Mind & Meaning
The science of the inner life, and the wonder it keeps trying to bury. Psychology, meaning, ritual, and the medicine that keeps digging itself out of the basement.
Weekly Poetry Posts 2
Seven poems from the public domain, one a day: farewells, nonsense, stillness and the delirious burning blue
Read postWeekly Poetry Posts
A poem a day, read from the public domain: hope, grief, joy and the occasional absurdity
Read postThree Poems from Rumi
The reed, the guest house and the mirror of the heart, in Reynold Nicholson's translations
Read postWho Am I?
Parts, roles and a more human way to understand ourselves
Read postCapitalist Communist Conundrum
Transparency, trust and what might come next
Read postReflections on a Still Lake
What if the thing we keep searching for is not hidden inside experience, but is the simple fact that experience is being noticed at all?
Read postHide and Seek
The Vijñāna Bhairava Tantra is a conversation. The Goddess, Bhairavī, asks the Lord, Bhairava, what reality truly is, and rather than argue he answers with 112 ways of tasting it directly. This little play borrows that shape, with Bhairava and Bhairavī in their more familiar names of Shiva and Shakti.
Read postA Reply From the Other Side
It supposes that the Reciprocity Manifesto was read by a civilisation considerably further along than ours, and asks what a fair-minded reply might look like. The respondent is not assumed to be benign, and not assumed to be hostile — only balanced, and curious.
Read postRain, the River, and the Return
Sixty-seven million American adults have cut off a family member. The doctrine that promised peace delivers a grief that outlives its cause and a loneliness that shortens lives on both sides of the wall. The strongest evidence against it comes from psychology's own research.
Read postWho Counts: The Long of It
The complete argument, worked through in twenty-five sections: the functional tests law already uses, the four times we decided a class of people did not count, what nobody knows about consciousness, why personhood was never about souls, the elephant in the mirror, and the reciprocity test that follows from taking the courts at their word.
Read postWho Counts: The Short of It
Every society has drawn a line around who counts, and every society has drawn it wrongly at least once. In every case the criterion sounded like principle, and in every case it selected for resemblance to the people applying it. We are about to draw that line again.
Read postHow Psychology Cured Itself of Wonder
A royal commission caught the most powerful medicine the species possesses red-handed at Passy in 1784 — and wrote it up as the culprit. A history of the profession that keeps burying its miracle in the basement, and of the miracle that keeps digging itself out.
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