Focus | from the Editor

“Be still and know that I am God” instructs the 46th Psalm, making firm statements about Reality (“I am God”) and how to attain it (“Be still”). This Summer 2024 issue of Parabola draws upon that psalm in considering fundamental questions shared by many. Is there an ultimate Reality? If so, how can we experience it? How to discern the real from the illusory?

 I learned early that differing versions of reality are the rule—from the shock of hearing a new friend describe “the mean old Polish lady” down the block and realizing he meant my saintly grandmother, to a growing awareness that my Jewish friends were taught a reality parallel to but not the same as the Catholic one I studied. That lesson resonates throughout this issue, with its kaleidoscope of realities. Parabola editorial director Tracy Cochran leads off with a report on the varying realities encountered during a recent pilgrimage; journalist Lisa Teasley writes of an infinite reality, one that harbors visitations from the dead; P.D. Ouspensky celebrates “a mysterious being—Nature”; Zen priest and acclaimed actor Peter Coyote writes of becoming “intimate with Emptiness”; and legendary director Alejandro Jodorowsky encounters Carlos Castaneda, then an alternate reality by way of magic mushrooms.

Later in life, we come to understand that all of this constitutes the Many, the “ten thousand things” Zen teachers speak of. Is there a One that embraces all? To answer that, we turn to mystics, women and men practiced in gathering the Many into the One. Novelist Mary Osborne writes of the glorious visions of Hildegard von Bingen; from the Muslim tradition, from scholar H. Talat Haman, we learn of Husayn ibn Mansur al-Hallaj, who was executed for his claim “I am the Real”; and Vedanta teacher John Roger Barrie explores mysticism across traditions and within science.

Near this issue’s end, we approach the ultimate universal reality—death—with wise words from four great teachers including these from Chan Master Sheng Yen. May they guide your way:

“Busy with nothing, growing old.

Within emptiness, weeping, laughing.

Intrinsically there is no “I.”

Life and death, thus cast aside."

—Jeff Zaleski