Wisdom, Love, and Beauty

A philosophical horoscope for the soul. Not too big, not too heavy, and sweet enough to go with your morning coffee. Get insights from the sacred science of synchronicity, and one of its finest field guides, the Yijing (I Ching). Embracing other ways of knowing and being, living and loving, we look to Yijing and the wisdom traditions to get insight into the patterning that creates and connects all things, and receive guidance on how we can best navigate our lives right now. This episode: The brightness of the mind hidden.

A philosophical horoscope for the soul. Not too big, not too heavy, and sweet enough to go with your morning coffee. Get insights from the sacred science of synchronicity, and one of its finest field guides, the Yijing (I Ching). Embracing other ways of knowing and being, living and loving, we look to Yijing and the wisdom traditions to get insight into the patterning that creates and connects all things, and receive guidance on how we can best navigate our lives right now. This episode: The meaning of sacrament in navigating the interplay of order and disorder.

A philosophical horoscope for the soul. Not too big, not too heavy, and sweet enough to go with your morning coffee. Get insights from the sacred science of synchronicity, and one of its finest field guides, the Yijing (I Ching). Embracing other ways of knowing and being, living and loving, we look to Yijing and the wisdom traditions to get insight into the patterning that creates and connects all things, and receive guidance on how we can best navigate our lives right now. This episode: When wisdom doesn't yet fill our body and mind, we can feel fulfilled; when wisdom begins to fill our body and mind, we sense something missing.

A philosophical horoscope for the soul. Not too big, not too heavy, and sweet enough to go with your morning coffee. Get insights from the sacred science of synchronicity, and one of its finest field guides, the Yijing (I Ching). Embracing other ways of knowing and being, living and loving, we look to Yijing and the wisdom traditions to get insight into the patterning that creates and connects all things, and receive guidance on how we can best navigate our lives right now. This episode: Our own back as a gateway to stillness and virtuosity.

A philosophical horoscope for the soul. Not too big, not too heavy, and sweet enough to go with your morning coffee. Get insights from the sacred science of synchronicity, and one of its finest field guides, the Yijing (I Ching). Embracing other ways of knowing and being, living and loving, we look to Yijing and the wisdom traditions to get insight into the patterning that creates and connects all things, and receive guidance on how we can best navigate our lives right now. This episode: Letting virtue give you virtuosity sometimes requires you to take the axle off.

A philosophical horoscope for the soul. Not too big, not too heavy, and sweet enough to go with your morning coffee. Get insights from the sacred science of synchronicity, and one of its finest field guides, the Yijing (I Ching). Embracing other ways of knowing and being, living and loving, we look to Yijing and the wisdom traditions to get insight into the patterning that creates and connects all things, and receive guidance on how we can best navigate our lives right now. This week: Letting virtue give you virtuosity.

A philosophical horoscope for the soul. Not too big, not too heavy, and sweet enough to go with your morning coffee. Get insights from the sacred science of synchronicity, and one of its finest field guides, the Yijing (I Ching). Embracing other ways of knowing and being, living and loving, we look to Yijing and the wisdom traditions to get insight into the patterning that creates and connects all things, and receive guidance on how we can best navigate our lives right now. This episode: Archetypal patterns of leadership and negotiation.

A philosophical horoscope for the soul. Not too big, not too heavy, and sweet enough to go with your morning coffee. Get insights from the sacred science of synchronicity, and one of its finest field guides, the Yijing (I Ching). Embracing other ways of knowing and being, living and loving, we look to Yijing and the wisdom traditions to get insight into the patterning that creates and connects all things, and receive guidance on how we can best navigate our lives right now. This episode: A listener's synchronicity with last week's contemplation of the spiritual dimension of travel.

A philosophical horoscope for the soul. Not too big, not too heavy, and sweet enough to go with your morning coffee. Get insights from the sacred science of synchronicity, and one of its finest field guides, the Yijing (I Ching). Embracing other ways of knowing and being, living and loving, we look to Yijing and the wisdom traditions to get insight into the patterning that creates and connects all things, and receive guidance on how we can best navigate our lives right now. This week: The archetypal pattern of following and how it relates to the archetypal patterns governing leadership, including lessons on leadership from tango.

A philosophical horoscope for the soul. Not too big, not too heavy, and sweet enough to go with your morning coffee. Get insights from the sacred science of synchronicity, and one of its finest field guides, the Yijing (I Ching). Embracing other ways of knowing and being, living and loving, we look to Yijing and the wisdom traditions to get insight into the patterning that creates and connects all things, and receive guidance on how we can best navigate our lives right now. This week: The archetypal pattern of dealing with small things, and the meaning of traveling as it relates to inner stillness.

A philosophical horoscope for the soul. Not too big, not too heavy, and sweet enough to go with your morning coffee. Get insights from the sacred science of synchronicity, and one of its finest field guides, the Yijing (I Ching). Embracing other ways of knowing and being, living and loving, we look to Yijing and the wisdom traditions to get insight into the patterning that creates and connects all things, and receive guidance on how we can best navigate our lives right now. This week: The archetypal pattern of dealing with small things, and the need to uncover our inner boundedness in order to free up our life.

A philosophical horoscope for the soul. Not too big, not too heavy, and sweet enough to go with your morning coffee. Get insights from the sacred science of synchronicity, and one of its finest field guides, the Yijing (I Ching). Embracing other ways of knowing and being, living and loving, we look to Yijing and the wisdom traditions to get insight into the patterning that creates and connects all things, and receive guidance on how we can best navigate our lives right now. This week: The archetypal pattern of dealing with small things.

A philosophical horoscope for the soul. Not too big, not too heavy, and sweet enough to go with your morning coffee. Get insights from the sacred science of synchronicity, and one of its finest field guides, the Yijing (I Ching). Embracing other ways of knowing and being, living and loving, we look to Yijing and the wisdom traditions to get insight into the patterning that creates and connects all things, and receive guidance on how we can best navigate our lives right now. This week: The archetypal meaning of nourishment, and how we can learn to nourish the whole world. This final contemplation invites the listener on a pilgrimage to wild water.

A philosophical horoscope for the soul. Not too big, not too heavy, and sweet enough to go with your morning coffee. Get insights from the sacred science of synchronicity, and one of its finest field guides, the Yijing (I Ching). Embracing other ways of knowing and being, living and loving, we look to Yijing and the wisdom traditions to get insight into the patterning that creates and connects all things, and receive guidance on how we can best navigate our lives right now. This week: The archetypal meaning of nourishment, and how we can learn to nourish the whole world.

A philosophical horoscope for the soul. Not too big, not too heavy, and sweet enough to go with your morning coffee. Get insights from the sacred science of synchronicity, and one of its finest field guides, the Yijing (I Ching). Embracing other ways of knowing and being, living and loving, we look to Yijing and the wisdom traditions to get insight into the patterning that creates and connects all things, and receive guidance on how we can best navigate our lives right now. This week: The archetypal meaning of nourishment, and how we can learn to nourish the whole world.

A philosophical horoscope for the soul. Not too big, not too heavy, and sweet enough to go with your morning coffee. Get insights from the sacred science of synchronicity, and one of its finest field guides, the Yijing (I Ching). Embracing other ways of knowing and being, living and loving, we look to Yijing and the wisdom traditions to get insight into the patterning that creates and connects all things, and receive guidance on how we can best navigate our lives right now. This week: Archetypal steps to actualize personal flourishing and galvanize a community.

A philosophical horoscope for the soul. Not too big, not too heavy, and sweet enough to go with your morning coffee. Get insights from the sacred science of synchronicity, and one of its finest field guides, the Yijing (I Ching). Embracing other ways of knowing and being, living and loving, we look to Yijing and the wisdom traditions to get insight into the patterning that creates and connects all things, and receive guidance on how we can best navigate our lives right now. This week: Archetypal steps to actualize personal flourishing and galvanize a community.

A philosophical horoscope for the soul. Not too big, not too heavy, and sweet enough to go with your morning coffee. Get insights from the sacred science of synchronicity, and one of its finest field guides, the Yijing (I Ching). Embracing other ways of knowing and being, living and loving, we look to Yijing and the wisdom traditions to get insight into the patterning that creates and connects all things, and receive guidance on how we can best navigate our lives right now.

A philosophical horoscope for the soul. Not too big, not too heavy, and sweet enough to go with your morning coffee. Get insights from the sacred science of synchronicity, and one of its finest field guides, the Yijing (I Ching). Embracing other ways of knowing and being, living and loving, we look to Yijing and the wisdom traditions to get insight into the patterning that creates and connects all things, and receive guidance on how we can best navigate our lives right now.

A philosophical horoscope for the soul. Not too big, not too heavy, and sweet enough to go with your morning coffee. Get insights from the sacred science of synchronicity, and one of its finest field guides, the Yijing (I Ching). Embracing other ways of knowing and being, living and loving, we look to Yijing and the wisdom traditions to get insight into the patterning that creates and connects all things, and receive guidance on how we can best navigate our lives right now.

Insights from the sacred science of synchronicity, and one of its finest field guides, the Yijing (I Ching). Embracing other ways of knowing and being, living and loving, we look to Yijing and the wisdom traditions to get insight into the patterning that creates and connects all things, and receive guidance on how we can best navigate our lives right now.

Humus, humility, homo sapiens, and Om share a common root, and considering their interwovenness can help us to touch our basic dignity. In this contemplation, the first to have both swearing and singing, we look at some elements of the dominant culture’s way of living that indicate how Nature has gotten pushed into the shadow. We consider the architectural manifestos of Hundertwasser, the memories of Jung, and the teachings of world philosophers who seek to help us find our awesome presence, even in the most mundane or seemingly profane activities of life.

In this contemplation of the shadow we ask some questions, take a kind of inventory, that can help us detect the presence of the shadow so that we could begin to bring light to its contents. But first we consider some of what we need to have in place in order to work skillfully with our unconscious, including a sense of the soul or psyche that transcends even Jung's vision. As part of our contemplation, we consider an artefact related to Jung that many people haven't heard about, and which may stand out as one of his greatest discoveries. This is an episode you don’t want to miss, as it brings us to the place where philosophy, psychology, and spirituality (including ecology and a sense of the Cosmic and the mysterious) come together.

The dominant culture tends to trivialize many of the spiritual teachings and practices that present a threat to it, or a threat to the egos within it. We get McMindfulness because a genuine practice of meditation, as part of a holistic and skillful philosophy of life, results in citizens who want nothing to do with core practices of the dominant culture. Shadow work runs the risk of the same kind of trivialization, such that we'll end up nibbling on McShadow nuggets and thinking we've confronted the vastness of the psyche. Meanwhile, the pattern of insanity will continue to unfold. In this contemplation we try to consider a few things about the shadow and the psyche that help us to understand its importance, and to get some sense of the consequences of any kind of avoidance on our part of the sometimes unpleasant or even frightening work of freeing ourselves from deception---both self-deception and the deceptions of the dominant culture.

“Shadow work” has gotten increasing attention in the dominant culture. This tends to carry the risk of trivialization and increasing spiritual materialism. Here we take a philosophical look at the unconscious and the nature of shadow work. Generally speaking, the dominant culture and most of the people of that culture haven’t come to terms with the unconscious, even though the spiritual and philosophical traditions warn us of its power to keep us in delusion. We avoid in the unconscious in part because, as Freud put it, the revelation of its presence and significance struck a major blow to the western ego. How can we more fully face up to the unconscious and begin to more skillfully work with it? We begin a short series of contemplations into these matters, building up to the sheer terror that the vastness of the psyche can evoke in us. In this first contemplation, we won’t rush into that terror, but begin to gather our senses and our sensibility to consider the questions and challenges the unconscious presents.

We could perhaps get at the questions of this contemplation by considering the images that go with it—visit wisdomloveand.org to view them. The first image looks like flowers. The second images reminds us: There are no “flowers,” but there is bee-and-flower. The third image reminds us that the patterning goes beyond that too: Bee-and-butterfly-and-flower. And we can go on and on, recognizing the magic and mystery of interwovenness. Since these images come from Return to Freedom, the Wild Horse Sanctuary where I live as philosopher-in-residence, you may realize that horses abide in each of the images as well. Our habitual mind covers over the patterning that creates and connects all sentient beings and all of sentient being. To our habitual mind—a mind of incoherence and a consciousness oriented toward conquest and the pursuit of goals and agendas—to that habitual mind, the patterning of life can not only remain hidden, but it can appear as noise. It takes a mind of Nature to sense the mind that is Nature—a mind of ecology to become liberated into larger ecologies of mind that direct the flow of magic and meaning in our world. Magic depends on relating to the patterning of Nature, from and towards its wholeness. But how do we relate to the wholeness of Nature if our culture, including our language, seduces us into fragmentation (in ways we may remain mostly unaware of)? In this contemplation we will consider some fascinating notions that help us to see how misguided we might currently be, and which may open us up to the kind of practice of life we need to follow if we want to realize the wholeness and healing that the mystery itself offers us.

The third principle of magic opens up an opportunity for greater understanding and even wonderstanding of the nature of our own mind and the nature of reality, and it helps us to begin to enter into the mysteries of life. Yeats tells us that the great mind and the great memory of Nature and of the Cosmos can be evoked by symbols. How does that work? As we contemplate this vitalizing question, we can understand much more about what the dominant culture cuts us off from, and how the loss of magic and sacredness goes altogether with the loss of species and the degradation of ecologies. This also suggests something important about the way to heal ourselves and our world: We may need a recovery of magic, an initiation again into magical consciousness. That will involve a spiritual path that helps us fully live into one of the most important spiritual ideas introduced in this contemplation: That we are patterns of primordial awareness, and that suffering arises when that awareness mistakes itself for something it is not.

Part 5 overall in our series on magic. Perfect for people not particularly drawn to horses, and potentially charged for those who are---well, there's a vital energy in there for all of us, and it can feel threatening. The horse is dangerous wisdom embodied, and the magic and mystery of horses, the wisdom and wildness of horses, challenges the whole of the dominant culture. The horse actively rebelled against the spread of conquest consciousness on Turtle Island, but this more material expression of the horse's power doesn't capture the fullness of the dangerous wisdom the horse presents. The most potent magic and mystery of the horse relates to the soul and the spiritual dimension. We explore how we might open ourselves to this magic and mystery, this wisdom and wildness, and how it might relate to the history of the horse in the dominant culture and also in the wider community of life.

Can we remember the future? If magic is mindfulness, and mindfulness means remembering, what is the relationship between past, present, and future? In giving us the principles of magic, Yeats mentions memory, but does not explicitly mention expectation and the future. In some sense, that appears implicitly in the third principle of magic, but here we look at the interwovenness of past, present, and future, the way memory appears right now, and the way possibility calls back to us like an unconscious memory. This episode is dedicated to the memory of horses---to their memory of the world, and our shared memory, as well as our shared possibilities for healing and transformation.

In part three in the series overall (part one is "How Magic Saved My Life"), here we continue our contemplation of the first principle of magic outlined by the poet W.B. Yeats, on mind, and continue on to the second principle, on memory. We consider aspects of mind and memory supported by peer-reviewed scientific evidence, but which defy the general paradigms of dominant culture science.

We consider three ways of understanding magic philosophically and scientifically, including a contemplation of the principles of magic crystalized by the poet W.B. Yeats. This episode helps us sense the intimacy and resonance between magical consciousness and spiritual or ecological consciousness. Ultimately, magic has to do with the practice and realization of ecosensual awareness, arising as wisdom, love, and beauty. But, first we have to face the taboos. Dangerous wisdom here---wisdom that carries us out of our own skin.

LoveWisdom teaches us the magic of the world. What is magic? Is there "real" magic? How can we experience it? Is there an important relationship between magic and ecology? How can magic and the experience of magic illuminate some of the most profound teachings of the wisdom traditions, and thus illuminate our own lives and the life of the world we share? In this first episode of a short series on magic, we look into the experience of magic, and its potential to transform us. This episode is "safe" for skeptics, but even this first contemplation leads us into dangerous wisdom, and the series will take us to places that scare even the most sober scientists and seekers.

Understanding the structure of experience helps us to enter a more skillful way of life. We could call it the essence of the philosophical path: To gain intimacy with our own experience and understand the nature of reality and the nature of our own mind. Once we begin to understand the structure of experience, we can practice more deeply, and we can approach a wonderstanding of the mind of Nature as well as the nature of our own mind.

We can't start with Why if Why already started with us, and if that Why contains the "karma" of our culture, of the land where we live, and our own ignorance, confusion, hopes, and fears as well. In order to start with Why, we have to understand the structure of our experience, and begin to walk a path that can heal our personal and collective karma and trauma. The traditions of LoveWisdom can help, and it begins with gaining clarity about the nature of our own mind, experience, and activity.

If we have the wrong vision of what a human being is, our soul will never fly. If we have the wrong vision of what reality is and what the World is, we will create suffering for ourselves and others. The “Start with Why” (or “golden circle”) theory is an example of dangerous wisdom in the bad sense: It gives us the wrong vision, and it ultimately makes us and our culture more incoherent.

Healing, wholeness, the challenges of suffering, and the paradoxes of success. In what sense is life a self-healing truth? What is the nature of health and healing? What is the nature of sickness—our cultural sickness and our own mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical sickness?

What is the experience of "This changes everything"? How can this basic philosophical/spiritual experience disrupt our delusions--both our individual and cultural delusions? And how can we cultivate such an experience?

True story: First bar fight, age 5. What does it mean?

A philosophical short story in the style of Sophiaesthetics and metta-physical fiction.

In part an addendum to the first contemplation on the self-help catastrophe. But this addendum is also its own contemplation, since we will consider some important topics, like spiritual materialism and systemic incoherence. Another installment in the series of contemplations to understand the self-help catastrophe, and to find ways out of it.

Why self-help might not be working for you, and what to do if you think it IS . . . The self-help-industrial complex is huge. Whether you consider yourself a self-help junkie, a self-help fan, or a self-help critic, contemplating the self-help catastrophe will shed light on our cultural and ecological emergency.

An inquiry into the nature of habit and freedom, the meaning of life, and how we can do our jobs and live together while feeling good in our mind, heart, and body, and feeling good about ourselves, about how we are living and loving.

How do we move forward in our lives? Maybe you have some problem or challenge in your personal life, or in your professional life. Or maybe you can sense the general stuckness of humanity, and maybe you even take that to be your own stuckness. Given all the confusion of the world, all the fear and uncertainty within our own soul and in the soul of the world, how can we find genuinely creative and beautiful ways to cultivate our lives forward, and cultivate the life of the world forward at the same time? The answer lies in stepping forward and backward at the same time/

In our culture, we have placed a set of habitual notions about time on top of the soul’s instincts and intuitions about rhythm and temporality. The physicist David Bohm said that, “. . . every thought assumes time. Whether we discuss thought or anything else, we always take time for granted. And we take for granted the notion that everything exists in time. We don’t take for granted that time is an abstraction and a representation, but we take for granted that time is of the essence—reality—and that everything is existing in time, including thought.” What if we have some very unskillful notions about time? What if the evolution of our culture depends on shifting our relationship with time?

The brain is sometimes called the most complex structure in the known universe. Somehow or other, that brain is related to our mind. What is the most complex structure of the mind? And what is its affect on our lives?

What is the biggest bite of knowledge fruit humanity has ever taken? How would pausing to genuinely savor and then metabolize that juicy bite change the way we live and work?

What is the force no human or god can resist? Why might it seem like a monster? And what does it have to do with our workaday life?