It is good that an orange is an orange and a mango is a mango. The colors, the smells, and the tastes are different, but looking deeply, we see that they are both authentic fruits. Looking more deeply, we can see the sunshine, the rain, the minerals, and the earth in both of them. Only their manifestations are different. Authentic experience makes a religion a true tradition.
Religious experience is, above all, human experience.
Meditation, contemplation and discussion are the vehicles that this electronic magazine will use to navigate the waters of religious experience, human experience. Nhat Hahn's friend and colleague, the Trappist monk and mystic, Thomas Merton, described contemplation as the means by which we deepen our sense of the present. One's own time, but not dominated by one's own ego and its demands. There are 84,000 dharmas, notes the Buddhist sage, Atisha, and they all agree at one point. The language they use to describe it may differ, and yet for millennia contemplatives across the globe have touched the vastness of inner space in meditation and contemplation.