Empty Bell New Year's Eve
2024-12-31 16:30 - 17:45 (America/New_York) | Zoom
Holiday and New Year blessings to you and your families. Here on the brink of a new year, please join our online community on New Year’s Eve. Together, we will take a sacred pause instead of rushing forward into 2025. We can’t know what this new year will bring, but perhaps we can identify some of our fears and hopes. Sharing with friends what we know and don’t know can bring solace and inspiration.
On Tuesday, Dec. 31, New Year’s Eve, we will meet on the usual Empty Bell Zoom site. Contact Jonas if you need the URL.
Rather than focusing on so-called New Year’s resolutions, we’ll focus on how we hope to live personally, in our families, and in our communities, as 2025 proceeds. We’ll focus more on who we want to be rather than on what we want to do. To whet the whistles of our hearts and minds, I’ve pasted below a number of quotes from thinkers many of us will recognize. Browse the list to see what stirs in your souls as you look ahead to the new year. When we meet, as usual, all perspectives will be honored. Let’s listen together in hope and mutual care.
Here are some quotes to ponder and perhaps to take on as your own guide to the future:
And now we welcome the new year. Full of things that have never been.
–Rainer Maria Rilke
Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.
–Ralph Waldo Emerson
We cannot change anything until we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses.
–Carl Jung
Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.
–Carl Jung
Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.
–Carl Jung
That best portion of a man’s life, his little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and love.
–William Wordsworth
The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.
–Ernest Hemingway
I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.
–Ernest Hemingway
Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.
Mahatma Gandhi
Do what you feel in your heart to be right–for you’ll be criticized anyway. You’ll be damned if you do, and damned if you don’t.
–Eleanor Roosevelt
The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.
–Alan Watts
If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, change your attitude.
–Maya Angelou
Always be a first-rate version of yourself, instead of a second-rate version of somebody else.
–Judy Garland
Grief is the price we pay for love.
–Anon
The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.
–Anais Nin
People living deeply have no fear of death.
Queen Elizabeth II
Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.
–Walt Whitman
I used to care about how other people thought I led my life. But lately I’ve realized that most people are too preoccupied with their own lives to give anybody else even the scantiest of thoughts.
― Douglas Coupland
Our Christian destiny is, in fact, a great one: but we cannot achieve greatness unless we lose all interest in being great. For our own idea of greatness is illusory, and if we pay too much attention to it we will be lured out of the peace and stability of the being God gave us, and seek to live in a myth we have created for ourselves. And when we are truly ourselves we lose most of the futile self-consciousness that keeps us constantly comparing ourselves with others in order to see how big we are.
― Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island
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Blessings, Jonas

Interspiritual Wisdom with Dana Sawyer
2025-11-12 10:30 - 12:00
Jonas interviews Dana Sawyer, author of The Perennial Philosophy Reloaded, A Guide for the Mystically Inclined, and biographer of Aldous Huxley and Huston Smith on Zoom.
Dr. Sawyer teaches courses in philosophy and world religions, with an emphasis on Asian religions. His areas of expertise and research are Hindu asceticism, Tibetan Buddhism, and the perennial philosophy of Aldous Huxley. He is a biographer of the well-known spiritual writer Aldous Huxley, a biographer of Huston Smith, another perennial philosopher. and SUNY Press will soon release a book of Sawyer’s analysis of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and his influence on American spirituality. Professor Sawyer also teaches meditation and leads trips to India. Professor Sawyer has traveled extensively in India, Nepal, Pakistan, Thailand, Cambodia, Hong Kong, and Japan. He has lectured at the Kyoto University of Foreign Studies, Banaras Hindu University, the University of Riga, Latvia, the Huntington Library, and at colleges at conferences throughout the U.S. In August 2005 he was an invited participant at the Oxford Roundtable, Oxford University, England, for a conference on “Government, Education, and Religion.”
Prof. Sawyer recently contributed an essay to Bruce Springsteen and the American Soul: Essays on the Songs and Influence of a Cultural Icon.

Phil Goldberg Interviews Jonas
2025-12-01 10:30 - 12:00
Philip Goldberg has studied the world’s spiritual traditions for more than 50 years, as a practitioner, teacher, and author. His essays have appeared in numerous publications, and he has authored or coauthored more than 25 books, including Roadsigns on the Spiritual Path; the award-winning American Veda: From Emerson and the Beatles to Yoga and Meditation, How Indian Spirituality Changed the West; the seminal biography The Life of Yogananda: The Story of the Yogi Who Became the First Modern Guru; and Spiritual Practice for Crazy Times: Powerful Tools to Cultivate Clarity, Calm and Courage. An Interfaith Minister, spiritual counselor, public speaker and workshop leader, he has appeared at leading venues throughout the U.S. and India and has taught online for Spirituality & Practice, Embodied Spirituality, and Hindu University of America. He serves on the board of the Association for Spiritual Integrity and as an advisor to the National Museum of Religion. His website is www.PhilipGoldberg.com. (For additional interviews, check out the archive at the earlier Spirit Matters podcast.)
