Joanna Macy, who passed away at age 96 a couple of days ago, was a profound inspiration to many in the environmental activist world. Among other things, she taught us that “environmentalism” was about dedication to the world around us and the relations that constitute it, that it begins from the deep experience of concern […]
Archive for the ‘Spirit matter’ Category
R.I.P., Joanna Macy
Posted in Spirit matter, Uncategorized, tagged Buddhism, deep ecology, eco-Buddhism, Joanna Macy, Mahayana Buddhism on July 21, 2025 | Leave a Comment »
What’s the question, again?
Posted in Philosophy, Spirit matter, tagged Buddhism, capitalism, fetishization, Lacanianism, Marxism, process philosophy, process-relational philosophy, psychoanalysis, reification on July 8, 2025 | 1 Comment »
Some sixteen years ago, in the first of a series of pieces that tried to define what my work aimed toward (which at the time I called a “post-anthropocentric political ecology”; see here and here for a few others), I wrote that “what is essential is a collective struggle to wrest a realm of compassionate […]
‘Belief in this world’ begins from feeling
Posted in Spirit matter, tagged belief in this world, Buddha, Deleuze, emotional practices, love for this world on May 23, 2025 | Leave a Comment »
“Belief in this world” — which we might define as faith that this world and what we do in it is genuinely significant — was a paramount value for Gilles Deleuze, who thought that we are at risk of collectively losing such a belief. Today, when the prospects for human flourishing are threatened from all […]
Burning moment
Posted in Spirit matter, tagged apocalypticism, Buddhism, Buddhistic viewing, California wildfires, Dzogchen, Los Angeles, Palisades, wildfires on January 11, 2025 | 1 Comment »
Watching Onscene.tv’s continuous, commentary-free footage of the fires in and around Los Angeles is like watching a Buddhist cremation ceremony. Recently vacated homes and buildings burn, slowly collapsing, walls crashing, smoke plumes exiting from windows, and embers blowing from building to building, as a hand-held or vehicle-mounted camera moves silently through empty neighborhoods. Sometimes it […]
The death trip and science’s experiential “blind spot”
Posted in Science & society, Spirit matter, tagged Adam Frank, dual-aspect monism, Evan Thompson, experientialism, Marcelo Gleiser, mind-body, mind-body dualism, near-death experience, Niagaras of beauty, nondualism, panpsychism, parapsychology, phenomenology, physicalism, process-relational ontology, Terence McKenna on April 5, 2024 | 4 Comments »
The study of so-called “near-death experiences” is fascinating, as it is one of those areas that remain most mysterious to science, yet which empirical evidence suggests is very consequential to those who undergo it. By now we’ve all likely heard of the countless reports of people journeying through tunnels toward sources of light, being greeted […]
Why religion isn’t (coherent)
Posted in Spirit matter, tagged global catastrophe, global crisis, Peter Sloterdijk, practice, religion, religious studies on February 29, 2024 | 5 Comments »
Language is an instrument for dealing with the details of reality. All of our words, along with the ways we string them together, contain or reflect concepts — signs or semiotic constructs – by which we refer to elements of a dynamic world. Because they are essentially pragmatic and context-specific, if we scrutinize any of […]
For a 21st century Logos
Posted in Philosophy, Spirit matter, tagged eco-Stoicism, future religion, Logos, spiritual practices, spirituality, Stoicism on December 20, 2023 | 1 Comment »
Teaching my course in comparative spiritual practices, I find there is a rationality underpinning each, but that some require lesser leaps of faith (for us twenty-first-century humans) than others. Stoicism is one of the lesser-leap philosophies: it has a pretty systematic account of the nature of things, which resonates with modern science reasonably well, and […]
Space
Posted in Manifestos & auguries, Spirit matter, tagged affect theory, apophatic theology, Buddhism on March 25, 2023 | Leave a Comment »
Like atoms and galaxies, days are full of space. What if the ways you take up this space—the pauses, transitions, and gaps between doings—shapes the world as much as the doings?* Do we fill the space with restless preoccupation? Death drive compulsions? Nervous uncertainty? Or curious delight at the poignancy of each thing?** What if […]
Žižek’s belated reply
Posted in Spirit matter, tagged Buddhism, Lacan, Slavoj Žižek, Žižek on January 6, 2023 | 3 Comments »
Slavoj Žižek has “belatedly” replied, in The Philosophical Salon, to some things I wrote in 2009 about his Lacanianism and his understanding (some would say misunderstanding) of Buddhism, and to other critiques of the latter. In his reply, he later mistakes another author — of the blog And Now For Something Completely Different — for […]
Thay passing
Posted in Process-relational thought, Spirit matter, tagged Buddhism, death, Heart Sutra, Mahayana Buddhism, Prajnaparamita, process-relational theory, Thich Nhat Hanh on January 22, 2022 | 2 Comments »
Readers of Shadowing the Anthropocene will know that Buddhist thought has influenced my own thinking in profound ways. To be more precise, Buddhist thought, feeling, and practice has influenced my own thought, feeling, and practice. But there are many forms of Buddhism; like all philosophical and religious systems, it is a long and complex historical […]
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