I've been writing these last weeks about the dissolution of the small, individual identity into the vast, eternal presence of the Divine. As St. John of the Cross wrote in the final stanza of his Dark Night of the Soul, "I remained, lost in oblivion; My face I reclined on...

Just as one cannot adequately describe in words the juicy sweetness of a ripe pear or the shocking depth of the color indigo, so too it seems impossible to relay in words the ecstasy of divine union.

While I have been blessed with intermittent perception of divine union, these...

Today's post is a personal journey. I haven't written in several weeks as I've been in a terrible state - lost, confused, despairing. Raw and vulnerable. Shattered. My only small comfort has been knowing this is a well-worn path. Many mystics have written about the Dark Night of the Soul,...

My post this week is a short chronicle from the road, deep from the heart of the Grace Light tour. Several weeks ago, I posted an article titled Amazing Grace, which explored the role of grace and divine intervention in awakening humanity to new levels of enlightened existence. Many...

My previous post explored a short aphorism from the Siva Sutras - "Knowledge is Bondage" - which warned that grasping for knowledge obscures true wisdom.

Some of you expressed concern that I was condoning ignorance or apathy - quite the contrary! If you reflect more deeply on the...

We have come to believe in our society that acquisition of knowledge is the hallmark of an intelligent, accomplished person. We strive to better ourselves by taking in more information, learning more skills, processing more facts, assimilating more content, and applying more of what we know.

We are better...

After reading my post on Grace last week (along with the string of blog comments that followed), a friend dashed me a quick note. Her email read something like this: "Don't let 'em get you down. Keep standing up for the light!"

Now, I'm well aware that the...

"Gracefulness has been defined as the outward expression of the inward harmony of the soul," wrote British essayist William Hazlitt. If gracefulness is the outer expression, then perhaps grace itself is the source of the inner light.

I have been reflecting recently on the notion of Grace. Nearly every...

As astronaut Edgar Mitchell, the sixth man to walk on the moon, completed his Apollo 14 mission and returned home toward our big blue earth, he experienced a sudden and radical epiphany. Trained in all the disciplines appropriate for space exploration -- physics, engineering, orbital mechanics -- nothing could have...

Have you ever wanted to change someone? A parent, spouse, child, lover, co-worker, or friend? If they just behaved a little differently, or responded to you more lovingly, you could be happier. Their shortcomings are so obvious, you think, there must be a way to change them.

What may...

Following from last week's post on the role of sacred sound in various spiritual traditions, I'd like to delve deeper into the ancient yogic science of sound and mantra. Capturing the essence of mantra (without oversimplifying) is a worthy undertaking, given the volumes of scriptures and thousands of pages...

If you've ever sat quietly and noticed the gentle whisper of your own breath...

If you've then listened deeper, finding the soft cadence of your heartbeat...

And if you've then gone even deeper, dropping into the resonant stillness of your innermost being, you might have heard it...

...the subtle,...

Following an afternoon of family mayhem and mother's day celebration (which included a lively crew of great-grandmothers, grandmothers, mothers and their various husbands, children and pets), I felt drawn to write a post honoring the universal energy which animates us all - the Divine Mother - who compassionately conceived the...

Henry David Thoreau once wrote, "The smallest seed of faith is better than the largest fruit of happiness." Faith is a seed of infinite potential. Faith holds all possibilities within it. Yet, what does faith mean in our modern age of reason?

Faith seems not quite natural to the...

In previous posts, I've written about the possibility of liberating ourselves from the confines of personal identity - the conditioning borrowed from our tribe, caste, race, religion, gender, ideology, political party or other affiliations which make us smaller than the whole.

Politically speaking, I was raised in a moderately...

At a core level, somewhere beyond our religious ideology and distinctions, the Pope's visit has stirred something sacred. It has stirred our faith. It has sparked a little hope in the human heart, a sense of possibility and connectedness, a hint of excitement and celebration.

During his American tour,...

I recently watched a short clip of Oprah describing a magical moment in her redwood grove. She had visited this place in her garden a hundred times before, but this day was different. On this day she released the word "tree" from her mind and entered the grove with full...

"Transformation doesn't require going to the mountain top," shares Marilyn Mandala Schlitz, Ph.D., co-author of Living Deeply and researcher at the Institute of Noetic Sciences. "Something as mundane as road rage, for instance, is the seed for a moment of compassion."

Schlitz and her colleagues ((Vieten and Amorok) have...

Have you ever had a situation where you wanted to love someone freely but you couldn't? For whatever reason you felt constricted or tight? Your heart longed to forgive, or to release, or to spontaneously become available to a higher energy... but there you sat, stuck and closed?

I've...

This is the final post in the series "7 Principles for Consciously Creating Your Life". Previous posts covered Living in the Now, Entering the Divine Mind, Summoning Pure Desire, Interrupting Old Patterns, The Ecstasy of Asking and Relax & Let it Go.

"There...