We live in a time when we tend to look so far ahead into the future that we may lose sight of what’s going on in our lives at the moment. I know I used to find myself running so far and so fast that I missed an entire year here and there. All that changed when I began meditating.…
Creativity is more complex than the maps we fashion to understand it. “There being no known method from the known to the unknown,” as the narrator of James Joyce’s über-imaginative Ulysses said, ascertaining what facilitates creativity might seem like a fool’s quest. Psychoanalyst Marion Milner’s On Not Being Able to Paint, a neglected classic in the literature on the creative…
Let’s say, for argument’s sake, that you find Western secular culture a breeding ground for the worst human values and qualities, from unquenchable selfishness and greed to unconscionable meanness and hard-heartedness. You are disgusted by the moral free-for-all that profits no one except the insanely rich. You hunger for a saner world than secular culture fosters—one committed to enriching, rather…
