• Spiritual and Emotional Themes

    God and the Computer Simulation

    Our Shadowy World They say reality is an illusion. For instance, maybe we’re dreaming. In the Zhuangzi, an ancient Taoist text, we find Zhuang Zhou’s famous butterfly dream. In it, the sage experienced himself as a happy butterfly. When he woke, he felt confused. Was he a butterfly now dreaming he was a man, or a man dreaming he’d been a butterfly? He couldn’t tell, for we can’t always trust our senses. [1] During the early twentieth century, the Baha’i teacher, Abdu’l-Baha, taught this same thing, that the world is an illusion. Reality exists only in God’s realm. What we see here “is only its shadow stretching out.” [2] Plato,…

  • Spiritual and Emotional Themes

    Love in the Lion, Witch, and Wardrobe

    Myth as Sacred Story Myths, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica’s article on the topic, are traditional, symbolic narratives that tell stories of gods or great heroes within a particular religious framework which gives them an authority, not necessarily of fact, but of truth. [1] Magical and wondrous things happen in myths, but we need not believe their particulars to gain wisdom from them. Still, it’s not easy to define myth or mythology. Different Western scholars emphasize different aspects of myth, and distinguishing a myth from fairy tale, fable, or folklore is even harder. That’s probably why, later in the above article, the authors admit “it is difficult to generalize about…

  • Spiritual and Emotional Themes

    This Moment Is Not Preparation

    This Moment Could Be Your Last In his treatise on Zen Buddhism, Shunryu Suzuki wrote, “Treat every moment as your last. It is not preparation for something else.” [1] On the surface, his meaning seems simple. Make each moment count. Live not for a dream or hope of some future goal, but for what life brings you in the here and now. Life is not a series of goals. It is a journey, and mindfulness is the tool we use to fully experience that journey. This is especially important because we never know when our journey will end. We can die at any time. When I was three, I announced…

  • Spiritual and Emotional Themes

    The Great Loneliness

    Ideas of the Ultimate In his book, The Masks of God, volume 1, Joseph Campbell quotes an Eskimo shaman, Igjugarjuk, who said, “The only true wisdom lives far from mankind, out in the great loneliness, and it can be reached only through suffering. Privation and suffering alone can open the mind of a man to all that is hidden to others.” [1] Igjugarjuk spoke those words in the context of a discussion about Sila. The different groups of Inuit have different notions who Sila is. Perhaps she is breath, soul, form. On the island of Nunivak, the people understand Sila to be a great spirit who speaks to them in…

  • Spiritual and Emotional Themes

    To Walk In Beauty

    Beauty Is An Ecstasy According to the poet, Kahlil Gibran, there are many different ways to understand this thing we call Beauty. For instance, the wounded speak of Beauty as kind and gentle. She glides past us “[l]ike a mother half-shy of her own glory.” [1] The “passionate,” on the other hand, claim her as a tempest, loud and powerful and dreadful, like a terrifying sense of wonder. To the “tired and weary,” she speaks to their spirit “like a faint light,” while to the “restless” she shouts as loud as stampeding hoof beats and roaring lions. The “watchmen” see Beauty in the sunrise, and “wayfarers” see her in the…

  • Spiritual and Emotional Themes

    Grief, Gratitude, and Joy

    Our Suffering World All over the world, people are suffering. That’s nothing new. We humans have been hurting one another since before we painted images of war on the walls of caves; and we hunt our furred and feathered cousins for food, or clothing, or just for sport; and now, in breathtaking numbers, we cut down the trees whose leaves turn our pollution into something breathable, and heat up our planet beyond repair. It seems there can be no life without pain. So suffering has always been with us. Lately, though, it has reached the point of explosion. With the pandemic, we became isolated. Businesses folded, employees lost jobs, schools…

  • Spiritual and Emotional Themes

    Freedom and “The Dawntreader”

    Songs of Freedom People have been singing songs about freedom for centuries. During their struggle for independence, the Irish sang songs such as “When Fenians Fight for Freedom,” and “I Had Dream that Ireland Was Free.” In the 1930s, labor unions had “Joe Hill,” “We Shall Not Be Moved,” and “Hallelujah, I’m a Bum.” “We Shall Not Be Moved” was apparently based on “I Shall Not Be Moved,” an African American spiritual. Slaves also sang “O, Freedom,” “Go Down, Moses,” “Up Above My Head.” Psalm 119 speaks of walking in freedom. How these verses, and many others, speak of freedom is different, however. There’s the freedom that comes from resistance…

  • Spiritual and Emotional Themes

    Every Day, a Little Death

    Life’s Fragility When we’re young, we rarely think about dying, but there are times in everyone’s life when the shadow of mortality looms over us. Perhaps we almost ski off a mountain or barely survive a car crash. A friend our age might get sick and die. For a moment, we are shocked into remembering: Oh, yes, our bodies are fragile. Anything could happen. Soon enough, though, we dismiss that worry, for who can continually walk along that fence? We must jump off, run around on solid ground, raise chickens, repair engines, fight tyranny. There is so much to do, to see, to say, to dream. We haven’t time to…

  • Spiritual and Emotional Themes

    Who Are We When Memory Is Gone?

    Memory Creates Us Memory is a fluid and unpredictable thing. It changes as we age. Not only do our stories evolve, but we may think about them more or less often, depending on our stage in life. When I was young, I hardly thought about past experiences, except when I rehashed them during therapy, transforming them into something soft that would not keep me up at night. Now my past looms, filling a larger proportion of my possible lifespan, so my history has become more important. In the morning before I rise or during the dark hours of the night, I sometimes think back to childhood and trace the strands…

  • Spiritual and Emotional Themes

    What Is the Nature of Love?

    Asking the Question Today we ask what love is. Given how many people have tried to analyze the sensation, action, and essence of love, I suspect this attempt will leave us with more questions than answers, but we humans have always asked unanswerable questions. Why stop now? So what is love? There’s the welling up of tenderness in a mother’s chest when she gazes upon her child, the sensation of hormones that surge through a lover’s bloodstream, the unconditional regard of friends for one another, the reverent respect of student for teacher. But there’s also the adoring gaze of a hound for its human companion, the geese who spend their…