03 Sunday Aug 2025
Posted in Flourishing, Foundations of Ethics, Health, Psychology, Serenity, Virtue
Tags
Charles Taylor, Daniel Mallory Ortberg, expressive individualism, Patrick Lee Miller, relativism
Like most of those around me, I feel the pull of expressive individualist ideas: I think it is a hugely important part of being human to be ourselves and express ourselves, in ways that express our own individuality and are not the same as others’. Yet there is also a grave danger in this ideal.
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 reading06 Sunday Jul 2025
Posted in Health, Politics, Psychology, Sex
Tags
American Psychological Association, Donald Trump, expressive individualism, gender, identity, Lady Gaga, Laura Edwards-Leeper, United States
Being gender-fluid, in a certain sense I transition and detransition my gender every week (just not medically). It feels only natural to me to think that people who’d undergone full-time or medical transition might come to regret it or decide it wasn’t for them. The core idea underlying the trans movement is expressive individualism: you should be able to express your true self. So surely, if you thought you were one gender and then realized you were another, that’s something the movement should affirm. And yet, sadly, it seems that much of the trans movement not only does not affirm such a position, but views it as a threat.
This Reuters report notes that online detransitioners often face “members of the transgender community telling them to ‘shut up’ and even sending death threats.” The work of Kinnon MacKinnon, the most prominent academic studying detransition, gets denounced as “transphobic”. True, right-wing groups hold up detransitioners to advance a political agenda against youth medical transition; they’re happy that detransitioners are convenient to that agenda. But when trans activists are denouncing research on detransition as transphobic and sending death threats to detransitioners, it’s simply laughable to claim that they are doing anything different! For both the right-wingers and the trans activists, the agenda comes first and the people second. Detransitioners are forced into taking a position I’ve too often found myself in in a variety of regards: I’m sorry that my existence is inconvenient to your narrative.
Continue reading08 Sunday Jun 2025
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Advaita Vedānta, Aristotle, drugs, Gauḍapāda, Ingmar Gorman, John Hick, MAPS, Meister Eckhart, mystical experience, nondualism, Rachael Petersen, religion, Roland Griffiths, Upaniṣads, Zhuangzi
I’m delighted to be giving a talk at Psychedelic Science 2025, the annual conference of the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies. The conference (June 17-20 in Denver) promises to be really fun and stimulating. If you can make it, I’d love to say hi: registration isn’t cheap, but you can use code SPEAKER15 to get 15% off your registration.
I’m especially excited because my talk is really experimental, the kind of broad comparative work that would have got frowned on when I was in grad school. I’m still aiming to exercise scholarly caution to avoid saying anything false, trying to stay reasonably close to what’s in the texts, but I am writing about multiple thinkers whose source languages (classical Chinese and old German) I don’t know well: something which I think one has to do in order to investigate human cultural commonalities, but which would have raised every eyebrow in my PhD program. It’s the kind of project that an aspiring professor only undertakes after getting tenure; in my case, I can do it because I’m no longer trying for a faculty job.
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.
Continue reading16 Sunday Feb 2025
Posted in Anger, Compassion, Emotion, External Goods, Fear, Health, Meditation, Mindfulness, Modernized Buddhism, Practice, Psychology, Stoicism, Unconscious Mind
The most important lesson I ever learned was back in Thailand in 1997: that the biggest contributor to my unhappiness wasn’t external problems like being single or unemployed, but my own mental states like craving. Fixing those mental states was a surer path to happiness and reducing suffering.
But the question that has played an ever-increasing role in the three ensuing decades has been: okay, but how? It is one thing to recognize that your craving and anger – or fear or self-pity or shame or other negative emotions – are the main thing keeping you down. It is quite another to do something about them. Our animal natures make those states quite recalcitrant.
Continue reading09 Sunday Feb 2025
Posted in Action, Biology, Emotion, Health, Human Nature, Psychology, Unconscious Mind
Over the years I’ve managed to treat my insomnia in various ways, to the point that nowadays I can get a reasonably good sleep most nights. Mindfulness meditation – prescribed to me medically before I called myself a Buddhist – has been one big help with that. But just as big has been a medication called trazodone: primarily used as an antidepressant, trazodone in smaller doses helps one stay asleep and avoid the typical insomniac anxiety spiral where you wake up and worry that you can’t get to sleep and find that the worry makes it harder to get to sleep so you worry more. It does a great deal to take the edge off.
Meanwhile my dog, Christmas Belle (so named because we got her in a snowstorm on December 22), faced various anxiety issues that made her resistant and fearful to getting in the car and going to the vet. To help her cope with those situations the vet recommended… trazodone.
29 Sunday Dec 2024
Tags
drugs, Jules Evans, Ken Wilber, Michael Pollan, mystical experience, phenomenology, Robert M. Gimello, Roland Griffiths, Timothy Leary, W.T. Stace
American psychedelic advocates received a great disappointment a couple months ago when the Food and Drug Administration refused to approve MDMA (ecstasy) as a treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder. The disappointment was great enough to lead Jules Evans of the Ecstatic Integration Substack to ask: “Is the psychedelic renaissance over?“
It seems silly to me to read too much into this one decision. It is not final; a new application could be made in a few years. More importantly, it is one decision, about one substance, by one agency in one country – for one purpose. (It was also a great disappointment for us in Massachusetts that our state voted down the ballot question to legalize psychedelics, but it too is just one state, where the question was extremely poorly promoted; Oregon and Colorado have proceeded with decriminalizing psilocybin.) If the entire “psychedelic renaissance” hung on the outcome of one agency’s decision or one state referendum, it would have been a shallow “renaissance” indeed. Even within the US there are already many other avenues for improving the legal status of psychedelics.
That said: Michael Pollan’s book How To Change Your Mind probably did more to kick off the supposed current renaissance than anything else, and one of Pollan’s most important takeaways in the book was, let’s not screw this up. Psychedelics were famously popular in the 1960s, but the messages around them were dominated by overenthusiastic salespeople like Timothy Leary, who had little sense of caution. The resulting backlash was so strong that it created the ignorant world I grew up in, in the 1980s and 1990s, where even video games felt the importance of including a heavy-handed “don’t do drugs” message – extending even to cannabis. What the FDA ruling should remind us of, is the importance of avoiding the mistakes of the ’60s – so that the renaissance can lead to an enlightenment, if you will.
Continue reading07 Sunday Jul 2024
Posted in Morality, Politics, Psychology, Social Science, Work
Tags
Daniel Kelly, Doug Bates, Evan Westra, gender, identity, Paul Bloom, race
Daniel Kelly and Evan Westra recently wrote a widely circulated Aeon article entitled “Moral progress is annoying”. It would have been more convincing – but also go against their agenda – if they added: “and so is moral regress.”
The article notes that when faced with changes in social norms, like declaring a certain term offensive or being expected to share pronouns, it is common for us to react with annoyance and irritation, most visibly expressed in the physical gesture of rolling our eyes. Kelly and Westra argue that this reaction is inappropriate:
we think that the eyeroll heuristic is a serious obstacle to moral progress. Many genuinely good arguments for moral change will be initially experienced as annoying. Moreover, the emotional responses that people feel in these situations are not typically produced by psychological processes that are closely tracking argument structure or responding directly to moral reasons. Instead, they stem from psychological mechanisms that enable people to adapt to local norms – what’s called our norm psychology.
Specifically, they claim that the annoyed eyeroll represents what they call affective friction:
When a person’s norm psychology is misaligned with the rules and customs around her, norms make their presence acutely felt…. Instead of fluency, we have disfluency, which can be stressful, frustrating and exhausting – just ask any North American tourist who has been cursed at by a Berlin cyclist after wandering into a bike lane, or been panicked by their first encounter with a squat toilet. Call this affective friction.
Because it is affective friction, they argue, the eyeroll is not really a rational response: “As tempting as it can be to interpret the unpleasant feelings as your moral compass ringing alarm bells, your annoyance is just a feature of your norm psychology becoming misaligned and reacting to the unfamiliar.”
Now Kelly and Westra are right that the annoyed eyeroll is a gut reaction rather than a rationally considered one. But the eyeroll is not unusual in that regard. Most of our actions, in a moral domain or any other, aren’t based on considered rationality. Crucially, that is just as true of the eyeroll’s opposite: namely bandwagon-jumping, the enthusiastic adoption of a new norm because it is a new norm, irrespective of whether that new norm actually benefits those it is supposed to help.
Continue reading25 Sunday Feb 2024
Posted in Christianity, Flourishing, Politics, Psychology, Virtue
It has taken me longer than expected to get to reviewing Seth Zuihō Segall’s thoughtful and engaging The House We Live In: Virtue, Wisdom and Pluralism. Most of the reasons for that are personal, but some have to do with the book itself: the book is short (less than 200 pages) and in admirably simple prose, but I spent a long time reading it because of the number of times it made me stop and provoked my thinking. It’s provoked me enough that my review and response to it will stretch over four different posts; the other thing that took a long time was organizing all the many things I had to say about the book. (I had even more to say than those four posts, but decided to restrain myself to the most important.)
The book is an ambitious attempt to set out Seth’s own constructive philosophy. (I went back and forth on first vs. last name – although when reviewing a book it’s conventional to use a last name, since Segall is an active contributor to Love of All Wisdom’s comments on a first-name basis, I prefer that friendlier usage.) I’m broadly sympathetic with this attempt, since like my own philosophy it is broadly eudaimonistic (and naturalistic). We agree on an ethical account that focuses on human virtue and flourishing.
Specifically, the book is Seth’s philosophical account of two things: the good modern human life, in an ethical and psychological sense, and a political direction for modern societies, especially the USA. (It does not attempt to probe other philosophical areas, such as metaphysics – possibly to its detriment, as we’ll see later.) The ethical account of the good life is relatively strong; the political account, somewhat less so. At its best it provides an admirable political vision to aspire to. The biggest problem with the book is its papering over of the major differences among traditions. I am going to spend more time on the criticism of that latter point than the praise of the former, just because I think there’s typically more to be learned in disagreement than in agreement. (And indeed, the importance of difference and disagreement will be at the heart of my critique.) I want to be clear that I think the book is well worth the read, at least its middle ethical chapters, and that’s a big reason I am engaging with it at length. For a long time, virtue ethics of any kind was so underrepresented in philosophy that we virtue ethicists all had to stick together against our Kantian and utilitarian foes. I think it’s a sign of major progress that books like Seth’s are now out there – in a way that allows us to turn our attention to our differences.
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