Thinking at the Edge is a philosophical method for systematically deepening thinking and exploring concepts from many different angles. The cognitive mechanisms through which Thinking at the Edge works are less clear. To explore these, this article will place Thinking at the Edge alongside another method that uses the body to think critically: Tibetan monastic debate. Tibetan monastic debate is...
In this paper, I examine the relationship between the mind-body disciplines of Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain systems of yoga, focusing on the use of psychoactive substances in the Indic religious context and the ways that modern cosmopolitan forms of yoga have been intersected with the use of psychedelic substances.The foundation of the study is a comparative examination of the semantic field of...
While it may be tempting to assume that the preponderance of Buddhist metaphors for the deceptive nature of appearances suggests that our experiences of the phenomenal world should be dismissed, in many Buddhist traditions, understanding why things appear as they do is central to realizing how they truly are. In this article, I illuminate the unique manner in which one Tibetan author uses...
What is, or what should be, a philosophy of psychedelics? This question has never been so broadly relevant, given the groundswell of mainstream interest and experimentation, scientific investigation, therapeutic trials, entrepreneurial enterprise, and decriminalization of natural psychedelics in several American states. Chris Letheby’s Philosophy of Psychedelics is the first monograph to apply...
In recent years, modern rationalists and religious extremists have attacked Islam’s esoteric Sufism, dismissing it as irrational or heretical. While Salafi groups aim to impose a strict legalism on Islam’s inner dimensions, the influence of modernity has also led many to abandon a cosmological view of existence. Amid a turbulent environment, Sufis persist in fostering an “anthropocosmic”...
This article calls for an ecological approach to Buddhist contemplation, which recognizes the inherently relational and ethical nature of contemplative practice, in contrast to modern, corporatized approaches to mindfulness as an exercise of detachment. Showing that Tibetan Buddhist onto-epistemologies rest on the entanglement of mind, body, and environment, this piece proposes that an...
Modern teachings on Buddhist meditation often draw on Śāntideva’s eighth-century Bodhicaryāvatāra (Introduction to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life). While Śāntideva’s thought is presented as fit for broad global audiences, the fact that it developed in tandem with restricted tantric practices has received little attention. Visualization techniques in the early chapters parallel transgressive...
According to Odysseus Stone and Dan Zahavi’s view, canonical Phenomenology is specifically concerned with analyzing the mind-world dyad and its theoretical implications for philosophy and science. Despite widespread adoption in therapy and research, they claim that mindfulness is ambiguously described as the practice of bare attention and nonjudgment, either on perceptual objects or subjective...
This article comprises an introduction to and annotated translation of a pair of passages from the Great Perfection text known as the Unimpeded Sound Tantra (Sgra thal ’gyur) and one of its earliest known commentaries from the twelfth century. The passages describe practices of divination that involve the interpretation of signs in the outer environing elements of earth, water, fire, and wind,...
While many martial arts include meditation as a part of their practice, some are regarded as being essentially spiritual exercises. Moreover, in a variety of religious traditions, certain forms of prayer and meditation are conceived as preparation for engagement in “spiritual combat.” Most immediately, these practices are designed to enhance one’s capacity to control attention, to defend it...
Contemporary Buddhist meditators in the West are likely to find themselves engaged in practices with rich associations with both religious and scientific worldviews. Meditation-related challenges can provoke existential concerns that make unexplored relationships between religious and scientific worldviews more important and explicit for Western Buddhist meditators, who may turn to both...
The paper aims to shed further light on the boran kammaṭṭhāna, or “old meditation,” tradition by providing a summary and an analysis of a meditation manual titled “Baep Doen That” (literally, “Model for walking the elements”) attributed to the Supreme Patriarch Suk Kai Thuean (1733–1822), the fourth Saṅgharāja of Bangkok, Thailand. It is a manual for advanced practitioners that consists of...
“Love’s deepest abyss is her most beautiful form,” so claims Hadewijch of Antwerp, the great medieval Flemish mystic. This strange and alluring idea, shared by many of the apophatic tradition, reflects the sense that the abyssal (sometimes conceived of as a void, a desert, or darkness) is essential to the work of love, and that love can only be known by relinquishing the narrow conception of...
Buddhist amulets have been a topic of academic research for decades. But scholarly presuppositions that amulets have circulated primarily in popular Buddhist milieus, related only tangentially to the pursuits of elite practitioners, has limited our appreciation of how amulets have inflected philosophical and contemplative concerns. This article aims to challenge this lopsided perspective by...
Nan Shepherd (1893–1981) was a Scottish novelist, poet, educator, and mountaineer. Her primary work of nonfiction, The Living Mountain, concerns the Cairngorm mountains of Scotland. More than a work of natural and cultural history, in this book Shepherd also recounts engaging in intentional practices for cultivating attention and sense perception. These practices culminate in states of...
What does a particular place and its unique yet integrated life-force do for our lamentation amid ecocide? Do we suppose that nature mourns for us? Restores us to full resurrection? I avoid either/or solutions as at best a misplaced romantic optimism and at worst escapism enabling capitalist exploitation. Rather, I draw upon Christian mystics Julian of Norwich, Mechthild of Magdeburg, and John...
Building on the works of the Sufi philosopher Seyyed Hossein Nasr and the German sociologist Hartmut Rosa, this article argues that the climate crisis signals a deeper spiritual and existential crisis beyond technological solutions and carbon reduction strategies. Departing from conventional problem-solution narratives, it frames climate change as a crisis of human self-understanding and our...
Contemplative ecologies seem to face two liabilities of injustice. First, they may appear to seek spiritual satisfaction in multispecies relations without connection to political work to protect them from extinction. Yet addressing that liability may compound the second: that in a time of radically unequal exposure to Anthropocene stresses, extending protections of justice to nonhuman creatures...
The psychoactive plant Datura metel appears across a range of traditions in premodern South Asia preserved in texts. Among those traditions is the form of tantric Buddhism (Vajrayāna) located in the yoginī tantras. In Vajrayāna works, the plant is most prominently used in instructions for bringing about one or more of the magical acts (ṣaṭkarman). This paper explores the possibility that datura...
After a century and a half of focus on Buddhist doctrine, academic attention is increasingly being paid to practice. What remains undertheorized, however, is the relation between the two. An example of this is the idea that tantric practice is simply a ritual technology, separate and autonomous from doctrinal formulation. This is a persisting academic trope, one that conceptualizes doctrine and...
This review explores how urban green spaces can promote mental well-being through intentional design informed by neuroscience, as discussed by Agnieszka Olszewska-Guizzo in Neuroscience for Designing Green Spaces: Contemplative Landscapes, published in 2023. The book introduces the Contemplative Landscape Model, a framework identifying seven features that enhance contemplative experiences in...
This article introduces a novel method presently in development that integrates ethnography and visual elicitation techniques to explore meditative experiences and investigate consciousness. Central to this method is the utilization of mandala-like images as a means to capture the dynamic evolution of consciousness during contemplative practices. The utilization of mandala drawings has been...
The religious or spiritual value of contemplative practices and the use of psychedelics is not intrinsic to experiences obtained through them and is instead relational—a function of how they alter consciousness. In support of that claim, I first present a nonreductive, nondualist Buddhist account of consciousness that calls critically into question the merits of both physicalist and...
The purpose of this essay is to introduce the reader to the tradition of Hesychasm—a form of monastic asceticism rooted in the tradition of the Desert Fathers and given a systematic articulation by the Byzantine author Gregory Palamas (1296–1359)—and to consider how the mystical experiences described in Palamas’s Triads compare to the altered states at the center of contemporary psychedelic...
This study delves into Cheng Yi’s (程頤, 1033–1107) Ruist (Confucian) contemplative practices, addressing a gap in contemplative studies from a Ruist perspective. As a seminal thinker in the Cheng-Zhu lineage, Cheng Yi developed various practices, including quiet-sitting meditation, beholding, calligraphy, restful sleep, and others. These practices incorporate techniques such as sitting postures,...