"Carol Lee Flinders writes so exquisitely that you want to go with her into every nook and cranny she explores."

Vicki Robin

Welcome to Two Rock Institute. We are currently working on an extensive reconstruction of our website. It's a long-range project so in the meantime we will say something about why we've undertaken it.

When we first launched the Two Rock Institute, we said we were hoping to help create a new kind of human story, one that imagines life as a web of meaning and purpose, and that seeks to restore the sacred to the everyday.

That desire hasn't changed. Our particular passion has long been the close study of a certain kind of life. Saint Francis of Assisi and Gandhi, Saint Teresa of Avila, and the Compassionate Buddha – but Jane Goodall, too, and John Muir – Badshah Khan and Tenzin Palmo – Sister Helen Prejean, and the brilliant, young Jewish seeker, Etty Hillesum who died at Auschwitz.

It's an eclectic group from all over time and place made up of mystics, but mystics-in-the-making as well– environmental visionaries, and spiritual activists. Their life stories couldn’t be more different, yet they all reveal an arc of potential and expression that suggests much in the way of human possibility. “Story,” then, and “spirit” have been in the mix all along, as our published work would suggest.

"Science," the third element in our triad has slipped into our thinking by degrees. The fact that it has such a prominent place in our thinking, writing, and conversation today has everything to do with the extraordinary scientific renaissance we are all living through.

We aren't trained scientists but we've begun to think that we have been functioning all this time as "ethologists" – investigators like Jane Goodall and Robert Sapolsky, who study behavior in the animals’ natural habitat. Instead of living with penguins or peacocks we’ve been observing that rarest of rare birds, the mystic or “mini-mystic.”

As one of the founders of ethology said, “We try to interview animals in their own language.” That rings true for us, having tried to understand these lives and their meaning by filling in the historical context of a Teresa, say, or a Badshah Khan, and by looking at the whole life of each subject in all of his or her relationships.

This new engagement with current research in fields like neuro-science and evolutionary psychology is prompting us now to frame our ongoing inquiry in fresh ways: “What kind of an organism is a mystic?” And, echoing paleo-archaeologist Donald Johanson, "What is the evolutionary advantage of the universality of mysticism in human societies?"

Over the months to come, then, we’ll be posting short essays here that consider these and related questions, and which continue to broaden our understanding of how these stories can better inform our own spiritual journeys.

This is a work very much in progress. Meanwhile, though, we are giving workshops, lectures, and classes where we can explore all of this material with like-minded seekers. We’ll post information on those events as they are confirmed.

Who we are...

Carol Lee Flinders received a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California at Berkeley, specializing in medieval studies. She then spent fifteen years writing about natural foods, co-authoring the popular Laurel's Kitchen cookbooks and writing a weekly syndicated newspaper column.

In 1990 Carol returned to her field of study and wrote Enduring Grace: Living Portraits of Seven Women Mystics. Subsequent books include At the Root of This Longing: Reconciling a Spiritual Hunger and a Feminist Thirst and Rebalancing the World. She has taught courses in mystical literature at UC, Berkeley, and at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. She is currently a Fellow of the Spirituality and Health Institute, Santa Clara University and serves on the Board of Directors of the Foundation for the Advancement for Women and Religion. Carol is currently visiting faculty at the Sophia Center in Culture and Spirituality, Holy Names University, Oakland.

Carol's latest book is Enduring Lives: Living Portraits of Women of Faith In Action (Putnam/Tarcher). It profiles four contemporary women that she believes live and work in the "spiritual mother-line" of women like Saint Teresa of Avila and Saint Catherine of Genoa. You can read Carol's recent article on "Women and Peace" here.

Tim Flinders studied English and Sanskrit literature at the University of California, Berkeley. An educator and writer, he has written about gifted education, Gandhian nonviolence, and health and spirituality. His writings on nonviolence appear in Gandhi the Man and Nonviolent Soldier of Islam. He is the author of The RISE Response: Illness, Wellness and Spirituality, and co-author, with Carol, of The Making of a Teacher. Tim is a Fellow of the Spirituality and Health Institute, Santa Clara University where he has taught courses on contemplative spirituality and co-authored a study on the health benefits of meditation for college students. His recent article on the Muslim Gandhi can be found here. And his book on gifted girls, Power and Promise, can be found here.

Both Carol and Tim are longtime students of Sri Eknath Easwaran and practitioners of his Eight Point Program of Passage Meditation. Their biography of Easwaran can be found here.

Where we are . . .

Two Rock Institute exists only here, on the web, a virtual but very real interchange between like-minded folk who are working for a more peaceable and sustainable future for their children.

Two Rock is a real place, north of San Francisco, a lovely knoll of grass and Eucalyptus topped by twin granite rocks that look out over the valley near where we have lived in community for the past thirty years. There’s a volunteer fire department where the road passes just below the knoll, and dairy cows graze the hillside.

We like to think that Two Rock was sacred to the Native Americans who inhabited the valley for more than three millennia, its twin knobs presiding graciously over the grasslands that surround it. We made it the name of our institute because of this sense of a sacred history – a real place, peopled and loved.

It’s our belief that if everyday life is to become sacred, then the places we inhabit must be lived in with commitment and reverence. Medieval European monastics believed this very thing, and took a vow of stabilitas, to stay put. We take no vows ourselves, but we have indeed stayed put.

Thanks for visiting us.