Although Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is best know as a towering literary figure he was also a scientific genius. His method of doing science was in some ways diametrically opposed to the methods of many of …
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 …
The Emergence of a New Reality of Relatedness
What do we mean when we say ‘reality”? One simple way to think about reality is that it is that which we can’t do anything to change. The fact that I will age is reality. …
Is Time Real?
The experience of the passage of time is one of the most foundational experiences of being human. We remember the past, we experience the immediacy of the present, and we imagine the possibilities of the …
A Very Brief History of Evolutionary Spirituality in America
The most obvious place to start the story of Evolutionary Spirituality in America is with Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson, who has been called the father of American culture, was a Christian minister who split with …
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 …
What does it feel like to evolve?
Evolutionary Ethics has been a topic of discussion ever since there has been discussion about evolution. In the early 20th century Eugenics was seriously studied at universities. Eugenics is the practice of controlled human breeding for evolutionary purposes. …
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 …
Meditate into Deep Trust
Many of my most profound spiritual awakenings have come to me through the practice of meditation. And although I haven’t written about that topic on this blog, I do see it as a spiritual discipline …
Art, Culture and Alfred North Whitehead
The art scene in New York in the fifties was a living hotbed for a new way of thinking and new conceptions about reality. Avant-garde painters, writers, musicians and more, were infused with a new …
Art and the Evolution of Consciousness
Did you know that American Avant-Garde painters, writers and musicians in the 1950’s were inspired by evolutionary philosophy? I just completed a weekend program with a group that I co-teach called The Evolutionary Collective and …
Staying Inside Our Relationships
This is my final post in a series exploring what it means to “stay on the inside of life.” What we are exploring is some of the philosophical/psychological challenges of extreme objectification. When the world …
Staying On the Inside of our Commitments
In my last few posts I outlined some of my thoughts about the tendency that most of us have of somehow mentally and emotionally stepping outside of ourselves. The way we do this is twofold. …
The Voices in Our Heads: Staying on the Inside of Awareness
In this series of posts I am using the metaphor of “staying on the inside” to explore the common human experience of isolation and fragmentation and also some possible solutions for it. We have all …
This Is It: Staying on the Inside of Life
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 …
Staying on the Inside – Unifying the Self with Reality
We live in fractured times. Our experience of reality and ourselves often seems to be dominated by a sense of isolation and separation. In the cannon of philosophy this sense of division is often spoken …
The American Philosophical Experiment
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 …
The Philosophical Roots of Socialism and the Free Market Economy
It is common knowledge that among developed western countries the two leading socioeconomic systems are socialism and capitalism. The former is often associated more closely with European systems of governance and the latter with the …