I started The Seekers Forum as a personal experiment in the winter of 2013. After three decades of immersion in spiritual life, having studied with teachers from many traditions, practiced meditation, and written books about the pitfalls and epiphanies of the seekers life, I found myself feeling isolated in and hungry for spiritual conversation.
Like many contemporary seekers, I wasn’t attracted to organized religion, and mistrusted the idea that any single approach to God or enlightenment was better than another. This belief turned me into a spiritual loner, a non-joiner, which left me imagining what the community I might want to belong to would look like. Reading Rumi one day, I came across the term sohbet, which translates as “the spiritual talk of friends.” That’s exactly what I wanted, a non-sectarian, open-minded, forward thinking community where faith was not required, and like-minded people could come together to talk about the things that concern every one of us. How can we live as conscious human beings in a complicated world? What, if anything, do our lives mean? How do we balance body-mind-spirit, connect ourselves to this astounding creation, and come to know who we really are?
I began to do a monthly talk on seeker-worthy topics and distributed it to people I knew, hoping to start a conversation. The response was beyond my expectations. In a short time, we had several hundred members on five continents who were listening to the Seekers Session every month and offering their questions and comments. We experimented by adding a monthly interview with a luminary, several short video lessons to deepen our dialogue on the present topic, as well as a Resource Library of books, articles, videos, and podcasts traversing the world’s spiritual and psychological tradition.
I took what I learned and spent most of 2019 developing a new platform to bring The Seekers Forum into the 21st century as a robust multi-media membership site with seventy-plus talks in the Seekers Forum archive in an effort to expand what we offer to a wider audience and facilitate greater interaction among members.
The need for spiritual talk has never been greater. As Shakespeare wrote, “There’s more between heaven and earth than is dreamt of in our philosophy.” I hope you will join us.