Lady Wisdom, Sophia, is a breath of the power of God, and a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty; therefore, nothing defiled gains entrance into her. She is a reflection of eternal light, a spotless mirror of the working of God, and an image of God’s goodness. Although she …
Hide and Seek
Alan Watts told a remarkable story about God playing hide-and-seek. It was a playful presentation of key ideas from Hindu philosophy. The Upanishads say, "You are That." Watts said, "You're IT!" The story goes something like this ...
Gone Beyond and Back – Perfect Wisdom
The Heart Sutra pushes wisdom into transcendence, but then brings it back into compassion. That's why it's the Perfection of Wisdom, the bodhisattva path.
Mist on a Breeze #1
You and menot-beingPerfect as isNot-you, not-mebeingPerfect as is—R. Neuwoehner Mist on a Breeze, Words in Mind – a periodic series of quotes and insights
“Life is change. How it differs from the rocks.”
In 1968, Jefferson Airplane released Crown of Creation, their fourth album, in which the political facet of their psychedelic rock became clearly visible. The album’s title track, written by Paul Kantner, blends philosophical insight with countercultural attitude in a song that, in the end, turns out to be a love song. The song’s closing lines …
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Reaching One Through Addition
THE HISTORY OF RELIGION ACTUALLY HAS SOMETHING TO SAY that’s important for us to hear, right now. Recognizing the ambiguity of the American national motto, E pluribus unum, points us toward the same understanding. How does one get to one, through subtraction or addition? In mathematics, reaching one through addition means we’re dealing with abstractions …
When He Saw Her Weeping, He Burst into Tears
JESUS OF NAZARETH WAS A HUMAN BEING. So, whenever we assert his divinity, we need to remember his humanity. The orthodox formula, for the last 1,700 years or so, has insisted Jesus Christ is both fully God and fully human. The Bible also shows us both, although the fully human sometimes can be harder to …
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René Descartes, Meet Peggy Lee
“EGO” IS IMPLIED IN DESCARTES’ (IN)FAMOUS EPIGRAM: “COGITO ERGO SUM.” In English, it’s explicit: “I think, therefore I am.” I feel it should be emphatic. Intended to be a statement that could not be denied, Descartes’ epigram only holds in a world without Hinduism, Buddhism, Daoism, Sufism, or any form of self-transcending mystical experience. As …
Carried Away in the Watercourse
LEFT ALONE TO FOLLOW ITS NATURAL COURSE, CONSCIOUSNESS EBBS AND FLOWS like the tides, rises and falls like waves on the sea, rolls and tumbles like a mountain stream, wanders like a meandering river. Over the past month or so, I’ve re-read the Zhuangzi (also known as the Chuang Tzu) in two translations, one old, …
Where Is Heaven?
THE QUESTION IS IRRATIONAL. It assumes the word “heaven” refers to an actual place. For more than 2,500 years, however, rational thinkers in the West have known heaven to be a mythic location, not a physical reality. Our image of heaven is a survival from a primordial model of the universe in which the earth …
Soul Spirit Wisdom 