Modern mindfulness meditation is helpful in a great variety of ways. Most importantly, it trains you to notice when your mind is distracted. Once you’ve done it for a while, the benefits go further. Especially, you can notice how your mind is distracted. Some of Andy Puddicombe’s more advanced Headspace meditation series ask you to…
“By reaching beyond the brain… we are able to focus more intently, comprehend more deeply, and create more imaginatively — to entertain ideas that would be literally unthinkable by the brain alone.” “Our minds are all threaded together,” the young Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary at the dawn of the twentieth century, “and all…
After one of my philosophy classes, a student asked me if water is wet. Being a philosopher, I had to apply some thought to this question. On the one hand, this is an easy question to answer as it just requires looking up the definition of “wet.” The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines “wet” as consisting of,…
Life is an ongoing expedition into the brambled tendrilled wilderness of ourselves, continually stymied by all we mistake for a final destination — success, superhuman strength, the love of another. Along the way, we keep confusing experiment and exploration. An experiment proves or disproves an existing theory; its payoff is data, fixed and binary. An…
