renowned 20th century psychologist, in a journal entry of his long-hidden diary-like...