illumination

It’s a clear and mild spring afternoon. Sitting beside the stream and delighting in the smells, sights and sounds of early spring, the senses attune to the present, and become…

Like most people, I’m finding hope hard to sustain. If you’re not grappling with hope and hopelessness, you’re either a dead conduit who has given up on humanity, or you’re…

It was sprinkling when I left the house, and 20 minutes into the sitting downstream from Cedar Grove in Chico’s big city park it began to rain fairly hard. I…

If the last year has demonstrated anything, it is that the Enlightenment ideals of reason and human rationality cannot hold sway over the chaos of belief, irrationality and tribalism. But…

Ignoring the culture that gave rise to Trump and Trumpism, and ignoring the fact that Americans just don’t like each other anymore, mavens of the media drop chestnuts like this:…

Let’s tentatively accept the premise that there’s an intrinsic intent in evolution (without implying a deity) to develop brains with the capacity to consciously commune with cosmic mind that infuses…

At the little creek at the edge of town, the wind blew and the clouds flew, but there was hardly a flutter of thought. Some days, like this one, meditation…

All systems of meditation are based on a false premise—that of control. The essence of any system, technique or method is control. Therefore all systems and methods of meditation are antithetical to meditation.