Each of us is rather caught up and fixated on our own personal life – making it through today, cleaning up from yesterday, and getting ready for tomorrow. There’s barely enough mental bandwidth to pay attention to all the details and passing concerns. Catching up on global events is out of the question, and thinkingContinue reading “What’s Really Going On”
Tag Archives: theory
The Big Picture
It’s true. I’m obsessed with trying to clarify the Big Picture, referring to the full view of our human situation not only inside our ethnic and national pocket cultures, but on the planet and across evolutionary time. Much of our difficulty at present, recurring through history as we tend to get snagged on the sameContinue reading “The Big Picture”
Science, Spirituality, and The World To Come
I probably spend too much time defending the role of religion in our lives, especially in the opinion of those who identify themselves as nonreligious or atheist. While they tend to define religion as a belief system oriented on the supernatural, driven by superstition, stuck in the past, prone to fanaticism, and utterly irrelevant toContinue reading “Science, Spirituality, and The World To Come”
Truth In Christian Mythology
One of the challenges in clarifying a post-theistic spirituality has to do with the fact that its principal concern – what I name the present mystery of reality – is impossible to define. While it is always and only right here, right now, any attempt to put a name and definition around it only managesContinue reading “Truth In Christian Mythology”
The Filters of Illusion
Constructivism is a philosophy that regards the mind as not merely active in our experience of reality (as opposed to some early modern theories which regarded it as a ‘blank slate’ written upon by experience), but creatively active in the way it constructs the mental models we take as our reality. In the course of ordinaryContinue reading “The Filters of Illusion”
Spirituality Basics 2: The Beyond Within
In Spirituality Basics: The Human Condition I explored our situation as it comes together (or perhaps rather, falls apart) around the delusion of a separate identity known as ego. Insofar as our ego is insecure and driven by ambition to resolve or compensate for this insecurity in various ways, we end up in an evenContinue reading “Spirituality Basics 2: The Beyond Within”
The Imaginarium of Belief
Humans are a storytelling species. Anything else that may set us apart from our fellow earthlings – our art, technology, industry, government, science, spirituality, and personal life – is made possible only as part of a larger endeavor in constructing meaning. As one of our ultimate concerns, making meaning through storytelling is how we orientContinue reading “The Imaginarium of Belief”
Whole Picture, Whole Brain
I’ll start with a proposition, and then work it out in more detail below: The meaning of life is an ongoing construction project involving two parallel processes, communion and knowledge. Communion refers to an experience of no-separation, where your existence is felt as not just connected to but as “one with” the rest of it.Continue reading “Whole Picture, Whole Brain”
Just a Little More Reality (Please)
Constructivism is an approach to understanding the world we live in as a product of our own creative intelligence. “World” refers to the habitat of meaning that human beings construct around themselves for security, to support identity, and to provide a sense of purpose to their lives. As a social species, humans are compelled toContinue reading “Just a Little More Reality (Please)”
The Possible Human
Anderson: “Contemporary civilization without ball games and movies would be as incomprehensible as medieval civilization without the Church. Our social reality is shaped by those myths and structures, our personal lives informed and sometimes inspired by them.” In the early flush of modernity, when the codes of the physical universe were being unlocked right andContinue reading “The Possible Human”
Tracts of Revolution 