Category Archives: Dialogue

Again, what A Course in Miracles did was organize my thinking about spirituality in a way that made clear the many seams, fractures and canyons implicit in that thinking. ACIM created problems it could not on its own resolve. In this sense, the course was not unlike so many other spiritual and religious experiences inContinue reading “On Reading Francisco Varela”

Institutions arise out of mutual acts of coordination among individuals who have as their goal a shared beneficence. For example, my neighbor and I have an agreement – I mow his lawn in spring, summer and Fall and he plows my driveway in winter. The institution is neighborhood, the coordinating mechanism is barter, and theContinue reading “Cooperation and Coordination are Love”

The human observer has a specific neural architecture (brain) which is instantiated in a specific perceptual system (body). Allowing for neural a-typicality, which happens, all human observers are having an approximately similar experience – language-based, tribal, biased, et cetera. Thus, the world that you see and think about is not vastly different than the worldContinue reading “Spiritual Teachers, Spiritual Parents”

In a way, the so-called spiritual process is akin to noticing – and then sustaining in awareness – the distinction between what is happening and an observer’s description of what is happening. The description is not the thing. Say that I am sad. You say, “Sean is sad. I can tell by the tears flowingContinue reading “Observation and Description of Phenomena”

A lot of my thinking over the past year rests on an assumption about observers, namely, that cognition and perception are observer-dependent, and thus cannot provide access to any absolute Reality or Truth. Yet notice that for this assumption to justify the conclusion, it has to be interpreted as being actually real – that is,Continue reading “On Being Wrong (And What Comes Next)”

Recently I wrote this sentence: There is no other way because we are already what we seek: are already the very home in which we long to rest. It was in the same paragraph as this little gem: We are love. Sigh. I try to be careful when writing that way. It’s not that theContinue reading “Dialogue as Love”