Transformations of Mind: Philosophy as Spiritual Practice

The book offers a conception of philosophy as a form of self-enquiry which begins not in reflection, but in silence and meditation, conceived as conditions for the emergence and cessation of contending states of mind which influence perception and action. The philosopher thus becomes a kind of cartographer of a shifting interior landscape. This underlying perspective explains the personal nature of the writing and its mixing of genres. The book draws on both the Greek and Buddhist traditions, recognising that it is time for Western thinkers to acknowledge and respond to an intercultural canon. It aims to integrate ethics and a non-theistic philosophy of religion through the medium of aesthetics, mapping Buddhist ‘mindfulness’ and the Greek virtues and vices of temperance and licentiousness, continence and incontinence, onto an account of the development of moral sentiments and their relation to practical judgement in the context of oppressive political and social realities.

• Raises profound questions about the self • A major investigation of what it means to be religious, or philosophical • Written in a movingly autobiographical spirit of self-enquiry

Introduction; 1. A philosophy that is not a philosophy; 2. Contrary states; 3. ‘ … you hear the grating roar …’; 4. The energy for war; 5. The division of the soul; 6. ‘Wandering between two worlds …’; 7. Kant’s aesthetic ideas; 8. And his rational ones; 9. Arnold’s recast religion; 10. Theism, non-theism and Haldane’s fork; 11. Erotic reformations; 12. A language of grasping and non-grasping; 13. ‘… sinne/like clouds ecclips’d my mind’; 14. Concentration, continence and arousal; 15. Uneasily, he retraces his steps …