BY CHARLENE MOSKAL As I age I find I can no longer enter certain rooms. I see backspaces inhabited by specters of a world fading into my past.
Tag: Awakening
Morning Toast
BY VINCENT PUZICK I remember the smell of toast. I was in the middle of my morning minutes of Transcendental Meditation when my mother got home from her graveyard shift at the hospital.
This is the Life: Annie Dillard Asks, Then What?
Annie Dillard celebrates humanity by taking the widest view of its activities, hopes, dreams and values. She then asks, what would we really do with this new, expanded perspective?
Milarepa’s Song of Transiency and Delusion
Milarepa is a much-loved figure in the Tibetan tradition, renowned for his songs that expound the teaching of the Buddha and his own dharmic worldview.
The Path Through the Gateless Gate
Jack Kornfield teaches that too much emphasis on 'special' experiences might take us away from the practice of opening up to what is in front of us.
David Whyte – The Bell and the Blackbird
The call of awakening can come in any form, even from something as simple as the voice of a blackbird, in David Whyte's poem, The Bell and the Blackbird.
Theodore Roethke – The Waking
Theodore Roethke was an intensely introspective poet whose work has been hailed by critics as some of the finest American poetry from the last century.
If Love Will Not Swing Wide the Gates, No Other Power Will
James Baldwin describes his own coming of age and awakening to spiritual and political consciousness as beginning with the revelation of sin: 'I became, during my fourteenth year, for the first time in my life, afraid—afraid of the evil within me and afraid of the evil without.'
Am I Conscious Now?
"What does it mean to ask a question? Is there some magic in the inquisitive brain?" Susan Blackmore's lifelong investigation into consciousness encompasses Zen practice and the recurring question: Am I conscious now?
Awakening is Not the End – it’s Just the First Step into the Stream
After the Ecstasy, the Laundry is Jack Kornfield's classic journey into modern spirituality and what is means to be a student of spirituality in the contemporary world. In the book, he uses first-hand accounts of various people's experiences of awakening, satori or kensho and goes into some detail about what these states actually feel like,… Continue reading Awakening is Not the End – it’s Just the First Step into the Stream