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Beyond Mindfulness – A call for a critical political economy of attention

The underlying teachings of mindfulness offer much more in this consumer age; they offer new sources of critical inquiry into our collective condition under the sway of consumer culture. Since the post-WWll rise of mass advertising and the more recent global advance of consumer culture cultivated through the ubiquitous forms of media technology, our collective… Continue reading Beyond Mindfulness – A call for a critical political economy of attention

Touching the Earth

‘Touching the Earth’ is a Buddhist meditation that invites us into that place where we encounter archaic memory, the memory of blissful unknowing.  It is a place within all of us that recalls – with every animal – that moment when we walked memoryless through bars of sunlight and shade in the morning of the… Continue reading Touching the Earth

Living in Challenging Times – Part Three

Conclusion: Living in Challenging Times The Buddha’s narrative and teaching have been transmitted across many cultures over the centuries and are always – in effect – in translation. The generic idea of the ‘buddha’ incorporates awakening and teaching for a given time or era. In our own times, our conditions of life are giving rise… Continue reading Living in Challenging Times – Part Three

Buddha’s Tool Box for Simple Living – Part Two

The Buddha referred to an unsettling characteristic of life as ‘dukkha’, which is the Sanskrit term that refers to a ‘wheel with an off-centre axle hole’. In stating that all things are marked by dukkha, the Buddha was simply observing that life can often be experienced as something that is out of kilter, always jolting… Continue reading Buddha’s Tool Box for Simple Living – Part Two

Buddha and the Age of the Anthropocene – Part One

The Historical Buddha: A Living Parable for the Age of the Anthropocene The historical figure, Siddhatta Gotama, probably lived and taught between the years 563 and 483 BCE in the foothills of the Himalayas. The iconic story of his birth into an economically and politically influential family in the village of Kapilavatthu and, at the… Continue reading Buddha and the Age of the Anthropocene – Part One

Mindfulness as Commons – Part Ten

We have known for some time that modernity and its exemplary mode of material transmission in the form of capitalism has only progressed by imposing collateral damage on society and nature. Indeed, for Carlisle, Henderson and Hanlon,[i] well-being is the collateral damage. They agree that the science of well-being and its critique are, despite their… Continue reading Mindfulness as Commons – Part Ten

Capitalist Realism – Part Nine

CAPITALIST REALISM IN THE 21ST CENTURY   In the Western experience, it seems the Kantian-inspired bar on consideration of the sensuous affect as integral to the agency side of pure morality has , it seems, contributed to a disembodied moral life that contributes to an ethos of pleasure and comfort-seeking as a poor substitute for… Continue reading Capitalist Realism – Part Nine

Foucault, Zen and the Biopolitics of Wellbeing – Part Eight

Foucault encountered Zen both in his reading and during a brief stay in a Zen monastery practicing the life of a Zen monk. In the spring of 1978 (Davisson 2002), Foucault travelled to Japan to visit a number of Zen centres and was invited by Zen master Omori Sogen, head of the Seionji temple in… Continue reading Foucault, Zen and the Biopolitics of Wellbeing – Part Eight

The Cartesian Moment, The Individual, The Point of Opposition – Part Seven

The individual is a relation of opposition Foucault recognized that the convergence of power-knowledge-subjectivity suggested an alternative model of political ethics, ‘or an ethics of resistance to the proliferation of power’ (McGushin 2007:14), a resistance to political power established in the relation of the self to itself[i]. For if it is true that modern disciplinary… Continue reading The Cartesian Moment, The Individual, The Point of Opposition – Part Seven

From Askēsis to Resistance as ‘Care of the Self’: technologies of the self – Part Six

Fortunately, contemporary regimes of subjectification are not all consuming. Foucault held open a conception of the subject that maintains the possibility of resisting or exercising choices that might be partially severed from a dominant ethic or the neoliberal enterprise culture (Shankar et. al. 2006:1019). Shankar (2006:1019) adds: If this is the case, technologies of the… Continue reading From Askēsis to Resistance as ‘Care of the Self’: technologies of the self – Part Six