now for Descartes there was the experiential taste of certainty. Jacques-Louis David, The Death of Socrates, 1787 RW: In your new book An Unknown World you bring up how Descartes has fallen into disfavor. And yet there is something, you write, that’s admirable about his search. JN: I think there is. He’s been demonized as being the chief culprit in practically every problem we face, especially the environmental crisis, alienating humanity from nature and divorcing the mind from matter. But , as a young person reading about his experiment of doubting everything, I remember this action of concentrating and withdrawing my attention (he calls i... posted on Jun 11 2016 (17,424 reads)

and you will sense two things: a wisdom that makes you curious and a casualness that makes you comfortable. One example of this kind of relaxed intelligence was when I was having lunch with him and we were discussing some of the ins and outs of doctoral research. In an off-handed way he said, “Don’t worry about finding the answers; find the questions. When you find the right questions the answers will follow.”       Dr. Nakasone’s inquisitive nature is evident in the variety of activities he has pursued and keeps pursuing. He is an accomplished scholar in Buddhist studies (he is a member of the Core Doctoral Faculty in Buddhist Art and Cul... posted on Feb 22 2017 (7,932 reads)

I've been thinking about the difference between the résumé virtues and the eulogy virtues. The résumé virtues are the ones you put on your résumé, which are the skills you bring to the marketplace.The eulogy virtues are the ones that get mentioned in the eulogy, which are deeper: who are you, in your depth, what is the nature of your relationships, are you bold, loving, dependable, consistency? And most of us, including me, would say that the eulogy virtues are the more important of the virtues. But at least in my case, are they the ones that I think about the most? And the answer is no.... posted on Mar 12 2017 (50,002 reads)

with even very horrendous events. But particularly traumas that occur at the hands of people who are supposed to take care of you, if you’re not allowed to feel what you feel, know what you know, your mind cannot integrate what goes on, and you can get stuck on the situation. So the social context in which it occurs is fantastically important. MS. TIPPETT: Something that’s very interesting to me in how you talk about trauma, the experience of trauma, what it is, is how the nature of memory is distorted, that memories are never precise recollections, but that in general, as we move through the world, memories become integrated and transformed into stories that help us ma... posted on Oct 20 2017 (66,879 reads)

with even very horrendous events. But particularly traumas that occur at the hands of people who are supposed to take care of you, if you’re not allowed to feel what you feel, know what you know, your mind cannot integrate what goes on, and you can get stuck on the situation. So the social context in which it occurs is fantastically important. MS. TIPPETT: Something that’s very interesting to me in how you talk about trauma, the experience of trauma, what it is, is how the nature of memory is distorted, that memories are never precise recollections, but that in general, as we move through the world, memories become integrated and transformed into stories that help us ma... posted on Oct 20 2017 (1,411 reads)

Harrod Buhner is an award-winning author of 22 books on nature, indigenous cultures, the environment, and herbal medicine. He comes from a long line of healers that include Leroy Burney, Surgeon General of the United States under Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy, and Elizabeth Lusterheide, a midwife and herbalist who worked in rural Indiana in the early nineteenth century. He says that the greatest influence on his work, however, has been his great-grandfather, C.G. Harrod, who primarily used botanical medicines, also in rural Indiana, when he began his work as a physician in 1911. Buhner, who says his DNA prevents him from working for others, has been a fulltime therapist in pri... posted on Mar 9 2018 (24,696 reads)

top solutions to climate change. These are proverbs, not solutions, and it doesn’t mean they’re not good things to do. Proverbs generally are. But they don’t give anybody a sense that their action is going to accumulate into a sufficient difference that will counter what is being predicted. So given this moral weight is, as you put it, often “invisible”—when did it become visible to you? I grew up outside and felt very safe there. I felt protected by nature. When I saw things like a new development, trees being cut down, a road scarring the landscape, the first RV camper in Yosemite, it was shocking. I would go, “Whoa, what’s that and ... posted on Apr 13 2018 (13,640 reads)

become problematic when we think they represent the truth. Whenever we believe that our storylines are the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, we are no longer in the present moment because we are so completely enmeshed in our preferred version of reality. This happens to all of us. It’s easy to get emotionally attached to whatever we believe is right or wrong, good or bad, fair or unfair. But no one’s storylines can ever represent the whole truth. By their very nature, storylines are subjective and partial because we each perceive life from our own perspective. My version of reality will always be different from yours because we are different people. When we... posted on May 3 2021 (59,095 reads)

going to know who we are.” For Berry, it all came down to cosmology—the basic worldview of a culture: its foundational story of how the world came to be and how it got to be as it is now, and how we, as humans, fit into it. To address the deep underlying causes of the industrial-capitalist-corporate destruction of the biosphere, we had to examine our worldview. In Berry’s view, a central cause of the West’s ecological hostility was its separation from nature—a separation that was at once spiritual, religious, psychological, emotional, intellectual, and philosophical. The root of the eco-destruction was an anthropocentric (human-centered) West... posted on Sep 19 2018 (11,824 reads)

and billions of bacterial cells in just one teaspoon of soil. So, think about that: one teaspoon of soil in your hand contains as many bacterial cells as there are humans over the entire globe. Of course, the human brain is a very centralized structure. In the forest, the intelligence, thought processes, memories, and decision-making are a lot more diffuse throughout the entire network, though they do include animal brains.  Pavi: You talk about the contradictory creative duality in nature. Are we atoms or networks? We are neither and both, and it's not just a question of metaphor but the fundamental nature of life. One of the most provocative realities that the book surfaces... posted on Mar 22 2019 (4,986 reads)

(often lurking in their dreams) of being scared stiff? To these stories we can add our contemporary myth of the “dis-ease” that psychiatry has named posttraumatic stress disorder or PTSD. Indeed, when compared with historical mythologies, modern science has certain advantages and disadvantages in accurately comprehending the universal human experience of terror, horror, injury and loss. The indigenous peoples throughout South America and Mesoamerica have long understood both the nature of fear and the essence of trauma. What’s more, they seemed to know how to transform it through their shamanic healing rituals. After colonization by the Spanish and Portuguese, the indig... posted on Feb 20 2019 (10,295 reads)

Webb, an English writer of the early 20th century was an acute observer of nature and its multi-dimensional splendor. Diagnosed with Graves’ disease at the age of 20, Webb soon discovered that nature played a powerful role in her periods of recovery. The Spring of Joy compiles a series of essays on nature, penned by Webb with the aim of bringing comfort to ‘the weary and wounded in the battle of life.’ They are a testament to Webb's capacity to bear witness to the record of nature and to draw nourishment from it in a way that continues to benefit readers far beyond her lifetime. The following is an excerpt from The Spring of Joy: A Little Book of Hea... posted on Apr 10 2019 (5,960 reads)

the skill in its construction. The entire essay, about 1,600 words in length, can be read HERE. Orwell’s Praise of the Neglected Eyes akin to chrysoberyl. From wikimedia commons, by Joxerra aihartza. Orwell begins the essay by selecting the common toad as his personal herald of spring’s arrival. The prose in the introduction is exquisite, gains power when read aloud. I found myself mouthing each line as David Attenborough would narrate the script of a nature documentary: “At this period, after his long fast, the toad has a very spiritual look, like a strict Anglo-Catholic towards the end of Lent. His movements are languid but purposeful,... posted on May 29 2019 (5,496 reads)

of the Holy Dollar is the church of consumerism. That really swallows people's lives. Their souls are sicked up in this form of consumerism. But we are greater than the product of our whole. We also have our spirit, we have our soul and our mind. The Church of the Holy Dollar does not cater to the spirit and to the mind and to really the arenas of compassion that humankind is greatly endowed with. Going back to the idea of the seanchai with the spirit, the spiritual world and all of nature. All of nature has a form of spirit, which is something that was understood in the olden times. Today scientifically we understand it and the word is called DNA. The living world has got the do... posted on Sep 12 2019 (6,861 reads)

and biodiversity is not only driving animals to extinction but directly causing animal viruses to spread to humans. In response our leaders are using the images of conflict: “We are at war with Covid 19,” we keep hearing; it is an “invisible enemy” we need to “vanquish.” But although this virus is disrupting our lives, causing sickness, death, and economic breakdown, it is itself a completely natural phenomenon, a living thing reproducing itself in the way nature intended. Are these images of conflict and conquest appropriate or even helpful? Do they help us to understand and to respond, to bring our world back into balance?  One of Carl Jung&rs... posted on Aug 9 2020 (15,361 reads)

online in The Huffington Post, 2011 Prayer is the simplest and most natural way to communicate with the Divine. Prayer is the heart speaking. There are the prescribed prayers, the rituals of inner communion. But there are also our personal prayers, our way of being with the Divine, with the sacred that is our deepest nature and that of the world around us. In whatever way we are drawn to pray, there is a pressing need at this time to include the earth in our prayers. We are living in a time of ecological devastation, in which our materialistic culture has had a catastrophic effect on the ecosystem. Our rivers are toxic, the rainforests slashed and burned, vast tracts ... posted on Nov 20 2020 (7,999 reads)

leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of the stars,” the young Walt Whitman sang in one of the finest poems from his Song of Myself — the aria of a self that seemed to him then, as it always seems to the young, infinite and invincible. But when a paralytic stroke felled him decades later, unpeeling his creaturely limits and his temporality, he leaned on the selfsame reverence of nature as he considered what makes life worth living: After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, love, and so on — have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear — what remains? Nature remains;... posted on Nov 30 2020 (5,522 reads)

contemporary seekers to learn that the things we nowadays identify with the feeling life—passion, drama, intensity, compelling emotion—are qualities that in the ancient anatomical treatises were associated not with the heart but with the liver! They are signs of agitation and turbidity (an excess of bile!) rather than authentic feelingness. In fact, they are traditionally seen as the roadblocks to the authentic feeling life, the saboteurs that steal its energy and distort its true nature. And so before we can even begin to unlock the wisdom of these ancient texts, we need to gently set aside our contemporary fascination with emotivity as the royal road to spiritual authentic... posted on Apr 10 2021 (8,862 reads)

there an underlying spiritual dimension behind the myriad forms of Qigong that by its very nature, invites us to simply and directly access deeper levels of being, pure awareness and the experience of Presence in daily life? If this is the original intent of Qigong, in what way can this ancient art be practiced as a Portal to Presence? These questions and the perspective that informs them stem directly from many years of my personal and professional experience as a psychologist, student and teacher of Qigong and Tai Chi Chuan. My own journey through the complex and often confusing landscape of these disciplines and practices has led me to some of the insights and ideas I would like to ... posted on Nov 9 2021 (4,580 reads)

system that we’re looking at, any map that we might work with, we don’t want to promise the moon and suggest it answers every human question. Of course, it doesn’t, but it does answer certain questions very well. Again, I think that the Enneagram and this view of humanity has been around for a long time. It has legs. There are roots of this that go back to the roots of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and some even before that.  So people have been looking at human nature a long time. I’ve almost never encountered a person that when they actually sat down and listened to these distinctions, didn’t recognize themselves or other people that they know. ... posted on Apr 7 2023 (6,318 reads)