Recent droughts, hurricanes and floods have made us more and more aware of the reality of climate change, and the disastrous environmental effect of our industrialized, materialistic civilization. As our world stumbles to the brink of ecological collapse -- the "tipping point" of irreversible climate change -- sustainability has become...

"The only way to change the world is to change the story."

Like a green shoot in early spring, a new story is trying to break through into our collective consciousness. How can we help it to emerge and grow, help it to change our fractured world?

We know only...

As we come toward the time of the winter solstice and a few days later the celebration of Christmas, we are reminded once again of the primal mystery of darkness and light, and the light being born in the darkness. As the longest night of the northern hemisphere approaches, what...

In a recent conversation for Super Soul Sunday, when Oprah described to me how so often in her conversations and interviews, people said to her how they just wanted to be happy, I found myself responding, "I think they want to be loved."

All of us want, or need, to...

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

There are so many different ways to pray; in Rumi's words, "there are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the ground." Recently I wrote about being drawn into silent inner prayer, but there is another form of prayer that meets...

"God does not look at your outer forms, but at the love within your love." --Rumi

Amid the noise and increasing demands of our daily life, it is more and more important for many of us to find a way to reach an inner quiet, a place of rest and...

Today there is a resurgence of interest in the sacred feminine. The immense popularity a few years ago of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code spoke not just to our enjoyment of a good thriller but also to the mystery of the divine feminine in Western culture, which is the...

What is mysticism? How is it different to spirituality? And why is mysticism important at this moment in time?

The spiritual journey can be most simply described as a way to access the light of our soul -- the beautiful light with which we came into the world. On...

Prayer is a way to be with the divine -- from the prayer born from need, where we use words to express our needs, to the deeper prayer that takes us beyond any words into the oneness and silence within the heart. This video is about the simplicity of the...

In March this year the science journal Nature announced what many people already knew: that there are clear indications that the world's sixth "mass extinction" is already underway.

The last mass extinction came some 65 million years ago when a comet or asteroid slammed into the Yucatan Peninsula, in...

This week's United Nations Climate Change Conference at Cancun, Mexico is a global forum in response to a global crisis. As well as considering cutting carbon emissions, the conference hopes among other issues to advance green technologies and fund safeguards to prevent further deforestation of the Amazon. Already there are...

Earlier in the year I posted a series of articles about the need to regain a symbolic consciousness -- the need to see the symbolic meaning of events that happen in our inner and outer lives. Recently we have been witnessing the worst ecological disaster in North America with the...

We live in a culture of religious diversity that is at present experiencing a reawakening of interest in spirituality. If we are to more fully understand what this reawakening might mean, it seems to me that we need to clarify the traditional difference between religion and spirituality, between the exoteric...

At the heart of most religions is prayer: a way to communicate with God. There are the prescribed prayers, the rituals of inner communion. But there is also our own personal prayer -- our way of being with God. For the mystic this is the prayer of the heart, in...

The valuable and varied responses to my recent blog about the Internet as a living symbol of global oneness made me aware of a need to explain more fully the nature and purpose of symbolic consciousness: how to access the meaning and power of symbols.

A symbol is not just...

Arianna's recent comments about Jeremy Rifkin's The Empathic Civilization, and in particular his reference to global communication, "Seven billion individual connections, absent any overall unifying purpose, seem a colossal waste of human energy," prompts me to write about my own experience of the unifying purpose and potential of the Internet,...

Our dreams take us into a world of images. Many of these dreams are just "mind dreams" in which our mind reworks and digests the images and impressions of the day, like a cow chewing the cud. But sometimes our dreams take us into a deeper realm within us, into...

The dream is a little hidden door
in the innermost and most secret recesses of the soul....
-- C. G. Jung

We live in a world in which we are saturated by so much information, but how much of this information nourishes our soul or reveals the real...