• What Do I Want to be Remembered For?

    A friend passed this on to me, and therefore I don’t know where it was posted originally. I liked it a lot, although — as i felt obliged to point out — it’s a little late for some of us! What Do I Want to be Remembered For? Peter F. Drucker February 1, 2008 When…

  • An alien life-form

    This is from a newly tweaked passage in the novel that I call Babe in the Woods, based on my experiences at the Monroe Institute’s Gateway program back in December, 1992. I wrote it in a couple of months (or in 15 years, depending on how you wish to count) and sent it to friends…

  • Lindbergh Among The Spirits

    One of the things that is wrong with our civilization is that it systematically falsifies its history, disregarding or ridiculing anything dealing with psychic experience, or the existence of a non-physical world, or anything demonstrating that time is not the simple obvious thing we think it is. Wouldn’t it be something if such experiences were…

  • Chaos Theory Scientist Edward Lorenz Dies At 90

    Do you think politicians are the important people who shape your world? Think again. Our world is shaped more by thinkers like this, it’s just that the effect takes longer to spread through the culture — and the effect, when it does arrive, is less likely to be chaos of the economic and political type.…

  • The real enemy

      This 19-year-old risked his life on Marye’s Heights to give aid to the wounded on the other side while the battle was still going on. The federals when they realized what he was doing stopped shooting and sent thunderous cheers. The boy was killed the following September, a month after his 20th birthday–but his…

  • Thomas Merton on ambition

    Thomas Merton was a Protestant before he became a Catholic, a very worldly writer and critic before he became a monk, an intellectual before he began to try to become something more profound than an intellectual. His language does not speak to us, perhaps, couched as it is in words like God and sin. This…

  • Confucius on the foundations of the state

    I saved this quotation in my journal many, many years ago. Every year that passes only proves the more how true it is. Fear guiding what passes for policy in our national political circles leads us to put ever more reliance on the military, ever more resources into wars and the means of making wars,…

  • Toynbee on society and spirituality

    In human terms, how are we to describe… our own Western civilization, or any other of the 10 or 20 civilizations which we can count up on our fingers? In human terms, I should say that each of these civilizations is, while in action, a distinctive attempt at a single great common human experience, or,…

  • How to sing like a planet

    Mark Morford is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle’s website SFGate. He’s often a little over-the-top but often entertaining and usually pretty right. This is from http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2008/04/23/notes042308.DTL&type=printable How to sing like a planet Scientists say the Earth is humming. Not just noise, but a deep, astonishing music. Can you hear it? By Mark Morford,…

  • Lecompte de Nuoy on certain teachers

    The history of humanity … evokes the picture of a creeping vine. If its prop is pulled up or broken, the plant creeps along the ground, unknowingly seeking a new support, another occasion to raise itself above the weeds, and as soon as it has found one it clings to it in an unconscious but…