One of the features of the AI age is that it raises important questions about us as human beings.

And, as a philosopher and one-time theologian, this means that it is really great to be alive right now. The questions that I have been asking for forty years, and people in my field have been asking for thousands of years, are suddenly the questions everyone is asking.

I thought it would be interesting to write a few articles about how modern questions about technology reflect ancient ideas about humanity. It might be that we can find answers, or at least, some clues about what answers might look like, from ancient sources.

So what are the questions that the AI age raises for us? In my professional life as a university executive I spend a great deal of time working with people who are for and against AI.

Out of all of those conversations, four themes keep coming up for me. I have reflected a lot on these four things. I think they are really important for our future in the light of this technology, and they all have profound foundations in philosophical and spiritual traditions. They are four themes that provide a bridge between the ancient world of thinking and feeling and the modern world of technology and advancement.

So what are they?

1. Creativity. The technosophical question, if I can coin a term, is about what it means to create something from nothing, whether that is a work of art, a piece of music, or a vibe-coded web app.

2. Aesthetics. Here we ask, in the context of technological advancement and a rich philosophical background: what makes something beautiful? What makes something ugly? Why does it matter?

3. Relationships. The question here is about why human relationships are so important for individual and collective flourishing. Is it incidental or fundamental?

4. Embodiment. Finally, we might ask, not superficially but in terms of humanity’s most profound spiritual yearnings, about what it means to be “in” a human body.

To make it easy to remember, these four things can be arranged into a nice acronym: CARE. Which reflects the deepest question I want to ask about the AI age and what happens after it. This question is about what we are going to CARE about in this new world as it emerges.

Workplace, Economy, Society

Each of these topics comes with a rich philosophical and spiritual background that reflects thousand of years of experiment and speculation in a wide variety of traditions.

But first, by way of background and context-setting, let me make two observations.

First, I am coming to think that these four themes will remain central to human experience and flourishing after AI has worked its way into all of our social and economic systems, which it most certainly will.

It is interesting to think about the kind of workplace and, more broadly, the kind of society, that could value and reward these things.

We currently work in a technocratically oriented world. Your ability to do complex technical tasks - coding, mathematical modelling, quantitative analysis and so on has been the ticket to success for many people, from accountants to engineers to entrepreneurs and technologists.

In fact, your ability to perform even the simplest technical tasks - use a computer for email, create PowerPoint presentations, author documents - has been the key to entering the workforce in the first place.

I don’t think any of that technocratic capability, from the simplest to the most complex, is going to matter very much in the future. These are precisely the tasks that AI can and will do. When the technocracy fails, we need a new aristocracy of the human.

So what remains? What are the inalienable and irreducible features of a human contribution to the economy and to society? How will we reward people financially and socially as we move out of technocratic valuations and towards aesthetic, relational, embodied and creative valuations of human effort? This is one set of things I want to look at during this series.

On Ecstasy

The second thing about these four themes is that they all have something in common. It’s not obvious what this thread is, and it’ll take a bit of work for you to follow me down this rabbit hole. But hang in there, it’s worth it I promise.

The thing that binds these things together is ecstasy. If you consider what each of these things are in the human experience, if you wonder what their underlying structure is, if you peer deeply into the abyss of these phenomena, I think you will see that their structure is fundamentally ecstatic.

Ecstasy is a very particular state of being. Now, by way of disclaimer, let me say that I usually despise it when a writer turns to dictionary definitions of words and homespun linguistics to explain an idea. But in this case, it is helpful to look at the word ‘ecstasy’ itself in order to understand the underlying philosophical idea.

The English word ‘ecstasy’ has a Greek origin. The Greek word is ‘ekstatis’, which combines the pronoun ‘ex,’ meaning out of, and the word ‘stasis,’ meaning ‘state of being.’

Put them together and you get the core idea of ecstasy. Ecstasy is where you are temporarily taken out of your normal state of being.

You become ‘ex-stasis.’

In each of these experiences - the experience of creativity, of beauty, of relationship and of embodiment - there is an opportunity for ecstatic experience.

Why is this important? It is important because it brings you closer to reality itself.

You can only realise the significance of this if you are prepared to go one step further with me. Let’s take this thought to its end. Let’s pursue a radically counter-intuitive hypothesis. Not just about ecstasy and its everyday availability to us in the experiences. Not just about how these human experiences stand to shape our future in the world after AI. It’s not just about those things, it is about the nature of reality itself.

The deeper idea here is that reality itself is relational. People and things exist because of their relations. They exist in the network of relations that constitute them.

And so, when we pursue ecstatic experience we become deeply aligned to how things really are.

The effect of this is that experiences of creativity, of aesthetic beauty, of deep relationships with others and of embodiment bring us closer than we can otherwise get to the truth of reality itself.

Neil

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I know that I have not been posting very much this year, and that perhaps some of you have wondered what happened to me.

Over the first half of this year my own thinking has developed. Not my philosophical thinking. Rather, my thinking about what I can offer you, not only on this platform but more broadly.

Over that time, a new project has emerged. I am very excited about it and I hope to share it with you all soon.

But for now, let me try to explain.

The Chasm

If you have been a subscriber for a while, you will know that I aim to take deep academic study in philosophy, theology and spirituality and to make it accessible. My goal here on Provocations has been to do the deep dive for you, into the source materials for different traditions, and then to write something that aims to be easy to understand with some measure of practical application.

In that process I have started to see the problem I am trying to solve more clearly. Yes, on the one hand, it is helpful to interpret these traditions for people to make it easier for them.

But that doesn’t put the reader directly in touch with the traditions themselves. I’ve started to think about how great it would be to make that possible.

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One of the reasons that would be great has to do with a huge gap, a chasm really, that I see in the world of spiritual seekers.

On the one side of this chasm is the high wall of academically-oriented philosophy and theology. On the other side is the equally high wall of experientially-motivated spirituality. The intellectually-minded people often scoff at the spiritual people as “wu-wu,” as lacking depth and seriousness. The spiritual people dismiss the intellectuals with equal ease as theoretical and abstract, without any sense of practical benefits for the everyday person.

The Bridge

I think it is important to bridge this gap, and I hope that I can be offer something to help.

There are many ways, no doubt, to bridge the gap. But there is one that I think is extremely important, perhaps the most important of all. And that has to do with access to the original texts in a language that you can understand, with some help on how to read and interpret them. And for that to be easy, community-building, and fun.

Let me explain a little bit more about the gap from the traditions that I am most familiar with: Tantrism, Nietzschean philosophy, and Christian theology.

Tantra is probably the most extreme example of it. For people that want to ground their spiritual practice in the roots of this tradition, there is a massive shortage of resources. This is due, in large part, to the basic unavailability of the Tantric textual traditions in edited and translated editions. And even if you can get your hands on a properly curated and translated text, its contents are likely to be esoteric and obscure.

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Work is being done by a significant number of scholars around the world, including in India, to recover these texts, to establish authoritative manuscripts, and then to translate them and make them available in a variety of ways. People like Christopher Wallis, Alexis Sanderson, and the late Mark Dyczkowski have all made enormous contributions in this space.

And yet, despite all of this work, the texts remain elusive to an English speaking audience. They come to us in bits and pieces, in academic articles and partial translations, often drowned out by academic apparatus, with large volumes of notes and interpretive material. The bottom line: it is still extremely difficult to get to the sources of Tantric spirituality.

This is true, but less extreme, in other areas. Nietzsche is a good example. It is easy to get hold of his canonical works. It is also easy to run off with them in all kinds of weird and wonderful directions. The academic mocks at the ‘angry young man’ phenomenon, those philosophically-minded young people who are drawn to Nietzsche’s bombast. In turn, those young people mock the professors for being the incarnation of everything Nietzsche hated about academic philosophy.

And I hardly need to mention the Christian faith. There is an awful lot of white-washing of the foundation texts of Christianity. Most people in secular society would like to think of the Christian faith as essentially the same as all the others, and bearing essentially the same message: love everyone and be kind. This gets a little awkward when you actually read the foundation texts of Christianity, and you find that it does not regard itself that way, and quite explicitly so.

Back to Source

In the Protestant revolution in Europe, the Latin phrase ad fontes became something of a catch-cry. It meant ‘back to the sources,’ and it was an encouragement for people to not just believe the priests but to go back to the foundation texts of Christianity, the Bible, for themselves.

This is the spirit of my new project. I want to bring together philosophical theology, linguistics and philology from my intellectual life, and teh affordances of artificial intelligence from my professional life.

I do this with one main goal: to bring you closer to the source for whatever spiritual tradition speaks to you the most. And, in doing this, hopefully we can create a community of people, each on their own journey into the depths and back to the sources.

Stay tuned good people. I will let you know more about this project over the coming weeks. And, what’s more, think I will need your help to bring it to life.

But for now, I will simply give you its name:

Neil

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I have described throughout this series the core of Tantric philosophy as an underlying commitment to a single principle. That principle has two functions. On the one hand, it is a principle that underlies everything that exists. And, on the other hand, it creates everything that exists.

If you put these together, you end up with the rather difficult-to-understand idea that this single principle is everything that exists. The entirety of human experience, and the entire universe that human beings experience, is a single thing that unfolds as a single thing from a single principle.

Tantric philosophy is, in large part, an attempt to describe this difficult idea in a myriad of ways. It uses gods and goddesses, complex communal rituals, the discipline of contemplative and meditative practices, reflection on the most mundane elements of ordinary human experience. It uses basically anything that it has to hand, to try to explore this one elemental idea: everything is one thing.

When you consult with the Tantric masters themselves, there are only a few concepts that might be able to capture the simplicity and difficulty of this proposal and make it immediately obvious and digestible.

One of those recurring ideas is freedom.

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But freedom, in its Tantric sense, is not what you think. It has little to do with contemporary obsessions like “free will” or American ideals about the individual being free to do whatever they want to do.

It is not fundamentally about freedom from things like rules or moralities, although this is certainly there in the outworking of Tantric philosophy.

Nor is it fundamentally about freedom for things like self-expression or personal authenticity, although, again, this is definitely one possible outworking of the basic philosophy.

Freedom, in its Tantric sense, is really freedom to see things as they are. It is the freedom of recognition, of insight, not freedom of choice or action.

The Sanskrit word that is translated as “freedom” in this sense is the word svatantrya.

Ultimately, this word describes the way in which the underlying principle works to create the world and our experience of the world. It does not apply, really, to how any individual within that operates.

It is perhaps easiest to understand this if we bring back to the stage one of the greatest actors in the tantric drama - the god Shiva. One of the best known representations of Shiva in Hinduism is Shiva Nataraja, Shiva the great dancer. The idea is that the universe as we know it is created by the spontaneous, unpredictable, even capricious movements of Shiva as he dances ecstatically, randomly but generatively, throughout the universe.

He is free to manifest whatever he chooses. You are free only insofar as you arise spontaneously, you are the consequence of his freedom.

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Another way that the Tantric masters talked about this had to do with the relationship between the Shiva principle (consciousness) and the Shakti principle (energy). In typical Tantric fashion, this is a thought experiment taken to its extreme. The idea is - what if we just assumed that there was no such thing as causation? What if everything that happens, at each and every moment, in the entire universe, has no prior cause? What if, each moment can only be traced back to the union of Shiva and Shakti as principle, rather than the series of things in the observable universe that we might otherwise take to be the “cause”?

In this case, they argued, we would have to say that the universe freely manifests itself as precisely what it is at least one thousand times per second.

The point is this: the unfolding of the universe, and of human experience of the universe, is caused by the free action of the universe itself. It arises internally, spontaneously, for no “reason” whatsoever. So from an outside perspective, the “god’s-eye view”, it is spontaneous, free and uncaused.

But. That has nothing to do with how the universe, and all of its component parts, experience themselves. From the outside, from the god’s-eye view, it is free and spontaneous. From the inside, it is something else entirely. It is experienced as fate. As inevitability.

In other words, the only thing that you are truly free to do, at least from this perspective, is to see this truth and, in response, to love only what is, and to hold no fondness or yearning for what is not.

In Tantric philosophy, this is perhaps most clearly captured by a particular school, the Pratyabhijnya (“recognition”) school.

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But this idea is not limited to Tantric philosophy. It is one of the most ubiquitous ideas, I think, in philosophy. You find it in ancient Greece, in the concept of amor fati, the love of fate.

In fact, I have tattooed on my arm some German words. They come from the great European philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche. They translate as:

“I want to learn more and more how to see what is necessary in things as what is beautiful in them - thus I will be one of those who makes things beautiful.”

I didn’t feel like I had room on my arm for the rest of this text. Nietzsche goes on:

“Amor Fati: let that be my love from now on! … all in all, and on the whole: some day I want only to be a yes-sayer!”

The question that Nietzsche, and Tantra, put to us goes something like this.

Are you able not only to accept yourself and life itself as a piece of fate, a fatality, as Nietzsche somewhat humorously puts it? Can you move beyond acceptance, resignation or resentment in facing your own fatality?

That is, can you love yourself, not as free, as someone who creates consequences. But as a single piece of a puzzle, as unique and unreplaceable, and also as inevitable?

And, perhaps far more challengingly, can you love everything and everyone in exactly that same way? This is crtiical because, in Tantra, there is fundamentally no difference between everything out there and you in yourself.

If you want a philosophy that allows you to be positive towards yourself, and positive towards life, then there is a real catch. You will be required, by that very same affirmative and affirming philosophy, to love not only the good, the pleasurable, the positive. You will be required to love everything.

This is the heart of Tantra.

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It is also the heart of other affirmative philosophies, like Nietzsche’s. So I find myself in an odd but rather enjoyable position. In closing this series on Tantra, I will give Nietzsche the final word:

The heaviest weight. — What if some day or night a demon were to steal into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it you will have to live once again and innumerable times again; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unspeakably small or great in your life must return to you, all in the same succession and sequence — even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!’ Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: ‘You are a god, and never have I heard anything more divine.’ If this thought gained power over you, as you are it would transform and possibly crush you; the question in each and every thing, ‘Do you want this again and innumerable times again?’ would lie on your actions as the heaviest weight! Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to long for nothing more fervently than for this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?

(I tried to make an AI song about this text - here is the link)

Neil

In a recent trip to India I had the honour of participating in a contemporary reconstruction of a 1000-year old ritual called the Trika Pūjā. Trika means “triad” and Pūjā means “worship.” This ritual is about the worship of three goddesses, who together form the holy trinity of Tantric religious practice.1

I was in an underground temple amongst the tea plantations of Kerala in southern India. I was with my beautiful wife and a small group of young Indians who are Tantric practitioners.

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This ritual, the Trika Pūjā, had essentially been lost until the scholarly work of Mark Dyczkowski. Markji, as he is affectionately known by these people, was a man who spent his life in India working to recapture the Tantric traditions. He passed away in early 2025 and so the enactment of this ritual in contemporary settings is, to some extent, a way to honour his legacy. Markji’s work has allowed practitioners to reconstruct the medieval style of worship of these three goddesses.

And so we were treated t…

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When I was a much younger man, I was really, really into mysticism. It was mysticism of a Christian variety, characterised by endless hours spent in prayer and study of Christianity’s sacred texts, and by many thousands of words handwritten in journals to analyse these texts, and, of course, to analyse my soul. I loved the Romantic and Metaphysical poets, I loved to play spiritual songs on my guitar.

I loved every search for anything transcendent.

Like most good mystics, I found in this search some experiential rewards: those moments of ecstasy, of stepping beyond the ordinary, those glimpses beyond the vagaries of change and decay, beyond the material limits of the body and the intellectual limits of the human mind.

But because my path towards transcendence was shaped by a conservative form of Christian belief, it included a negative stance towards the human experience. This can be captured by one word: “sin.”

If you approach Christian mysticism with an interest in the textual traditi…

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I remember as a young child growing up in South Africa a particularly close call with electricity.

My father was replacing the plug on his electric drill. I’m not sure exactly why, but this process produced a metre long black electric cable with a functioning set of prongs to plug into the wall, and two orange copper wires poking out the other end.

Spotting this, I immediately took the plug-end, marched over to a wall socket, and plugged it in. As it happens, the copper wires were resting loose against the skin of my thigh. I remember the exquisite power of that jolt, and the cable falling from my leg, and the entire house going into darkness.

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It is not obvious what the electric outlets in a suburban house, the way that the thigh muscle of a human being contracts, and, say, a lightning bolt kilometres high, have in common. Many of us will think it’s obvious, but that is because of what we have learnt in school about physics.

If you dropped all of that underlying cultural and scientific k…

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there is no essential difference between waking and dreaming… all our so-called consciousness is a more or less fantastic commentary on an unknown, perhaps unknowable, but felt, text…

Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak §119

I had an uncomfortable dream last night. I was in a church, about to deliver a sermon. But I was in my dressing gown and I was having real trouble keeping it tied up. I guess it was the preacher’s version of that dream where you turn up to school naked.

And, what’s more, I had not had time to prepare properly. My notes were a mess and I was struggling to make sense of them. I started to speak several times, losing my train of thought while having to awkwardly retie my gown.

Finally, just as I was finally about to launch into it, two people from the congregation rose to their feet, came up to the pulpit, and started heckling me. They jabbed their fingers at me and poked me, even calling me names.

One of the interesting things about dreams is how you don’t know when you’re in …

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It’s not so easy to understand how the world works. For starters, “the world” is a big place. And, what’s more, there’s no reason to think that the world owes us any kind of explanation. The way the world actually works might be completely inaccessible to us, it might make no ‘sense’ whatsoever to human beings.

And yet the quest persists. People - scientists, philosophers, theologians, electricians, landscape gardeners - continue to insist on figuring out what works and how it works.

This isn’t always a quest for a grand theory of everything. Sometimes the quest has modest goals - like how to build a retaining wall that lasts. But it seems to me that no matter how grand the ambition is, the quest is always the same: we start with what works, we understand why it works, and then we extrapolate from there to some broader theory so that we can succeed with that thing in new situations.

And every now and again people stumble across things that seem, just, well, strange. Unthinkable. And in t…

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It’s good to be back and writing after my summer holidays. Taking a break has given me the chance to step back and reflect on what I’m doing here and why I’m doing it.

I started Provocations when I was finishing my PhD. I suppose I wanted a way to keep writing and to keep learning. Writing these weekly philosophical musings definitely keeps me thinking and reading.

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In the last few years, though, it has morphed into something else. I have become more and more interested in what I could write that would actually he helpful to you, the reader. Especially as my philosophical interests started to evolve and I began my research into the spiritual traditions of medieval India, most particularly the Tantric tradition of Kashmir Shaivism.

This year I plan to continue this work. My hope is to bring you philosophical insights that are helpful and practical. And yes, I hope to continue provoking you too.

To start off, I plan to write a six week series, starting Saturday, covering six of the most basi…

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But if you love dance/funk then check out Dirty Loops, if you want to see the three sisters who are singlehandedly recreating hard rock, then go check out the Warning. I can’t believe Spiritbox, the biggest new band in metal right now didn’t make it here. And there’s no “real” metal here either, no tech death or otherwise extreme music. So it’s been a strange year….

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But these 13 songs are the ones. They’ve been on all my playlists, and been with me through all the highs and lows of 2025. And they’re the one’s that kind of go together into a playlist that has a beginning, a middle and an end.

So here it is. My Top 13 playlist for 2025.

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…Slowly We Fell Into Slumber and I Held You Until the End of Time

Urs…

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There’s a good chance that this will be my last post for 2025. If I post again, it will be to give you my annual playlist, my top 13 songs for the year.

I started publishing my annual top 13 playlist here a couple of years ago, because “Life without music would be a mistake.” This collation of musical enjoyments is an annual ritual. I have “Top 13” playlists going back to 2012. It’s a sure sign that another year is ending, and another about to begin, when I start to curate the orgy of music from a calendar year into this all-too short format.

As it happens, I have spent most of 2025 thinking and reading about ritual.1 Rituals, it seems, have many functions. Daily rituals, for example, reduce stress by increasing predictability. Communal rituals create a sense of community by binding people together through shared experiences.

Codes or Portals

But these are not the aspects of ritual that fascinate me, as important as they might be. I’m interested in the way that rituals have a particular k…

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I was at the Sydney Opera House a couple of weeks ago. It was not the usual Opera House crowd: I was surrounded by a sea of dark T-shirts decorated with the spiky indecipherable fonts of death metal bands. We were there to see the Swedish death metal band Opeth.

We found ourselves somewhere to sit and eat, just next to a young man with long red hair that framed his face. I noticed that his face was trembling and his eyes were filled with tears. His feet, clad in black and white Converse shoes, were twisting together like mating snakes.

I asked him if there was anything he needed. He said “No it’s OK, just anxiety.”

It made me wonder what kind of trauma this young man had experienced to produce this kind of extreme anxiety.

And then I put my philosopher’s hat on. Many philosophers and philosophies find themselves deeply interested in how people think and feel, and what can be done about it.

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The concept of Samskara

Last post I talked about the Tantric idea of vikalpas - thought constructs o…

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I’m sure we have all been there.

Those midnight sessions when your mind is racing. Unable to control your thoughts and get to sleep, frustration builds. And now you’re awake and frustrated, further from sleep. There seems to be no way out, except to stop your mind.

Or that moment when intrusive thoughts start to win.

I remember a time in my life when I was under stress. Extreme stress. My marriage was falling apart (thanks to meeting the love of my life). My career as a church minister was ending (thanks to incipient atheism). I was trapped, and I had nowhere to go, I could see I was about to lose everything.

It seemed obvious that one way to silence the mental noise was to take a knife from the kitchen bench and draw it across my shoulder. Eventually, after months of enduring the dissolution of my life as I knew it, it started to seem obvious that there might be another way to silence these thoughts.

I started to have intrusive thoughts about how to end my li…

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I love the fact that my interest in classical Tantric philosophy and spirituality has brought an incredible number of new and interesting people into my life. I have attended many events and workshops in the world of alternative spirituality, and even had the chance to teach a bit of Tantric philosophy at some of them.

One of the features of the new age Tantric scene is the intense desire that people have for healing. This desire manifests in many different ways, but especially in the desire for healing from psychological problems and wounds.

And there are plenty of people offering help. Whether it is simple meditation practices or the more out there wu-wu of past life regression or quantum field therapy, there is no shortage of offerings to help with psychological healing.

I’ve been wondering whether classical Tantric philosophy and spirituality has anything to say about this kind of healing.

Mapping Consciousness: Where Do Your Thoughts and Traumas Live?

Thankfully, the medieval Tantric…

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In the late 1990s I was living a rather difficult life. Well, at least by comparison to the one I live today.

I was in a a smallish coal city, Newcastle, just a few hours north of Sydney. It was difficult for an Arts graduate majoring in Linguistics to get a full time job, so I was pulling things together as best I could with a range of odd jobs - lawn mowing for a friend’s business, casual work in a CBD petrol station, and part-time outreach work for the local Baptist Church.

All of these jobs involved odd hours. Mowing lawns started at 7am, graveyard shifts at the petrol station start at 10pm, and my outreach work the Church started at midnight because the people I was trying to help were the local street people - sex workers, heroin addicts and mobsters.

It’s fair to say that my consciousness, my waking experience of life, was filled with tension, stress, and various deprivations of diet, sleep and exercise.

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In the midst of all of this, I had one of the most elevated experiences of my …

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I’m back from a 2 week hiatus. I’ve been on a work trip to Greece and India in search of education and technology partners.

I spent about ten days in India and during this time I had the immense privilege of a weekend at a place called Rythmbhara.

Rythmbhara is a commune set amongst the tea plantations of the Western Ghat ranges of Kerala in southern India. The commune has been established to support and promote the spiritual and philosophical tradition of Trika (or Kashmir) Shaivism. Regular readers will know that I have been obsessed with this spiritual tradition for the past few years.

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It was an exceptional experience that I feel very privileged to have been afforded. Not only were we hosted with great kindness and generosity, we were also invited to participate in the spiritual and intellectual life of a small group of people who are immersed in this tradition.

One of these experiences was a ritual called the Parapuja. This is the central ritual of Trika Shaivism, which, after being l…

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One of the things I do in my day job is to work with technologists on AI. I have really one overarching goal with this: to figure out how to use AI for good in education.

So this means I think a lot about what’s happening with AI. And, being a philosopher at heart, I can’t help but think about it philosophically.

One of the things I’ve been wondering about is a theory called “dead internet theory.” This is the idea that the internet is mostly just the internet replicating itself with AI. There’s very little that is original in the majority of internet content.

And, with the increasing sophistication of AI tools, our ability to rely on digital content is rapidly diminishing. It is very difficult to tell if images, videos and text have been produced by humans or bots.

So where does this leave us, philosophically speaking?

To answer this, I will turn to the philosophy of mind/consciousness that you encounter in Trika Shaivism, from 11th century Kashmir.

Embodied Minds

One relevant question, I t…

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Wondering about spirituality, and what it means for everyday life, has been a pastime of mine for my entire life, just about. Even when I was a hardcore materialist atheist, I was still kind of exploring spirituality. Just from an anti-spirituality perspective.

As many of you will know, I’ve been studying some of the spiritual traditions of India for the last couple of years. It struck me the other day that, at least in the traditions I’m studying, there is no gap between theory and practice.

This is most obviously true in the more extreme sects. The Kāpālikas, for example, were pretty extreme. They did all kinds of weird and wonderful things - drinking blood from hollowed-out skulls, hanging out in cemeteries and smearing themselves with corpse-ash, and on and on it goes.

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The thing about the Kāpālikas, though, is that these extreme acts were underpinned by a philosophical theory. This theory was to do with life-force energy and the idea that, ultimately, everything was one. So it didn’t…

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I had an interesting experience this week at work. I had submitted a PowerPoint presentation for my executive colleagues to review. It was an important presentation that I was developing for the university’s governing Council. I was unsure about how to present my ideas, especially as it is my first time presenting as an executive to a governing board.

What’s more, I knew it was totally rushed and undercooked but I had no time to refine. So I just sent it in and hoped for a good discussion.

Which is what I got. The discussion was helpful and everyone took my half-baked presentation in the spirit that it was intended.

But there was one interesting moment. At one point in the presentation I included some ideas that used the words “larrikin”, “rebel” and outlier.”

One of my colleagues - very respectfully and graciously - objected. These words, she said, are problematic when used to describe a university. They were problematic, in her view, because they are “masculine.”

Immediately, I could …

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If you’ve spent any time on social media going down pop psychology or alternative spirituality rabbit holes, you will probably have come across the concept of the mantra.

In pop psychology, a mantra is a phrase that you say out loud to give yourself some encouragement or to try to change something about your life or mental state. It’s a little bit like cognitive therapy where you gain some kind of positive impact by changing the way you feel about things, by changing the way that you talk about them.

In alternative spirituality, mantras are often Sanskrit words or phrases that are chanted or intoned. This might be part of an overall approach to meditation or breathwork, or it may be more religious in character. The more religious version is where the mantra is there to invoke a specific deity and bring their powers into your life for some material benefit.

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As many of you will know, I’ve been studying classical Tantra for the past few years. In particular, I’ve b…

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