Michael will be speaking at this UC Berkeley event this coming Sunday afternoon, September 15th, 2019. If you are able to attend, please come and say hello. … read more
Meditation and Prayer: How to Uplift Ourselves and the World
Tag Archives: spirituality
“Mutual Respect and Service”–Daily Metta
April 8: “My effort should never be to undermine another’s faith, but to make him a better follower of his own faith.” –Gandhi (Mahatma, Vol. 2, p. 343) Throughout Gandhi’s life, especially in the early days, many of his friends wanted to convert him to Christianity, thinking that Hinduism–his own religion–was inferior. For example,… read more
On Fear: An Excercise in Personal Power
A funny thing happens when I receive love, appreciation, support: I freak out. An intense fear permeates the whole body. From the outside, I probably appear calm (unless you’re standing right next to me, in which case you’ll notice my face growing red and sweaty). But on the inside, I experience a frenetic energy that… read more
Meditation: A Brief Reflection
“Meditation is not evasion; it is a serene encounter with reality.” ~ Thich Nhat Hanh I’ve been practicing meditation for more than two years, and I come to this realization each and every time I sit: Meditation meets us where we’re at in life, opening and strengthening our hearts and minds where they most need… read more
Where the Spiritual and Political Meet
In this blog-series accompanying our project of updating the Peace and Conflict Studies lectures (we call it PACS 164-c), Kimberlyn David reviews some of the key material of the course from a personal lens in an effort to generate personal reflection and the application of course content. That Western yoga and spiritual practitioners often… read more
Feminist Spiritual Politics: Getting Personal About Gun Control
The personal is the political, has always struck me as incomplete. It was Teilhard de Chardin who first said “we are not human beings having a spiritual experience, we are spiritual beings having a human experience.” The ‘personal is the political’ assumes an incomplete worldview, a cosmology of separation where the individual is forced to turn… read more
Approaching Spiritual Death
by Michael N. Nagler In 1925, Gandhi unveiled what he called the “Seven Social Sins” in his newspaper, Young India: Politics without principles Wealth without work Pleasure without conscience Knowledge without character Commerce without morality Science without humanity Worship without sacrifice. Today I think we need to add an eighth: “Entertainment without common sense.” The idea that we… read more
Spirit and Science in the Vedanta
IN AUGUST OF 1932, MAHATMA GANDHI WAS IN PRISON WHEN NEWS REACHED him that the “Paramount Power,” the British Raj, planned to introduce separate electorates for the untouchables and the caste Hindus. Believing that this would amount to a “vivisection” of India, what was he to do? On September 13th he stunned the nation by… read more
Do we live in a meaningless universe?
Ours is not an empty, disorderly world, but an exquisitely structured web whose design embraces and affects all living things. –Sally Goerner WESTERN CIVILIZATION could be considered a grand experiment, culminating in the three-plus centuries of the industrial revolution, to see if the universe could be accounted for without resorting to the concept of a… read more
How to sustain a revolution
By Stephanie Van Hook (distributed by Peace Voice 1.1.12) Starting a revolution is like lighting a match; it risks becoming extinguished as quickly as it was lit. Sustaining a revolution, however, is like starting a fire, and ensuring that it has the fuel to burn as long as necessary. As an agent of change,… read more
