Reading Archives (Author)
Radical Amazement
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel
The surest way to suppress our ability to understand the meaning of God and the importance of worship is to take things for granted. Indifference to the sublime wonder of living is the root of sin. Wo...
Comparisons
Rabbi Pliskin
A person can potentially use comparisons to mess up his life. For example, a person can go to the most elegant restaurant which employs the greatest chef. He can order the most expensive food. Then ...
Praying With The News
Rabbi Yael Levy
The 17th of the Hebrew month Tammuz initiates a three-week period of mourning that leads to Tisha b’Av, which is the day that marks the destruction of the Temples in Jerusalem in 586 BCE an...
Centuries of Culture
Rabindranath Tagore
Once there was an occasion for me to motor down to Calcutta from a place a hundred miles away. Something wrong with the mechanism made it necessary for us to have a repeated supply of water almost eve...
What is Goodness?
Rabindranath Tagore
The question will be asked, "What is goodness? What does our moral nature mean?" My answer is that when a man begins to have an extended vision of his self, when he realizes that...
An Undying Faith of the Infinite in Us
Rabindranath Tagore
When we watch a child trying to walk, we see its countless failures; its successes are but few. If we had to limit our observation within a narrow space of time, the sight would be cruel. ...
Freedom Manifests in Action
Rabindranath Tagore
The more man acts and makes actual what was latent in him, the nearer does he bring the distant Yet-to-be. In that actualisation, man is ever making himself more and yet more distinct, and s...
Beauty Harmonizes Law and Liberty
Rabindranath Tagore
A great poem, when analyzed, is a set of detached sounds. The reader who finds out the meaning, which is the inner medium that connects these outer sounds, discovers a perfect law all through, which i...
Opening Thy Palm
Rabindranath Tagore
I had gone a-begging from door to door in the village path when thy golden chariot appeared in the distance like a gorgeous dream and I wondered who was this King of all kings! My hopes rose high a...
The Message
Rabindranath Tagore
I see a light, but no fire. Is this what my life is to be like? Better to head for the grave. A messenger comes, the grief-courier, and the message is that the woman you love is in her hous...
Search Inside or Outside?
Rabiya
A famous Sufi mystic, Rabiya, was searching for something on the street outsider her small hut. The sun was setting and darkness was descending, as few people gathered around her. "What have...
Stepping Over The Bag Of Gold
Rachel Naomi Remen
My patient, a physician who has cancer, comes to his session enormously pleased with himself. Knowing my love of stories, he says that he has found a perfect story and tells me the following parable: ...
The Gift of New Eyes
Rachel Naomi Remen
Many years ago, I had just given a talk on the messages, both positive and negative, that we convey to our patients without our awareness; sometimes with words but often with just our tone of voice, o...
The Difference Between Education and Training
Rachel Naomi Remen
For me, the process of education is intimately related to the process of healing. The root word of education -- educare -- means to lead forth a hidden wholeness in another person. A genuine education...
Only Service Heals
Rachel Naomi Remen
If helping is an experience of strength, fixing is an experience of mastery and expertise. Service, on the other hand, is an experience of mystery, surrender and awe. A fixer has the illusion of being...
Serving Is Different From Helping And Fixing
Rachel Naomi Remen
In recent years the question how can I help? has become meaningful to many people. But perhaps there is a deeper question we might consider. Perhaps the real question is not how can I help? but how ca...
An Unusual Gift From My Grandfather
Rachel Naomi Remen
Often, when he came to visit, my grandfather would bring me a present. These were never the sorts of things that other people brought, dolls and books and stuffed animals. My dolls and stuffed animals...
Life May Itself Be A Koan
Rachel Naomi Remen
Consider the Zen practice of the koan, the question or problem proposed by Zen masters to each other or by masters to students. The koan is a dilemma, a mystery which the rational mind cannot solve. T...
Impermanence is Not Fragility
Rachel Naomi Remen
Perhaps survival was not only a question of the skillful use of state-of-the-art technology, perhaps there was something innate, some strength in those tiny pink infants, that enabled both them and me...
Power of Blessing
Rachel Naomi Remen
We bless the life around us far more than we realize. Many simple, ordinary things that we do can affect those around us in profound ways: the unexpected phone call, the brief touch, the willingness t...
Helping, Fixing, Serving
Rachel Remen
Service is not the same as helping. Helping is based on inequality, it's not a relationship between equals. When you help, you use your own strength to help someone with less strength. It's a one up,...
Cultivation of that Dormant Love
Radhanath Swami
Mother Nature is always speaking. She speaks in a language understood within the peaceful mind of the sincere observer. Leopards, cobras, monkeys, rivers and trees; they all served as my teachers when...
Live the Questions Now
Rainer Maria Rilke
In the great silence of these distances, I am touched by your beautiful anxiety about life, even more than I was in Paris, where everything echoes and fades away differently because of the excessive n...
Trust in the Difficult
Rainer Maria Rilke
It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living. Because we are alone with the unfamiliar prese...
We Move in Infinite Space
Rainer Maria Rilke
It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living. Because we are alone with the unfamiliar prese...
Meaning of Success
Ralph Waldo Emerson
To earn the respect of intelligent people and to win the affection of children; To appreciate the beauty in nature and all that surrounds us; To seek out and nuture the best in others; To give the ...
Untested Simplicity of the Villages
Ram Dass
Is the vision of simple living provided by this village in the East the answer? Is this an example of a primitive simplicity of the past or of an enlightened simplicity of the future? Gradual...
Suffering Leads to Grace
Ram Dass
For most people, when you say that suffering is Grace it seems off the wall to them. And we’ve got to deal now with our own suffering and other people’s suffering. That is a distinction th...
The Witness
Ram Dass
George Gurdjieff, a Russian philosopher-mystic noted that if you set an alarm clock at night in order to get up early to get some work done, who you are in the morning when the alarm goes off is quit...
Unconditional Love Really Exists
Ram Dass
Unconditional love really exists in each of us. It is part of our deep inner being. It is not so much an active emotion as a state of being. It’s not "I love you" for this or that reas...
Be Love Now
Ram Dass
Imagine feeling more love from someone than you have ever known. You’re being loved even more than your mother loved you when you were an infant, more than you were ever loved by your father, yo...
The Game Is To Be Where You Are
Ram Dass
When I was born I donned a spacesuit for living on this plane, it was this body, my spacesuit, and it had a steering mechanism which is my pre-frontal lobe and all the brain that helps with coordinati...
Compassion in Action
Ram Dass
When we look at the vast sadness and suffering in the world, we often experience intense pain in our hearts. The suffering so often seems cruel, unnecessary, and unjustified ~ reflecting a heartless ...
When Skills Meet Demand
Ram Dass
For surfers it is the moment when they come into equilibrium with the incredible force of the wave. For skiers it is when the balance is perfect. When our skills fit the demand perfectly, then there ...
The Emerging Game
Ram Dass
As chaos increases - and there's a lot of inertia in the system that seems to suggest that is the direction we're going in - it behooves us to prepare ourselves to ride the changes. If, in the face of...
Compassion in Action
Ram Dass
I'm explicitly making my life a teaching, by expressing the lessons that I've learned through it so it can become a map for other people. Everybody's life could be like that, if they choose to make it...
Beyond Content Of Thought
Ram Dass
Instead of trying so hard to get out of the shadow, the dark, which I think actually reinforces the shadow and its reality, just do your practices. See, if somebody says, “I’m having these...
The Opportunity Aging Offers
Ram Dass
One of the best parts of aging is entering the "don't know," learning to be someone who can rest comfortably in uncertainty. There are as many ways of embodying wisdom as there are people on this eart...
Travel Light
Ram Tzu
You read the Spiritual guidebooks. God on $25 a Day. You are inspired. You can't wait to see All the sights So eloquently described. It all sounds Much more exciting Than what you...
The Salt Doll
Ramakrishna Paramhansa
A salt doll journeyed for thousands of miles over land, until it finally came to the sea. It was fascinated by this strange moving mass, quite unlike anything it had ever seen before. “Who...
Error Of Perception
Ramana Maharshi
Q: Are names and forms real? Ramana Maharshi: You won’t find them separate from [reality]. When you try to get at name and form, you will find reality only. Therefore attain the kno...
Fear of Death
Ramana Maharshi
It was about six weeks before I left Madura for good that the great change in my life took place. It was quite sudden. I was sitting alone in a room on the first floor of my Uncle's house. I se...
From Theory To Practice
Ramana Maharshi
Q: Sankara says that we are all free, not bound, and that we shall all return to God from whom we came, like sparks from a fire. If that is so, why should we not commit all sorts of sins? A: It ...
Let Life Flow
Ramesh Balsekar
It is a curious fact that we are usually ready enough to be aware of the moment in times of happiness and pleasure, and to 'forget ourselves'. But with the arrival of pain, whether physical or emotio...
The Quantum Matrix
Raphael Kellman
Although doctors might disagree on this or that cure, they all agreed on one thing: the patient's own consciousness was irrelevant. What mattered was the doctor's ability to manipulate drugs and body...
Why Busyness Is Actually Modern Laziness
Rasmus Hougaard and Jacqueline Carter
Action addiction is an advanced sort of laziness. It keeps us busily occupied with tasks. The busier we keep ourselves, the more we avoid being confronted with questions of life and death. As we keep ...
Each Thing's Way
Ray Grigg
Trouble is caused by people who think they are smart enough to improve things. First they try. When there is resistance, they push. Then they push harder until their intentions are lost in strugg...
Everyday Heroes
Reader Digest
Nancy Rivard lost her 54-year-old father suddenly to bladder cancer on Christmas Eve 1983. "I wondered what life was about that it could be taken from us like that," she recalls. "I began to evalua...
Faith Is Different Than Beliefs
Reb Zalman
Where there is faith, there are fewer beliefs. We use beliefs to shore up opinions, rather than a relationship with the cosmos. Faith is what we call the relationship with the cosmos. It's differe...
The Endless Fertility of Walking
Rebecca Solnit
Walking, ideally, is a state in which the mind, the body, and the world are aligned, as though they were three characters finally in conversation together, three notes suddenly making a chord. Walking...
If Sameness Is A Demand We Make
Rev. Carol Carnes
When I lived in Hawaii, if the temperature dropped to 65 degrees Fahrenheit, we felt we had been hit with serious winter. In California, 41 degrees was enough to cause complaints. Here in Canada...
Fighting Inside-Wars Outside
Rev. Heng Sure
I turn everything into a contest and a game; everyone becomes an opponent and rival. Driving the freeway, getting the best deal, always racing and beating the clock, making a hit and a score -- bigg...
Let Us Be One
Rev. Jeffrey Symynkywicz
May all humanity be one, and we be one with them. And may we feel our kinship now with all living things, as well: with the creatures of the land and sea and sky, and feel our common bond with our Mot...
Radical Optimism
Rev. Joan Halifax
Radical optimism is a big view of the moment that does not include outcome. Another way of saying this is that the radical optimist is not undertaking an investment plan. Rather he or she is involved ...
Two Kinds Of Resistance
Rhonda Fabian
The light begins its slow return to places in the North, and today a new year begins. Some people are saying it is already “too late” – climate chaos, species loss, war, disparity...
Your Job -- A Manifestation of Your Spirit
Ric Giardina
[At your job], just as with prayer, any attempt to change the outer circumstances without making a change within the consciousness is pointless. In fact, to do so might be compared to believing it po...
Tired of Clinging
Richard Bach
Once there lived a village of creatures along the bottom of a great crystal river. The current of the river swept silently over them all - young and old, rich and poor, good and evil, the current go...
Letting Go Of The Glory
Richard Carlson
There is something magical that happens to the human spirit, a sense of calm that comes over you, when you cease needing all the attention directed towards yourself and instead allow others to have th...
New Atoms Doing the Same Dance
Richard Feynman
I stand at the seashore, alone, and start to think. There are the rushing waves ... mountains of molecules, each stupidly minding its own business ... trillions apart ... yet forming white surf...
Suffering Is Never Alone But Shared
Richard Flyer
I feel and see the flow of life and death inside and outside me. Sometimes, I resist in despair, saying — why should this be, all the senseless misery? Tears are unleashed. Torrents of liquid...
Doorways To Creativity
Richard Moss
Question: You have said that feelings such as fear, anxiety, and depression are beginnings, not ends, and in fact, that these feelings are doorways into a universe of creativity and discovery, no...
Honoring Complexity, Being Rooted in Simplicity
Richard Powell
The complexity of life can mask its poignancy. The web of daily tasks and events can seem so manifold, so knotty and tangled, that the deeper richness contained within them gets overshadowed, lost in ...
Secret Kinship With The Other
Richard Powers
Perhaps genes aren’t the only thing that we’ve been shaped to try and save. Maybe altruism evolves to recognize affinity, joint purpose, shared values. Maybe nothing elicits a sense of rel...
Opposite Of Meditation Is Not Action, It's Reaction
Richard Rohr
It seems like our society is at a low point in terms of how we talk about challenging, controversial topics within our political discourse and even our spiritual reflections. I believe the only way th...
A Fixed Place To Stand
Richard Rohr
Archimedes (c. 287–c. 212 BCE), a Greek philosopher and mathematician, noticed that if a lever was balanced in the correct place, on the correct fulcrum, it could move proportionally much greate...
From Being Driven To Being Drawn
Richard Rohr
When I was a young man, I liked ideas and books quite a lot, and I still read a great deal. But each time I come back from a long hermitage retreat, I have no desire to read a book for the next few we...
You Cannot Capture Silence, It Captures You
Richard Rohr
For me, the two correctives of all spirituality are silence and service. If either of those is missing, it is not true, healthy spirituality. Without silence, we do not really experience our experienc...
Search Itself Changes You
Richard Rose
"This whole planet is fiction," he said. "A picture show. Sometimes it can be a rather engrossing picture show, but that doesn't make it real. Our heads are programmed to get puffed up with all kinds...
Asleep To Our Own Nature
Richard Shiffman
Right now we humans are asleep to our own nature, the sages tell us. Each of us is ensconced in the dream (or perhaps the nightmare) that we have woven around ourselves. We might seem to be awake, bu...
Come Home to Love
Rick Hanson
Take a breath right now, and notice how abundant the air is, full of life-giving oxygen offered freely by trees and other green growing things. You can't see air, but it's always available for...
Unconditioned Stillness
Rick Hanson
Stillness, a sense of the unchanging, is all around. For example, it’s not the ultimate stillness, but there is that lovely feeling when the house is quiet and you’re sitting in p...
Living from the Heart
Rick Jarow
When we are envious of somebody, it is because they are mirroring a place in us that does not feel abundant. After all, if you feel abundant, if you are overflowing, the symptom of abundance is that a...
The Vessel And The Filter
Rick Rubin
Each of us has a container within. It is constantly being filled with data. It holds the sum total of our thoughts, feelings, dreams, and experiences in the world. Let's call this the vessel. I...
The Grandest Vision For Humanity
Riva Melissa Taz
The universe is complex and beautiful. When we listen to stories of humanity, life and death, we can’t fathom the complexity of the narratives of all those who have lived before us, of all th...
Pay Attention To A Sense Of Space
Rob Burbea
Whenever there is any grasping or aversion towards something, indeed whenever any hindrances are present, the mind is, to some degree or other, in a contracted state. It has, so to speak, been sucked ...
The False Dichotomy Between Being And Doing
Rob Burbea
One believes that "being" and "doing" are different. Often, "just being" is regarded as preferable or somehow more authentic. With maturing of insight, however, one reali...
This I Believe
Robert A. Heinlein
I am not going to talk about religious beliefs but about matters so obvious that it has gone out of style to mention them. I believe in my neighbors. I know their faults, and I know that their virtues...
A Relentless Search For Greater Understanding
Robert E. Rubin
There are no provable certainties. That is the view of modern science and much of modern philosophy. And, this view — that there are no absolute or certain answers — quickly leads to recognizing t...
What Is Mu?
Robert G. Harwood
“What is mu?” By contemplating such zen koans, students sometimes have deep existential insights, and it was this question that I now asked myself. In the past, I had no idea what an appro...
Ninety Six Words for Love
Robert Johnson
The first difficulty we meet in discussing anything concerning our feelings is that we have no adequate vocabulary to use. Where there is no terminology, there is no consciousness. A poverty-stricken ...
The Art of the Skilled Mechanic
Robert Pirsig
Not moving, not really thinking about anything, not really caring about anything either, seems to draw out the inner tensions and frustrations that have prevented you from solving problems you couldn'...
The Japanese Word, Mu
Robert Pirsig
Yes and no…this or that…one or zero. In the basis of this elementary two-term discrimination, all human knowledge is built up. The demonstration of this is the computer memory that store...
Futility of Discrimination
Robert Pirsig
"All the time we are aware of millions of things around us--these changing shapes, these burning hills, the sound of the engine, the feel of the throttle, each rock and weed and fence post and piec...
Selfless Climbing versus Ego Climbing
Robert Pirsig
Phaedrus wrote a letter from India about a pilgrimage to holy Mount Kailas, the source of the Ganges and the abode of Shiva, high in the Himalayas, in the company of a holy man and his adherents. H...
Bringing the Vacation Spirit into Daily Life
Robert S. Hartman
Our definition of value was that a thing was good if it fulfills its definition. The definition of a human being is in himself. Hence, a human being is good when he fulfills his own definition of hi...
Ambiguity Of Violence
Robert Sapolsky
It is the ambiguity of violence, that we can pull a trigger as an act of hideous aggression or of self-sacrificing love, that is so challenging. As a result, violence will always be a part of the huma...
Planting Twin Trees
Robin Wall Kimmerer
There was a custom in the mid-eighteen hundreds of planting twin trees to celebrate a marriage and the starting of a home. The stance of these two, just ten feet apart, recalls a couple standing toget...
Returning the Gift
Robin Wall Kimmerer
In the teachings of my Potawatomi ancestors, responsibilities and gifts are understood as two sides of the same coin. The possession of a gift is coupled with a duty to use it for the benefit of all. ...
To Find Something, Don't Look For It
Robin Wall Kimmerer
Between takeoff and landing, we are each in suspended animation, a pause between chapters of our lives. When we stare out the window into the sun’s glare, the landscape is only a flat projection...
Uniform Corn-Rows In High-Tech Isolation
Robin Wall Kimmerer
I live in the lush green farm country of upstate New York, in a town that likely has more cows than people. Most everyone I know grows something: apples, hops, grapes, potatoes, berries, and lots of c...
Attachments Are Not Set in Stone
Robina Courtin
Attachment is such a simple word, but it’s multi-faceted. At the most fundamental level it’s that feeling of neediness deep inside us; that belief that somehow I am not enough, I don&rsquo...
You Gotta Wobble Before You Stand
Roger S. Keyes
Hokusai says look carefully. He says pay attention, notice. He says keep looking, stay curious. He says there is no end to seeing. He says look forward to getting old. He says keep changing, y...
Seven People Cutting Stones
Roger Walsh
For several weeks strange sounds had drifted over the mountains from the neighboring valley. There was much talk in the village about what these noises could be, but no one could make sense of them. E...
Indulge an Attachment
Roger Walsh
One of my meditation teachers was a man who had devoted many years to spiritual practice. He had studied many spiritual texts, lived in monasteries under austere conditions, and done long medita...
Beauty of the Mosaic
Rosalina Chai
For as long as I recall having memory, I've found mosaic incredibly mesmerising. Alongside the increasing presence of grey hair on my head grew my awareness of how aptly the mosaic can serve as a ...
Conscious Completion
Rosie Bell
Youth is peppered with conspicuous firsts. And unless we’re really trying, life's lasts can tend to sneak past, unnoticed. Your last cigarette may have warranted some ceremony. But what abou...
Past and Future: Two Streams of the Soul
Rudolf Steiner
Thus there are two streams, one from the past and one from the future, which come together in the soul -- will anyone who observes himself deny that? -- and produce a kind of whirlpool, comparable to ...
Mercy
Rudy Francisco
She asks me to kill the spider. Instead, I get the most peaceful weapons I can find. I take a cup and a napkin. I catch the spider, put it outside and allow it to walk away. If I am ever cau...
If ...
Rudyard Kipling
IF ... If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you; If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too: If you can w...
Let Them Sleep
Rumi
Those who don't feel this Love pulling them like a river, those who don't drink dawn like a cup of spring water or take in sunset like supper, those who don't want to change, let them sleep. This...
The Root Of The Root Of Your Self
Rumi
Don’t go away, come near. Don’t be faithless, be faithful. Find the antidote in the venom. Come to the root of the root of yourself. Molded of clay, yet kneaded from the substance o...
Guest House
Rumi
This being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival. A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes with an unexpected visitor. Welcome and entertain them all! Even...
One Sip of An Answer
Rumi
All day I think about it, then at night I say it. Where did I come from, and What am I supposed to be doing? I have no idea. My soul is from elsewhere, I'm sure of that, and I intend to end up ther...
The Tavern
Rumi
All day I think about it, then at night I say it. Where did I come from, and what am I supposed to be doing? I have no idea. My soul is from elsewhere, I\'m sure of that, And I intend to end up there....
Guest House
Rumi
This being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival. A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes As an unexpected visitor. Welcome and entertain them all! Ev...
Seven Stages Of The Ego
Rumi, as told by Elif Shafak
The first stage is the Depraved Ego (Nafs), the most primitive and common state of being, when the soul is entrapped in worldly pursuits. Most human beings are stuck there, struggling and suffering in...
The Reality of the Illusory World
Rupert Spira
Well over a hundred years ago the painter Paul Cézanne said, “A time is coming when a carrot, freshly observed, will trigger a revolution.” Cézanne meant that if we could see...
What Is Prayer?
Rupert Spira
And what is prayer? Again, I would like to remain silent, for silence is the closest we come to God before losing ourself in that. Prayer is simply to remain as the ‘I am’ before the words...
Cognitive Bypassing
Russell Kennedy
I am a physician, neuroscientist, and anxiety expert. Many people I speak with have anxiety because they are trapped in their heads. I’d like to introduce a term here that I have not heard...
Between Knowing And Not Knowing
Ruth Ozeki and Ezra Klein
Ezra Klein: I sometimes play with the idea — and recognizing that I know nothing in these areas — that a lot of what is being described here is simply unreliableness. And that sounds negat...
Everyday Creativity
Ruth Richards
I’m rather good at maps. I’m also good at using a GPS device. But I forgot the maps and here we were, late afternoon, last day of vacation, my daughter my cousin and I, driving along a two...
What Is Wealth?
Ryan Holiday
What is wealth? It’s having plenty, right? The variables in the equation are pretty simple. What you have, what you’ve got coming in, and what’s going out. If those are in proper pro...
Feel Free To Set A Better Example
Ryan Holiday
At the core of legal theory is this idea that there are essentially two forms of liberty—positive and negative. Positive liberty is the freedom to do something, such as the freedom of speech or ...