23 Sunday Nov 2025
Posted in Emotion, Mahāyāna, Meditation, Mindfulness, Modernized Buddhism, Psychology
Modern mindfulness tends to urge us to stay in the present moment, learn to avoid getting distracted by wandering thoughts. A friend recently raised a thoughtful critique of this approach: aren’t there times when we want, even need, our thoughts to wander?
Continue reading12 Wednesday Nov 2025
Posted in Anger, Attachment and Craving, Confucianism, Early and Theravāda, Emotion, External Goods, Flourishing, Foundations of Ethics, Human Nature, Mahāyāna, Meditation, Metaphysics, Mindfulness, Morality, Natural Science, Pleasure, Politics, Psychology, Self
≈ Comments Off on Mindform Podcast interview
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Alex O'Connor, Aristotle, authenticity, autobiography, Charles Goodman, conventional/ultimate, expressive individualism, Frank Lawton, Friedrich Nietzsche, interview, Jeremy Bentham, Kāma Sūtra, Madhyamaka, phenomenology, Śāntideva, Thailand, utilitarianism, virtue ethics
I was interviewed by Frank Lawton on a recent episode of the Mindform Podcast on self-development and wisdom, associated with Ryan A. Bush’s Designing the Mind. We begin with my formative story in Thailand and the anti-politics associated with it, proceeding to a critique of utilitarianism, a discussion of my gradual movement from Theravāda to Mahāyāna Buddhism, and finally to an exploration of expressive individualism. All told, I think it’s a very nicely rounded introduction to my philosophical thinking – even if my growing hair is in its awkward phase and I stammer a little too much!
21 Sunday Sep 2025
Posted in Aesthetics, Analytic Tradition, Food, Play, Pleasure, Psychology, Sex, South Asia, Zest
Daniel Pallies, a philosophy postdoc at Lingnan University in Hong Kong, recently wrote a blog post entitled “The inexplicable appeal of spicy food”. Pallies, from his bio, indicates that one of his key interests is the question: “What makes a feeling pleasant, or unpleasant?” And so he is puzzled by a phenomenon that he and I share: we enjoy eating food high in capsaicin, even though the sensation of eating these foods is painful. He adds: “And like most people, I think that pain makes your life worse. All else being equal, your life goes worse for you to the extent that it is painful. So why do I, and lots of other people, eat spicy food?”
Continue reading07 Sunday Sep 2025
Last month I had the good fortune to attend a weeklong conference of Buddhism scholars in Leipzig, Germany – a wonderful opportunity in many ways, not least that one gets to be in a world far removed from the current craziness of American politics. So not long afterwards, I set myself the goal of not saying the T-word to anyone during my week there.
I succeeded at that goal, barely. But it was really hard.
Continue reading31 Sunday Aug 2025
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Alison Vipond, autobiography, Canada, Claude Vipond, Dave Harkness, Facebook, Jayant Lele, mystical experience
Grief can be more complicated than we often make it out to be. In the wake of my father’s death, several people have reminded me of this point, and they’ve been right – in a way that I know a little too well, because of other experiences with grieving over the past decade.
Continue reading17 Sunday Aug 2025
Posted in Attachment and Craving, Christianity, Deity, Foundations of Ethics, Islam, Mahāyāna, Metaphysics, Truth
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Augustine, C.S. Lewis, Candrakīrti, conventional/ultimate, existentialism, ibn Sīnā, Madhyamaka, Plato, Śāntideva
While Buddhist schools have many different takes on metaphysics – on what the world really is – they all acknowledge a distinction between two truths, or two levels of reality. That is: there is a conventional truth, the one familiar to us in everyday life where we can fruitfully speak of individual selves or persons and other everyday objects – and another, more ultimate (paramārtha) truth that is distinguished in some respect from the conventional, truer than the conventional. Their widely varying metaphysics mostly have to do with how we understand the ultimate truth, and I’ll talk about that more next week. I want to start this time, though, I want to note a key point that the metaphysical schools share: the importance of breaking down the conventional – or, put another way, of seeing through it.
Continue reading27 Sunday Jul 2025
Posted in Death, Emotion, Family, Gratitude, Grief, Health, Metaphilosophy, Politics, Psychology
This Friday, while I was taking my lunch break from work, my mother called to let me know that my father, Jayant Lele, had peacefully passed away.
His health had been failing for a while. It got so bad in January that we expected to be saying goodbye to him then; miraculously he survived that, but he never made anything close to a full recovery. So we knew this was coming, but we didn’t know when, which put a lot of stress on all of us.
These last months have been the hardest. I got several chances to visit this year, which I’m very grateful for. (My parents have continued living in Kingston, Ontario, where I grew up, while I live in metro Boston now.) Those visits felt to me like I imagine raising a child must feel: difficult and frustrating, but rewarding.
Continue reading29 Sunday Jun 2025
Posted in Analytic Tradition, Certainty and Doubt, Fear, Humility, Metaphilosophy, Politics
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academia, Daily Nous, gender, identity, John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, Kathleen Stock, Willow Starr
Transgender identity raises a variety of interesting philosophical questions, and on an issue this controversial, the answers to those questions will necessarily be controversial too. I recently found myself embroiled in some of this controversy on Daily Nous, the main blog for philosophy as a profession.
I’ll start here by recapping the controversy to date, before turning to a response. There’s a new free zine out just launched, called Being Trans in Philosophy, which shares trans philosophers’ stories of their experiences. That’s not the controversial part: I think it’s great to give trans philosophers a dedicated space to tell their stories! I have no objection to the zine itself. What I objected to was this passage in the zine’s press release:
Philosophical conversations about trans people do not happen in a vacuum. They happen in a political context where trans people are relentlessly attacked and a material context where trans lives are particularly vulnerable. These contexts make it impossible to “just ask questions” about trans people. And trans people and our loved ones are not okay—in, with, and because of our discipline.
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16 Sunday Mar 2025
Posted in Despair, Early and Theravāda, Hope, Politics, Serenity
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21st century, Disengaged Buddhism, Donald Trump, Mohandas K. Gandhi, Pali suttas, Siddhattha Gotama (Buddha), United States
Early in the first Trump administration, I preached the importance of disengaged Buddhists’ lessons: to refrain from anger, to remind ourselves that some things are more important than politics. I think that that was easier to do the first time round. For in the end, the main thing that distinguished the Trump administration from previous Republican administrations – until the various self-coup attempts at the end of his reign – was its hostile rhetoric. On policy, on running the government, Trump 1.0 was not all that different from a standard garden-variety Republican: the only major controversial piece of legislation he passed was to borrow money and hand it to the rich, just as Reagan and George W. Bush had done before him. Some of the policies that drew the biggest outrage – like putting children in cages – turned out to be the work of previous administrations, including Obama. While Trump’s bark did make the United States a more hostile place for everyone, it nevertheless remained far worse than his bite. That made it a lot easier to preach taking a chill pill.
I don’t think any of that is true this time around. After the election, my hope had been for a second Trump term mostly like the first, probably a little worse. But nothing of the sort has happened. As far as I can tell, Trump has done far more damage in the first month of his second term than he did in three and a half years of his first. The actions of Trump, and his unelected viceroy Elon Musk, have already killed thousands of African recipients denied aid, and wreaked havoc on the world from Ukraine through Canada to here in metropolitan Boston, where nearly everyone I know has had their job redefined – if not lost – as a result of cuts and freezes to science funding.
Continue reading09 Sunday Mar 2025
Posted in Emotion, Meditation, Mindfulness, Modernized Buddhism, Psychology
One of the things that really surprises me about contemporary mindfulness meditation is how rarely – especially at the beginning – they highlight what, as far as I can tell, is the most beneficial aspect of the practice. It’s not a “secret” in the sense of being concealed away somewhere, just that beginners are rarely told how important it is; I more or less had to figure it out for myself. This holds true for the practices I’m most familiar with – Headspace, Robert Sokolove’s medical mindfulness recording, Goenka vipassanā – but also seems to hold for other forms of modern mindfulness that I’ve listened to recordings of. Because of this, I think it’s easy for a beginner to misinterpret what mindfulness meditation is about.
Headspace’s meditation instructions usually involve focusing your attention on your breath – its inward and outward movement, the way your chest and stomach rise and fall with the breath. (Sokolove’s likewise.) Goenka vipassanā puts more emphasis on repeatedly scanning your attention up and down through your body. But it’s become clear to me that that focus, on the breath or the bodily sensations, is not the point of any of these exercises.
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