Many years ago William S. Burroughs wrote: “The face of evil is always the face of total need.” I’ve kept this in a back corner of my mind until now when it seems necessary to bring the question of evil forward. Philosophical debates about the nature of evil, or religious commentaries on Satan, or struggles…

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.” Martin Luther King Jr. We need to remember these wise words now in our age of wildly out-of-balance individualism. I believe that centuries of…

Often when I meet somebody for the first time and they ask that ordinary question “What do you do?” – I hesitate. What’s safe to say? Is this someone who will hear that I’ve created WINN, a small magazine that publishes information about experiences and experiments about the non-material dimensions of reality, and think I’m…

By Celia Coates Stories, so many stories. And, there are so many kinds of stories – myths, fables, fairy tales, parables, news stories, yarns, personal accounts, and more. Whether it’s one person’s point of view or a collective outlook, there’s always a perspective when a story is told. Arthur Deikman, a psychiatrist and writer, published…

By Celia Coates 1954, like 2017, was a time of investigations, divisive politics, and anger. Senator Joseph McCarthy had begun his rise to prominence in 1950 and by 1954 he was the center of the Army-McCarthy Hearings. That was the year Phyllis McGinley, a Pulitzer Prize winning poet, published this poem, The Angry Man The…

By Celia Coates Most of us don’t spend much time asking deeply serious questions. It’s easier to ignore them or distract ourselves with something more amusing. So that’s where I’ll start – with an amusing story from THE NEW YORKER, “What does it all mean? Why are we here? These are questions with which philosophers…

By Celia Coates If you look up the meaning of “namaste” in Wikipedia you get a stripped down, basic definition: ‘namas’ means  ‘bow’ and ‘te’ means ‘to you’ – “I bow to you.” It’s described as a respectful greeting. But there is a great deal more to the word, and especially to the gesture, than…

By Celia Coates I enjoy reading about the wisdom of nature in NEW SCIENTIST. At the end of February the magazine published a very short article about the productive ingenuity of some ants. * Ants live in just-my-own-kind, exclusive communities and don’t share their homes or neighborhoods with other ants, but in the forests of…

By Celia Coates In the most recent J.K.Rowling movie one of the characters says, “When No-mags are afraid, they attack.” Because the story is set on this side of the Atlantic, No-mags is an Americanization of “Muggles”, the name used in the Harry Potter books for conventional people who oppose the magical ways of wizards….

By Celia Coates Our calendars say we are about to leave 2016 behind and begin a new year. What will 2017 be like? There’s more than one way to anticipate the future, but the most common way is to worry. When we worry we construct events and outcomes and turn various possibilities over and over…