Hari-kirtana das
resources for transforming consciousness
Social Commentary
What I remember most was how quickly I was able to accept what was happening. An eastward swing down Porter Street, a long residential mediary between two busy thoroughfares, offers an easy and enjoyable tree-lined descent to cyclists with a modicum of common sense. But am I a sensible cyclist? Nope. I was coasting down a curve after leaving a friend’s house near the […]
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After a couple of weeks of watching the competing narratives coming out of the impeachment inquiry, I felt inspired to sit with the question: how do we know what’s true? Conventional wisdom tells us that we live in a post-truth world where up can mean down, forward means backward, and left and right mean really left and right. Separating fact […]
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I don’t know why I’m so surprised when I meet young people who have no interest in voting. After all, I didn’t vote the first few times I could have. Watching the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement play out on the nightly news inspired my youthful interest in politics. But by the time I graduated from high school […]
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During a recent visit with my in-laws down in Southern Virginia, we drove out to Poplar Forest, Thomas Jefferson’s retreat home. Built as a perfect, single-story octagon with four elongated octagons set around an almost-perfect cube, Jefferson designed this architectural and engineering masterpiece to be his getaway from the hubbub of public life. Every year on the Fourth of July, Americans […]
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My first opportunity to learn a second language came when I was in Junior High School, what we now call Middle School. Back then, Latin, Spanish, French, and German were the standard choices and perhaps they still are. By the will of providence, my school district offered the rare opportunity to take Russian. I have both a penchant for novelty […]
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The Power of Truthfulness
It’s said that we live in an unfortunate season of time; a time when simple living and elevated thinking give way to complicated entanglements and diminished reasoning, when purity gives way to pollution, mercy gives way to malevolence, and truthfulness gives way to falsehood. It’s a time when people are needlessly quarrelsome, consistently misguided, unlucky, and, above all, always disturbed. […]
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