07 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 reading10 Sunday Aug 2025
Posted in Early and Theravāda, Flourishing, Human Nature, Metaphysics, Psychology, Self, Virtue
Tags
Amber Carpenter, Bronwyn Finnigan, existentialism, expressive individualism, Four Noble Truths, Friedrich Nietzsche, gender, Pali suttas, Walt Whitman
One of the reasons Buddhists emphasize the idea of non-self so much, I think, is they see the kind of danger that can emerge from self-focused approaches like expressive individualism. That danger is when we identify with our bad qualities in a way that stops us from getting better. Buddhists emphasize the lack of an essential self so that we can shed our bad qualities, become better than we are.
Continue reading03 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.
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