My course “Self-Cultivation and Spiritual Practice” starts from the premise that philosophy — at least as it has existed outside of today’s analytical philosophy departments — has generally been about how to live, and that the best philosophers around the world have offered detailed instructions on how to get better at that. Historian of philosophy […]
Archive for the ‘Spirit matter’ Category
Above us only sky (or, Stoic & Epicurean takes on things)
Posted in Philosophy, Spirit matter, tagged argument from nature, Epicureanism, Pierre Hadot, spiritual exercises, spiritual practice, Stoicism, view from above, world situation on September 22, 2020 | Leave a Comment »
Emotional practices, part 2: Affective construction, the triune self, & the art of joyful deliberation
Posted in Spirit matter, tagged A. H. Almaas, affect theory, affective neuroscience, affective practice, askesis, C. S. Peirce, constructivism, emotional practice, G. I. Gurdjieff, Gurdjieff, Hadot, inquiry, Jacques Lacan, neo-Spinozism, Paul Maclean, philosophy as way of life, philosophy of the moment, Shadowing the Anthropocene, Shinzen Young, Spinoza, spiritual practice, three-body practice, triune brain, triune self on August 25, 2020 | 1 Comment »
In part 1 of this article, I compared two recent books, each of which proclaims a “new paradigm” in the scientific study of emotions and affect: Lisa Feldman Barrett’s “constructivist” How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain and Stephen Asma’s and Rami Gabriel’s “basic emotions”-rooted The Emotional Mind: The Affective Roots of Culture and Cognition. In […]
Deep Adaptation & its critics: a question of reality
Posted in Eco-culture, Spirit matter, tagged Deep Adaptation, ecospirituality, environmentalism, Jem Bendell, Open Democracy, radical environmentalism, religion and ecology, societal collapse, spiritual environmentalism, spiritual movements on July 18, 2020 | 6 Comments »
I’ve long been receptive to the idea that we need a spiritual, or even a religious, movement to address the climate crisis. Of course, I define both “spiritual” and “religious” quite broadly, and am well aware of how both terms have been shaped within histories that are Eurocentric and dominated by monotheistic, Christian, and more […]
On being a mortal
Posted in Spirit matter, tagged beliefs, Buddhism, Christianity, cosmology, humanism, immanence, indigenous philosophy, mortality, perspectives on life, reincarnation, religion, transcendence, world philosophy on May 21, 2020 | Leave a Comment »
Some people believe you’re born from nothing; you live, which is something; and then you’re gone again, back to nothing. (Here’s a poignantly compressed version of that, a life in under 6 minutes.) Others believe you’re part of a much larger thing, which keeps recycling itself (including you). Maybe there’s progress or development over the […]
Comments on process-relational meditation
Posted in Process-relational thought, Spirit matter, tagged Buddhism, experience, meditation, mindfulness, pre-G, Shadowing the Anthropocene, Shinzen Young, spiritual practice on April 17, 2020 | 4 Comments »
Part Two of my book Shadowing the Anthropocene (open access to all) outlines a system of “bodymindfulness” practice rooted in the mindfulness meditation system of Shinzen Young, but extended triadically to account for the active nature of living. Here are a couple of comments on and tweaks to that system, which I’ll refer to as […]
The (un)binding & (re)bounding of worlds
Posted in Anthropocene, Spirit matter, tagged boundaries, environmental change, more-than-human world, other-than-human world, Peder Sather Workshop, Reassembling Democracy, religion and ecology, ritual, ritualizing on March 2, 2020 | Leave a Comment »
The following is a short essay I wrote for the Peder Sather/Reassembling Democracy workshop on “Environmental Change and Ritualized Relationships with the Other-than-Human World,” held at UC Berkeley this past December. There are physical boundaries between humans and specific nonhumans—fences, walls, windows (of homes, gardens, kennels, zoos, abbatoirs, safari vehicles, camera lenses, guns); and there […]
Long-term civilizational prognosis: a hypothesis
Posted in Climate change, Manifestos & auguries, Spirit matter, tagged abduction, C. S. Peirce, civilizational crisis, climate crisis, climate emergency, eco-religion, global civil religion, global disorder, globalism, Latour, politics of meaning, religion, Varela on October 14, 2019 | 3 Comments »
Here’s a hypothesis: If the human community exists in some more or less unified form in 880 years (in the year 3000 by our calendar), that feat will have been accomplished, at least in part, in and through the emergence of an ecological religion. What does this mean, and how could we test it? Religion, […]
So, here we are…
Posted in Anthropocene, Climate change, Spirit matter, tagged Christianity, ClimateJustice, globalization, hope, Jonathan Franzen, Matthew 25:40 on September 8, 2019 | Leave a Comment »
Wow, what a reaction the article described here has gotten… This version includes a follow-up comment below. Jonathan Franzen’s “What If We Stopped Pretending?” articulates an important point about hope and hopelessness in the face of climate change. Franzen suggests that an “all-out war on climate change” no longer makes sense because the scenario for […]
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