In a strange moment today I looked back over my history of relationships with women; and with the thought and mental image of each one I felt what can only be described as love. Each of them smiled at me in my mind; I smiled back, and we shared just one fleeting moment of pure, honest love. All of this philosophy, both here and in my academic life, can lead to a certain hardening. We debate, we define, we judge.... Read more

I’m starting a new post for Zen Unbound’s questions. I’m hoping my somewhat arbitrary new posting and parsing of previous posts is helpful, especially for readers who are not heavily schooled in all of this stuff. From the comments of Postmodernism and Buddhism, some new questions arise. The discussion so far. Questions: Is postmodernism foundational? Is Buddhism foundational? And if so, what is the nature of this “something extra?” and how do you “get at it?” Are transgressional novels representative... Read more

I’ve seen lots of fill-in-your-own questionnaires on blogs, but never felt the need to toss one on my own blog. Until now. The main reason is Balance. The theoretical discussion of late has been fantastic (my heartfelt thanks to Zen Unbound and Nacho along with others who have chimed in and/or got us started), but it is a bit heady, and I just found this on one of my favorite local blogs and thought that this is the time for... Read more

More on Postmodernism (the last of it, thankfully) See here to get started. Nacho wrote, “I don’t think PoMo is nihilistic, but I also think that Nihilism gets a bad rap. Nihilism about what?” Good point – The word Nihilism is abused today almost as much as freedom. But I think the case of the Postmodernists (or rather their objectors) is that there is Truth which is independent of our designation of it, and if you reject this completely you’re... Read more

More Postmodernism (see the last post to get started or jump in here). Nacho wrote, “What those basic themes do is really open up a three-pronged crisis (Norman Denzin): 1) A crisis of Representation (we cannot capture direct lived experience. Such experience is constituted textually. This renders the connection between experience and text problematic also). 2) A crisis of Legitimation ( if we have a crisis of representation, how do we legitimate validity, generalizability, etc.), and 3) A crisis of... Read more

Amongst other topics, there has been a recent surge in talk on Postmodernism here so I thought I should dedicate a post to it. I would love to see comments with links to further reading (as I know all of this could baloon into endless exegesis on our parts, and I for one don’t have time for that!) First read the third comment here for Nacho’s full intro to Postmodernism. My own scattered comments can be found elsewhere, but aren’t... Read more

I think I’m in the midst of some kind of intellectual spasms at the moment. I had been chained and confined (my energy channeled) in academia for the last 5 years, and now, my dissertation completed and taking only two graduate courses, I feel a certain intellectual openness. Of course, that is not necessarily a good thing. I could just flounder, absorbing bits and pieces from a dozen different perspectives without understanding them as whole systems, and fade out into... Read more

Listening to Ken Wilber, and having just read Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (or much of it for a course) I’ve decided to lay out some of the schemata of Hegel’s work, with some interpolations of my own. Hegel’s work itself reads as a flow of the development of consciousness. It is famously opaque, and has been neglected, so my professor claims, mostly due to its breadth and difficulty (Ken Wilber may face similar shunning, from academics at least). Hegel’s development... Read more

So I’m reading Ken Wilber now (thanks to Zen Unbound’s comments); more ‘listening to him‘ actually, I have Kosmic Consciousness on audio, along with A Brief History of Everything, which I tried to get into a while back but got distracted. I also read “A Way out for Wilberians” by John Heron, a critical examination of his life’s work today. I didn’t find it too convincing, to be honest. Quotes like, “Buddhists throw the distinct baby out with the separated... Read more

Tsuru, Japanese Flute Read more