• Memorial ceremony for Rita Warren

    Beginning at 1 p.m. Saturday, March 22, some of Rita’s friends and neighbors gathered in David Francis Hall at the Monroe Institute to celebrate her life — not least by telling stories. As usual I had my camera in my pocket, but it never seemed appropriate to take photos of the room or the participants…

  • God-fearing men

    This being Easter, it is perhaps a good time to point you to a very interesting discussion that I had with Joseph Smallwood some time ago, which you can find here: http://frankdemarco.wordpress.com/2007/05/02/chasing-smallwood-32/

  • Tide, Rising

    My friend Rich Spees and I had a brief exchange this morning after I left a comment on his blog entry about the first world-wide Gallop Poll on what the world’s people actually think about things. (It’s very interesting, if long. Find it at the-sacred-path.com). Rich said he didn’t think the crowd in power would…

  • E.R.

    In the fall of 2004, at the end of several days of asthma during a business trip to Ohio, I wound up being taken by ambulance from the Charlottesville Airport to the Emergency Room at UVA Hospital. I am a very independent person, but on that day I had realized that I had reached my…

  • What kind of world do you want to live in?

    It is pretty well understaood in spiritual circles, and increasingly even in some circles in science, that our mental world calls forth the external circumstances of our lives. If that’s so, then the clearer our image of the world we wish to live in, the more powerful our visualizing ability, and the stronger our “pull”…

  • Colin Wilson on the three absolutes

    I have been going through more than 40 years of journals, finding and indexing quotations from various writers and others who have influenced me over the years. In the first rank among these, certainly among the first in point of time and among the longest lasting in terms of continued influence, is Colin Wilson. Perhaps…

  • Toynbee on civilization

    A little long-winded, perhaps, but not the less insightful for all that. I copied out this quotation back in 1972. It doesn’t seem any the less applicable to the 21st century than it did to the last third of the 20th. In human terms, how are we to describe… our own Western civilization, or any…

  • Show horses and work horses

  • Gurdjieff on finding our own work

    If you have not yet heard of G.I. Gurdjieff, this may be your lucky day. Back in 1972 I was introduced to the work of Gurdjieff by way of the work of P.D. Ouspensky. (The first book of Ouspensky’s I read was In Search of the Miraculous, the title of which in itself immediately grabbed…

  • The two opposed errors of pessimism

    I think that this was written in the depths of the Great Depression, though I am not sure. (In my earlier days of journalizing I wasn’t particularly careful about my citations.) In any case, it seems appropriate for these times.   “I predict that both of the two opposed errors of pessimism which now make…