Silent friend of many distances, feel how your breath enlarges all of space. Let your presence ring out like a bell into the night. What feeds upon your face grows mighty from the nourishment thus offered. Move through transformation, out and in. What is the deepest loss that you have suffered? If drinking is bitter, change yourself to wine. In this immeasurable darkness, be the powerthat rounds your senses in their magic ring,the sense of their mysterious encounter. And if... Read more

Recently UU blogger Will Shetterly pointed readers to a fascinating quote from “Two logical fallacies that we must avoid” by Satoshi Kanazawa, reprinted from his Psychology Today blog the Scientific Fundamentalist. (So, I’m reflecting on a reflection of a reflection. Don’t you love how we really are so interdependent?) The naturalistic fallacy, which was coined by the English philosopher George Edward Moore in the early 20th century though first identified much earlier by the Scottish philosopher David Hume, is the... Read more

Let us gather our aspirations. Let us throw ourselves with abandon into the great mystery. Let us pray. Oh mystery at the heart of our lives. We gather here before the vastness. Some name you God. Others among us have no word for what we encounter when we open our hearts wide. But even without words we intuit something large, something good. As we open ourselves to all that is, we find our hidden hearts revealed. We gather together filled... Read more

Recently a reader took me to task for my criticism of appeal to revelation in Christianity, asking somewhat rhetorically if Buddhists don’t also have authoritative texts. I thought my point was moderately clear, but I’m too often mistaken about such things, and once again it appears to be the case that I wasn’t near as clear as I thought… Let me try to be clearer here. I believe the only measures of authenticity, of our spiritual quest are those found... Read more

I’ve just learned from my stepson that Dr Javad Nurbakhsh died last week. Dr Nurbakhsh led the Iranian Nimatullahi Sufi Order. He was a voice of spiritual depth and genuine wisdom. And he will be missed… Read more

There is that old joke which goes if the Ku Klux Klan wanted to frighten a Unitarian Universalist family, they’d burn a giant question mark on the family’s lawn. Actually like many jokes, this one doesn’t hang very well. Nonetheless, I’ve been thinking a bit about questions and their place in matters spiritual… As I was wandering around the web the other day I stumbled upon a Christian site where the writer briefly noted how Christianity asked the question why... Read more

I notice how on this day in 1940 Charlie Chaplin’s tour de force, the Great Dictator was released. Somehow that dance with the globe just floated to the front of my mind… Read more

worth a read… Read more

My only credentials for making a comment on the current financial crisis is that I’m living it, up to my eyeballs… Now way back when the Soviet empire collapsed and there was general rejoicing at the end of a discredited communism, I will claim that I thought a comeuppance with our capitalist system was probably also coming. The only question to my mind was when… I’ve long been confused by those who seemed to have a mystical trust in an... Read more

Ages ago I received an invitation to attend a ceremony of entrustment between Roko Sherry Chayat and her teacher Eido Shimano. I was little confused as to what this ceremony was supposed to be about as Roko had received Inka from Eido something like a decade ago. This meant she was a fully authorized and to the best of my knowledge the first Western woman to be fully authorized an “orthodox” Japanese Rinzai Zen master. I’ve known Roko for many... Read more