In the autumn of 2006 I took up temporary residence in a small town in the mountains of New Mexico. Still wrestling with some fairly acute inner demons, I yearned for extended stretches of silence and remote, solitary nature walks. My routine was simple: each morning I'd read a few >>>>

It's a discovery unique to the earnest spiritual seeker: one day it is discovered that a longtime source of angst or illness is no longer as acute or has simply vanished. For a time I may not even recognize the change, may still feel anxious or lost or melancholy; may >>>>

Searching for peace, happiness, truth, God, meaning, I spent years exploring a variety of religious, spiritual, metaphysical, and alternative teachings. One by one, however, each failed me due to their various inventor-inspired rites, rituals, teachers, and related orthodoxies. Note here the inventor wasn't the mystic behind those religions. To the >>>>

Spirituality is often dismissed as the domain of fantasists, the reasoning being that if one can't touch, smell, hear, taste, see or think it, it's of no tangible benefit to those occupied by the 'real world.' Yet what most of our species thinks of as the real world - the >>>>

Because we spend our lives driven by thought, it can be terribly difficult for even the tiniest snippet of Truth to edge its way into our consciousness. Without such Truths, the inner journey lacks legs. I've always suspected this is in part what Thoreau meant by 'the mass of men >>>>

A meta-analysis of studies on psilocybin show that high doses of the substance can alleviate symptoms of depression in people at levels comparable to the SSRI drug escitalopram, which is used to treat major depressive episodes. Researchers found that patients fared better with psilocybin - the active ingredient in 'magic >>>>