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 […]
Archive for the ‘Spirit matter’ Category
Burning moment
Posted in Spirit matter, tagged apocalypticism, Buddhism, Buddhistic viewing, California wildfires, Dzogchen, Los Angeles, Palisades, wildfires on January 11, 2025 | 1 Comment »
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 | Leave a 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 […]
Reimagining religious imagination
Posted in Philosophy, Spirit matter, tagged cognitive theory, image, imaginal, imagination, Jeffrey Kripal, philosophy of imagination, philosophy of religion, religion, religious imagination, T. M. Luhrmann, visual culture, visual theory, Wouter Hanegraaff on December 14, 2021 | 5 Comments »
Wouter Hanegraaff has proposed that we rethink the study of religion as the study of “imaginative formations.” Much of my research has focused on something like that, or at least on the creative role of imagination in mediating the ways people come to live in the world, shape that world, and contest it among each […]
Dreamlife of the Anthropocene
Posted in Spirit matter, tagged brain, COVID-19, dream research, dreaming, dreamlife, emotional practices, mind, pandemic, psychology on November 8, 2021 | 4 Comments »
The work of environmental/climate humanists is premised on the assumption that the way we make sense of the world matters. This means that the dreams we have — Covid pandemic dreams, climate change dreams — also matter. The best artists, in turn, help shape our collective dreaming. The environmental arts and humanities aim to help […]
Being present while screaming
Posted in Spirit matter, tagged askesis, G. I. Gurdjieff, Gurdjieff, Gurdjieff Work, mindfulness, philosophy as a way of life, philosophy as way of life, practice, presence, Shadowing the Anthropocene, Shinzen Young, triune brain, vibrant materialism, Vipassana meditation on October 20, 2021 | Leave a Comment »
One of the things modern humans aren’t very good at is being fully present in a given moment — being here now, as Ram Dass famously put it — and remaining so in the midst of the activities, distractions, and challenges of the day. Meditation apps and mindfulness teachers can train you to do that […]
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