Tag: spirituality

Psychedelics, Prayer, and the Big Question: What’s Really Going On?

I’m scrolling Facebook, minding my own business, and up pops Timothy Leary — yeah, that Timothy Leary — calling LSD a “microscope for consciousness.” And I’m sitting there thinking, Jesus, Tim, that’s one hell of a claim. But it stuck with me. Got under my skin a little. Made me wonder about awareness, perception, and all the ways people try to crack open the hood on their own minds.

Leary swore psychedelics could peel back the wallpaper and show you what’s really going on behind the scenes. But the more I chewed on it, the more I thought: are drugs the only way people get there? Or have monks and mystics been hitting the same level of awareness for centuries without dropping anything stronger than tea?

You look at Buddhist monks — guys who sit still longer than most of us can stay awake — and they talk about slipping into states where the “self” just dissolves. No ego, no boundaries, no noise. Sounds a hell of a lot like what Leary’s crowd described, minus the tie‑dye and the Grateful Dead soundtrack. They get there through breath, silence, and discipline. No shortcuts. No chemical boost. Just decades of showing up.

Then you’ve got Christian mystics writing about ecstatic union with God, Sufi mystics spinning themselves into divine drunkenness, Indigenous traditions using rhythm and fasting to shift consciousness. Different cultures, different methods — but they all end up describing the same thing: a mind cracked open wider than the everyday grind ever allows.

Leary’s microscope was chemical. The monk’s is meditation. The mystic’s is prayer. The Sufi’s is rhythm.

Different tools, same damn question: What is consciousness, really? Is it just neurons firing, or is there something deeper we can tune into if we know how?

Science is still poking at it with machines. Religion is still trying to wrap words around it. And regular people — folks like you and me — are still trying to experience it without losing our balance.

Some take the long road — decades of practice, discipline, devotion. Some take the shortcut — a few hours that feel like a lifetime.

And honestly?

Who are we to say the drugs aren’t the HOV lane to the same destination? Who are we to say the monk and the psychonaut aren’t both touching the same absolute truths — just arriving by different routes?

Maybe awareness has more than one doorway. And maybe every doorway leads to the same room.

Don’t get me wrong — I’m not telling you to drop acid or freeze your backside on a monastery rock. I’m just thinking out loud here.

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The Diamond Sutra.

The Diamond Sutra is set up as a conversation between the Buddha and an elderly disciple named Subhuti. Two voices, one asking, one answering, both circling around the same old questions we still ask today: What matters? What lasts? How do we see the world without getting lost in it?

Some dates slip past us without a sound, and some carry a little echo if you stop long enough to listen. This one goes all the way back to 868 A.D., when somebody — a monk, a printer, a pair of hands we’ll never know — pressed inked wood against paper and created what we now call the oldest printed book with a publication date. The Diamond Sutra. Sixteen feet of teachings, questions, answers, and the quiet persistence of human curiosity.

The word sutra comes from Sanskrit and means “teaching,” but it’s more than that. It’s a thread, a line connecting one mind to another across centuries. The Diamond Sutra is set up as a conversation between the Buddha and an elderly disciple named Subhuti. Two voices, one asking, one answering, both circling around the same old questions we still ask today: What matters? What lasts? How do we see the world without getting lost in it?

The physical book itself was printed from carved wooden blocks onto seven long strips of paper. Each page had its own block, carved by hand, reversed like a mirror, every line a small act of faith that someone in the future would want to read it. Those seven sheets were pasted together into a scroll about sixteen feet long — a book before books were bound the way we know them now. Imagine unrolling that thing, the slow reveal of words that had already traveled further than most people of that time ever would.

And then, like so many things, it vanished.

For more than a thousand years the scroll sat hidden away in Turkestan, sealed up with hundreds of other manuscripts in one of the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas. A whole library walled off, maybe to protect it, maybe to forget it, maybe because someone thought the world was ending and wanted to save what they could. We’ll never know. What we do know is that in 1900, a caretaker sweeping out a cave stumbled onto a doorway that hadn’t been opened in centuries. Behind it: bundles of manuscripts, paintings, scrolls, and among them, this sixteen‑foot conversation between a teacher and a disciple.

I like stories like this. They remind me that the things we make — the words we write, the thoughts we try to pin down — have a way of outliving us. They get lost, they get found, they get read by someone a thousand years later who has no idea who we were but still feels the spark of recognition. A voice calling across time saying, “I was here. I wondered about the same things you do.”

Maybe that’s why I keep writing. Maybe that’s why any of us do.

SUBSCRIPTIONS ARE ALWAYS FREE

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Mentors

Mentors can come from the docks, the back roads and back alleys, or, surprisingly, a monastery in Kentucky. Thomas Merton was one of mine. He wasn’t my only mentor, but he was a steady voice that helped me find clarity.

He was born in 1915 in Prades, France—a place distant from here, and even further removed from the Trappist life he ultimately embraced. Throughout his life, he authored 50 books, wrote 2,000 poems, and kept journals that revealed a relentless pursuit of personal growth.

What I admired wasn’t just that he was a monk. It was the strength underneath. He questioned everything, including himself. He spent time in silence, listening to things most of us drown out with noise, drinking, TV, or anything else we use to avoid facing ourselves.

He wasn’t afraid to say he didn’t have all the answers. Sometimes, he wasn’t even sure he was asking the right questions. That kind of honesty can surprise you and help you see things more clearly.

He taught me that solitude isn’t about escaping. It’s about taking care of yourself, like cleaning a boat so it keeps moving. He showed me that silence isn’t empty; it’s where change happens. He also taught me that being human is slow, difficult work, often done without recognition and against challenges.

I’ve had other mentors—some loud, some quiet, some unexpected. But Merton taught me how to be still without losing myself, how to listen, and how to stay honest even when the truth is hard to accept.

Every year on his birthday, I remember him. Though he was born in France in 1915 and eventually became a Kentucky monk, he somehow found his way into my journey. Even from behind monastery walls, he found ways to help others see new possibilities.

We don’t choose all our mentors. Some arrive unexpectedly, shaped by life, and turn out to be just what we need to keep going.

Now, fifty years later, after running up and down many roads, I find myself once again sitting in silence. Being alone is sometimes the hardest part—quiet, remembering who I have been, and, most importantly, who I am. I sometimes drift with the tide, or swim against it when necessary, here on the shores of Rambling Harbor.

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I Was There When the Soup Was Still steaming, and now I’m steaming

Father J. Edward Guinan didn’t start a charity. He started a rebellion wrapped in mercy.

In 1970, fresh from the Paulist Council and the restless spirit of George Washington University, Guinan and a handful of students opened the Community for Creative Non-Violence (CCNV)—a communal home dedicated to radical service, protest, and poetic resistance. His vision was seismic and straightforward:
“To resist the violent; to gather the gentle; to help free compassion and mercy and truth from the stockades of our empire.”

I joined not long after being released from Danbury Federal Correctional Institution, where I’d served time for refusing induction into the Vietnam War. That refusal wasn’t just political—it was spiritual. I walked out of Danbury with a record and a rhythm, and CCNV gave me a place to put both.

We met at the Newman Center, planned protests like prayers, and fed strangers like family. The Zacchaeus Community Kitchen had just opened near the White House, and Mother Teresa—not yet a household name—came quietly to serve the first bowls of soup. She sat with the guests. That was enough.

In 1973, we launched the Hospitality House, offering medical care to the homeless. It wasn’t a clinic—it was a promise. We fed 200, sometimes 300 people a day. Seven days a week. No grants. Just grit.


By 1974, we opened Euclid House, a communal living space and organizing hub. We fasted for famine relief. We slept on floors. We argued about scripture and soup recipes. We were broke, burning with purpose, and building a sanctuary from scraps.

And now—in 2025—I find myself thinking about those days more than ever. The government is shut down. SNAP benefits are expiring. Families are forced to choose between rent and food. Shelters are full. The hunger we fought in 1973 is still here—just dressed in new bureaucracy.

And I’m mad as hell.
Not just at the politicians who play chicken with people’s lives.
But in the silence. The scrolling. The shrugging.
The way we let hunger become background noise.
Where is the outrage?
Where is the yelling on social media?
Where is the mercy?

CCNV wasn’t perfect. But it was real. It was radiant.
And I was there when the steam rose from the first pot,
when protest became presence,
and when mercy moved in.
You don’t have to go out and get arrested.
You don’t have to directly feed the hungry.
You don’t have to open your home to the homeless.
But for Christ’s sake—YELL.

Yell at the fat-cat politicians who play with poor people’s lives like it’s a game.
Yell like someone’s life depends on it.
Because it does.
Rambling Harbor is where memory meets resistance.
Where soup becomes scripture.
Where sanctuary is stitched from scraps.

I was there.
And I’m still here.
And I’m still yelling.
I’m no longer at CCNV. I’m not peeling potatoes or stirring soup.
But like in the movie Network—the one someone asked about the other day—I’m still yelling.
Through my posts. Through my websites. Through my letters to Congress.
I am yelling that I am mad as hell.
And if you’re not—
You could be.
You should be.

And for Christ’s sake, don’t tell me not to call the fat cats fat
When children are skinny from need.
I’m yelling.
And you could too.

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