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A Reflection on the Soul’s Journey Before there was a name, there was a light. It existed in the Field of Consciousness, where no horizon marked an ending and no distance separated one soul from another. The Creator was not somewhere beyond this place. The Creator was the infinite field itself—the source of all consciousness, the presence from which awareness arose and within which every soul existed. Within that vastness were countless pinpoints of light. Each pinpoint was a

What Shelters Us in the Wilderness Now Clouds of Glory There are moments when an ancient story reaches across thousands of years and suddenly feels as though it was meant for this moment. That happened to me at a Sukkot dinner with friends. Our delightful hostess read We Are All Sukkah-Dwellers, a reflection by Rabbi Eliezer B. Diamond of the Jewish Theological Seminary. In it, I encountered something I had never heard of before: the Clouds of Glory — the Ananei HaKavod. Rabb

Where does the music come from? Like most of us, I assumed consciousness came from the brain. The equation seemed simple enough. Build a sufficiently complex nervous system, add billions of neurons, connect them through trillions of synapses, and somewhere within that astonishing electrical machinery the experience of being you somehow appears. Science still does not know exactly how that happens. We can watch neurons fire. We can map networks in the brain. We can observe wha

Mindfulness teaches us to return to the present. But what if meditation could also teach us how to leave it? I have been experimenting with a different kind of practice—one that does not treat memory or imagination as distractions. Instead of focusing only on the breath, a mantra, or the immediate moment, I allow consciousness to move deliberately through time. I begin in the present. Then I visit a happy memory. Not to become lost in nostalgia, but to reenter a moment of lov

When “Be Here Now” Asks Too Little of Consciousness Mindfulness has become a central spiritual practice of our time. Be present. Stay in the moment. Return to the breath. Don't get lost in the past. Do not become consumed by the future. There is wisdom in this. Anyone trapped in regret knows how merciless the past can become. Anyone who has lived with anxiety knows how frightening the future can seem. The present can be a refuge. A breath can become an anchor. The body can re

What Mother Earth and Father Time May Reveal About Consciousness There are two figures we have carried with us for so long that we rarely stop to consider what they actually mean. Mother Earth. Father Time. One is feminine. One is masculine. One gives us a place to exist. The other gives us a way to move through it. And somewhere between the two, perhaps, is consciousness. We call the Earth Mother for reasons that seem almost instinctive. She gives birth. She nourishes. She r

A reflection on identity, consciousness, and what the soul becomes through a human life. When we meet someone for the first time, we usually ask: What do you do? It is a reasonable question. We need somewhere to begin, and one’s occupation gives us an easy point of entry. It tells us how a person spends their days, what they know, and something about the world they move through. I say that I’m in the drapery and upholstery business. I have spent much of my adult life measurin

A father’s journey through grief, consciousness, and the mystery of what continues. There is a moment that occasionally arrives in conversation when I tell someone that I lost my son, Sam. It is rarely something I plan to say. The conversation simply reaches a place where leaving him out would feel less honest than speaking his name. So I say it. “My son passed.” And almost immediately, my attention shifts to the person hearing those words. I watch their expression change. I

The identities we weave—and what aging may ask us to loosen Penelope at the loom Saturday morning, I ran into a wise friend at the pâtisserie who shared a quote from a book he was reading. In The Craft of Zeus: Myths of Weaving and Fabric, John Scheid and Jesper Svenbro describe the individual as one “who is born a thread and dies a fabric.” We are born a thread. Then life begins weaving. We are given a name and placed within a family. Before we understand who we are, others