http://www.dharmacafe.com/ en bruce@bkdesign.ca Copyright 2006 2006-07-21T06:07:00+00:00 http://www.dharmacafe.com/new-science/the-mysticism-of-space1/ http://www.dharmacafe.com/site/the-mysticism-of-space1/#When:19:54:35Z The physical universe is thus no more than a dance of energy spun out of the space that defines it. It seems that the scientists have verified this at a deeply fundamental level. What they have as yet been unable to determine is the source of the energy that keeps it going. 2011-09-23T19:54:35+00:00 http://www.dharmacafe.com/history/louis-dupre-the-dharmacafe-interview/ http://www.dharmacafe.com/site/louis-dupre-the-dharmacafe-interview/#When:21:09:12Z Louis Dupré from DharmaCafe.com on Vimeo.DharmaCafé interviews Louis Dupré, a brilliant and enormously learned Catholic cultural historian and philosopher of religion with a soul deep enough to write respectfully on the likes of Marx and the Romantics and to conclude his anthology of Christian mysticism, “Light from Light”, with selections from a monk named “Abhishiktananda”. 2011-03-19T21:09:12+00:00 http://www.dharmacafe.com/history/more-than-apocalypse-the-deep-cultural-prophecy-of-richard-grossingers-2013/ http://www.dharmacafe.com/site/more-than-apocalypse-the-deep-cultural-prophecy-of-richard-grossingers-2013/#When:19:44:05Z Now that we have been suitably flattered and frightened by the purportedly Mayan deus ex machina of 2012, it is high time we rejected its myth of hardwired inevitabilities. In his latest book, “2013”, Richard Grossinger, America’s great unsung cultural prophet, melds his personal explorations and cosmic reflections to elevate prophecy to a more serving and liberating role. 2010-05-23T19:44:05+00:00 http://www.dharmacafe.com/nature-psyche/why-havent-we-seen-a-picture-of-the-whole-mind-yet-positive-possibilities-f/ http://www.dharmacafe.com/site/why-havent-we-seen-a-picture-of-the-whole-mind-yet-positive-possibilities-f/#When:19:06:07Z If the recent hit movie It’s Complicated and the spate of legalization initiatives queuing up in California are any indication, pot has finally achieved mainstream respectability. More remarkably, despite the unrelentingly repressive atmosphere that smothered the first decade of our brave new century, psychedelic research in America has entered its Golden Age. James Fadiman, perhaps America’s wisest and most respected authority on psychedelics and their use, gives us a valuable update. 2010-02-10T19:06:07+00:00 http://www.dharmacafe.com/history/whats-so-positive-about-positive-law-a-review-of-stephen-d.-smiths-laws-qua/ http://www.dharmacafe.com/site/whats-so-positive-about-positive-law-a-review-of-stephen-d.-smiths-laws-qua/#When:04:35:17Z In his review of Stephen D. Smith’s “Law’s Quandary,” Daniel Sheehan, one of America’s leading Constitutional lawyers, asks why the author stopped before the job was done. 2009-09-22T04:35:17+00:00 http://www.dharmacafe.com/philosophy-gnosis/the-great-secret-corrected-/ http://www.dharmacafe.com/site/the-great-secret-corrected-/#When:20:30:24Z Now that Rhonda Byrne’s runaway bestseller, “The Secret,” has garnered more than 2,400 reviews on Amazon.com, the crack DharmaCafé editorial team has decided to swing into action and offer its own review of the book. 2009-07-04T20:30:24+00:00 http://www.dharmacafe.com/health-sexuality/stephen-buhner-is-listening-to-the-plants/ http://www.dharmacafe.com/site/stephen-buhner-is-listening-to-the-plants/#When:23:11:33Z Like the speaking stones celebrated by poets, herbs too have a voice of their own. Each one speaks within a community so vast and in a language so rich that, taken together, these natural miracle workers truly represent one of humanity’s greatest treasures. 2009-04-09T23:11:33+00:00 http://www.dharmacafe.com/life-cycles/sparks-of-light-faith-hope-and-rdlaing/ http://www.dharmacafe.com/site/sparks-of-light-faith-hope-and-rdlaing/#When:02:20:00Z R.D. Laing was an iconic figure of the sixties. Unconventional, controversial, and undeniably brilliant, how people viewed him then— or remember him now — is itself a kind of historical rorschach test. Since his death, in 1989, he has been praised, plagiarized, imitated, vilified, and increasingly forgotten. Dan Burston, perhaps Laing’s most astute biographer, thinks it important that we remember him. 2008-09-16T02:20:00+00:00 http://www.dharmacafe.com/gaia/descartes-and-animals-what-if-they-also-think/ http://www.dharmacafe.com/site/descartes-and-animals-what-if-they-also-think/#When:16:45:01Z “Before humans shifted into rational thinking, we saw our world as reflections of us; we knew we existed as a part of the great web of existence. And we therefore understood that non-human animals are different from us in degree only. We did not see ourselves as distinct, as a completely separate species. We knew that other animals operate with awareness, understand the world in different, sometimes superior ways, and respond consciously to the world. We saw them with compassion.” 2008-08-30T16:45:01+00:00 http://www.dharmacafe.com/sustainable/fixing-the-problems-of-our-world/ http://www.dharmacafe.com/site/fixing-the-problems-of-our-world/#When:15:48:00Z In this excerpt from his latest book, “The Bardo of Waking Life”, Richard Grossinger once again demonstrates how much our poet/seers have to give to our public policy debates. 2008-07-07T15:48:00+00:00 http://www.dharmacafe.com/pilgrims-journal/ill-blood-level-with-you-new-poems-from-william-gottleib/ http://www.dharmacafe.com/site/ill-blood-level-with-you-new-poems-from-william-gottleib/#When:04:21:01Z With their humorous diction and sudden changes of rhythm and speed, William Gottlieb’s racy, percussive poems cover a lot of territory fast. He pleads for us to get serious about the cut. 2008-05-15T04:21:01+00:00 http://www.dharmacafe.com/culture-arts/tacit-glimpses-a-review-of-adi-da-samrajs-transcendental-realism-and-aesthe/ http://www.dharmacafe.com/site/tacit-glimpses-a-review-of-adi-da-samrajs-transcendental-realism-and-aesthe/#When:21:01:21Z At last year’s Venice Biennale and this year’s Winter in Florence exhibitions, Adi Da Samraj’s monumentally sized images have drawn both media praise and a rapturous public response. Art historian, art critic, and practicing artist Celia Rabinovitch assesses his recent essays on aesthetics. Image: The Pastimes of Narcissus I, 2006 (from Spectra One)   2008-05-12T21:01:21+00:00 http://www.dharmacafe.com/spiritual-heroes/in-praise-of-holy-madness-ithe-wild-palms-of-etowah-i/ http://www.dharmacafe.com/site/in-praise-of-holy-madness-ithe-wild-palms-of-etowah-i/#When:19:28:00Z “One mark of our soulless New American Century is the lack of respect for saintly madmen. By that I mean holy seers of the Blakean-Coleridge stripe who could be found on America’s streets as recently as the hippy era. The kind of crazy adepts and enlightened iconoclasts honored by Allen Ginsberg and the beats, holy foolishness in the tradition of Saint Simeon with the dead dog tied to his waist and throwing nuts at the congregation, or Tibetan lama myonpas and India’s avadhutas. Perhaps such holy madmen are still out there among the homeless and the crack whores.” 2008-03-01T19:28:00+00:00 http://www.dharmacafe.com/life-cycles/nondualism-in-the-clinic-can-psychotherapy-help-two-people-know-the-one-rea/ http://www.dharmacafe.com/site/nondualism-in-the-clinic-can-psychotherapy-help-two-people-know-the-one-rea/#When:22:29:00Z Transpersonal psychology—the umbrella term for psychotherapies that view human beings as more than just skin-encapsulated egos—has greatly expanded the scope of human psychology. In his review “The Sacred Mirror: Nondual Wisdom and Psychotherapy”, a pioneering anthology about the application of nondualist spiritual views in the clinical circumstance, transpersonal psychologist D. B. Sleeth wonders if some practitioners are overreaching. 2008-02-23T22:29:00+00:00 http://www.dharmacafe.com/sustainable/the-heart-of-community/ http://www.dharmacafe.com/site/the-heart-of-community/#When:22:16:01Z “Our challenge is to rediscover the heart of local human community and find ways to realize the depth and richness of traditional cultures that yet allow us the creative freedom we have come to enjoy as individuals in the modern world.” 2008-01-12T22:16:01+00:00 http://www.dharmacafe.com/philosophy-gnosis/reason-and-religion-irremediably-incompatible-bedfellows/ http://www.dharmacafe.com/site/reason-and-religion-irremediably-incompatible-bedfellows/#When:21:27:02Z Like the poet e.e. cummings, floyd merriell writes his name in the lower case to stress the arbitrariness and non-necessity of our egoic self-identification. That humility is conjoined to one of the most interesting intellects in American letters today. In his many books, merrell has demonstrated how the obscure science of semiotics—especially as developed by the great American philosopher C.S. Peirce—can play a fundamental role in developing the emerging new paradigm of an evolving, self-organizating, irreducibly interdependent universe. Here we present merrell’s extended essay on the paradoxical nature of religious truth. 2008-01-06T21:27:02+00:00 http://www.dharmacafe.com/pilgrims-journal/almost-the-way-a-thing-feels/ http://www.dharmacafe.com/site/almost-the-way-a-thing-feels/#When:16:12:00Z Here are two new poems from Ken Stateman, an artist, entrepreneur, and spiritual practitioner who lives in Marin County, California. 2007-11-22T16:12:00+00:00 http://www.dharmacafe.com/philosophy-gnosis/tanabe-hajimes-philosophy-as-metanoetics/ http://www.dharmacafe.com/site/tanabe-hajimes-philosophy-as-metanoetics/#When:06:56:00Z Tanabe Hajime, a founding member of Japan’s famed Kyoto School of Philosophy, studied under two giants of twentieth century philosophy, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger (the latter’s own philosophy was likely influenced by Tanabe’s Buddhist views). “Philosophy as Metanoetics” was developed from lectures the author delivered in Kyoto during Japan’s disastrous war with America, Britain, and China, the shadows of which fall heavily across its pages. In this “appreciation and celebration” of Tanabe’s principal work, Steven M. Rosen (whose own pioneering writings are laying a foundation for a new non-dual philosophy of science) identifies key elements of Tanabe’s paradox-drenched philosophy and pauses to question whether the Buddhist notion of the relative self needs to be supplemented by a more dynamic vision of absolute being such as is found in some Western phenomenological thinkers. 2007-11-21T06:56:00+00:00 http://www.dharmacafe.com/nature-psyche/lessons-from-alchemy-and-chaos-theory-part-ii/ http://www.dharmacafe.com/site/lessons-from-alchemy-and-chaos-theory-part-ii/#When:05:05:00Z Continuing our series of Robin Robertson’s “Lessons from Alchemy and Chaos Theory”, it is now time to be introduced to fractals. 2007-11-07T05:05:00+00:00 http://www.dharmacafe.com/nature-psyche/lessons-from-alchemy-chaos-theory/ http://www.dharmacafe.com/site/lessons-from-alchemy-chaos-theory/#When:20:10:00Z DharmaCafe is pleased to present the first in a series of articles connecting the traditional and ancient science of alchemy to the new science of chaos theory written by mathematician, practicing Jungian psychologist, and life-long amateur magician Robin Robertson. Here Dr. Robertson overviews the entire series and introduces several fundamental alchemical principles. 2007-10-06T20:10:00+00:00 http://www.dharmacafe.com/peacelaw/peace-is-childs-play/ http://www.dharmacafe.com/site/peace-is-childs-play/#When:19:37:00Z Dr. O. Fred Donaldson travels the world to play with children, adults, and even all kinds of non-human creatures (including wolves!). The mission of his extraordinary explorations of our mundane pastime? Nothing less than peace. 2007-09-18T19:37:00+00:00 http://www.dharmacafe.com/new-science/ancient-physics-modern-myths-paul-laviolettes-pathbreaking-genesis-of-the-c/ http://www.dharmacafe.com/site/ancient-physics-modern-myths-paul-laviolettes-pathbreaking-genesis-of-the-c/#When:19:55:00Z For those who are open to a new and unfamiliar theory of microphysics, an unusual understanding of cosmogenesis, a serious consideration of a host of conventionally-red-flagged, status-quo-tabooed, lunatic-fringe topics (including ancient metaphysics, the Tarot, astrology, Atlantis, and the I Ching), a comprehensive and alarmingly specific correlation of subquantum physics with ancient creation myths, and an across-the-board, no-holds-barred rejection of every significant tenet of twentieth century relativistic cosmology, there is probably no better place to begin. 2007-08-22T19:55:00+00:00 http://www.dharmacafe.com/life-cycles/faith-and-disillusionment-an-interview-with-dr-michael-eigen/ http://www.dharmacafe.com/site/faith-and-disillusionment-an-interview-with-dr-michael-eigen/#When:17:34:00Z Michael Eigen is widely acknowledged to be the finest, most profound psychoanalytic writer of our time. In a review of one of Dr. Eigen’s works, Christopher Bollas writes:  “Eigen has not only assimilated the works of his intellectual tradition, they have traveled a dense journey into his unconscious and returned in the form of spontaneous original thinking, as rare as the authors he admires.  Do we know of any one who writes like an evocative amalgam of William Blake, Mark Twain, Freud, and Raymond Chandler?  Eigen’s voice is unique; his vision is singular yet embracing, his mysticism is of this earth yet transcendent, and each of his chapters is a wonderful ‘spot in time’.” Dr. Michael Eigen is Associate Clinical Professor of Psychology in the Post Doctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis at New York University, and Senior Member of the National Psychological Association of Psychoanalysis. He is also the editor of the Psychoanalytic Review. Dr.Michael Eigen was interviewed in September 2006 by New York Institute for Psychotherapy Training (NYIPT) faculty and supervisor, Dr. Regina Monti.  Dr. Eigen has a relationship with respected NYIPT going back to the 1970’s when he was a teacher and supervisor at the New Hope Guild. 2007-08-09T17:34:00+00:00 http://www.dharmacafe.com/pilgrims-journal/the-watered-ego/ http://www.dharmacafe.com/site/the-watered-ego/#When:21:02:00Z Brilliantly alliterative and punnish, Heather McHugh’s confident, sensual insights find the fissures and seams in our ordinary heedlessness. She has a gift for turning our touchy, unnoticed vulnerabilities into revelation. 2007-08-08T21:02:00+00:00 http://www.dharmacafe.com/gaia/how-to-befriend-a-tree/ http://www.dharmacafe.com/site/how-to-befriend-a-tree/#When:20:37:00Z Beginning practitioners of Chinese internal organ massage (Chi Nei Tsang) are taught how to commune with trees. Shouldn’t this be part of everyone’s education? 2007-07-21T20:37:00+00:00 http://www.dharmacafe.com/maps-consciousness/the-transcendence-of-consciousness/ http://www.dharmacafe.com/site/the-transcendence-of-consciousness/#When:01:57:01Z For all that is being written today about spirituality and the “new biology,”  bestselling science popularizer Guy Murchie’s classic work, “The Seven Mysteries of Life”, published in 1978, may come closest to touching divinity. 2007-07-12T01:57:01+00:00 http://www.dharmacafe.com/health-sexuality/jungle-medicine/ http://www.dharmacafe.com/site/jungle-medicine/#When:21:40:00Z   “In the spring of 2003, I spent a month on a little island in a lake not far from Pucallpa, Peru to drink ayahuasca with the Shipibo curandero, Mateo Arevalo. I had gone down there to investigate a story of a man who, by drinking ayahuasca every other day for two months, had been cured of a melanoma that western oncologists said would kill him within the year. I brought with me two people who also had cancer. They of course hoped that the ayahuasca would cure them, as well.” 2007-06-18T21:40:00+00:00 http://www.dharmacafe.com/pilgrims-journal/what-man-most-passionately-wants/ http://www.dharmacafe.com/site/what-man-most-passionately-wants/#When:01:24:00Z In the conclusion to “Apocalypse,” effectively his last literary will and testament, D. H. Lawrence restates the faith that animated all his work. The Apocalypse shows us what we are resisting, unnaturally. We are unnaturally resisting our connection with the cosmos, with the world, with mankind, with the nation, with the family. All these connections are, in the Apocalypse, anathema, and they are anathema to us. We cannot bear connection. That is our malady. We must break away, and be isolate. We call that being free, being individual. Beyond a certain point, which we have reached it is suicide. Well and good. The Apocalypse too chose suicide, with subsequent self-glorification. But the Apocalypse shows, by its very resistance, the things that the human heart secretly years after. By the very frenzy with which the Apocalypse destroys the sun and the stars, the world, and all kings and all rulers, all scarlet and purple and cinnamon, all harlots, finally all men together who are not ‘sealed’, we can see how deeply the apocalyptists are yearning for the sun and the stars and the earth and the waters of the earth, for nobility and lordship and might, and scarlet and gold splendour, for passionate love, and a proper unison with men, apart from this sealing business. What man most passionately wants is his living wholeness and his living unison, not his own isolate salvation of his ‘soul’. Man wants his physical fulfillment first and foremost, since now, once and once only, he is in the flesh and potent. For man, the vast marvel is to be alive. For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive. Whatever the unborn and the dead may know, they cannot know the beauty, the marvel of being alive in the flesh. The dead may look after the afterwards. But the magnificent here and now of life in the flesh is ours, and ours alone, and ours only for a time. We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh, and part of the living, incarnate cosmos. I am part of the sun as my eye is part of me. That I am part of the earth my feet know perfectly, and my blood is part of the sea. My soul knows that I am part of the human race, my soul is an organic part of the great human soul, as my spirit is part of my nation. In my own very self, I am part of my family. There is nothing of me that is alone and absolute except my mind, and we shall find that the mind has no existence by itself, it is only the glitter of the sun on the surface of the waters. So that my individualism is really an illusion. I am a part of the great whole, and I can never escape. But I can deny my connections, break them, and become a fragment. Then I am wretched. What we want is to destroy our false, inorganic connections, especially those related to money, and re-establish the living organic connections, with the cosmos, the sun and earth, with mankind and nation and family. Start with the sun, and the rest will slowly, slowly happen. 2007-06-05T01:24:00+00:00 http://www.dharmacafe.com/health-sexuality/medicalizing-young-women-a-dangerous-trend/ http://www.dharmacafe.com/site/medicalizing-young-women-a-dangerous-trend/#When:00:15:00Z   A new drug just approved by the FDA, “Lybrel,” is one of a new breed of pharmaceuticals that profoundly interfere with a woman’s menstrual cycle. While a few members of the medical establishment have questioned their safety and value, these drugs have received precious little public discussion. In her forthcoming book “What Women MUST Know To Protect Their Daughters From Breast Cancer,”  a pioneering voice in the women’s health movement sounds a serious warning about these strange new interventions in the order of nature. 2007-06-05T00:15:00+00:00 http://www.dharmacafe.com/philosophy-gnosis/the-most-deeply-distorted-and-misunderstood-intuition-of-all/ http://www.dharmacafe.com/site/the-most-deeply-distorted-and-misunderstood-intuition-of-all/#When:19:56:00Z 2007-05-31T19:56:00+00:00