Time travel and other features of everyday awareness ... Lucid dreaming is to ordinary dreaming as mindfulness is to waking life ... Meta-awareness and the search for the true self ... Self is a construction, says Evan, but not an illusion ... Near-death and out-of-body experiences ... Ways to approach the problem of consciousness ...

Why Rebecca calls herself an essayist ... Rebecca’s commitment to telling stories that don't fuel cynicism ... “People love certainty more than they love hope” ... Buddhism and activism ... The necessity of political compromise ... What the Occupy movement achieved ...

Meet the American Jubu ... How far into Buddhism do Jubus go? ... Fusing Judaism and Buddhist practice ... A brief history of Jubus ... Is meditation a lefty thing to do? ... Varieties of Jubu experience ...

Rationalism, its virtues and ideals ... Manifestations of rationalism in epistemology ... ... ... in ethics ... ... ... and in political philosophy ... Critique of rationalism: It can't be reasons all the way down ... Dan K. claims rational ethicists don't really exist ... ... ... and if they did, you wouldn't like them ... How philosophy turned to rationalism, and Dan K. turned away from it ...

Why do people believe in Donald Trump? ... Tapping into fear and resentment ... What’s the appeal of vulgar rhetoric? ... Us vs. Them ... The “Trumpvangelical" ... Donald Trump at AIPAC ...

The unique weirdness of light ... Time travel and the theory of relativity ... Comparing "emptiness" in physics and Buddhist philosophy ... Why Einstein never accepted quantum physics ... Can physics really explain why there’s something rather than nothing? ... Teaching science to Buddhist monks ...

The Western encounter with Buddhism ... Divine beings and supernatural forces in Buddhism ... Why Stephen finds Buddhism appealing ... Drawing as meditation ... Does neuroscience support the Buddhist view of the self? ... What the New Atheists get wrong about religion ...

The road as the medium of the car ... A story of a blind man who could see ... Parallels between rap and The Odyssey ... How the alphabet made us detached from the world ... The comeback of images as a way of thinking ...

The psychology of essentialism ... Is your dog an essentialist? ... The essence of good, evil, and Donald Trump ... Why we value some objects more than others ... Religion and essentialism ... Do we perceive reality accurately? ...

What is it like to be an arhat? ... Perspectives on the self: It's nothing, it's everything ... What enlightenment is, and what's so great about it ... Dwelling in enlightenment is easy, but getting there can be hard ... Does enlightenment entail moral improvement? ... Can meditation save—or impede salvation of—the world? ...