Can water quaff itself?Can trees taste of the fruit they bear?He who worships God must stand distinct from Him,So only shall he know the joyful love of God.For if he says that God and he are one,That joy, that love, shall vanish instantly away. Pray no more for utter oneness

“If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the skythat would be like the splendorof the Might One . . . I am Death, destroyer of worlds.” Robert Oppenheimer quoting Bhagavad Gita (11.12 and 11.32),New Mexico, July 16, 1945,on the first test of an atomic

My dear friends, John and his wife, Marcia, are philosophy professors. They’re in their eighties now. They love to dance, and John once made a simple observation about dancing that marked me with its spiritual depth. When people first learn to dance, he said, they often move mechanically, counting steps,

I will never be sure about the events I’m about to describe. For years the images have been like pieces of stained glass in a church window, and the more I try to fit the pieces together, the more I cut my hands. But they did happen. In February 1970,

Growing up in midtown New York City in the 1950s, I lived with my mother in a two-room apartment near Central Park. In those days, you could rent a small place in that neighborhood for a few hundred dollars a month. It strained our two-person budget, but she saw a

For my 60th birthday some years ago, my wife bought a steam function for my shower. She didn’t know it would provide me with an ideal metaphor for explaining kaivalya, the state of ego dissolution that is the goal of Shankarite monistic Advaita philosophy. “Shankarite” refers to the teachings of