Dear God is a global project for people around the world to share their innermost hopes - and fears - through prayer. Some photos NSFW.
posted on Apr 13, 2008 - View this thread

Papa Palmérino Sorgente, the Pope of Montréal
posted on Feb 28, 2008 - View this thread

Esalen: Where "California" Bubbled Up (one photo mildly NSFW) For many others in America and around the world, Esalen stands more vaguely for that metaphorical point where “East meets West” and is transformed into something uniquely and mystically American or New Agey. And for a great many others yet, Esalen is simply that notorious bagno-bordello where people had sex and got high throughout the 1960s and 1970s before coming home talking psychobabble and dangling crystals. In short, Esalen is in every way, even geologically, California at its most extreme. It is its caricature, as well as its noblest expression.
posted on Feb 11, 2008 - View this thread

The Temples of Damanhur. Behold the Eighth Wonder of the World (according to the Italian government). [Via Boing Boing.]
posted on Nov 23, 2007 - View this thread

Supreme Master TV. As advertised on the very back page of this week's Economist Newspaper. It's great when spiritual leaders just come right out and say it. Check out the awesome paintings.
posted on Nov 10, 2007 - View this thread

Searching for God in the Brain. "Researchers are unearthing the roots of religious feeling in the neural commotion that accompanies the spiritual epiphanies of nuns, Buddhists and other people of faith." [Via MindHacks, which points out a few niggling omissions in the article.]
posted on Oct 9, 2007 - View this thread

Peter Stafford, psychedelics investigator and author of the Psychedelics Encyclopedia (PDF preview), has died. [Via BB.]
posted on Jul 21, 2007 - View this thread

Love on Campus: Why We Should Encourage an Eroticism (of the Mind) Between Professor and Student. Yale English professor William Deresiewicz argues that the newly-emerged stereotype of professors as "pompous, lecherous, alcoholic failures" is in the main due to our culture's fear of and inability to understand the true intimacy between professor and student: that of the mind. Cf. controversial Hindu teacher-student relationships, the same in Christianity, or merely observe Oscar Wilde: "I knew that I had come face to face with someone whose mere personality was so fascinating that, if I allowed it to do so, it would absorb my whole nature, my whole soul, my very art itself."
posted on Jul 13, 2007 - View this thread

Entheogens and Psychotherapy. A 2001 paper by Canadian psychotherapist Andrew Feldmar on the potential therapeutic uses of psychedelics and his own experience with LSD. Now, because of this paper, he is no longer allowed to enter the U.S. [Via MindHacks.]
posted on Apr 24, 2007 - View this thread

The Spy of the Heart - The story of an American's exploration of Islamic spirituality within the turmoil of Afghanistan. Full book (PDF) available free onsite.
posted on Apr 16, 2007 - View this thread

The Hostile New Age Takeover of Yoga [print version]. Standard "omg commoditization" rant, but has a delectable anecdote wherein someone mistakes clingy navel-gazing for reflection. ("What part of no don't you understand?" his note said. "I never want to hear from you again.")
posted on Apr 6, 2007 - View this thread

Yoga Action Squad! Episode 1: Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad Vibrations --- The Yoga Action Squad, an elite team of yogis and yoginis from Santa Monica, spring into action to stop the very negative Dr. Bad Vibes and his overpaid bitchy assistant, Lethargo.
posted on Mar 26, 2007 - View this thread

"All over Orlando you see forces at work that are changing America from Fairbanks to Little Rock. This, truly, is a 21st-century paradigm: It is growth built on consumption, not production; a society founded not on natural resources, but upon the dissipation of capital accumulated elsewhere; a place of infinite possibilities, somehow held together, to the extent it is held together at all, by a shared recognition of highway signs, brand names, TV shows, and personalities, rather than any shared history. Nowhere else is the juxtaposition of what America actually is and the conventional idea of what America should be more vivid and revealing."

"Welcome to the theme-park nation." [more inside]
posted on Mar 2, 2007 - View this thread

I Love You Kenisha. My dear sweet Kenisha, If you find this page, please forgive me for my failure to be a the kind of leader in our marriage and our home that God has called me to be. When ever you decide to come home, I'll be here waiting for you. If I'm 100 years old, and on my death bed, and you haven't come back yet, I'll still be waiting for you!!! I love you with all my heart!!!
posted on Feb 11, 2007 - View this thread

From organically-farming Zen centers to celebrity-cultivating Scientology centres^TM, California is a seedbed of the most earnest (and most frivolous or worse) branches of spiritual inquiry. What's in the water in the Golden State that has made it The Visionary State? In an interview with editor Geoff Manaugh of the excellent BLDGBLOG, author Erik Davis -- whose published passions have ranged from an analysis of Philip K. Dick's "divine invasions" to erudite musings on Led Zeppelin's fourth album to an ode to the joys of being a teenage bongeur -- talks about the formerly chic devil-worshipper Anton LaVey, Beat Zen, Aldous Huxley, the Watts Towers, and beyond, with great photos by Michael Rauner, who collaborated with Davis on the new book.
posted on Aug 10, 2006 - View this thread

The Angels of the Hours offer us the opportunity to direct our lives from within,not being swept along by the demands of the clock.By living in the real rhythms of the day we become more real...(real audio) .
posted on Dec 12, 2005 - View this thread

There is nothing flaky about this. There is nothing New Age about this. These people are practical. They love the Earth, and they want to live their values

What the hell is a Cultural Creative? According to this book, there are already 50 million Cultural Creativists in the US, many of whom may not know it yet. Are you one?
But is this really a social movement, or just another manufactured demographic marketing term, like "metrosexual"?
Could CC give the left a language with which to discuss spirituality? or is this all just hype?
posted on May 15, 2005 - View this thread

Queen of Suffering: A Spiritual History of Korea, by Ham Sok Hon
posted on Feb 10, 2004 - View this thread

We've heard of intelligence and emotional intelligence, but what about spiritual intelligence? Gary Zukav is spiritually brilliant. He frequently appears on Oprah, from which I assume (accepting all implicit risks) that his audience consists largely of women. Which is too bad, because men have quite a lot to learn from this man as well, and it would do a world of good (being, unjustly, a man's world) if every man did.
posted on Sep 20, 2000 - View this thread