A Talk with Brad Warner about There is No God and He is Always with You

Why did you write a book about God?

I got into Buddhist practice because I wanted to understand God. I didn’t grow up in a religious family so I had no indoctrination into beliefs about God. But in my teens I found that I really wanted to understand this idea of God. The religious people I encountered when I was growing up in rural Ohio seemed mostly just delusional and irrational. Science made sense and could be demonstrated to work, so I couldn’t reject it the way they did. And yet there seemed to be something valuable to this idea of God. I wanted to pursue it further. This book is the outgrowth of decades of personal inquiry into the question of whether or not there is a God. Not just inquiry through reading and thinking about the...

A Talk with Bill Plotkin about Wild Mind

What does it mean to have a wild mind?

As author Gary Snyder notes, “To speak of wilderness is to speak of wholeness.” To have a wild mind is to have a whole mind. People with wild minds are those who have cultivated and embodied their innate human wholeness — the full rainbow spectrum of capacities, talents, and sensibilities that constellate our evolutionary birthright. My new book, Wild Mind, is a field guide to the cultivation of this astonishing medley of wholeness. It introduces what I call the Nature-Based Map of the Human Psyche, which identifies and describes the four facets of indigenous human wholeness.

Collectively, these four facets of wholeness make up what I call the human Self...