Buddha at the Gas Pump

Stephan Bodian is a teacher in the nondual wisdom tradition of Zen, Dzogchen, and Advaita Vedanta and the founder and director of the annual School for Awakening, an intensive six-month program of exploration and study. His offerings are noted for their humor, warmth, spontaneity, and intimacy and combine direct pointers, lively dialogues, silent sitting, and guided self-inquiry. He’s the author o...

Stephen C. Meyer received his Ph. D. in the philosophy of science from the University of Cambridge. A former geophysicist and college professor, he now directs Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture. Meyer is author of the New York Times bestseller Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design and Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence f...

Chelan Harkin has been channeling ecstatic poetry for years and has now published two books in the past seven months, Susceptible to Light and Let Us Dance!: The Stumble and Whirl With The Beloved. Her publishing journey has been mystical and transformational and filled with "prayer experiments" gone right. Chelan has regularly been compared to the great mystic poets, Rumi, Hafiz, and Rilke. She l...

Ilia Delio, OSF holds the Josephine C. Connelly Chair in Christian Theology at Villanova University. Her area of research is Science and Religion with interests in artificial intelligence, evolution, quantum physics, and the import of these for Christian doctrine and life. She holds a doctorate in Pharmacology from Rutgers University, Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, and a doctorate in Hist...

From her teenage years onwards Tara has been deeply interested in personal growth and self-development and has dedicated her life to this quest. Tara holds an M.A. in Education and has post-graduate qualifications in gestalt therapy, body awareness therapy, and transpersonal therapy. She is a fully qualified and licensed psychotherapist and counselor. Tara has worked as a drug counselor, counselor...

Diederik was born in 1942 in a tiny village south of what now is known as Jakarta, Indonesia. The first three and a half years of his life were spent in Japanese POW camps and it was here that he formed most of his core beliefs, beliefs which he thought were his actual ‘character’. After some fifty years of self-loathing, alcohol, and drug abuse he decided there had to be a better way, it was time...

Laurence Freeman is a Benedictine monk and teacher and is Director of The World Community for Christian Meditation (WCCM) a global, inclusive contemplative community. He resides at the international centre of the WCCM at Bonnevaux Centre for Peace near Paris. With Irish and English roots, he was educated by the Benedictines and studied English Literature at New College, Oxford University. Before e...

Anita Moorjani is the New York Times bestselling author of What If This Is Heaven?: How Our Cultural Myths Prevent Us from Experiencing Heaven on Earth and Dying To Be Me: My Journey from Cancer, to Near Death, to True Healing. A beloved international speaker, she lives in the United States with her husband, Danny, and has dedicated her life to empowering the minds and hearts of people with her st...

Stephen Cope is the Scholar Emeritus at the renowned Kripalu Center in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. He is the author of many best-selling books on the topic of yoga and meditation. For over thirty years, his interest has been in bringing important but esoteric yoga scriptures to the mainstream, including, most recently, the two-thousand-year-old spiritual classic called The Bhagavad Gita, or "The S...

Born and brought up in Mumbai, Gautam faced one challenge after another fairly early in life. He remarks, “As a result, I grew up before my time.” Having to cope with the loss of his father at the young age of 14 gave rise to questions related to death, insecurity, and survival, which would affect most children faced with a similar loss. At the turn of the millennium (December 1999), Gautam’s inhe...

Sufi mystic and visionary Shaykh Fadhlalla Haeri is an enlightened spiritual master. His life and works serve as a reminder that spirituality is a science and an art vitally relevant to our times. Shaykh Fadhlalla grew up in an environment where religious scholars, as well as Sufi and mystics, were part of his formative experience. His love and understanding of the universality of the Qur'anic mes...

Richard Tarnas is a professor of psychology and cultural history at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, where he founded the graduate program in Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness. He teaches courses in the history of ideas, archetypal studies, depth psychology, and religious evolution. He frequently lectures on archetypal studies and depth psychology at Pacifica G...

Academic neurosurgeon Dr. Eben Alexander III, whose career includes decades as a physician and associate professor at Harvard Medical School and revered teaching hospitals, was once staunchly committed to the materialist world view -- the belief that the physical world is all that exists. His scientific belief system was altered by a 2008 transcendental near-death experience (NDE) in which a bacte...

All I ever did was emphatically declare, “I want to know God, NOW!”  It wasn’t long before I was fast-tracked into a reality I didn’t know existed, an inner world full of extraordinary gifts and ultimately liberation of the mind.  I’d stumbled upon a pamphlet that outlines a formula to regenerate one’s human race consciousness to Divine Consciousness, like a reboot, by calling forth into one’s min...

Ameeta was born and raised in Mumbai India and recalls two predominant family themes which influenced her formative years: intellectual curiosity and devotion to God. She was educated and conditioned to aspire to conventional success, which pursuit dominated the first three decades of her life. She consciously experienced the first stirrings of her deepest yearning following the cancer diagnosis a...

Richard Rohr is a Franciscan priest of the New Mexico Province. He is the founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation and academic dean of the CAC’s Living School. An internationally recognized author and spiritual leader, Fr. Richard teaches primarily on incarnational mysticism, non-dual consciousness, and contemplation, with a particular emphasis on how these affect the social justice iss...

A Jewish practitioner of Perennial Wisdom, Rabbi Rami Shapiro is an award–winning author of over thirty-six books on religion and spirituality. He received rabbinical ordination from the Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion and holds a PH.D. in religion from Union Graduate School. A rabbinic chaplain with the USAF for 3 years, a congregational rabbi for 20, and a professor of religiou...

Theresa Cheung was born into a family of spiritualists. She has a Masters degree from Kings College, Cambridge, and has written numerous bestselling dream, angel, afterlife, ritual, and spiritual titles and Encyclopedias, including two Sunday Times top 10 bestsellers. She has been a guest on Russell Brand's Under the Skin and Coast to Coast AM and featured in numerous newspapers and media. A few o...

Raymond Schumann is a fifth-generation carpenter with a high school education. A Roman Catholic upbringing left him sexually repressed. Adolescence left him a Soldier of Christ gone AWOL. In his twenties, he learned about dissociative disorder. The theory explained much. Help was not thick on the ground and ripe in the pod. Not in those days. A shrink who claimed to treat multiple personalities en...

Bruce Greyson, M.D., is the Chester F. Carlson Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry & Neurobehavioral Sciences and Director Emeritus of the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia. He was one of the founders of the International Association for Near-Death Studies, and for 27 years edited the Journal of Near-Death Studies. Dr. Greyson majored in psychology at Cornell University...

Sebene Selassie is a teacher, author, and speaker who explores the themes of belonging and identity through meditation, creativity, and spirituality. Born in Ethiopia and raised in Washington DC, she began studying Buddhism 30 years ago as an undergraduate at McGill University where she majored in Comparative Religious Studies. She has an MA from the New School where she focused on race and cultur...

Cynthia Bourgeault is a modern day mystic, Episcopal priest, and theologian. For thirty years she worked closely with Fr. Thomas Keating as a student, editor, and colleague and has taught and written extensively on Centering Prayer. She is a core faculty member at the Center for Action and Contemplation and founding director of an international network of Wisdom Schools. In addition to her work on...

Doug Scott, LCSW, works as a mental health counselor in his private practice in Dallas, Texas.  After graduating from college in 1997, he served as an international volunteer for two years in Bluefields, Nicaragua. This intense experience changed his life and he returned to the US to pursue graduate studies in clinical social work and pastoral ministry at Boston College. The nexus of spirituality...

Helané Wahbeh is the Director of Research at the Institute of Noetic Sciences and an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Neurology at Oregon Health & Science University. Dr. Wahbeh is clinically trained as a naturopathic physician and research trained with a Master of Clinical Research and two post-doctoral research fellowships. She has published on and spoken internationally abou...

Damo Mitchell has studied the martial, medical, and spiritual arts of Asia since the age of four. His studies have taken him across the planet in search of authentic masters. He is the technical director of the Lotus Nei Gong School of Daoist Arts and teaches Nei Gong in various locations around the world. He specializes in uncovering and studying with rare alchemical and spiritual lineages linked...