I once read a story about a researcher who was studying consciousness in a group of Tibetan monks. He began strapping electrodes to the heads of the monks to measure their brain waves—which the monks found uproariously funny. The researcher asked, “Why are you all laughing?” One monk sheepishly replied, “because consciousness is not up here” (pointing to his head), “it is in here” (pointing to his heart). I was reminded of this tale while reading What Is GOD? by... Read more
What happens when we die? Is it lights out, game over? Or is there more to it, something hinted at by those who have had a near-death experience (NDE) and appear to catch a glimpse of an afterlife? These are some of the questions Sebastian Junger addresses in his new book My Time of Dying: How I Came Face-to-Face with the Idea of an Afterlife. You may know Junger as the author of several books including The Perfect Storm and... Read more
Earlier this year, after forty years in advertising, I walked away from my career and its accompanying six-figure salary. Sure, I was approaching retirement age, but I knew I still had some gas in the tank. I could have successfully continued in my job as a pharma advertising copywriter for another five years or so. But something inside me had changed. If you’ve glimpsed my recent book Wake Up Call: Daily Insights for the Spiritually Curious, this might come as... Read more
Do you remember the book The Shack? It was the story of a man’s journey from personal tragedy to spiritual rebirth, with a key component being his conversations with God, who appeared to him as a black woman. It sold more than 10 million copies after its release in 2007 and was later made into a movie—but it was not without its detractors. While the book was based loosely on Biblical scripture and was a huge hit with the Christian market, it also... Read more
What if the four Gospels of the Bible aren’t the most reliable source for the spoken words of Jesus? What if there was another source that consisted merely of the things Jesus said, with no attempt to weave a story around the sayings? Almost like someone had jotted them down in a notebook as he spoke? Well, such a document exists, and it’s called the Gospel of Thomas. In the book The Quantum Sayings: Decoding the Lost Gospel of Thomas,... Read more
If I were to ask you “would you rather feel empty or full?” what would you say? I know my first instinct would be to respond full. That may be because we’re a society that seems to yearn for fullness. We like our bellies to be full, our calendars to be full of activities, our homes and garages full of stuff. In The Eloquence of Silence: Surprising Wisdom in Tales of Emptiness, Thomas Moore makes the case that there’s a... Read more
What do you do if you’re a man of the cloth and are confronted by the reality of UFOs? I’m not talking about a now commonplace flying saucer sighting, but a middle-of-the-night visitation by a gray alien—an incident that’s then repeated over and over again, with a changing cast of extraterrestrial visitors. If you’re the Reverend Michael J.S. Carter, who currently serves as the minister of a Unitarian Universalist congregation in North Carolina, you try to make sense of the... Read more
Have you heard of “the shimmer”? It’s a term coined by the life philosopher and dharma artist Erick Godsey to describe our unhealthy attraction to our smartphones, or any screen that sucks us into the Internet. Godsey, whose ideas are rooted in mythology, didn’t exactly invent “the shimmer.” He borrowed it from the 2018 science fiction movie Annihilation. In that film, the shimmer is (as reported by Wikipedia) “a mysterious quarantined zone of mutating plants and animals caused by an... Read more
I was a good ten years into my spirituality explorations before I seriously tried meditation. I had wondered, “what’s the point?” I had believed that my mind was the vehicle that would garner me new spiritual insights—and wondered how thinking about “nothing” could result in something. But eventually, I got it. I began to see that my ever-thinking, always analyzing mind didn’t have all the answers. In fact, it was sometimes getting in the way. I discovered that the quietude... Read more
I read a lot of spirituality books and articles and sometimes stumble upon stories that don’t merit a full column—but have messages worth repeating. Each of these “tidbits” has an important insight (or insights) to offer, ideas that may have you thinking long after you read them. Here are four of my recent favorites, with some light editing. What Does the World Owe You? This short piece comes from Seth Godin’s Blog and is a trick question of sorts. The... Read more
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In