I've been flirting with the idea of the "feminine hero" as an intermediary figure between ordinary persons and divine beings in Process Buddhism, inspired partly by the Tibetan rendering of "bodhisattva" as "byang chub sems dpa'" or "enlightened/awakened hero". The reason why I label it, at the moment, as "feminine hero" rather than heroine is …
The Empty Wellspring of Your Own Being
What if that pit in your heart was not a lack but a wellspring? What if desire were not a drive to fill a painful bottomless pit of lack but a channel for the unimpeded outpour of this overwhelming wellspring at the heart of your heart? What if that open space feels empty only because …
On Rainbows, Orchids and Transsexuals
I like to think of rainbows, orchids and transsexual people as "exemplary beings" (or exemplary "occasions" or "societies" in process-philosophical parlance) in the sense that their very nature and form transparently exemplify principles which are universally shared with other things, in a way that those other things might only instantiate such principles opaquely, or to …
Philosophy Comes Last, Life Comes First
Philosophy is the supreme discipline not because it is the absolute foundational ground upon which all other disciplines necessarily depend but precisely the opposite: it is the most dependent, the most relative, the most contingent. Philosophy is the last, not the first, of all the disciplines. Philosophy is supreme because it alone gets the fortunate …
Buddhism & Process within Process-Buddhism
Within Process Buddhism, the sides of Buddhism and Process both debate and dialogue with one another. First, Process articulates reality and experience categorically. Then, Buddhism responds that this speculation obscures the true nature of the non-categorical condition of these categories. Then, Process responds that the Buddhist critique of the categorical and its emphasis on the …
Continue reading "Buddhism & Process within Process-Buddhism"
Empty Being, Creatively Becoming.
According to Process thought (particularly through the Pierce-Whitehead-Hartshorne matrix), each and every actual occasion of experience is a perspective which constitutes a genuine subject of satisfaction, a subject born out of a creative synthesis of the many antecedent perspectival conditions of the past with the self-determining creative potential of the present aimed towards some definite …
Buddhist Critics of Process Buddhism?
Some Madhyamaka Buddhists — particularly Prasaá¹…gikas of Sakya persuasion — can be suspicious or even hostile to the very possibility of something like "Process Buddhism" because they make the same error that the critical "targets" of Process Buddhism (i.e. substantialist and dualistic frameworks) do, which is to conflate ontology with cosmology, rendering them as basically identical …
On Post-Dualism
The genuine, authentic alternative to dualism is not non-dualism but what we could call post-dualism. Non-dualism often amounts to the monistic collapse of dualism into one of its poles, thus remaining ultimately dependent on its conditional terms (the terms being that, insofar as a contrast is conceivable, it must be a dualistic contrast i.e. the …
Buddha-Nature as a Logical and Practical Necessity in Process Buddhism
Some claim that the concept of "Buddha-nature" (the innate, pure and potent capacity for every being to become awakened) in Mahayana Buddhism is a supernatural, arbitrary posit and an aberration of the teachings of Early Buddhism. Even some Buddhists who accept the doctrine will relegate it to an "inferior" level of truth or doxographic strata, …
Continue reading "Buddha-Nature as a Logical and Practical Necessity in Process Buddhism"
Inclusively-Transcending the Open/Emptiness of Eliminative Materialism and Panpsychism
The fundamental issue of Eliminative Materialism — the metaphysical view that subjective mental states do not actually exist — is that it cannot eliminate subjectivity from explanations of how consciousness works without also undermining the very thing that makes this elimination epistemically intelligible. If there is no agent of knowledge, how is this very knowledge …
