Month: November 2019
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The Roomba Ain’t A Flying Car
Roomba Roomba Roomba! My wife Alexandra and I recently bought a Roomba iRobot vacuum cleaner. Ours is Model 690, not Model 980. I’ll try to say something about why that makes a difference below. Our Roomba, named “Sopapilla II,” took its maiden voyage around the house yesterday, and we were amazed by how well it…
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A Tentative Curriculum For Psychotechnologies Of Self-transformation
Yesterday I recorded a conversation with Jonny Miller for his Curious Humans Podcast. (About which, more fairly soon.) Near the end of our conversation, Jonny asked me a question akin to this one: “If you build a school around certain psychotechnologies of self-transformation, what curriculum would you create?” I’m not satisfied with the answer I…
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On The Saying, ‘I Am Not The Doer’
Believing ourselves to be people, we care about free will. We care about free will because we care about the capacity to choose this rather than that, to live this way rather than that way. The alternative seems to be some version of determinism, and this can be scary, or scary sounding, because it can…
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The I-thought Takes One Home
When asked by a student whether the teacher Francis Lucille can “say something about using the thought ‘I’ or ‘I am’ as a way of returning to one’s true nature,” Lucille replies: As we take the I-thought, we take it with the intention of understanding, of experiencing the reality that it refers to. We take…
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True Meditation Is Not Secular In Nature
When asked whether there are any prerequisites to meditation, the Advaita Vedanta teacher Francis Lucille replies that there are two: “Our intention has to be directed towards the impersonal, the divine” and “our attention has to be free from any object” (The Perfume of Silence, pp. 70-1). A similar answer is provided by The Upanishads where that…
Andrew Taggart, Ph.D. 