My short book, Radical Inclusivity, can be seen as (and in fact in many ways is) my personal introduction to the philosophy called speculative realism. This new philosophy has only been defined and developed during the course of the last decade by a handful of pioneering thinkers. As I see it, speculative realism is creating […]
Category Archives: Expanding Mind
We Don’t Create Time – We Freeze It In Its Tracks.
posted by Jeff Carreira
We have learned to see time as if it appears in chunks – minutes, hours, days, and years. But if time comes in chunks how do we experience past memories in the present? How does the previous moment’s chunk of time connect to the chunk of the present moment? Wait a minute. It will take […]
The Non-Locality of Self
posted by Jeff Carreira
The literary movement known as Romanticism actively embraced the idea of multiple perspectives. The Romantics were in part reacting against what they saw as the limitations of the Enlightenment. One of those limitations was that for all of its magnificent advances the Enlightenment thinkers were still in some ways committed to a single view of […]
What is the difference between Philosophy and Spirituality
posted by Jeff Carreira
“What is the difference between Philosophy and Spirituality?” This is a question that has been propelling much of my efforts in writing this blog. Generally here I have limited my meandering thoughts to those ideas and thinkers that tend to safely fall within the general spectrum of what are known as philosophies and philosophers. My […]
The Soul Evolves
posted by Jeff Carreira
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 that is what Ralph Waldo Emerson learned from Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Emerson used the term the Over-Soul to express this […]
The American Philosophical Experiment
posted by Jeff Carreira
Nations and cultures embody ideas. The individuals and institutions of a nation are reflections of the ideas and values held in common within it. In order to deeply understand a culture, or the people in it, you have to understand the ideas that are being shared. The United States is a particularly vivid example of […]
This Is It: Staying on the Inside of Life
posted by Jeff Carreira
How much time do we spend preparing for a moment other than the one we are in? How many hours are passed in critique of what we are doing rather than doing it? These are interesting questions especially when we are considering the phrase ‘staying on the inside’ in relationship to our human experience. In […]
How Meditation Supports a Paradigm Shift
posted by Jeff Carreira
Many of us have discovered that profound transformation necessitates a deep shift in the paradigm we live in. In moments of deep insight we realize that we live under the influence of deeply held beliefs and assumptions that limit what is possible. What we often don’t realize is that even the part of us that […]
A World of Sentences, Part 3: The Transformative Power of Language
posted by Jeff Carreira
In my last two posts I have suggested that it may not be valid to think of language as a description of reality. So if our language does not describe reality, what does it do? There are many ways to look at the value and function of language, but there is one that I find […]
A World of Sentences, Part 2: Language and the Reality of Reality
posted by Jeff Carreira
When we begin to suspect how much language might be influencing our perception of reality our fundamental conception of what is real and true starts to unravel. Have we been wrong to assume that language is an accurate reflection of reality? Is there even a ‘reality’ out there to be reflected back to us in […]