Each of us, in our own way, is seeking liberation. We want to experience the rapture of reality. We have been taught to pursue this through addition. We want to add happiness, prosperity, love, success. Yet no matter how much we add to ourselves...
I was on the wrestling team in high school. I wrestled at 123 lbs. My best friend on the team, in fact my best friend throughout the final two years of high school, worked after school and on weekends in his father’s butcher shop. He got me a...
Imagine: every company hires a mystic to sit in the executive circle as an advocate of consciousness. His or her role is to enter meditative communion with the source of life, there to dwell and listen to the goings-on in the meetings. The mystic's...
A few years ago, I took an executive team to the Green Gulch Zen Center in Mill Valley, California for a three-day retreat. Our agenda was to review corporate goals, renew commitments, and strengthen relationships. Well after the first day’s...
The governors of each state must execute the guilty person. I say the governor because that is the person who, in the system we have created, carries the power of clemency: the governor can commute a death sentence. The governor that we have elected...
This column was inspired by a conversation with a client, and while I am addressing him, it has implications for all of us. A few years ago, I was consulted by the president of a manufacturing company, and it was there that I first heard about...
No one I know has penetrated the koan of leadership. A koan is a riddle, the solution to which can only be found by going completely beyond all conditioning and thought. The solution originates from a place utterly free from image, belief, and...
There is a lot of talk about importing spirituality into business as an antidote to various forms of malaise. I think it’s important to ask, “Will it fit?” Personally, I don’t think so, because it would be like trying to...
I am sometimes consulted by people in the corporate sector to shed light on a particular situation or relationship. In one such case, I walked into the office of a client and he looked at me as though I were an alien from outer space, still dirty...
I have been searching for a metaphor to describe the ending of the spiritual path, about which people never speak. I found it today, or rather it found me, in the theater. In the movie “Shine” a young pianist named David Helfgott wanted...