Sometimes I use the word ‘God’ in my reflections and I use it both sincerely and ironically. It’s ironic because I’m a Buddhist and Buddhists have always criticized and deflated the notion of a monotheistic creator or absolute supreme being. But it’s also sincere because I understand what…
Perhaps implicit in the original formulation but made explicit through Process Buddhism, the Whiteheadian Process notion that all actual entities in the entire universe feel some level of experience — from the tiniest quantum fluctuation to the most complex organisms and everything in between — resuscitates a more…
The question of whether class society first emerged in ancient times as a necessary historical function of economic development predicated on surplus production, or a historically contingent imposition through voluntary force, seems to implicitly assume a mind-matter, subject-object distinction, one in which the physical conditions of life and…
Trans people tend to be either “realist” or “idealist” about their gender identities: the realists tend to try and ground their identities on an essential, objective substratum (the most popular form being a neuroessentialist reduction of transgender identity to supposed “brain-sex” differences) while the idealists appeal to the…
One of the “innovations” of Process Buddhism is a certain democratization and pluralization of the function of “God” in Whitehead’s original articulation of his process-relational metaphysics. Rather than there being a single divine element offering the value hierarchies by which we can drive our own development, there is…
As I research and design Process Buddhism, I’ve come to understand the unity of the two ultimates of open/emptiness and inclusive-transcendence in three different ways, where the two ultimates are different aspects of a “third” ultimate: holopoiesis (my own novel concept), power, and love. I came to these…
I think there is an implicit ontology baked into capitalist social relations, and it’s a contradictory “practical ontology” that simultaneously upholds a dualism between subject and object, self and other, the intensive and the extensive, mind and matter, etc. while unfolding through time as a tendency towards a…
I would consider Nāgārjuna’s Madhyamaka works (the “yukti-corpus”) to be “trans-philosophical,” which is to say that he (as the prefix “trans-” suggests) goes “beyond” or “across” philosophy. His works are not philosophical, because they do not attempt to build a system of thought that speculatively induces or transcendentally…
I believe that any and every instance of power is an empowered process empowering others to participate in the “creordering” (creative re-ordering) of a given social organization — power is not a “thing” that a single, isolated individual or even group of individuals can “possess,”; it is a…
Under conditions of hypermodernity, sedentary life predominates over nomadic life, and our asses suffer as a consequence. During hypermodernity, both production and consumption are predominantly cognitive or intellectual in nature rather than physical or manual, and they are increasingly mediated by the use of “computer terminals” (broadly construed,…