WRITINGS

Here is a sampling of articles and reviews I have written and interviews I have conducted.

From Hired Guns to Healers: The Emerging Movement to Renew Legal Culture

Today, few people outside the legal profession have any notion that a serious movement is afoot to end the widespread materialism, vindictiveness and cold self-interest of legal practice. The assumption among the general public is that lawyers are ruthless sharks and they love it that way. But a recent study shows that sixty five per cent of practicing lawyers are deeply unhappy with the state of their profession. A sneaking suspicion is starting to emerge that lawyers may be human after all and they have had enough of the seedy and reptilian ethics so widespread in current American jurisprudence.
It’s not clear when the turning point was reached. Perhaps a nadir occurred when O.J. Simpson’s trial revealed to the world that big money and fancy lawyers can buy almost anyone freedom today. Or perhaps it was the grotesque and hypocritical politicization of the law around the presidential impeachment farce. Or maybe it was simply one final distasteful display of Judge Judy’s distinctly non-judicial rudeness and intemperance. We may never know, as we could all offer our own examples of when the dismal state of law today was revealed in all its pathos and shame. But what we do know is that lawyers in increasing numbers are demanding changes in the way the law is both taught and practiced. And they are serious.
Read More

The truth about Rudolf Steiner

Exactly one hundred years ago something spiritually remarkable was happening in Central Europe. A figure had emerged with the most profound insight into the deepest mysteries of the human experience: death, reincarnation, the existence of higher worlds, and the destiny of human evolution. He was highly educated in Western philosophy and science, widely read in cultural and artistic matters, and possessed a magnetic gift as a public speaker and writer. Over the course of the next twenty five years he gave over six thousand lectures, none of them the same, wrote over twenty books, and founded major new impulses in education, agriculture, medicine and numerous other disciplines. A century later the schools that developed from his spiritual insight into the unfoldment of the child constitute the world’s most widespread, independent approach to education. His organic approach to farming and agriculture preceded the back to the land movement of the Sixties by half a century and is now widely practiced. And villages inspired by his work for “those in need of special care,” adults and children with developmental disabilities, are found on every continent.
Surely such a figure would be a household name among the millions in North American who consider themselves part of the consciousness community – people concerned with the very issues to which this individual had devoted his life. It would be hard to imagine that someone so dedicated to serving humanity and so successful in his efforts would be mostly unknown to the many who take pride in their commitment to spiritual and social renewal.
Read More

Findhorn at Forty

The story of the Findhorn Community in Northern Scotland has become one of the inspirational legends of the last forty years. It tells the tale of three individuals, a British couple and their Canadian friend, who found themselves unemployed and penniless in 1962. With nowhere else to turn, they towed their green caravan to a remote and windswept trailer park thirty miles east of Inverness and began to scratch a modest existence from the poor and sandy soil. But these were not ordinary people. Eileen Caddy, the mother of three young boys, had a disciplined contemplative practice that enabled her in moments of great quiet to hear “the still, small voice within.” Dorothy Maclean found that she had the gift of attunement to what she called the devas, the angelic presences within and behind the world of nature. And Peter Caddy, a former RAF officer and hotel manager, was an energetic man of action and strong intuition who reposed a profound faith in the spiritual attunement of his two colleagues.
Read More

The International Holistic Centers’ Gathering

Over the last quarter century or more, many of us have clung to the notion that there is some kind of awakening of consciousness happening throughout the planet. Countless spiritual visionaries have spoken of a global paradigm shift, but in Bush=s retrograde America can we really see any evidence that this is happening? Skeptics might do well to examine a little known event that has passed unnoticed by most observers – the annual International Gathering of Holistic Centers that took place recently at Hollyhock, Canada=s beautiful island retreat in British Columbia.
Read More

 

Looking Deeper Into Palin’s Beliefs

Published in Huffington Post
As the world awaits Obama’s accession to power with unlimited hope and enthusiasm, this is certainly a time to celebrate the success of American democracy. Optimism and idealism reign supreme and it’s about time after far too many years of deep disappointment. But a dark shadow mars the American political landscape. What will happen to the extreme right wing embodied in Sarah Palin’s ascendancy to the national stage? Will it slide into well deserved obscurity or will it continue to plague the American body politic? It seems to me that this is a crucial question as we look ahead.
As the Republican Party attempts to regroup and begins to splinter between the moderate and far right wings, progressive thinkers will have to be conscious of any tendency to smugness. No need to worry, some say. If Palin’s crowd comes out on top of the power struggle they will be so extreme and irrelevant that they will attract insufficient numbers to ever pose a significant threat again. They can be gleefully consigned to history there to be viewed occasionally as a bizarre relic of a disturbed and wacky time in the country’s political journey.
Read More

The Seeker Chronicles

Interview with me in the online travel magazine, Brave New Traveler.
Read More

 

 

 

 

Interview with Frederick Franck on his Art, his Life and his Work

Frederick Franck who was a much loved friend and honored member of the New York Open Center faculty died in June at the age of 97. In the over 20 years that we were blessed to have him in our lives, he inspired thousands of people through his books, his workshops on the Zen of Seeing and his magical presence. He was a renaissance man, a painter, sculptor, author of over 20 books and creator, with his wife Claske, of Pacem in Terris, a public oasis of peace and beauty filled with his inspired works of art. He inspired us throughout with his boundless creativity, his irrepressible humor, his indomitable spirit and his generosity of heart. He will be greatly missed.
Ralph: Frederick, I would like to ask you about your early life. I know you were born in Maastricht in the Netherlands, and in many ways your life has spanned this whole century.
Franck: For me, the century began on the 4th of August, 1914 when I was five years old. On that day, I remember walking with my grandfather and seeing a proclamation pasted on a wall by the Dutch army. I also remember the first bombardment of Visey, which is a little town 16 kilometers south of Maastricht. I saw a zeppelin fly over–sometimes I think I imagined it, but I remember my father saying, “Look at that!” Then, almost at once, endless files of refugees started to trek over the border past our house. It is as clear to me as if it happened yesterday. I remember an old man in this endless file of people. He was carrying a little cage with a canary in it. I was standing there eating grapes, which I started to throw. It was a kind of impudent gesture of compassion.
Read More

Interview with Rene Querido on Waldorf Education and the Path of Anthroposophy

In the first quarter of this century, the Austrian philosopher and educator Rudolf Steiner articulated one of the most extraordinary worldviews in modern times: Anthroposophy. Filled with profound insights that are simultaneously practical and spiritual, it has given birth to numerous successful and enduring initiatives in such fields as Waldorf education, biodynamic agriculture, the Camphill communities for those with mental disabilities in need of special care, and many creative developments in architecture, medicine, and even banking. In fact, the Waldorf schools now constitute the largest grouping in the world in the field of private education. Yet Anthroposophy remains in general, poorly understood and little recognized outside Europe, despite its many achievements.

Given the exploding interest today in alternative forms of education, Lapis felt it was time to talk to one of the major influences in the development of Waldorf schools in America, Rene Querido. Born in Holland and brought up in a family with no religious orientation, he escaped the invading Nazis and came to Britain as a child in the midst of the Blitz. He was introduced to the work of Rudolf Steiner by an enigmatic Cockney workman while working in an art store, and went on to teach in one of England’s early Waldorf schools. He first came to the States in the early Sixties and returned in the Seventies to establish Rudolf Steiner College in Fair Oaks, California, the West Coast’s leading center for Waldorf education. Now retired, he discusses here the nature of his life’s work and the deeper spiritual insights about the world to be found within Anthroposophy.
Read More

Interview with David Spangler on the State of the American Soul 2005
David Spangler is one of the most remarkable spiritual seers of our time. For many years he has demonstrated a profound attunement to the higher levels of reality beyond the material world. Yet he is a spiritual researcher with a difference — he has always had an intense engagement with current affairs and the significance of world events in the larger context of the evolution of consciousness. Who better, then, to discuss with Lapis’ editor Ralph White the state of America’s soul?
David Spangler has been writing, lecturing, and teaching since the early seventies, when he was codirector of the spiritual community of Findhorn in Northern Scotland. He is the author of Revelation: The Birth of a New Age; Emergence: The Rebirth of the Sacred; Everyday Miracles; A Pilgrim in Aquarius; The Call; and most recently Parent as Mystic, Mystic as Parent.
Read More

An Interview with Andrew Harvey on Sacred Activism
Andrew Harvey discusses with Lapis editor Ralph White his experience of the Divine Mother and his views on the dangers of gurus. He also argues that an authentic spirituality can never be mired in narcissism but must instead take service to the world as its primary ethic. We need a mystic activism that fuses a contemplative awareness of the divine with an impassioned devotion to justice, the environment, and the alleviation of suffering.

Born to British parents in India in 1952, Andrew Harvey at nine was sent to England to begin his education. At twenty-one, he was elected the youngest Fellow in the history of All Soul’s College, Oxford. But academic life began to feel hollow to Harvey. Sick at heart, he abandoned what he had come to see as “the concentration camp of reason”, and returned to India to look for a spiritual path.
There, he studied Hindu mysticism at the ashram of Sri Aurobindo and with Tibetan Buddhist master Thuksey Rinpoche, drawing on the latter experience for his 1983 book A Journey in Ladakh. He returned briefly to Europe, but a lingering dissatisfaction haunted him.
Read More

An Interview with Russell Hemenway on American Political Culture
Russell Hemenway has for fifty years been a true warrior spirit in American politics, combating the power of the radical right from the days of Joe McCarthy to the contemporary influence of the Christian Coalition. As National Director of the National Committee for an Effective Congress, he has been on the inside of countless political campaigns and has witnessed up close the changes wrought in our political culture by the rising influence of big money, television advertising, and attacks based on a candidate’s personal life. In this presidential election year, Ralph talked to him about his rich life experience at the heart of American political culture and the insights it has brought him.
Read More

Reviews

Consuming Desires: Culture, Consumption and the Pursuit of Happiness edited by Roger Rosenblatt
At a time when the power of consumerism drives not only the American but also the global economy, this is a timely and valuable book. Roger Rosenblatt, best known for his commentary for The Newshour on PBS, has compiled a stimulating and varied series of essays by mostly well-known writers like William Greider and Bill McKibben who ponder questions of serious contemporary relevance. From where does this rapacious appetite for more spring? And what is the predicament it leaves us in today when the environmental consequences of our unrelenting obsessions with buying and having are increasingly apparent?
Read More

The Last Mughal by William Dalrymple

For anyone interested in the world of mid-Nineteenth-Century India, this is a wonderful book. William Dalrymple has established himself as one of the most original and compelling authors writing today about the Indian sub-continent and the Middle East. His capacity to paint graphic word pictures of lost worlds, his masterly storytelling abilities and scholarship, and his clear sympathy for the Sufi culture of the late Mughal Dynasty all make his work compulsively readable. This book tells the poignant tale of the last Mughal emperor of India in the days leading up to the Indian Mutiny (or First War of Independence, as the Indians call it).
Read More