Life 101, A Wise Man's Advice for Adulthood

Our individual journey can be confusing and complex. This figure, called a labyrinth, has been helpful to me. The Chartres Cathedral in France, built in 1220, has a labyrinth on its floor design.  St. Mary's Cathedral in San Francisco* has two, one within the walls of the cathedral and one on the grounds outside available to everyone. It is a trail you can walk. At first glance the Labyrinth may appear to be a maze with puzzling alternative turning points, many of which lead to dead ends. But a labyrinth actually has no dead ends. It is one continuous path that does eventually end up at the center, which represents life's ultimate objective or Truth or spiritual fulfillment or God or whatever. Nevertheless, the path of the labyrinth often feels confusing. If you trace the path you'll notice that at first it moves you directly toward the center, but soon you turn off to the left and later to the right. At one time or another you'll move in each of the four directions. ...

You are the last person who needs to be reminded to dance. You've discovered in your own life the liberating power of dance. From that experience you are probably learning that that applies not only as an art form, but as a lifestyle. When we lived in England for a period, Tim was attending art school in London. I visited him one week-end when his school was sponsoring a square dance. We attended and at one point the square dance caller was explaining a rather complicated new dance and concluded by saying, "and we end up just where we started," at which a bloke in the back said, "Then what's the point?" "Ts'ao-Shu Dancer I" by Tim Holmes Although he was joking, I think I've known people who have that attitude about the dance of life. Life is serious and ought to be lived with a clear direction from point A to point B. The more important truth is that we do not dance in order to get somewhere. Friedrich Nietzsche was a German philosopher, w...

Oscar Ameringer once said with tongue in cheek, "Except that I inherited certain characteristics from an unknown number of unknown ancestors, was deeply influenced by persons most of whom were dead before I was born, and shaped by circumstances over which I had no control, I am a self-made man."  The only appropriate response would be the one George Bernard Shaw is reported to have made to someone who boasted of being self-made: "Sir, you have relieved God of a tremendous responsibility!" The truth is there's no such thing as a self-made person. We are all, in part, the product of a variety of influences in our lives. That includes everything we've been told or taught. If you are an American, or a member of a political party, or a follower of a religion, chances are it's because your parents were (though with respect to religion that's less true than it used to be.) Those are all part of the "givens" of our lives, but they're not the...

Feelings can sometimes motivate good and responsible actions, but they can also impede good actions or motivate irresponsible ones. Feelings need to be felt and understood so that they can become our servants rather than making us slaves. Just as the Age of Reason was a reaction against tendencies toward unthinking superstitions and careless religion, there came to be a reaction to the Age of Enlightenment as well and it was called Romanticism. It affirmed that the human being is more than just a thinking head. Humans are also able to have strong emotions and capable of expressing them in personal relationships and in the arts. In the past three decades or so there has been a resurgence of appreciation for the importance of "getting in touch with our feelings" and expressing them in appropriate ways. All sorts of therapeutic techniques and movements have emerged that have helped us recover this "lost dimension" of our humanness, despite the critical caricatures that...

So far in our search for the Truth about Reality as outlined in these pages we have sounded pretty much rationalistic in our approach, a matter of thinking. Clear thinking is the biggest part of it, but it's not all of it. If we want to know the whole Truth, we must seek it as whole human beings. Our thinking capacities, our mind, our brain, are only part of who we are and how we function. We are also feeling creatures capable of great emotions. There are some people, and have been ever since the rise of what is called The Age of Enlightenment or the Age of Reason , in 18th century Europe, who tend to think that emotion is the natural enemy of reason and who have utter confidence in the human being's reasoning capacity. The Age of Reason wasn't all bad. It challenged superstition and a lot of patterns of belief that just didn't make any "sense" at all. But this reaction against matters emotional and spiritual went too far. To use a popular image, it "t...