The Dharma Bum’s Guide to Western Literature: Finding Nirvana in the Classics by Dean Sluyter I love diving deep into great literature. I love receiving spiritual wisdom through the written word. Not very often do I get to do both with the same book. Then again, I’m not Dean Sluyter, whose mind is a divining rod [...]
Dean Sluyter offers a skilled meditation guide in Natural Meditation Dean Sluyter is in the grand tradition of authors who interpret traditional enlightenment teachings and apply them to modern Western life. In his latest book, Natural Meditation, he certainly accomplishes that task with a rare combination of insight, clarity, wit, and pragmatic common sense. Can [...]
When he first arrived on the West Coast in 1925, Paramahansa Yogananda called Los Angeles “the Benares of America.” L.A. reminded him of India’s holiest city because a certain spiritual energy permeated the hot, dry air. He may have sensed that the growing town was destined to become the prime relay station for the processing [...]
In the 200 years that Eastern spiritual teachings have been filtering into American life, the disseminators have included great artists as well as gurus, scholars, and scientists. We have absorbed the principles of Hinduism, Buddhism and other Asian traditions through the poems of T.S. Eliot and W.B. Yeats; the novels of Herman Hesse, Somerset Maugham [...]
The obituaries and tributes to J.D. Salinger, the seminal novelist who died in January at the age of 91, have tended to ignore one important feature of his life and work: for many readers, especially young seekers of truth in the sixties and seventies, he was a kind of guru figure. I was [...]
Truth Is One; The Wise Call It By Many Names: A Collective Search For Meaning OF ALL THE ICONIC IMAGES THE MEDIA trotted out to remind us of Woodstock on the fortieth anniversary of that seminal event (August 15 - 18, 1969), the one that best captures what endured from the Sixties was [...]