Author Ken McAlpine stands in his front yard one night in Ventura, California, trying to see the stars. His view is diminished by light pollution, making it hard to see much of anything in the sky. Our fast-paced, technologically advanced society, he concludes, is not conducive to stargazing or...

The world we inhabit is enchanted—every tree, rock, and star, and even "empty" space itself, is teeming with living energy and awareness. And it's all nearer to us than our own breath. Why, then, can't we see it? Because, according to Jeremy Hayward, we are taught not to. And because...

When the Peace Corps sends Susana Herrera to teach English in Northern Cameroon, she yearns to embrace her adopted village and its people, to drink deep from the spirit of Mother Africa—and to forget a bitter childhood and painful past. To the villagers, however, she's a rich American tourist,...

It's July 4, 1845. A soft-spoken young man named Henry David Thoreau has carefully constructed a small, simple cabin in the woods overlooking Walden Pond. For the next two years, his closest companions will be the chickadees, the woodchucks, and the quiet pines of the Walden Woods.

Henry...

Ellen is forty-six, divorced, and having no luck with personal ads when her Chinese girlfriend comes up with a plan: she has a brother in China, Zhong-hua, who’s lonely too. Maybe they’d like each other? Taking a leap of faith that most of us wouldn’t dare, Ellen travels to China...

In August 1968, naturalist-explorer Peter Matthiessen returned from Africa to his home in Sagaponack, Long Island, to find three Zen masters in his driveway—guests of his wife, a new student of Zen. Thirteen years later, Matthiessen was ordained a Buddhist monk. Written in the same format as...

This frank account by a longtime Zen student looks back over a journey that began in Berkeley in the heady sixties when the author experimented with psychedelics and started to study with Suzuki Roshi, who encouraged his students to find a genuine way of practicing Zen.

Imperialism. It has been the dominant and dominating political force on planet Earth for centuries—from the age of the great European empires to our own era of giant corporate takeovers. Its influence is felt in every area of our lives, from the global to the deeply personal. In this book,...

As one who has written extensively about the interior life, meditation, and psychotherapy, Ken Wilber—the leading theorist in the field of integral psychology—naturally arouses the curiosity of his numerous readers. In response to this curiosity, this one-year diary not only offers an...

This is the story of a determined woman who overcame great obstacles in order to achieve religious freedom. Born in eastern Tibet, Jamyang Sakya married into the powerful Sakya family, spiritual advisers of Kublai Khan and for years rulers of much of Central Asia. Her engaging personal story evokes...

Morihei Ueshiba (1883-1969), founder of the Japanese martial art of Aikido, is one of the greatest and most beloved martial artists in history. Remembering O-Sensei is a portrait of Ueshiba as told by his uchi-deshi, the students who lived and trained with him as his disciples. This...

In this delightful memoir, Bhante Walpola Piyananda, a Buddhist monk from Sri Lanka, shares his often amusing, often poignant experiences of life in America. Whether he's reasoning with a group of confrontational punks on Venice Beach, bridging the gap between a rebellious teenager and her traditional...

Soulfully Gayis a personal memoir of an intellectually rigorous gay man wrestling with fundamental issues of meaning and self-acceptance. Joe Perez finds himself on a quest to understand what it means to be gay at the intersection of conflicts between homosexuality and Christianity, faith...

She was the last person anyone would have expected to become a nun, yet she became one of the most famous nuns of all time. She was a brilliant administrator in a world where such vocations were all but closed to women. And above...

Listen to an audio excerpt online in MP3 format—click here.

She was the...