The advantage of being a materialist is that so much of our experience seems to point to a material basis for reality. Idealists usually have to appeal to some inner knowing as the justification of …
What comes first, mind or matter?
First there was mind – absolute intelligence, pure consciousness. From this mind came the world and the universe and all forms of living beings. This would be the position of an idealist and Samuel Taylor …
The Soul Evolves
The human soul is not the procession of any single individual; it is the ground of awareness that is the essence of the entire human experience. It is a field of pure knowing. At least …
A Field of Pure Knowing
What is the human soul? Is it some phantom-like part of us or is it a living dimension of the universe from which all life flows? The later is what Samuel Taylor Coleridge taught and …
Breaking the Bonds of Language
Have you ever tried to have an original thought – or worse – had a truly original thought that you tried to put into language? That is when you realize that you are trapped in …
The Bible, Poetry and Mental Sensations
By the early part of the nineteenth century the Age of Reason had made it increasingly difficult for progressive religious thinkers to accept a literal interpretation of the Bible. It was clear that many passages of …
Understanding, Rationality and Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridge could have used the same tag line as Apple Computers – Think Different! Coleridge is one of the early pioneers of Romanticism and Romanticism was a different way of thinking. In 1825 …
Are We Intelligent Matter or Incarnate Spirit?
One of the most confounding philosophical questions involves our understanding of who we really are. Are we intelligent matter – stuff that got smart – or are we incarnate spirit – smarts that grew stuff …
Swimming is to Water as Knowing is to Language
When we think about knowing and not knowing, the known and the unknown, sooner or later we have to start thinking about language. Language is the currency of knowing. Realizing this is like swimming for …
Vicious Intellectualism and the Reality of the Unknown
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. These last are the “unknown unknowns” …
The Truth is Out There: Pragmatism and The X-files
It occurred to me the other day that the American Philosophy of Pragmatism shares some remarkable similarities with the television series The X-files. Let’s start with the TV show’s moto – “the truth is out …
Interpreting the Signs of Reality
The concept of signs is so common to us that we hardly think about it. (Of course many of the most profound ideas are disguised as common ones that we don’t need to think about.) …
The Many Layers of Reality or “Is a Fire Truck Really a Fire Truck?”
Is a fire truck really a fire truck? Is a truck really a truck? Is anything really what it is? We assume that things really are what they appear to us to be. This assumption …
Escape From The Myth of the Given
One way to think about the existential dilemma of postmodernism is that we began to realize that our perception of reality is a hopeless tangle of sensation and interpretation. What we assume to be reality as we …
The Myth of the Given – or – Marooned on Mount Assumption
We all believe in an outdated myth. It is the unconscious belief that something is given – that we are standing on some solid ground of truth from which the rest of our understanding of …
The Assumption of Reality
When we think about reality or talk about reality the big assumption we almost always make is that there is a reality to think and talk about. When Rene Descartes drew an astonishingly original distinction …
“To Thing”: A New Verb
Thing (v). to thing, thinging. 1. To create an object by defining a boundary around some portion of reality separating it from everything else and then labeling that portion of reality with a name. One …
Embedding Consciousness Back Into The World
It seems to me that one of the great philosophical projects of our age is the effort to re-embed human consciousness into nature. This would be the antidote to some negative ramifications of another great …
Are We On the Outside of the Universe Looking In?
It might be that the representational model of mind is the source of the existential feelings of separation, isolation and alienation that are so common in our world. Let me explain, most of us would …
The Reality of the Immediately Present – William James and Rudolf Steiner
Some things in reality force themselves upon us immediately. They appear spontaneously without provocation and they impress themselves upon our senses in ways that we cannot withstand. These things surely must be real. Direct sense …