Year: 2020

January 2021 On a recent Zoom call with one of my communities the conveners suggested an inquiry into “what drives true belonging?” As I engaged the question my mind initially went where it has gone for many years, recalling Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and my belief that one of humanity’s basic needs is to belong. […]

December 2020 [Last month my editorial focused on “Loving Thy Enemies” and more has been revealed since. I suggest reading “part one” (see link above) if you haven’t done so; then read this follow-on piece] Several people who read last month’s editorial shared how difficult it was to think of an enemy as I defined […]

November 2020 Loving our enemies is no longer merely a nice idea advocated by Jesus Christ and other spiritual prophets throughout history. It no longer fits exclusively into Sunday School classes, catechism studies, or theology discussions.  Loving our enemies has become a requisite for our survival. Hate is killing us. Division and separation is destroying […]

October 2020 Recently one of my newsletter subscribers took issue with an editorial I wrote in which I was critical of people who were ignoring protocol for preventing the spread of COVID-19. The reader challenged the wisdom of wearing masks and admitted he wasn’t sure they didn’t add to the infection rate instead of minimizing […]

September 2020 The point I was making when I wrote The Great Growing Up book was that the human species needs to stop acting like adolescents and grow up into fully functioning adulthood, being responsible for our collective future. In my more recent delving into non-dualism, Advaita and unity consciousness I discovered a writer who […]

August 2020 As of yet, I haven’t written anything on the two crises the world is currently dealing with right now – racism and the COVID-19 pandemic; but I awoke the other day with the urge to speak to a principle underlying both of them.  I see the matter as a conflict between individual liberty […]

July 2020 Angeles Arrien (1940-2014) was a beloved colleague whose influence lives on in me to this day. “Angie,” as most of her friends called her, was a Basque-American cultural anthropologist, educator, author, lecturer, and consultant, best known for her book The Four-Fold Way: Walking the Paths of the Warrior, Healer, Teacher and Visionary. In […]

June 2020 Studying the philosophy of unity conscious, what the ancient Hindus called Adavita* or what many modern sages call “nondual,” I have noticed a shortage of graphical depictions that might be helpful for people who are visual learners. As a result, I  created a graphic in an attempt to describe and distinguish the two […]

April 2020 Looking back on the most recent part of my career, say, the last thirty or forty years, it occurred to me that I made a living by being willing to say and write things that went against the grain for most people. I see how I was willing to be unreasonable and even […]