Crashingly Beautiful

Celebrated composer, Laurence Rosenthal recounts his experience with LSD in our summer issue: THE WILD: 

I had known about drugs given to novices in mystical schools of the East at the beginning of their training, for the purpose of providing a confirming glimpse of the kind of state they might one day reach through their own inner work. In fact it was a motive related to this idea that led me to try LSD. And now the mounting magnificence of the hours, growing constantly more radiant, finally melted all resistance.

To read the entire essay, click here.

Lisa Starr remembers beloved poet, Mary Oliver in our summer issue, THE WILD: 

We now know, through some of the later poems, a few of the details about the abuse she endured as a child, and we also know that she used her craft to transform not only her own suffering, but also the heartbreaking nature of the world—the fact, say, that everything and everyone is going to die—into a thing of beauty. Think of ‘Night and The River;’ think of the snapping turtle she found and captured in the city and released into a nearby pond because: “Nothing’s important/except that the great and cruel mystery of the world,/of which this is a part,/ not be denied.”

Read it here.

Pictured: Mary Oliver, photograph by Tricia Spoto

The Spring 2019 Issue, CHANGE & THE CHANGELESS is now available on newsstands and online!

FOCUS | From the Editor

In his heralded poem “Burnt Norton,” T.S. Eliot speaks of “The still point of the turning world,” a near perfect expression of Change and the Changeless. Eliot attended lectures in 1920s London by the Russian philosopher P.D. Ouspensky, featured in this Spring 2019 issue of Parabola; no surprise as the search for that still point is a perennial spiritual quest, one that has inspired seekers from the Buddha to Thoreau, Thomas Merton, and countless others including G.I. Gurdjieff, Ouspensky’s own teacher.

If we can rest in that stillness, the sages say, we will find there “the peace…that surpasses all understanding”; or “I Am”; or God: call it what you will, it is the Center that does hold. To reach it requires effort and guidance. And so this issue opens with meditations on the changeless and change by masters of the spirit: Ramana Maharshi, Lewellyn Vaughan-Lee, and Adyashanti. At this year’s World Parliament of Religions, those who share those teachers’ visions and many others exchanged their practices and wisdoms; a report by Trebbe Johnson appears in these pages.

This issue delves into less traditional realms as well. There is a powerful photo essay on sand dunes by David Ulrich; a call to conscience and common sense from Lucinda Herring, a pioneer of the green burial movement; an exploration of hidden esoteric wisdom in Shakespeare; and a brief visit with an extraordinary man in touch with both change and the changeless, Mister Fred Rogers.

May this issue of Parabola serve you well.

—Jeff Zaleski

Cover Description: Unsplash.com. Photograph by Yuran Ding

“Much on earth is hidden from us; but to make up for that we have been given a precious mystic sense of our living bond with the other world, with the higher heavenly world, and the roots of our thoughts and feelings are not here but in other worlds. That is why the philosophers say that we cannot understand the reality of things on earth. God took seeds from different worlds and sowed them on this earth, and His garden grew up and everything came up that could come up. But what grows lives and is alive only through the feeling of its contact with other mysterious worlds. If that feeling grows weak or is destroyed in you, the heavenly growth will die away in you. Then you will be indifferent to life and even grow to hate it. That’s what I think.”

—Father Zossima from Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karazamov, trans. by Constance Garnett (New York: New American Library, 1957). 

Wisdom gathered in our Spring 1984 Issue on Hierarchy, available in our online store here.

“By embarking on the spiritual path, an aspirant is attempting to encounter silence firsthand. This is the quintessential journey in life–the inner sojourn. It is returning to a source long ago forgotten but often glimpsed at moment unawares. Recapturing that which flitters on the periphery of awareness is the goal of the mystic. …The mystic consciously dives into silence, at first unfelt. With repeated practice it becomes a living, palpable Presence filled with immeasurable vitality and boundless, nondual continuity. But what causes this gradual revelation?

First we need to discover why we do not experience silence. The simplest answer is that we are habituated to noise. We are addicted to novelty, sensation, to ourselves. Fuss and commotion, mental chattering, and outer stimulation occupy our minds from dawn to dusk. The twentieth-century Japanese Zen master Nan-in rightly noted that we are overflowing with our own ideas and opinions; to learn Zen we must first empty our minds. But there is no room for such emptiness. When one is clattering away on a keyboard sixteen hours every day, the capacious pockets of silence are kept well at bay. We thereby deafen ourselves to the underlying silence we would otherwise clearly hear.“

—John Roger Barrie: “The Deepest Silence,” from PARABOLA, VOL. 33, No 1., Spring 2008: Silence. Read the essay here: