The REIKIDOGS Blog

In Bernard Malamud's "The Magic Barrel," a tentative young rabbi explains his arrival at his professional station: " I came to God not because I loved him but because I did not." Sometimes I read a line and pause to reflect a minute before continuing. Often I read without needing to register the words because they're either familiar or insignificant. But occasionally words immobilize me, not because they possess extraordinary power in themselves but because they arrive at the precise time and place I need to receive their message. I came to God not because I loved him but because I did not. What a contrast-based, convoluted route to enlightenment. Aha! But this is how so many of us arrived here. When I began studying loss and death, people questioned me, barely able to camouflage their distaste for the subject, which usually emerged as a sneaky grimace. Why on earth would you want to study death? I answer the way Malamud’s rabbi would have: I came to death b

I think I resisted blogging for so long because the word sounds so creepy: blog. It reminds me of a scary "B" movie about an unearthly thing that manifests on our planet , expanding like an amorphous tumor, devouring a typical American town: The Blog. Come to think of it, that has happened on the web in recent years. We're overrun by blogs, the information superhighway equivalent of an afternoon talk show. Yet here I am, succumbing. The Blog wins.Remember the late 1980s channeling craze? Everyone had an invisible other-worldly companion who strayed from his evolutionary dimension to impart long-lost but sacred wisdom to an underemployed American who in turn enlightened the rest of us to the tune of million$ from book sales, workshops, and speaking engagments.Well, I, too, read those books, and I attended those workshops, and I actually altered my consciousness and opened to the greater realities of multi-level existence. But while I do work in harmony with multidimensiona