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 …
A Deceptively Simple Approach to Meditation
The meditation practice that I am describing here is the simplest thing you could possibly do. In fact it is so simple that you are already doing it right now without realizing it. It is …
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 …
Are you a Romantic? You are if…
In the late eighteenth century a literary and philosophical movement called Romanticism began. This movement was the emergence of a new consciousness in part spurred by the failings of the European Enlightenment. It lived in …
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 …
The Source of Creativity in the Universe
The American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce believed that the universe was evolving – the whole universe, not just the things in it. He believed that the universe itself, including the seemingly immutable laws of time, …
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 …
Romanticism and the Human Soul
Most of us know Samuel Taylor Coleridge as the English Romantic poet and author of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. We may not be aware that he was also an important English theologian 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 …
To thing or not to thing? That is the question.
One of the greatest human skills is the ability to thing. We are thinging beings. We thing all the time. We thing the natural world into pieces. We saw a tall plant and we defined …
William James, The Stream of Consciousness and Freewill
William James was trained as a medical doctor at Harvard University and became generally recognized as the first psychologist in America and his first and arguably most significant written work was “The Principles of Psychology” published …
How do you read philosophy?
As I have been reading through some of the works of the great American philosophers I have found myself having to think about “how” to read them. When you read Ralph Waldo Emerson or …
The Non-Dual Awakening of Ralph Waldo Emerson
One of the themes that I intend to develop in this blog is the understanding of non-duality. Non-duality is a term that means literally – “not two.” It is used in philosophy, but even more …
The Evolutionary Ethics of John Dewey
The American philosopher John Dewey wrote another of my favorite philosophy passages in the last paragraph of his 1898 essay Evolution and Ethics. Dewey articulates in this paragraph what he sees as a monumental leap …
Everything Exists in Relationship
Things do not exist unless they exist in relationship with something else. In fact, things do not exist at all. Relationships exist. There are no individual things. The existence of anything is always contingent upon …
Contact, Concept and Art
We live in a reality constructed of contact and concept. The world reveals itself to us in a stream of sensation. We see colors, shapes, lines, shades of light and dark. We hear sounds shrill …
Meditation is Not a Luxury
I believe meditation is essential for living a human life because our experience of consciousness is so subtle and so easily misinterpreted. In particular one distinction comes to mind when thinking about why meditative practice …