Our cognitions, our languages, and our metaphors are expressions of our bodies and their kinesthetic orientation and movement through space and time. All our thoughts are embodied thoughts.

Sometimes one can best understand an idea by looking at those who reject it.

Research on fundamentalist movements around the globe has shown that there have been two especially common career paths from which fundamentalist leaders have often emerged: engineering and computer science. I suspect cognitive and educational reasons for this. These individuals tend to think in very literal and literally binary terms. Computer cod

Dark ecology, he writes, “is how we find ourselves in a story we have written, and the next part is becoming conscious authors of the story we are writing.”20 Morton detects this future humankind in particular genres of art, particularly science fiction, for “art is thought from the future”—that is, “[t]hought we cannot presently think at the prese

Deep ecology is a broad spiritual and philosophical movement that can be traced back to the Norwegian intellectual and activist Arne Næss, who was a trained philosopher and a student of Mahatma Gandhi. Its basic claim is that we are an intimate part of a larger ecobody or ecosystem and so should care for the ecosystem not as a collection of dead ob

What if we all accepted and embraced our own specific cultural or religious identities, yes, but stopped seeing any of these as ultimate, and started seeing them all as expressions of our shared humanity? Herein lies the potential politics of the flip. We are not our thoughts. We are not even our beliefs. We are first and foremost conscious and cos

Traditional religious faith sacralizes some past event or set of events to which believers are to stay faithful or believe in. Those events are ritualized, institutionalized, and mythologized. The faithful tell the same stories or myths over and over again and reenact them in the theater of ritual, festival, architecture, and institution. The resul

Much of this comes down to how we orient ourselves to history and whether we do or do not possess a robust historical consciousness that mourns as well as memorializes. We are suffering through a gigantic anachronism today. One can and should use the past as a resource, even be inspired by its various positive intellectual, artistic, spiritual, and

It understands that we need culture and language and (often) religion, just as the artist needs paint, canvas, and brush. Religions are one way we paint ourselves, sculpt ourselves, author ourselves. The problem arises when the artists mistake their art forms for absolute blueprints or final descriptions.