Fragments of Contemplation

This book is not linear, yet it has a goal-awakening to the mystical depth of life. My path to that depth has not been direct, since it has been marked by detours, backslidings, awakenings, disappointments, dark nights of the soul, and golden mountaintop mornings. I have responded to all of this with words: poems, journal entries, manifestos, aphorisms, and the first pages of numerous started but not finished articles and books (as well as published articles and books). This book is a gathering of many of these unpublished attempts to describe countless moments of elation, surprise, despair, or joy on the spiritual path.This book reflects my own journey, and it is not as straight and as methodical as some may desire. Although I sometimes imagine that I would have liked nothing more than to have been an ascetic in a Himalayan hermitage meditating calmly for a dozen hours a day for fifty years, this has not been the path that has unfolded karmically and dharmically before my feet. So I have taken my spiritual life as I could get it while I was on the run.These fragments of contemplation are news reports or dispatches from the ancient and unbroken spiritual heritage of humanity, which has come to me mostly through the study and practice of Hindu schools of yoga, Vedānta, and bhakti, Mahāyāna and Theravāda Buddhist meditation, and Christian mystical theology, east and west. My personal practice has long cycled through these traditions, ever and again, like the change of the seasons. If you would like to share this journey with me, you need not start at the beginning or at the end of this book. Just open the book on impulse or with a random intention and read a bit here and there until the wisdom that might help you on your own journey emerges. Then, you can put the book aside-until perhaps the next time you need a fragment of contemplation as you run through a hectic week.