Amazon Has Deleted My Book Reviews

February 11, 2019
Without notice and without providing specifics, Amazon, a few days  deleted my 350 + book reviews, which took me thousands of hours to write. Although I doubt that it will do any good, you are welcome to complain to Amazon and ask that they re-post them. Below is their final response to me on this matter:

"We took this action because your Customer Content violated our guidelines and Conditions of Use. We won't reinstate your posting permissions for this account.

For more information, see our Customer Review Guidelines (and Conditions of Use:


I understand you're upset, and I'm sorry we haven't been able to address your concerns to your satisfaction. However, we won't be able to offer any additional insight or action on this matter.

Thanks for your understanding."

However, all is not lost. I have about 90% of the reviews in a Word document (though the reviews often don't identify the title or author), and many are available through the Way Back Machine. In the coming months, I will gradually post the reviews that I can salvage and that are worth posting. After I'm done posting all of them, I will arrange them in categories.
… Read the full article

Geistians, Zeitgeistians, and Trans-zeitgeistians

November 8, 2018
The word “Geist” is German, and means Spirit or Ghost. A “Geistian” is a person who lives in the timeless Holy Spirit (or Ghost). Such a person lives in the world, but is not of the world, is not of the zeitgeist, the spirit of the times. A Geistian is, spontaneously, a trans-zeitgeistian, for he always transcends, and is not implicated by, the zeitgeist, the temporal sociocultural milieu.


An individual can be a trans-zeitgeistian without being a Geistian. Such non-conformists and esotericists are “outsiders” who recoil from the madness and mediocrity of the mainstream sociocultural milieu, but their alienation is devoid of a Transcendental Abode that offers Sanctuary from the time-bound madness. These individuals understand the “phenomenology of the spirit (of the times),” but until they grok the “noumenology of the Holy (or Sacred) Spirit,” they will be stuck in “no-man’s land,” a place between the zeitgeist and the Geist.

… Read the full article

Causation, Correlation, Science, and Astrology

October 28, 2018
Is astrology a science? Yes and no. The astronomy of astrology is scientific, for it objectively identifies the positions of the sun, moon, planets, and stars in relation to a specific time and location on the earth. But how an astrologer interprets these positions (usually in relation to person) is subjective and an art.

It’s always fun for me to have conversations with naysayers of astrology, because these people are always ignorant on the subject. Typically, they insist that the stars can’t influence human behavior. When I reply that I practice tropical, rather than sidereal, astrology, which is about the correlation of the positions of the sun, moon and solar system planets, and not the stars, in relation to time and location on earth, they sometimes become silent. And when I tell them that the planets may not influence human behavior but merely provide (as a watch does for time) a correlative “map” for reading it, they seldom know what to say.


When Isaac Newton was asked by a fellow scientist how he could believe in astrology, he replied, “I have studied it, you haven’t.”
… Read the full article

The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly

October 23, 2018

[This is my just-posted two star Amazon review of Seyyed Hossein Nasr's "Knowledge and the Sacred."]

Seyyed Hossein Nasr, now 85 is an Iranian professor emeritus of Islamic studies at George Washington University. Nasr’s educational background is impressive--BS in physics and MS in geology and geophysics from MIT, and a Ph.D in the history of science and learning from Harvard. Nasr, who has authored over fifty books, specializes in elaborating Traditionalist school’s ideas on metaphysics, Islamic science, religion and the environment, Sufism, and Islamic philosophy.

Per Wikipedia, “The Traditionalist School is a group of 20th- and 21st-century thinkers concerned with what they consider to be the demise of traditional forms of knowledge, both aesthetic and spiritual, within Western society. The principal thinkers in this tradition are René Guénon, Ananda Coomaraswamy and Frithjof Schuon. Other important thinkers in this tradition include Titus Burckhardt, Martin Lings, Jean-Louis Michon, Marco Pallis, Huston Smith, Hossein Nasr, DragoÅ¡ Kalajić, Jean Borella, and Julius Evola.… Read the full article

The Trikaya in Zen

October 11, 2018

[This is a raw, unedited excerpt from my forthcoming book on Zen.]

A major difference between Zen and Dzogchen is their respective understanding of and attitude toward the Trikaya, the Buddhist Triple Body (Dharmakaya, Sambhogakaya, Nirmanakaya). Whereas Zen deemphasizes the Trikaya, often to the point of ignoring it, Dzogchen emphasizes it, using it to explain Enlightenment. Because Zen is a sutra-based tradition, built upon the Prajnaparamita Sutras, Nagarjuna’s Madhyamika, and Yogacara, it reduces everything to emptiness and/or Mind, which it conflates with the Dharmakaya. Hence, it has little use for the Sambhogakaya and the Nirmanakaya, which it considers superfluous to the Enlightenment project. Dzogchen, on the other hand, incorporates tantric concepts and practices that involve Energy, which, sans the Trikaya doctrine, cannot be properly explained and integrated.

Because Zen all but ignores the Energetic dimension of Enlightenment, Zennists have no real understanding of the Trikaya. I’ve read dozens of Zen texts in the past five decades, and not a single one satisfactorily explicates the Trikaya.… Read the full article

← Previous Entries

Next Entries →