Last night my wife, Carolyn, plunged into a stormy mood. Gazing darkly into the middle distance, she said that her latest novel, the one she’s been toiling away on for the last three months, was falling apart. The novel, she said, is catastrophically flawed. At its very core. All is lost. Also, she added, it […]
Most of us don’t know how identified we are with our minds. Or, to use a phrase Adi Da once used, how identified we are with “the chaos of mind.” In this sense, we are like the proverbial fish who doesn’t know he lives in water. Adi Da said that if we could somehow step […]
The question is this: Is there a sun in your lower belly? Do you feel potent, full, and strong there? Like there’s life-force glowing in your tummy, all warm, open, and powerful? Last November, as I lay on my couch with the ‘Rona, staring, zombie-like, at Bobby Lee podcasts (both of them) on YouTube, I […]
People keep saying, “I hope 2022 is better than the last two years.” Usually, they’re talking about “big picture” issues. News headlines stuff. And yes, of course, I, too, hope 2022 will be better in those macrocosm ways. In the meantime, though, maybe we can do more than just “wait” and “hope” for good things […]
Imagine a guy who’s been a raging health nut for decades – refrigerator full of kale, kitchen counters teeming with exotic superfoods., the full catastrophe. A guy who has only been sick once in the last 20 years. A guy who has obnoxious amounts of gonzo energy pretty much always, and maybe sometimes feels a […]
When I was in kindergarten I was taught the Transcendental Meditation technique (TM) by gentle hippies in a duplex in South Minneapolis. They gave me a special, customized, top-secret mantra. My parents practiced the technique, too. They did TM while sitting in comfy chairs with their eyes closed. But since I was only six, the […]
In the book, Not-Two Is Peace, Adi Da Samraj writes that humankind is, “chronically depressed by the frustration of the ego-transcending deepest and most profound impulses that are the inherent characteristics at the heart and root of every living being. The ego- ‘I’, whether individual or collective, is eventually reduced to sorrow and despair (or chronic life-depression), because […]
I’m sitting outside at the coffeeshop, chatting with my old friend, Jack, when an old acquaintance comes barreling up to us on her bike. She stops in front of our table, legs spread wide as a sumo wrestler. Apropos of nothing whatsoever she announces, with Spanish Inquisition zeal, that she has been “working ceaselessly to […]
I’m writing outside at the coffee shop and, sitting at a table a couple feet behind me, is a 20-something white woman in black hipster clothes (combat boots, yada yada) and half a head of jet-black hair. The other half of her head, the shaved half, has a five o’clock shadow. She is on the […]
Adi Da Samraj Instructs his devotees to “be love,” an admonition probably made, in one way or another, by virtually all Spiritual Masters, Gurus, Sages, and Saints. Here, now, a brief sampling of my failures to be love in a typical day. I’m in the produce section at the co-op. I want to grab some […]