Tag: Ethics

• August 23, 2025

  Contrition As A Key To The Spiritual Life

  What role does contrition or shame play in nondual spirituality? Perhaps an interesting one insofar as it could be a gateway. To what? So long as one takes oneself to be an agent, the teaching says, just so long are the fruits of one’s actions “one’s own.” Honesty, then, encourages one to admit, perhaps, that…
• April 30, 2015

  Why Everyone is Sad yet Nobody Angry

  Have you noticed that, by and large, few people get angry today? That few stand up for themselves and lash out? Get irritated? Yes. Ornery? Sure. Persnickety? No doubt. But blood boiling? No. Have you also noticed how most people get–and are–really sad? They have the blues, they’re in a foul mood, they’re down in the…
• August 25, 2014

  A review of Chapter One of Sam Harris, Waking Up: Preliminary questions

  I recently read Chapter One of Sam Harris’s forthcoming book, Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion and found myself thinking, ‘This may not end up being an excellent book, but for all that it is an important and prescient one.’ (You can read Chapter One here on his website.) Harris’s principal question, which goes unstated…
• June 27, 2014

  The good life and sustaining life: Early reflections on my fall course at Kaos Pilots

  With special reference to the neighborhood dugnad * The subject of my fall course at Kaos Pilots is the connection between the good life and sustaining (or bare) life. Logically and chronologically, the question of the good life must come before that of sustaining life. It is not the case, I shall be arguing, that human beings first…
• May 14, 2014

  Our modern moral metaphysic: My basic set of questions

  In the past weeks, I have been investigating the main assumptions that underlie our modern moral metaphysic. So far, I have examined arguments 4 and 3 (in that order). 1.) Because the world is lost and fallen, it needs to be changed or ultimately saved. 2.) Because the world is broken or out-of-order, it needs…