Tag: philosophy
All You Need To Know About The “Yin Yang” Philosophy
The "Yin and Yang" symbol, also known as the "Chi Tai" or "Taiqi", consists of a circle...
Nihilism Made ComfortableNihilismo Hecho a la Medida
The collapse of Western values and traditions has led, as philosopher A.C. Grayling puts it, to the nihilistic view that “life has no point,...
Enlightenment Revisited
The question of enlightenment is so fraught with projection and tradition that it is almost impossible to use the word without getting caught in...
Referendum On Humanity: The Sudan
Featured Columnist - Meditations
Martin LeFevre
What would you do if you knew something bad was going to happen, but something far worse could be prevented...
Sangha and Spiritual Friendship
Featured Columnist - Meditations
Martin LeFevre
As Buddhism has proliferated in America and the West, the notion of sangha has gone along with it. In this...
Freedom and the Dark Current of Destiny
Featured Columnist - Meditations
Martin LeFevre
Autumn is at its peak and premium in northern California’s Central Valley. The yellows, oranges, and golds are resplendent in...
The Lingering Echo of Rousseau
Featured Columnist - Meditations
Martin LeFevre
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, despite or because of our cynical age, retains a powerful hold on the post-modern mind. Nowhere is that...
Why Meditate?
Featured Columnist – Meditations
Martin LeFevre
Living in a cultural desert, as we do in the West, and as more and more people do in this vapid...
The Human Capacity for Insight
Featured Columnist – Meditations
Martin LeFevre
When asked where the capacity to be creative comes from, Eric Kandel, the Nobel Laureate neuroscientist, answers very assertively: “It comes...
Just Like Us?
Featured Columnist – Meditations
Martin LeFevre
Jane Goodall, the aging but still very active doyenne of chimpanzee studies in the Gombe Reserve, Tanzania, was interviewed recently on...
Running Amok and Among
Featured Columnist – Meditations
Martin LeFevre
Martin LeFevre: It’s autumn in northern California, and the weather has changed with the season. Though cloudier and cooler, we’ve...
Tai Chi Beyond Health and Wellness
TCRN Staff
Health, fitness, rejuvenation… these words are associated with Costa Rica and its broad offering of wellness retreats. While yoga is one of the...
Can Psychological Time End?
Featured Columnist – Meditations
Martin LeFevre
Overhanging the gorge are great angular outcroppings of volcanic rock—solid and sharp edged protrusions from the gently sloping grasslands behind them....
I Want My Country Back!
Featured Columnist – Meditations
Martin LeFevre
I had a cousin, born a few days after I was in the same Midwestern town, with whom I was close...
Chinese and American Confucianism
Featured Columnist – Meditations
Martin LeFevre
China just passed Japan as the second largest economy in the world. Never mind that per capita income in China is...
Back to Basics: Good and Evil
Featured Columnist – Meditations
Martin LeFevre
One of the best studies of good and evil by an American writer is Herman Melville’s “Billy Budd.” If you haven’t...
Thought Is a Single Stream
Featured Columnist – Meditations
Martin LeFerve
It’s near dusk, and the parkland seems to be full of Cooper’s hawks. At one point on the path, a large,...
The Unmet Sorrow of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Featured Columnist – Meditations
Martin LeFerve
Here we are again, 65 years and tens of thousands of nuclear weapons later, commemorating the dropping of the atomic bombs...
What Is Human Freedom?
Featured Columnist – Meditations
Martin LeFerve
A few friends and I have been asking: Are there choices in life, but is the chooser an illusion? If so,...
Creative Destruction and Man’s Destructiveness
Featured Columnist – Meditations
Martin LeFerve
The American media, even the progressive media, are promoting the idea that most of the life on Earth has been wiped...
Knowledge, Truth, and Growth
Featured Columnist – Meditations
Martin LeFerve
The branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of knowledge, especially with reference to its limits and validity, is called epistemology....
The Urgency of Psychological Revolution
Featured Columnist – Meditations
Martin LeFerve
The foundational philosophical investigation to which I devoted my youth flowed from this question: Why are humans generating increasing disorder and...
July 4th, 2010— Dunghills From Diamonds?
Featured Columnist – Meditations
Martin LeFerve
This weekend Americans are celebrating the 4th of July, the date that commemorates the birth of the United States 234 years...
Where There’s Will, There’s No Way
Featured Columnist – Meditations
Martin LeFerve
A neuroscientist named Benjamin Libet made a remarkable discovery at the University of California, San Francisco in the mid-1980’s. Placing electrodes...
The Observer In an Infinite Regress
Featured Columnist – Meditations
Martin LeFerve
Is the brain capable of observing without an observer? What is the observer? What part does it play in the division,...
Beyond the Matrix
Featured Columnist – Meditations
Martin LeFerve
Set to the lyrics from Willy Wonka’s “A world of pure imagination,” the business ad invites participants into a brave new...
May Tibet Never Be Forgotten
Featured Columnist – Meditations
Martin LeFerve
The Dalai Lama has said that he may not reincarnate again, and if he does, it will not be in Tibet....
The Scientific and Religious Minds
Featured Columnist – Meditations
Martin LeFerve
Though the rain didn’t begin until mid-morning, by mid-afternoon the park that runs through town felt like a wild place. A...
The Dark Night of Man’s Soul
Featured Columnist – Meditations
Martin LeFerve
After some strong insights and strange events with a friend, I go to the parkland for a sitting and walk. The...
Technology Is No Mystery
Featured Columnist – Meditations
Martin LeFerve
In America at least, we are still in the ‘new toy’ phase of high technology. Every new gadget that comes out...
Barack Lets Bashir Walk
Featured Columnist – Meditations
Martin LeFerve
Omar al-Bashir, the President of Sudan who has been indicted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity, has been...
Another Kind of Consciousness
Featured Columnist – Meditations
Martin LeFerve
It’s near dusk, and the parkland seems to be full of Cooper’s hawks. At one point on the path, a large,...
A Growing Tide of Anger, or Compassion
Featured Columnist – Meditations
Martin LeFerve
Sometimes, fewer than a thousand words are better than a picture, or a video. For example, the image of a San...
The Light of Insight
Featured Columnist – Meditations
Martin LeFerve
A recent conversation with a Buddhist teacher from India turned to the Buddha’s illumination. “The
Buddha,” he said, “was attacked by Mara,...
The Intrinsic Intent of the Universe
Featured Columnist – Meditations
Martin LeFerve
As I see it, human consciousness is an unexplained contradiction in the infinitely dynamic order of the universe. Consciousness is not...
Meditation, Illumination, and Revolution
Contributor – Meditations
Martin LeFerve
The shirtsleeve weather of the previous few days suddenly shifted last night. Rain fell in the valley and snow fell in...
The Emergence of Intelligence
Contributor – Meditations
Martin LeFerve
Fog enshrouds the town as I enter the mountain community from the valley below. With a few hundred meters more of...
