About my sites

Life and ways to live it: I present a unified story, in divergent styles, across several web sites. The main one is Meaningness, an exploration of ways of relating to meaning. Vividness is a Buddhist expression of the ideas of Meaningness.

Greatest hits

I write mainly web books—expositions extended over dozens of web pages—not individual essays. Some popular pages, for tasting, selected from multiple sites:

An appetizer: purpose
An introduction to the main ideas, via the question: What—if anything—is “purpose”?
Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution
Subcultures were the main creative cultural force from roughly 1975 to 2000, when they stopped working. Why?
“Ethics” is advertising
Claims about ethics mainly function to make oneself attractive.
How To Think Real Good
Patterns of intellectual insight that respect, but transcend, systematic rationality.
Black magic, transformation, and power
How “black magic” can be useful in the non-magical real world; how it can be dangerous even though it “doesn’t really work”; and its role in Buddhism.
Developing ethical, social, and cognitive competence
A summary of Robert Kegan’s model of adult development; and its personal, social, and cultural implications.

About this site

On this site, I write about the recent history, fluid present, and possible futures of Buddhism.

I suggest that a window has opened for innovative Buddhisms that can address new cultural, social, and personal problems. The past couple of decades have been dominated by a “Consensus Buddhism,” whose time has passed. I am cheerleading for emerging alternatives.

Currently I am concentrating on the possibility of reinventing Buddhist tantra for the 21st century global culture.

My other sites

Meaningness: How should we live when we understand meaning is real, but does not come from any ultimate source such as God? How do we avoid the rage and depression of nihilism that comes from realizing that nothing is ultimately meaningful? How do we avoid eternalism, the self-delusion that meanings are objective and fixed?

Buddhism for Vampires is a playful, yet deadly serious, look at the dark side of Buddhism. We are all monsters, but we can embrace our monstrosity while retaining our human nobility. We can allow each to transform the other, so we become cheerful, kind, useful monsters who are also overpowering, unpredictable, and dangerous heroes.