We are all aware – sometimes painfully so – that the past influences the present. If we have not studied we will not do well on our exam. If we don’t practice our instrument we …
What is the Relationship Between Meditation and Transformation?
I have dedicated my life to the exploration of the profound potential for transformation that all human beings possess. In this pursuit I have had the grace of experiencing transformation at the core of my …
Self-Authoring a Paradigm Shift
We live inside of a paradigm based on an assumption of separation and division. We have been trained to believe that we live in reality and we have been taught that the reality we live …
The Experience of Suspended Limitation
The experience of spiritual freedom is a condition of suspended limitation. I remember a very profound moment in my life when I realized that I didn’t really know what was possible. Stop and think about …
The Three Stage Process of Evolving Selfhood
I believe that the evolution of the self occurs through successive transformative leaps and that this is the whole purpose of spiritual life. The spiritual experiences that we have, the breakthroughs, openings and energetic surges …
Spiritual Growth and the Emergence of the Meta-Being
The purpose of spiritual growth is the expansion of self-awareness. As we grow we become more aware of who we are. Human life is our spiritual path. It leads to the gradual expansion of self-awareness. …
William James and Radical Empiricism
William James is the author of The Varieties of Religious Experience and one of my biggest philosophical heroes. He was born in upstate New York in a family rich with inherited wealth. James was a …
Participatory Ontological Emergence: Questioning Some Foundational Assumptions of our Current Reality
It takes a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious. – Alfred North Whitehead Ontology is the branch of philosophy that asks the question “What is Reality?” This is a profound question, …
Embracing Radical Pluralism – or – Can we really live with Paradox?
Ontology is the branch of philosophy concerned with questions about the essential nature of reality. When you ask, “Is this real?” you are asking an ontological question. Ontology is often what we think about when …
The Secret of Perpetual Awakening
For the past few years I have been exploring and teaching about a distinction that I speak about as the first and second surrender of spiritual awakening. The first surrender is the utterly passive acceptance …
The Non-Locality of Self
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 …
A Multi-Dimensional View of Consciousness
Most of us have been taught to understand mind, thought, and self through a dualistic model of reality. I call that model of reality things-in-space consciousness, and it was born in the West during the …
How Meditation Supports a Paradigm Shift
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 …
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 …