I love the quote from Mother Teresa – now Saint Teresa – because it speaks to our most basic need to belong. It speaks to what our world needs so much at this moment: peace.

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As I meditate for longer and longer periods of time (1­–2 hours) at daybreak each morning, I am finding complexity and simplicity are merging into one flowing experience. Seems contradictory, I know, but only because of the constraints of language. Put another way, layer upon layer of awareness is opening up within me, yet all the layers are part of one whole, one seamless state of being. I’m discovering it is possible to feel inner peace at the same time that I’m feeling sadness or distraction. I am aware of silence at the heart of all sound, of light at the center of darkness. Beyond the illusion of separation, there is wholeness. Within complexity itself is infinite simplicity. Perhaps the best way to describe all of this is oneness, feeling one with everything, at times just resting without thought in simply being, in simply breathing.

The issue of integrity was haunting me. The issue of living my life in a way that doesn’t acknowledge what I know. I am part of the small percentage of the universe, of this world, of the 7 billion people of this world, that uses an inordinately large amount of resources. I am part of the wealthy, middle-class of America. I’m not wealthy, but by standards of the world, I’m wealthy, so I have to struggle with a question, really the issue of suffering.

Today I woke up and thought – hmmm what wisdom can I tap into to share in my weekly blog? Usually I find it pretty easy to talk about something relevant by tuning into the collective but after frying myself in the crazy energy lately, I knew I had to temporarily close up the connection for repairs.

Every week here at The Sunday Paper, we focus on Moving Humanity Forward. That’s our tagline, but more importantly, it’s our mission and our purpose.

The evolution of higher mammals, including chimps, cetaceans and humans, brought forth a new level of awareness called “self-consciousness,” or, simply, the conscious mind.

Kennedy shares with us how to ride the waves of change by creating and becoming the wave and ultimately being our own signature wave to the planet.

There are many different ways to pray and I believe one of the most powerful and effective ways are prayers of gratitude.

All of these practices that alter consciousness and open the heart and quiet the mind – all the meditative practices, all the ways of serving as a yoga to awaken, the karma yoga that I do… All of that stuff, all of it slowly, slowly starts to establish you in the part of your awareness where things are not separate from one another, where they’re interdependent and they’re not separate. That’s the level of consciousness from which ecological sensitivity arises, by the way, if you’re asking where humans could be ecologically conscious.

Imagine knowing that down a proverbial stream is a vast treasure with your name on it. You can’t see it but you know it’s there. So you think, hmm how do I get there? What if I don’t know what’s in the water?

Science has been falsely portrayed as the enemy of spirituality, largely because of a noisy band of militant atheists who also happen to be scientists. Their outcry that to believe in God is irrational and therefore anti-scientific misses the point. Not all scientists are irreligious, but the whole premise of this militant group is faulty. They don't just disbelieve in God; they disbelieve in the entire domain of subjectivity. What happens “in here" is unscientific, they say, a preposterous claim given that the works of Shakespeare and Mozart emerged from the inner world, along with all sensations, feelings, and thoughts.

The universe and the human brain have something important in common. The inner workings of both are invisible. At this moment you have no perception of what's happening in your brain; neural activity is unknown to the mind of the person to whom the neurons belong without the invention of brain scans to reveal that activity, and then only crudely. Imagine, being a master of a house and not knowing or seeing what is inside the house.