Right this minute, people are making plans, making promises and poems, while at the center of our galaxy a black hole with the mass of four billion suns screams its open-mouth kiss of oblivion. Someday it will swallow every atom that ever touched us and every datum we ever produc … | Continue reading
“We understand very little of what is happening to us at any given moment.” | Continue reading
“…or there will be genocide, atomic bombs, and we’ll all perish and take the planet with us.” | Continue reading
This is the supreme challenge of intimacy — how to reconcile the aching yearning for closeness with the painful pressures of actually being close, how to forge a bond tight enough to feel the warmth of connection but spacious enough to feel free. Kahlil Gibran knew this when he c … | Continue reading
“The chief prevention against getting old is to remain astonished.” | Continue reading
“Enough is so vast a sweetness, I suppose it never occurs, only pathetic counterfeits,” Emily Dickinson lamented in a love letter. In his splendid short poem about the secret of happiness, Kurt Vonnegut exposed the taproot of our modern suffering as the gnawing sense that what we … | Continue reading
How to tell a plaything from a necessity. | Continue reading
"Come with me. I'll teach you the flowers and the stars." | Continue reading
“If you don’t know what to say, start by saying that… That opens things up.” | Continue reading
“The day of a single universal language will dawn!… This language will be of the soul, for the soul, encompassing everything, scents, sounds, colors, one thought mounting another.”… | Continue reading
“Liberty is a better husband than love.” | Continue reading
Bridging Blake and Darwin with a single-hair brush. | Continue reading
"You may be weaker than the whole world but you are always stronger than yourself. Let me send my power against my power... Let me discover what it is that I want and fear from love. Power and love, might and grace." | Continue reading
Traversing the landscape of life on the wings of trust. | Continue reading
How to embrace our inheritance as “a creature of organic substance and electricity that can be eaten, injured and dissipated back into the enigmatic physics of the universe.” | Continue reading
"If we are to be true and worthy heretics, we need not only new heads, but new hearts, and, most of all, that new emotional imagination... begotten of enlarged sympathies and a more sensitive habit of feeling." | Continue reading
“While wandering down the path of wonder, I briefly escape the world of separation and enter the world of unity.” | Continue reading
“We create ourselves. The sequence is suffering, insight, will, action, change.” | Continue reading
How a brilliant woman rose against the tide of her time to fathom the mysteries of space. | Continue reading
An antidote to the civilizational compulsions that rob human nature of nature. | Continue reading
"The emotional life is not simply a part or an aspect of human life. It is not, as we so often think, subordinate, or subsidiary to the mind. It is the core and essence of human life. The intellect arises out of it, is rooted in it, draws its nourishment and sustenance from it." | Continue reading
“What is happiness but growth in peace.” | Continue reading
“Songs are like rivers: each follows its own course, yet all flow to the sea, from which everything came.” | Continue reading
An invitation to “a certain, forgotten way of seeing the world” and an exultation at “earthly life, with its duration so short it obliges us to surpass ourselves.” | Continue reading
“It’s part of being human to fall short of that total acceptance and ultimate understanding — and often far short.” | Continue reading
Inside Earth’s most alien vision. | Continue reading
"We are never simply seeing what’s 'really there,' stripped bare of our own anticipations or insulated from our own past experiences. Instead, all human experience is part phantom — the product of deep-set predictions." | Continue reading
“We are carriers of spirit… into a future unknown, unknowable, and in continual creation.” | Continue reading
“This has nothing to do with premonitions, there is nothing supernatural or mysterious about it, what’s mysterious is that we pay no heed to it.” | Continue reading
“Once upon a time your fore-fathers made no scruple about not only killing, but also eating their relations.” | Continue reading
“To despair over oneself, in despair to want to be rid of oneself, is the formula for all despair.” | Continue reading
How to grow “absorbed into the being or existence of the universe.” | Continue reading
"The most comprehensive formulation of therapeutic goals is the striving for wholeheartedness: to be without pretense, to be emotionally sincere, to be able to put the whole of oneself into one’s feelings, one’s work, one’s beliefs. It can be approximated only to the extent that … | Continue reading
“The true realism, always and everywhere, is that of the poets: to find out where joy resides, and give it a voice far beyond singing.” | Continue reading
“Neither the whole of truth nor the whole of good is revealed to any single observer.” | Continue reading
“Life is wasted when we make it more terrifying, precisely because it is so easy to do so.” | Continue reading
The art-science that captured the wonder of some of “the most brilliant productions of Nature.” | Continue reading
How to bear the gravity of being. | Continue reading
How to “include everything coherently and harmoniously in an overall whole that is undivided, unbroken, and without a border.” | Continue reading
The psychological machinery of our commonest coping mechanism for the terror of hurt, rejection, and abandonment. | Continue reading
“We’ve come this far, survived this much. What would happen if we decided to survive more? To love harder?” | Continue reading
“The people we love are built into us.” | Continue reading
Notes on the eternal dialogue between art and science in our yearning to know reality. | Continue reading
Searching for “that principle which keys us deeply into the pattern of all life.” | Continue reading
“Love bade me welcome; yet my soul drew back.” | Continue reading
"Self-knowledge... is not an aim in itself, but a means of liberating the forces of spontaneous growth. In this sense, to work at ourselves becomes not only the prime moral obligation, but... the prime moral privilege." | Continue reading
The neuroscience, physics, and philosophy of freedom in a universe of fixed laws. | Continue reading
Soulful art from stories that speak “to the childhood of all times and all races.” | Continue reading