Visionary William Blake Explored Nirvana through Poetry To a natural-born visionary like William Blake, the divine is revealed by — the divine is — every ordinary object. We can try to reject it, but it’s always up in our face, like blowing sand. As he famously put it: If the doors of perception were cleansed [...]
Hang around any ashram or yoga studio for 10 minutes and you’ll meet someone whose quest was sparked by Autobiography of a Yogi, the stranger-than-fiction account of how the Indian lad Mukunda became Paramahansa Yogananda — meeting possibly immortal Himalayan adepts, witnessing feats of superconsciousness, and attaining the light of Self-realization. The Life of Yogananda [...]
The Horror Film We Shoot in Our Minds What makes a horror film horrifying? Of course, there’s the Thing lurking at the center of the film’s labyrinth: the monster, the slasher, the hungry alien, the nightmare clown, the live organ harvesting mill disguised as a daycare center. But, especially early in the film, before we [...]
Remembering Jeremy Tarcher, 1932–2015 by Dean Sluyter You may not know his name, but if you meditate, practice yoga, use alternative diets or medicine, cultivate right-brain creativity, or consume information about any form of inner development, then an unlikely character changed your life. A dapper New Yorker with the patrician voice of a Franklin Roosevelt, [...]
Once upon a time in a long-ago decade, before doctors were recommending meditation to control blood pressure and insomnia, before football teams and tech companies were using it to get better at crushing the competition, I started my career as a meditation teacher. Back then, mainstream folks were generally curious but dubious: Was this [...]