PHILIP GOLDBERG
Author - Spiritual Coach - Public Speaker

[This blog first appeared on the Huffington Post]

No, this is not about Beck, Hannity and O’Reilly getting busted by a celestial truth squad. It’s about karma on Fox TV. The broadcast network just unveiled Past Life, a one-hour series—with American Idol as a lead-in, no less—whose premise hinges on (more…)

[This blog first appeared on the Huffington Post]

The obituaries and tributes to J.D. Salinger, the seminal novelist who died two weeks ago at 91, have tended to ignore one important feature of his life and work: for many readers, especially young seekers of truth in the sixties and seventies, he was a kind (more…)

Did you see Newsweek’s August 31 edition? In it, Lisa Miller has a short piece titled “We Are All Hindus Now.” She doesn’t mean that vast numbers of Americans are going to Hindu temples or doing pujas to Ganesh at their home altars. She means that, according to surveys, a large and growing number of people hold a pluralistic world-view, in line with the core principle of Hinduism, as expressed in the ancient Rig Veda: “Truth is one, the wise call it by many names.” (more…)

Of all the iconic images the media trotted out to remind us of Woodstock on the fortieth anniversary of that seminal event (August 15 – 18, 1969), the one that best captures what endured from the Sixties was orange-robed Swami Satchidananda addressing the multitude. It wasn’t displayed nearly as often as the writhing bodies, impassioned performers and muddy encampments, but that tableau, captured in black-and-white before the music started and before the rains came, stands as a potent symbol of the meeting of East and West that has transformed American culture. While most of the values that Woodstock was said to embody faded away as the baby boomers grew up, the embrace of Eastern spirituality has only grown stronger, changing the way we understand and practice religion, the way we take care of our minds and bodies, and the way we contemplate our place in the cosmos. Think of it this way: it wasn’t long before even the hippest of hippies stopped living communally, sharing food with strangers and dancing naked in the mud. But, forty years on, more people than ever meditate, chant mantras, read the sacred books of the East, and, participate in the six-billion-dollar-a-year Yoga industry. (more…)

This week I will attend a Passover seder. On Sunday I will go to a church for Easter services. I honor both holidays because I see them as two limbs in a season of spiritual liberation.
I don’t much care whether the Red Sea actually parted like a curtain to let the Hebrews (more…)

It’s that time of year when the Judeo-Christian world recalls one of its most sacred and powerful stories. It is not just Jews at their Passover seders who are influenced by the tale of Moses leading the Hebrews out of slavery, but also Christians and Muslims and (more…)

In the Brooklyn neighborhood where I grew up in the 1950s, there was a man named Horowitz who would tell anyone who would listen that he had served in the Navy during World War II. He was stationed on the coast of Connecticut. "The whole time I was there," he would say proudly, "Not one German submarine landed on our shores."

The claim of the Bush administration that they kept us safe from terror attacks reminded me of Mr. Horowitz. (more…)

My elation over the Obama victory was tempered by the outcome, that same night, of the California ballot initiative to ban gay marriage. As someone who has always hoped he could someday attend his gay brother's wedding -- and secretly hoped he'd give me a nephew or niece -- it was a blow. But, as with Obama's win, this loss has to be seen in a historical context. That we're even arguing about gay people getting married is as mind-blowing as having a black president, when you consider that forty years ago psychiatry considered homosexuality a mental disorder and gay people were routinely arrested in New York City, of all places.

In any event, it put me in mind of one of my college professors back in the sixties. (more…)

When I was in the 6th grade, my mother fought to make an African American woman president of the PTA at my school. It seems absurd now, but that small victory was a big deal in my neighborhood. Never mind that the black woman, Mrs. Mason, was the only college graduate among the candidates. Never mind that this was in multi-ethnic Brooklyn, where white and black people rode subways, went to school and sometimes worked with each other. Never mind that Jackie Robinson had already been playing for the Dodgers about 8 years at the time.

I wish my mother were here today. I wish my father were too, because Jackie Robinson was his hero on and off the field.
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