In the meditation of The Practice of No Problem I simply ask people to sit still and not make a problem out of anything. No matter what happens in the privacy of your own inner …
Tantra, Non-Duality and the Practice of No Problem: Part 1
In the traditions of the East a spiritual path is considered Tantric when its goal is to bring about the direct recognition of the immediate availability of our boundless nature. Tantric paths do not see …
Freedom from Mental Chatter
The opening paragraph of the book Radical Inclusivity says: The first time I was engulfed by the realization of Radical Inclusivity was during a sixty-day meditation retreat under the guidance of my spiritual teacher. As …
How Can Our Current Consciousness Induce a New One?
In the book Radical Inclusivity I am pointing to a new level of consciousness. The idea that we are in the midst of a shift in consciousness is not original and in fact is gaining …
The Heart and Soul of Romanticism
In deep meditation we encounter our own non-existence, or at least we discover that we are not who, or what, we thought we were. We see that our experience is made up of a never-ending …
Beyond Flatland: Multiple Dimensions & Mystical Experience
In 1884 Edwin Abbott published a novella called Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions and the exploration of multi-dimensional reality that it contains. In this post I use this book as the basis for a …
How we think and the way things are…
Our customary perception tells us that we live in a world made up of separate things. We have been trained to see reality as a collection of objects. Hence we use the word ‘everything’ to …
Intuition, Understanding and the Science of Subjectivity
In our last session we explore how our thinking is trapped in words – nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, etc. because our language shapes what can be thought of. The Romantic thinkers of the 18th and …
Martin Heidegger and The LEGO Movie: An Existentialist Interpretation
The LEGO Movie is an animated film that brings the plastic construction toy to life. Like so many others, I found the film to be a delight. I also found it to be a delightful …
Compelled By Possibility – Meditation and a New Way of Being
There are personally and culturally conditioned parts of us that hold onto a problem orientation. If we want to think in evolutionary terms, the habit of having a problem probably goes very deep. There is …
How to Move Beyond Vicious Intellectualism
There are things that we know. And there are things that we know that we don’t know. And there are things that we don’t know that we don’t know. Those things that we don’t even …
What is Radical Inclusivity? Introducing a New Reality
Radical Inclusivity is a philosophical perspective and an awakening experience that opens a portal to a new reality. My passion for philosophy is fueled by my recognition that the reality we live in needs to …
Lesson 7: Existentialism and Pragmatism in Defense of Faith
During the late 19th and early 20th centuries two philosophical perspectives emerged to challenge the supremacy of rationalism. One of these was the philosophy of Existentialism developed in Continental Europe, the other was Pragmatism developed in America.
Lesson 6: The Triumph of Romanticism
As we discussed in earlier lessons for a time during the 18th Century it seems that the rationality of the Enlightenment triumphed over all other ways of knowing. Many rejoiced that soon the laws that operated behind the universe would all be known and humankind would create the future it wanted.
Lesson 5: Science, Scientism and the Fate of Spirituality in the Western World
In our last lesson we transitioned from the Middle Ages into the Enlightenment and the modern age of philosophy. What we found were new variations of the intellectual conflict between the ideal and the real that the early Greeks were wrestling with.
Lesson 4: The Battle of Mind and Matter
As Western history moved beyond the Middle Ages and approached the dawning of enlightenment the stage had been set for an intellectual struggle that continues with us today. It is a dualistic dilemma of two philosophical positions that are fundamentally conflicting.
Lesson 3: The Heroic Leap from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment
The leap that occurred in human consciousness from the time known as The Middle Ages to the Age of Enlightenment is nothing short of miraculous.
Lesson 2: The Two Truths of the Middle Ages
During the trial of Jesus it is said that if Jesus had only been willing to deny that he was the king of the Jews his life would have been spared. He refused and was punished by the painful death of crucifixion.
Lesson 1: Plato and Aristotle: The Dreamer and The Scientist
The 20th Century philosopher Alfred North Whitehead has described all of Western philosophy as a footnote to Plato. By this he implies that all of philosophy has either been an extension of, or a refutation of what Plato originally thought.
A Crash Course in Western Philosophy
Over my next seven blog posts I am going to be giving you ‘A Crash Course in Western Philosophy’. In this course you will get a rapid, but fascinating tour through the twists and turns …