Not long after I turned 13, I found myself living with my father on the 11th floor of a Virginia apartment 20 minutes from downtown Washington, D.C. One morning, shortly before departing for his secretive Pentagon job, my father announced he'd be gone for an extended stretch of time due to growing concerns a nuclear[...]

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 contrary, anyone who studies 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 one they're busy sensing and[...]

Like most, I've experienced my share of suffering. Also like most, I turned to the usual suspects for help: psychoanalysis, drugs (legal and not-so-legal), sex, money, adventure, career, family, and so on. Some of it worked. Until it didn't. I suppose because a stretch of my childhood was particularly rough, my brand of suffering[...]