Leland van den Daele

  • Thank God for Denial

    Thank God for Denial

    As I contemplate aging, and I can have no doubt that it is happening to me since I am to endure my another birthday in another week, I have been thrust into reflections on aging. Let me be candid: My favorite posture in the face of the clock’s tortuous inevitable measure of the unseen yardstick of…

  • Asymmetry in Reproductive Choice between the Sexes

    Asymmetry in Reproductive Choice between the Sexes

    Since impregnation is always in the other, the male knows only through trust and vicarious identification that the fetus or offspring is his own. And only perhaps through pragmatic proofs such as physical or behavioral similarities and DNA tests is his role in conception garnered with empirical probability. The sometimes tenuous and always mysterious relation of fatherhood…

  • Anatomy and Destiny

    Anatomy and Destiny

    Biologically-based qualitative differences between the sexes define the natural distinctions that differentiate male and female. The male possesses a penis; the female, a vagina and breasts. These anatomical differences are the foundation for functional divergences which possess profound psychological import. The psychological import arises from the natural potentials and constraints that are associated with anatomy. The…

  • Phases of Early Adulthood

    Phases of Early Adulthood

    Early Adulthood Phase One occurs with establishment of a job or career. A job or career impacts upon the subject’s definitions, frameworks, and working methods of adaptation. Lawyers, accountants, doctors, military and police officers, priests, monks, and reverends, psychologists, professors, plumbers, carpenters, farmers, ranchers, contractors, salespersons, and business owners really think differently. Concordance of thought among occupations…

  • My Adventures with Meditation

    My Adventures with Meditation

    My history of meditation is humorous since I have approached meditation with the same fast-food consciousness that Americans tend to approach all aspects of their lives from diet to human relations. The first time I meditated I was sixteen years old. I had just read Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha, and I picked-up some of the descriptions…

  • The Enduring Effect of Home Economics Research

    The Enduring Effect of Home Economics Research

    The “discipline” of Home Economics is a curiosity of American culture, a discipline, as American as apple pie –and like apple pie it occupies a hindmost position to more substantive food. Departments and Schools of Home Economics and more recent incarnations, such as colleges of “Health and Human Development” and “Family and Consumer Sciences”, are ubiquitous…

  • Fifty Ways to Kill Your Lover: “Good” Foods that Debilitate

    Fifty Ways to Kill Your Lover: “Good” Foods that Debilitate

    As consumers of the great American cornucopia, we are told that some foods are good for us like fruits and vegetables. We are under the impression that some foods are bad for us such as foods high in fat, sugar, or salt. Even these simple generalizations are dubious. America uses more pesticide per acre of…

  • Maturity and Adaptation for the Post-Modern Adult

    Maturity and Adaptation for the Post-Modern Adult

    Like the branches of interconnecting trees in a forest, the adult mind is interwoven with ideas and associations. The mind’s network is buttressed by behavior and habitat that support intention. The progress toward maturity is marked by a process of accumulation of ideas, skills and habits, relationships and responsibilities, and things. Wisely selected and articulated,…

  • Prayer for Each Day

    Prayer for Each Day

    Lord of my Being, Creator, Sustainer, Destroyer, Immeasurable Source, Profound Emptiness, Harmonizer, Sustain my life Unify with Your way. Nourish in me Awareness, Wisdom and Compassion. Bear up my resolve and make clear the path. May Your Way and my way be one now and every day.                      …

  • Some Contrasts among Transpersonal Psychological Theories: Wilber, Washburn, Russell, and Epstein.

    Some Contrasts among Transpersonal Psychological Theories: Wilber, Washburn, Russell, and Epstein.

    By Leland van den Daele In his seminal book The Perennial Philosophy, Aldous Huxley illustrates how religious experience, cross-culturally and historically, gives rise to commonalities in attitudes, values, and orientation toward the world. In the subsequent literature in the burgeoning area of transpersonal psychology, the idea that the mystic worldview embodies an organized whole with…