Archive for March 2013
Beyond Praise and Blame
This week William Irvine, a philosophy professor in at Wright State University in Ohio, wrote a short piece for TIME magazine on insults (he is the author of a book on the topic). The premise is relatively simple: we are social animals driven by desires to reach the top and, of course, to hold back others who…
Read MoreRevisiting Meditation: Week 1
Note to readers: This is the second installment in a weekly series which focuses on establishing or re-establishing a consistent meditation practice. Please refer to my introductory article on this topic. If any of you are following this course with me, and to all of you out there registered for the March Challenge, I hope…
Read MoreEpisode 159 :: Dr. Cathy Kerr :: Somatosensory Attention and Alpha Rhythms
Cathy Kerr Dr. Cathy Kerr joins us again to speak about her new paper, “Mindfulness starts with the body: somatosensory attention and top-down modulation of cortical alpha rhythms in mindfulness meditation.” What is it that happens when we meditate? We know what some of the effects are, we know how it makes us feel, but…
Read MoreOn Supramundane Freedom
In my last post we looked a bit at mundane freedom: what it is, and what it is not. We saw that mundane freedom involved volitional formations (saṇkhāras) within a more-or-less deterministic causal nexus. What made the will free is that it was constituted by our desires, rather than by those of another. That is,…
Read MoreEpisode 158 :: Phie Ambo, Sigrid Dyekjaer, Richard Davidson :: Free The Mind
Phie Ambo Today we have a round table discussion with film producer Sigrid Dyekjaer, director Phie Ambo, and researcher Dr. Richard Davidson about the new film Free The Mind. We live in a very exciting time, especially as meditators. It is likely that we’ve experienced the benefits of a regular practice, we see how it…
Read MoreRevisiting Meditation: Getting Back on Track
It’s been a couple of years since I started up my study and practice of Buddhism. I have to say that the part of all of this that I often find the most challenging is not the reading up, not the discussions, not the carrying out of the dharma per se, but instead, in making…
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