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 …
Thinking About Thinking: Thinking is NOT something you do!
In the decade of the 1880’s two daringly original thinkers, working on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean, both recognized that reality was built upon a foundation of pure experience. One was William James who …
William James, The Stream of Consciousness and Freewill
William James was trained as a medical doctor at Harvard University and became generally recognized as the first psychologist in America and his first and arguably most significant written work was “The Principles of Psychology” published …
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 …
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 …
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 Trouble with Worldviews
I have been thinking about how challenging philosophical discussion can be and I think that part of that difficulty comes about when we are not discussing ideas within a single worldview, but are actually clashing …
Nature Mystics and Scientific Progressives
The European Enlightenment produced two responses; Scientific Rationalism and Romanticism. The Scientific Rationalism represented in the science of Sir Isaac Newton and the philosophy of John Locke. Romanticism produced the writing of Goethe in Germany …
From Mysticism to We-Mysticism
Mysticism is most often associated with the lone spiritual adventurer who separates from the world in order to turn his or her gaze inward and unite with the divine. Yet there is also another form …
The Heart of the Mystic
A mystic is one who sees the deeper reality that lies hidden beneath our ordinary experience of reality. The mystic looks deeply into the nature of things by letting go of conventional wisdom and allowing …
Pluralism and Relativism
There are two other terms that many of us have heard which are good to look at more closely, because they are often misused – or only used partially for what they are. The terms are pluralism and …
Is there One World or Many?
Our spontaneously arising experience of the present moment is a miraculous event that we are constantly in the middle of. In my last couple of posts I described the depth and majesty of all that …
The Transformation of the Present Moment
Generally we assume that the world just exists – sitting there dead and meaningless – the object of our perceptions. The world doesn’t just exist – it shows up. It presents itself to us through …
William James and the Flow of Pure Experience –or– Why are two experiences better than one?
What you are experiencing right now is all there is – at least that is one of the implications of William James’ radical views on reality. William James was the first great American psychologist and …
Did Modernism Isolate Us from the World?
The world doesn’t just exist, it shows up for us. It appears as the pure experience of the present moment. And one of the most amazing things about the world is that it changes – …
Are we just Thinking Things in a World?
What do we really know about the relationship between the world and our experience of it? That is an important question and there are at least three things that we can be sure of. We …
Cartesian Dualism and Brains In Vats
If you could put your brain in a nutrient bath so that it could keep on functioning outside of your body what would it (or would it still be you) experience? Would it still have …
The Ego Tunnel and the Nature of Reality
Thomas Metzinger’s new book The Ego Tunnel weaves research in out-of-body experiences, lucid dreaming, phantom limbs and other extraordinary human occurrences with leading edge neuroscience to create a convincing picture of how neural activity constantly …