In this post I want to share an audio clip that was taken from a lecture I gave in a philosophy program I used to offer called The Breakthrough Intensive. In the Breakthrough Intensive we …
The Secret of Manifesting Abundance in 12 Minutes
This 12 minute audio clip was edited from a workshop called Manifesting Abundance given by Jeff Carreira and Susan Kullman on June 25, 2018 at the Aligned Center in Irvington, NY. In this short clip …
William James and the Introduction of Buddhism into America (70mins)
This teaching introduces what I see as the two step process of the path to awakening. I sometimes refer to these two aspects of the path as first and second surrender, and sometimes as spiritual freedom and spiritual illumination.
The Evolution of Evolution
In 1859 Charles Darwin rocked the scientific and intellectual world with the publication of The Origin of Species (or more completely, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured …
The Art of Wormhole Inquiry (33mins)
A wormhole inquiry is a philosophical hack designed to liberate us from some of our most foundational assumptions about reality. There are beliefs that we hold so deeply in our unconscious mind that questioning them …
Ralph Waldo Emerson and The Origins of the Spiritual but Not Religious
It is not uncommon today for people to describe themselves as spiritual but not religious. This trend is a direct result of the secularization process that began during the Western Enlightenment, During the span of …
Life Without Truth: A Wormhole Inquiry
What I call wormhole inquiries are a sort of philosophical hack that free us from strict adherence to our current belief system and propel us into the open-ended possibility field of the unknown. I see this as …
The Reality of Reality: A Wormhole Inquiry
It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious. – Alfred North Whitehead In the current paradigm there is a strong belief that there is only one reality. We hold as …
Thinking the Thoughts of the Universe: A Wormhole Inquiry
In the current paradigm of being human we are trained to think of ourselves as independent achievers. That means we imagine that we are isolated individual beings who run around with brains processing information that …
Living in a Storybook Universe
Most of us reading this essay will be reading it from inside the paradigm of the modern Western world. That paradigm has often been seen as rooted in scientific materialism and sometimes been called the …
More than Human: A Wormhole Inquiry
We live in a conceptual world. That means that we perceive concepts. For example, I am sitting in a coffee shop writing. As I look around I see tables and chairs, coffee cups and croissants, …
Intuition and Understanding: two ways of knowing
In 1825 Samuel Taylor Coleridge published “Aids to Reflection” and put forth his answer to the question of whether we are stuff that got smart, or smarts that grew stuff, by proposing that there are actually two sources …
What counts as a being?
I believe that the most important philosophical question of our time is, what counts as a being? A thing is an object. It doesn’t count as a being. We can use things, manipulate them and …
Beyond the Brain’s Picture of Reality
It is much more exciting to question the whole of reality than it is to question any number of its parts. That might be why there has been such a surge in popularity in the …
The Expansion of Mind
In the 18th century Immanuel Kant articulated a magnificent vision of how the human mind keeps us contained within a single worldview. Kant realized that we don’t see the world as it is. Instead we …
The Holistic Evolution of Charles Sanders Peirce
The American Philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce did not see the universe as collection of separate but interconnected things that evolved together. He saw a continuous whole universe with three essential characteristics that co-emerge. All of …
Thinking is NOT something you do!
In the decade of the 1880’s two daringly original thinkers, working on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean, both recognized that reality was built upon a foundation of pure experience. One was William James who …
Seeing through Sentences in your Head
One of the things that the study of philosophy reveals is the profound relationship between the language that we use and our perception of what is real. We don’t have to look too deeply into …
Are we stuff that got smart? Or smarts that grew stuff?
One of the most confounding philosophical questions is the one about who we are, and how we got here. Are we intelligent matter – stuff that got smart – or are we incarnate spirit – …
How do we know what we think we know?
How do we know what we think we know? We think we know things, but do we really? What do we know, and more importantly how do we know that we know it? Think of …