15 Sunday Jun 2025
Posted in Certainty and Doubt, Epistemology, French Tradition, Mahāyāna, Meditation, Metaphilosophy, Metaphysics, Practice, Self, Serenity
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Chan/Zen 禪, David J. Blacker, drugs, Madhyamaka, mystical experience, Oxherding Pictures, Pierre Hadot, René Descartes, Śāntideva
David J. Blacker’s recent Deeper Learning with Psychedelics is a valuable attempt to think through the implications of psychedelics for philosophy and education. One passage in particular caught my imagination: Blacker points out the similarities between a psychedelic experience and René Descartes’s passage of radical doubt.
Continue reading16 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 reading24 Sunday Nov 2024
Posted in Action, Anger, German Tradition, Morality, Roman Catholicism, Serenity, Shame and Guilt
It’s not hard to see why the Catholic Church condemned Meister Eckhart for heresy. One of his teachings, in particular, is shocking even today: the good or blessed man, properly “poor in spirit”, is
so much of one will with God that he wills everything that God wills, and in the fashion in which God wills it. And therefore, because in some way or another it is God’s will that I should have sinned, I should not want not to have done so, for in this way God’s will is done “on earth,” that is, in misdeeds, “as it is in heaven,” that is, in good deeds. (Book of Benedictus section 2, pp. 216-17 in Meister Eckhart)
Or, as Eckhart’s accusers put it in the papal bull accusing him of heresy, “A good man ought to so conform his will to the divine will that he should will whatever God wills. Since God in some way wills for me to have sinned, I should not will that I had not committed sins; and this is true penitence.” (p. 77)
That’s a pretty extraordinary thing to be saying: it sounds like Eckhart is saying it’s good to be doing evil. That idea is as alarming to us as it would have been to the medieval Church.
Continue reading10 Sunday Nov 2024
Posted in Anger, Attachment and Craving, Compassion, Despair, Gratitude, Grief, Happiness, Mahāyāna, Patient Endurance, Politics, Serenity
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21st century, Donald Trump, early writings, George W. Bush, Martha Nussbaum, Prabhupada, Śāntideva, Treya Killam Wilber, United States
This is the first time I’ve ever reposted an old Love of All Wisdom post, because, despite its being nearly twenty years old now, I think it’s timelier than ever.
I first posted the following piece in 2016 when Trump won the first time – but I wrote it in 2005, after George W. Bush won the second time. I had been furious at Bush’s endorsement of torture and devastation of the climate throughout his first term I had been able to comfort myself with the thought that he didn’t really win: after all, even leaving aside all the voting irregularities, his opponent had also got more votes than he did. But in 2004 no such comfort was available to me; that disaster of a president had won a decisive victory including even the popular vote, and I had to find some way of coming to terms with the awful world he was going to keep building. I wrote this piece in my personal journal, for myself, and I have kept its original stream-of-consciousness style, reflecting my raw thought process as I processed.
Continue reading28 Sunday Jul 2024
Posted in Consciousness, Daoism, Epistemology, M.T.S.R., Mahāyāna, Meditation, Serenity
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Buddhaghosa, Butön, Cloud of Unknowing, Confucius, Dov Baer, Meister Eckhart, mystical experience, Ninian Smart, perennialism, phenomenology, Śāntideva, Tāranātha, Tibet, Victor Mair, Yoga Sūtras, Zhuangzi
When I was in grad school, a big academic fashion was to heap scorn on the idea that mystical experience could be something cross-cultural: everything was reducible to social context, and the similarities of experience didn’t really matter, as I had once argued myself. But the roots of that idea were often more asserted than argued: the famous article by Steven Katz, which inaugurated the approach, didn’t bother to justify its assumption that “There are NO pure (unmediated) experiences“, assuming perhaps that italics and capital letters were the only support necessary.
A little while ago I noted how Robert Forman’s collection of essays illustrate “cool” mystical experiences, where distinctions of senses and self drop away and the mind ceases to fluctuate, in sources as varied as the Indian Yoga Sūtras, the Ukrainian Hasidic Dov Baer and the German mystic Meister Eckhart. Something similar seems to be going on in the Sri Lankan systematizer Buddhaghosa and the medieval English Cloud of Unknowing, which both involve, in Ninan Smart’s terms, a “systematic effort to blot out sense perception, memories, and imaginings of the world of our sensory environment and of corresponding inner states.” And it turns out that once your mind is no longer prejudged to deny any cross-cultural similarity, you start noticing it in a lot of other places.
Continue reading21 Sunday Jul 2024
Posted in Action, Daoism, Flourishing, Metaphysics, Protestantism, Serenity
≈ Comments Off on George Grant, Daoist
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Canada, Chris Fraser, George Grant, Martin Heidegger, Martin Luther, modernity, natural environment, Robert Meynell, Robert Sibley, Zhuangzi
I think George Grant is in many respects a Daoist. I don’t think he thought of himself as a Daoist. But key parts of his viewpoint seem very Daoist to me.
For those who don’t know Grant: he was a 20th-century Canadian philosopher best known for his Lament for a Nation, a book which claimed that the idea of Canada was to remain an outpost of the British Empire in North America, and thereby resist the influence of the United States – an idea which he thought had been lost. (In those ideas he was taking cues from John Watson, in the stream of Canadian Hegelianism.) I have little love for that view of Canada, so it’s not my favourite part of Grant’s thought. But there’s a lot more to Grant that I find much more exciting.
Continue reading19 Sunday Nov 2023
Posted in Anger, Daoism, East Asia, Flourishing, Mahāyāna, Meditation, Mindfulness, Modernized Buddhism, Serenity
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Andy Puddicombe, autobiography, Brook Ziporyn, drugs, Four Noble Truths, Headspace, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Dunne, Pali suttas, Ron Purser, Śāntideva, Tiantai 天台, Zhiyi
One of the things that helped me realize the need for self-improvement by not-self-improvement was regular practice with the excellent Headspace meditation app, created by a former Tibetan monk named Andy Puddicombe. Headspace is at the epicenter of “McMindfulness”: the app normally charges for access but I get it for free as a work wellness benefit, and this arrangement has made Puddicombe millions of dollars. In turn, the app is a big reason I defend McMindfulness – especially through John Dunne’s hugely helpful distinction between “classical” and “nondual” mindfulness.
That is to say: the core practice in Headspace is noticing your emotions, positive and negative, as they arise, and reacting to them with nonjudgemental acceptance. And you do so, yes, in the present moment. Critics like Ron Purser correctly note that that present-moment focus is not found in classical Indian texts like the Pali suttas or Śāntideva – but Dunne notes that it is found in other premodern Buddhist traditions, like the Tibetan writings of Wangchuk Dorje. And I dare say that that present-moment technique is an improvement: one that does a better job than the classical tradition’s techniques at their shared goal of reducing our suffering.
Continue reading05 Sunday Nov 2023
Posted in Attachment and Craving, Christianity, Daoism, Deity, Flourishing, Humility, Mahāyāna, Meditation, Mindfulness, Self-Discipline, Serenity, Virtue
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Augustine, autobiography, Chan/Zen 禪, Disengaged Buddhism, John Dunne, Nancy Houfek, Pali suttas, Śāntideva, skholiast (blogger), Wangchuk Dorje
Years ago, in a difficult period of my life, I had looked for philosophical help and explicitly found it in Buddhism and not Daoism, rejecting Daoism and its sudden-liberation views in about the strongest possible terms. But that wasn’t the whole story.
I had already been trying to apply the four-stage model of skill development, taught to me by Nancy Houfek, in which one progresses from unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence to conscious competence to unconscious competence. Trying to find a peaceful mind in those difficult days, I was all too conscious of my own incompetence, and Daoism provided no guidance that I could discern on how one could make the all-important step to conscious competence. But it is eight years later now, eight years I have spent working on my mindfulness through a nightly prayer ritual and, increasingly, meditation. I’ve gotten better at stopping my harmful thoughts when I put my mind to it; I think I’ve acquired a certain degree of conscious competence. The next step seems to be making it a habit, making it unconscious competence. And when it comes to that, the Daoists might have a point.
Continue reading26 Sunday Feb 2023
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Epictetus, gender, intimacy/integrity, John Dunne, Skye Cleary, Thomas P. Kasulis, United States
The contemporary world is not a particularly philosophical place, the United States even less so. Philosophy’s reputation can be low enough to make it a convenient whipping boy, as when politicians join in a pile-on on it. So it’s a wonderful surprise when a philosophical tradition becomes a trend.
Such is the recent rise of popular Stoicism in the past decade. While it’s particularly influential in Silicon Valley, the modern Stoic movement is popular around the world, with conventions on multiple continents. Stoicism’s message that external goods are not what makes the difference to living well proved a particularly important consolation during the pandemic, when sales of the works of Seneca and Marcus Aurelius surged.
Now a common observation about the newly popular Stoicism is that it appeals primarily to men. I’ve often heard its practitioners dismissed as “tech bros”. An interview by Skye Cleary observed that Stoicon attenders were primarily men, and took this as an occasion for criticism: little surprise, perhaps, in an era that rarely uses the noun “masculinity” without attaching the adjective “toxic”.
Continue reading06 Sunday Jun 2021
Posted in Action, Courage, External Goods, Prayer, Protestantism, Serenity
≈ Comments Off on The courage to change the things we can
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12-step programs, Aśvaghoṣa, Elisabeth Sifton, Fred Shapiro, Reinhold Niebuhr, Winnifred Crane Wygal
The Serenity Prayer, it turns out, has multiple versions. On the Alcoholics Anonymous website you’ll find the version I quoted before, though the site adds that the first person is often pluralized, “I” to “we”:
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
The courage to change the things I can,
And the wisdom to know the difference.
However, Reinhold Niebuhr’s daughter Elisabeth Sifton in her memoir gives us a different version. She says that Niebuhr’s original version of the prayer was composed in 1943, was first preached by him in a Sunday sermon that year in Heath, Massachusetts, and looked like this:
God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things that should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.
As Sifton notes on pp292-3, there are at least two major differences between these two versions. The first refers to grace and the second does not; the first refers to changing what I or we can change, the second to what should be changed. Sifton prefers the second; she says that AA “simplified” the text and her father “minded” the change but did not object.
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