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Archive for the ‘Spirit matter’ Category

on Buddhism, objects, Zizek, Morton, etc.

Posted in Politics, Spirit matter, tagged , , , on October 25, 2010 | 5 Comments »

I’ve been meaning to catch up on the discussions over Buddhism and objects/relations, Slavoj Zizek’s critique of “Western Buddhism,” and related topics, which have been continuing on Tim Morton’s Ecology Without Nature, Jeffrey Bell’s Aberrant Monism, Skholiast’s Speculum Criticum Traditionis, and elsewhere. I haven’t quite caught up, but here are a few quick notes on […]

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stones still standing

Posted in Spirit matter, tagged on October 11, 2010 | 3 Comments »

Amazing that after 7000 years this 100+ megalith cromlech is standing (once again), and that it was only “discovered” in 1964. (Discovered presumably by those who had a reasonably good idea of what they were discovering…) It is the Almendres Cromlech outside Evora, Portugal.

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Green pilgrimage & global civil religion

Posted in Spirit matter, tagged , , , , , , , , on October 5, 2010 | 7 Comments »

I’m getting ready to head to Spain, where I’ve been invited to give a talk on “green pilgrimage” at the Fourth Colloquium Compostela. Here’s a brief overview of what I’ll be speaking about.   Green Pilgrimage: Prospects for Ecology and Peace-Building

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philosophy, salvation, & the world

Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, Spirit matter, tagged , on October 1, 2010 | 7 Comments »

Fabio Gironi has a very perceptive response to the recent posts at Larval Subjects, Ecology Without Nature, and here, over Buddhism, objects, and relations. I like his admission that “I have never been – nor [do] I plan to be—a practicing Buddhist or a ‘believer’ of any sort, but the encounter with Nāgārjuna’s philosophy was […]

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Buddhist objects & processes

Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, Spirit matter, tagged , , , , , , on September 29, 2010 | 6 Comments »

Does object-oriented ontology = Buddhism? Tim Morton has been making intriguing sounds to that effect, and Levi Bryant has begun to ask him the hard questions about how and whether that might be possible — of how to “square the circle” of independent substances (OOO) with Buddhism’s conditioned genesis (a.k.a. dependent arising, codependent origination). Tim’s […]

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just sitting there

Posted in Spirit matter, tagged , on September 16, 2010 | 2 Comments »

My favorite line in Patrick Groneman’s account of a group of Buddhist meditators’ attempt to bear witness, by just sitting, amidst the rival armies of 9-11 protestors in downtown New York City (anti-mosque, pro-mosque, et al) is the passer-by yelling “This is New York, don’t just sit there…stand up and say what you believe in.” […]

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field of dreams

Posted in Cinema, Eco-culture, Spirit matter, tagged , , , , on September 13, 2010 | Leave a Comment »

I just watched Amy Hardie’s recent film The Edge of Dreaming, a documentary about a year in her life during which this science documentarian and self-proclaimed skeptic becomes haunted by a series of dreams that appear to foretell her own death before the year is over. The film becomes an exploration of neuroscience, the meaning […]

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conversions

Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, Spirit matter, tagged , on August 7, 2010 | 1 Comment »

What a lovely, touching post Tim Morton has written about his conversion to object-oriented ontology. Since my days of doing religious-studies fieldwork, I’ve always gotten ripples of that nameless mixture of joy, pleasure, and sad melancholy — that feeling of being existentially touched, even pierced — whenever I’ve been around people undergoing conversion experiences (whether […]

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relationalism, earth jazz, & the solstice

Posted in Music & soundscape, Philosophy, Spirit matter, tagged , , , , , , , on June 20, 2010 | 9 Comments »

If there’s a musical demonstration of relationalism, and by extension (as Skholiast points out) of ecology, it’s the kind of improvised music that the Dead are supposed to have excelled at (and occasionally did). The universe gives rise to many wondrous entities in its long history of spontaneity, relational responsiveness, habit-formation, and form-building. The habits start as rhythms, melodic chirps that turn into territorial refrains and calls, and that gradually maneuvre their way into verse patterns, melodies, harmonies, polyrhythms. Distinct songs develop for particular purposes and gradually get freed from those purposes, taken up into improvisational routines and performances, some of which crystallize into larger-scale architectonics, but only ever temporarily.

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coming home

Posted in Eco-culture, Spirit matter, tagged on June 3, 2010 | 2 Comments »

Visiting Montreal is always enjoyable, even if the many overlapping conferences that are part of every year’s so-called Learneds kept me busier than I wanted to be. But there’s something about the trip back down to Vermont that has grown on me over the last seven years since I moved here. It’s not the border […]

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the other invisible hand

Posted in Spirit matter on May 17, 2010 | 1 Comment »

The mirror neuron meme continues to circulate via that dependable circulator of likable sciencey ideas, Jeremy Rifkin: There’s much more to his argument than mirror neurons (fortunately). “Empathy is grounded in the acknowledgment of death and the celebration of life in rooting for each other to flourish and be. It’s based on our frailties and […]

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cataclysmic eventology

Posted in Cinema, Spirit matter, tagged , , , , , , on April 23, 2010 | 6 Comments »

Hiroshima mon amour (dir. Alain Resnais, 1959) In my reply to kvond’s and Meg’s comments on the Event, I alluded to a quote from Derrida’s Cinders, which I thought would be worth posting, especially since I can’t find any reference to it online and I don’t have the book handy to check it. “At what […]

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