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 […]
Posts Tagged ‘Buddhism’
On being a mortal
Posted in SpiritMatter, 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 »
Comments on process-relational meditation
Posted in SpiritMatter, tagged Buddhism, experience, meditation, mindfulness, pre-G, process-relational thought, Shadowing the Anthropocene, Shinzen Young, spiritual practice on April 17, 2020 | 2 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 […]
Sobering up…
Posted in AnthropoScene, GeoPhilosophy, tagged Anthropocene, anthropocentrism, Buddhism, C. S. Peirce, Ecozoic, love, Neocene, process-relational thought, Shadowing the Anthropocene, sustainability on August 22, 2019 | 4 Comments »
Peter Brannen’s Atlantic article “The Anthropocene is a Joke” provides a helpful cold shower for those who’ve gotten a little too drunk on the concept of the Anthropocene. The entire article is worth reading. Here are a few snippets:
The second ontological twist
Posted in GeoPhilosophy, tagged Buddhism, C. S. Peirce, Huayan Buddhism, Mind-Only Buddhism, ontology, Peirce, process philosophy, process-relational theory, semiotics, Y, Yogacara philosophy on July 10, 2019 | Leave a Comment »
I keep trying to rephrase the second piece of the “double insight” — or two ontological “twists” — around which the philosophical argument of Shadowing the Anthropocene (and Ecologies of the Moving Image) is woven. The first insight is the process-relational one, which is at the core of both A. N. Whitehead’s metaphysics and many variations […]
(Mc)Mindfulness?
Posted in GeoPhilosophy, SpiritMatter, tagged Buddhism, McMindfulness, mindfulness, Peirce, political ecology, practice, process-relational theory, Shadowing the Anthropocene, Shinzen Young on June 22, 2019 | 2 Comments »
A Guardian article making the rounds on social media argues that the mindfulness movement has become “the new capitalist spirituality” — “magical thinking on steroids,” which instead of overturning the “neoliberal order,” now “only serves to reinforce its destructive logic.” This “McMindfulness,” as Ronald Purser calls it, has been “stripped of the teachings on ethics […]
Interview & autobio
Posted in SpiritMatter, tagged Adrian Ivakhiv, autobiography, Buddhism, Dzogchen, interviews, Lacan, meditation, pagan studies, paganism, Peirce, post-traditional Buddhism, process-relational thought, religion, Shinzen Young, spirituality, Whitehead, Zizek on May 31, 2016 | 4 Comments »
Interviews are funny things: you have to think on the spot, but later realize how deeply and profoundly imperfect (!) was your choice of words. The Imperfect Buddha Podcast has an interview with me in which host Matthew O’Connor (of Post-Traditional Buddhism) and I talk at length about Buddhism, process-relational metaphysics, panpsychism, social constructionism, cognitive science, […]
Sustainability bottleneck (or, No one here gets out alive?)
Posted in AnthropoScene, EcoCulture, GeoPhilosophy, tagged Anthropocene, astrobiology, Buddhism, cosmology, sustainability, sustainability bottleneck on January 22, 2015 | 10 Comments »
Astrophysicist and NPR blogger Adam Frank writes about the “sustainability bottleneck” as the state faced by technological civilizations like ours, which have learned how to “intensively harvest” energy, but not how to sustain themselves through the crisis this harvesting sets off. It turns out there may be millions of planets that give rise to life in our galaxy alone. Frank […]
Quaking the subject
Posted in SpiritMatter, tagged Buddhism, meditation, mindfulness, Peirce, process-relational thought, Shinzen Young, spiritual practice, Whitehead on April 13, 2014 | 4 Comments »
This post continues my thinking on the topic of a process-relational “bodymind practice” — an existential art or “technique of the self” building on Buddhist meditation practice reinterpreted and augmented through process-relational philosophy. In this post, I incorporate insights obtained through the practice of Quaker silent worship. See the posts “ What a bodymind can do” parts 1, 2, 3, and update for background […]
What’s real
Posted in GeoPhilosophy, tagged actual, Buddhism, James, liberation, panexperientialism, panpsychism, Politics, prehension, process-relational thought, virtual, Whitehead on October 21, 2013 | Leave a Comment »
Conversation overheard between an ambitious grad student and a simpleminded process-relational philosopher . . . Jake Wanano-Everton: Sir, where do you draw the line between what’s real and what’s not real? Prof. Noah Fewthings: The only things that are real are the moments of experienced reality — drops of experience, let’s […]
Half-Buddhist, half-Marxist
Posted in SpiritMatter, tagged Buddhism, Dalai Lama, Marxism on July 2, 2013 | Leave a Comment »
For anyone who thought “socially engaged Buddhism” (a.k.a. liberation Buddhism, Buddhist socialism, et al.) was a marginal movement within the Buddhist world, Bruce Smithers’s Tricycle article “Occupy Buddhism” shows it reaches high up the (sort of) hierarchy of publicly known Buddhists… to the Dalai Lama. It’s a selective analysis (the DL is much more pragmatic […]
“What a bodymind can do” update
Posted in SpiritMatter, tagged bodymind, Buddhism, categories, experience, Mahayana, meditation, mindfulness, Peirce, Shinzen Young on March 25, 2013 | 2 Comments »
The following provides an updated diagram and some further notes pertaining to my three-part article “What A Bodymind Can Do.” The earlier parts can be read here: part 1, part 2, part 3. (Please note that this version has corrected a minor error in the originally posted article, and added a bit more information at […]