Have you ever had a premonition? It’s the feeling that something good or bad is about to happen to you, often with specific details, that’s often so strong you just can’t shake it. I like to think of it as your intuition on overdrive. In the book The Power of Premonitions, Larry Dosse describes them this way: A premonition is literally a forewarning. It is a glimpse of the future, a feeling or sense that something is about to happen. They can... Read more
“You don’t get life right. Life gets you right.” In the book Wisdom, Apprenticing to the Unknown and Befriending Fate, Paul Dunion explains his philosophy of life. Which might best be summed up by the two sentences you see above in bold type. According to Dunion, getting things right in your life comes down to a matter of fate—and how you choose to deal with it. Until I picked up Wisdom, I had never heard of Dunion who is now... Read more
In the early 1810s, a newly retired Thomas Jefferson took on a project that no one had undertaken before him. After ordering two copies of the New Testament, he took out a razor and painstakingly cut out the portions of the text he preferred. He then rearranged these passages and glued them into the pages of a blank book. The result is what Jefferson called The Philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth, though today it is better known as The Jefferson... Read more
One of my most popular columns over the past few years is “3 Daily Prayers for the Spiritual but not Religious.” It appears most people are stumbling upon the story using Google search—which would seem to indicate there’s a yearning for non-traditional prayers, the kind you don’t hear in church. For me, prayer represents another tool in the spiritual toolbox. While there’s something to be said for the inner calm that can be achieved through meditation, prayer can help us connect... Read more
My family was recently watching the oddly entertaining miniseries White Lotus, which is set in a Hawaiian vacation “paradise.” As a still working professional, it was hard not to notice that one of the characters, a high-powered businesswoman, was regularly attending Zoom calls and checking her work email while supposedly on vacation. And all I could think was, what a mistake. I learned long ago about the need to occasionally unplug from the distractions of the world. There comes a... Read more
Bob Thurman may be the best-known American Buddhist living today. A long-time professor of Buddhist studies at Columbia, he was the first Westerner ever to be ordained a Buddhist monk by the Dalai Lama. He has also published a series of popular books on Buddhism; I first became aware of him with the publication of Inner Revolution, which just had its 25th anniversary. Thurman will tell you that Buddhism is not so much a religion as it is a way... Read more
How much stillness do you have in your life? Stillness is defined as “a calm, quiet, motionless state.” When we achieve a state stillness, we have calmed the waters of the internal self. We’ve, at least momentarily, escaped the noise that sometimes clouds our heads and become fully immersed in the present moment. In the book Stillness is The Key (featured in a previous column), the author Ryan Holiday reminds us that we are at our best when we can achieve... Read more
If you read through the early Christian texts known as the Gnostic Gospels, you’ll find there are two primary themes that appear again and again. The first is the idea that the kingdom of God is not found in heaven but is here on Earth right now. It’s not so much a place as it is a state-of-mind. The second idea that appears several times in the Gnostic texts is in regard to the path to enlightenment—and how we get... Read more
Are you a dog person or a cat person? Most people fall into one camp or the other. I am proudly a cat person, not that it has always been that way. I started out as a dog person, but early in my adult life I was converted. My wife can take credit for that. Laney is a magnet for cats. When she is outdoors, strays have a way of finding her. Not long after we moved in together, we... Read more
What if we got the true message of Jesus wrong? What if his real message was hiding in plain sight, in familiar parables whose meaning we take at face value, but that contain deeper and more meaningful truths? That is one of the primary themes in Jesus, A New Vision by the bestselling author Whitley Strieber, a book that forces us to look at the life and teachings of Jesus in a fresh light. Strieber believes that “for too many... Read more
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