I’m creating a new taxonomy for my meditation series and writing after years of careful study and analysis. I have no sentimentality, and am dropping long-favored terms like mindfulness and awakening. The basic term, meditation, however, denies change. I know it has too many meanings and uses, and is prey to misuse by charlatans, but it is still the best term for the modern practice I describe, grounded in traditional Buddhism, bolstered with neuroscience and neurotech, and creatively expressed with sound art. I think the term, meditation, sticks. I remain open to your thoughts.
Join the NDP by Jan 28 to Vote for its New Leader
Friends, like many Canadians, I was delighted to see Mark Carney defeat Pierre Poilievre and the MAGA Conservatives. I was also impressed by his recent speech at Davos, where he called out the collapse of the rules-based order and the need to align with middle powers of goodwill. Carney is a strong fighter for Canada on the international front.
On the domestic front, however, I am concerned. Today’s Liberals are indistinguishable from the old Progressive Conservatives, sidelining climate policy and the health and community issues the NDP once kept firmly on the agenda. There is now a gap in the political centre that the NDP are well positioned to occupy.
Unlike the U.S., Canada’s third parties have historically exercised real leverage at key moments, preventing extremism and helping to keep Parliament and the country balanced. For these reasons, I have joined the NDP and will be voting for Avi Lewis as its new leader. I encourage you to join as well, so you can make your choice for leader. The deadline is January 28.
Meditation as Nervous System Training
How attention, awareness, and repetition gradually reshape the mind
Announcement
The next Meditation Community series will be themed as the Neuroscience Edition. It will add a layer of neuroscientific explanation to traditional Buddhist meditation. The series will launch in autumn 2026.
Meditation is not about emptying the mind or achieving special states. At a basic level, it is a way of gently training the nervous system. Modern neuroscience helps explain why this works.
Attention is trainable
Attention is supported by networks in the front of the brain that help us focus, choose, and inhibit impulses. Each time you notice your attention has wandered and bring it back, you are exercising these networks. This is not a mistake. The moment you notice distraction is the moment of training.
The mind wanders by default
When we are not deliberately focused, the brain naturally activates what is sometimes called the default mode network. This network supports self-talk, memory, and imagining the future. Meditation does not stop thinking. It changes our relationship to thought, so thoughts are seen more clearly and held more lightly.
Emotion regulation comes from awareness
Strong emotions are generated in older parts of the brain. Meditation does not suppress emotion. By staying present with sensation and feeling, without immediately reacting, the nervous system gradually learns that emotions can be experienced safely. Calm often appears as a side effect rather than a goal.
The body is the gateway
Breath, posture, and bodily awareness influence the nervous system directly. Slow breathing and grounded posture support stability and recovery. Returning attention to physical sensation is one of the most reliable ways to steady the mind.
Repetition matters
From a brain perspective, meditation is training. Short, regular practice produces more lasting change than occasional intense experiences. Consistency matters more than depth.
In simple terms
Meditation trains us to notice without immediately reacting, steady attention, regulate emotion through awareness, and inhabit the body more fully. It is the slow education of a living nervous system.
Canada Went Along With the Rules-Based Order Because It Served Our Prosperity
What Václav Havel Would Ask Mark Carney About Power and Truth
Mark Carney’s speech at Davos this past week, heard around the world, was unusually clear-minded about the moment we are in. Speaking to an audience fluent in the language of global cooperation, Carney stripped away the comforting myths that have long sustained the rules-based international order and named its quiet collapse. The unresolved question his speech leaves hanging is whether Canada and the middle powers will repeat this failed pattern of power among themselves and at home, or take the harder lesson and change how power is shared.
The rules-based international order was the postwar system meant to replace raw power with shared rules and institutions, underwritten by U.S. leadership. It relied on bodies such as the UN, global trade rules, and international financial institutions to create predictability, limit the use of force, and give smaller states some protection from great-power coercion. In theory, disputes were settled by process rather than pressure, and economic openness was balanced by collective security.
Carney argues that for decades countries like Canada went along with this order even though we knew it was only partly true. We knew the strongest states exempted themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically, and that international law was applied unevenly depending on who was accused and who was harmed.
We accepted this unevenness because we prospered under the arrangement. But the bargain no longer holds. We are now in the midst of a rupture. Carney did not name the United States, but his meaning was clear. The U.S. is using economic integration as a weapon, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, and supply chains as vulnerabilities to exploit.
Carney said that we tolerated the system’s inconsistencies because it served our own prosperity. Canada went along with the unevenness, discrepancies, and injustices because it worked for us. It worked for us. Don’t miss that.
This makes Carney’s invocation of Václav Havel’s The Power of the Powerless especially interesting. Havel argued that the power of a system often rests on shared rituals and unspoken compliance, and that late communism endured partly because people acted as if they believed in it. The rules-based order functioned in much the same way. But Havel would have insisted that naming the lie is only the first step. The real test is whether those who benefit from a system are willing to stop performing belief in it themselves. For Havel, truth was not a rhetorical insight but a lived risk. He might have asked whether Carney’s use of the story leads to genuine relinquishing of power.
The hard question is what this rupture means in practice, both among middle powers and at home. Have they learned the lesson of failed rule-based orders, or will they reproduce the same dynamics in a new alignment?
Carney declared that Canada was among the first to hear the wake-up call. Will Canada emerge as a leader of the middle powers, offering yet another convenient fiction of cooperation for as long as it suits us? Or will we fundamentally change how we cooperate with other nations?
And what lesson does Carney bring home to Canada? Renewal should not come through further concentration of federal and prime-ministerial power. It means finally moving forward on electoral reform toward proportional representation. It means sharing power more widely by strengthening local governments and communities. If this sounds complicated in an increasingly complex world, it is. Difficulty is not an argument against doing it.
Peer-Led Meditation
On facilitation, letting go, and sitting together
When I started a meditation group at my workplace in 2019, I suggested to my two colleagues that it be “peer-led.” What I meant at the time was that I did not especially know much about guiding meditations, and their quick embrace of the idea suggested they did not either.
It turns out it is not hard to guide a meditation. Sit, relax, breathe, meditate in silence for a while, thanks for coming. Of course, there are many kinds of meditation. As our meditation group caught on, hundreds of people have attended, many of whom shared their own meditation knowledge, from music and visualization to yoga nidra and vipassana. I believe it was the peer-led quality of our organization that made so many people feel welcome, not only to join us but to share what they knew.
Meditation has not always been associated with this kind of peer-led or decentralized organizational structure. For much of its history, it has been transmitted through formal lineages, hierarchical institutions, and clearly defined teacher–student relationships. Authority was conferred by training, ordination, or proximity to a tradition, and the role of the teacher was to preserve and pass on a specific form with fidelity. Access to meditation often depended on geography, culture, language, and permission. In that context, meditation was not something one casually offered to others, but something one received carefully from someone authorized to give it.
In the meditation community in which I participated at work for the past seven years, and continue to participate, being peer-led was always treated as an essential quality. I understand now that this was not incidental. It may, in fact, have been the defining quality of the community itself.
That quality expressed itself in many ways. While a small number of people led most meditations, myself included, this is true of most volunteer organizations, and for familiar reasons. Still, there was always room for movement, and movement did happen. At different times, I and other active leaders were away from work for various reasons, and others stepped in, changing how things ran, along with the style and tone of the group.
Being peer-led also meant that sometimes nothing happened at all. No one signed up to guide a meditation. People showed up and improvised, or simply drifted away. At times it seemed as though everyone had lost interest and the group might fold. More often, it turned out to be just ebb and flow. With the turn of a season, the group would surge back into life again.
I intend this peer-led quality to guide more explicitly the design of this public meditation community, something like the prime directive of Star Trek. While there is a program design, I invite anyone who is interested to guide a meditation. Whether it fits a designated topic or not, we will make it work. Future phases of the program will offer opportunities for participants to join design sessions, as we explore research and artistic applications of meditation. Finally, while this community operates on my digital platform, I think of it as an open-source model, available to be branched should someone wish to start their own meditation community. I would assist and support this.
One last thing. I mentioned in the last sitting that, despite my best efforts, there may be an occasion when my power is out, my phone is down, and I cannot join a scheduled meditation. In that case, I invite anyone who is able to take the lead and guide a meditation. Perhaps only to say: sit, relax, breathe, meditate in silence for a while, thanks for coming. Such is the way of a peer-led meditation group.
What is it Like to Be a Bat, Man?
Thomas Nagel asks what it is like to be a bat, challenging us to imagine an experience radically unlike our own.
But before we ask that question, I wonder about the baseline we are starting from.
Is it human?
Is it narrower than that?
Is it assumed to be a man?
And do I, as a so-called man, even know what it is like to be one?
I suspect I have more in common with women than I have differences from them, and more in common with any body at all than with the analytic boxes we are placed into.
Experience does not arrive subdivided.
It arrives as breath in the chest.
As weight in the body.
As hunger, fatigue, warmth.
As the brief flare of attention when something matters.
It does not appear as male or female, white or straight.
It does not announce itself with labels.
It simply happens.
Only later do we name it.
Only later do we sort it.
Only later do we lay grids over it and call the grids reality.
So what does it mean to be subdivided analytically, endlessly, into white, straight, male, and so on?
Is that something it is like to be at all?
A body does not feel like a category.
A mind does not wake up as an abstraction.
Breath has no taxonomy.
Attention does not check boxes before it moves.
When lived experience resists subdivision, it is not confused.
It is exact.
And if experience is grounded in sensation rather than category, then Nagel’s question changes shape.
I may not know what it is like to be a bat in its particulars. I cannot hear with echo or map space through sound. But I do know what it is like to have a world at all.
To be oriented.
To be drawn toward what matters.
To perceive selectively, partially, and sufficiently.
In that sense, experience is shared.
Not in content.
In structure.
What I share with the bat is not its world.
What I share is world-having itself.
The bat is not unknowable.
The category is.
Why is Google Assistant still so dumb?
With all the advances in language models, why is Google Assistant still so dumb? “I’m sorry, I don’t understand.” 👾
The wisdom of meditation is death
The wisdom of meditation is death.
Sorry not sorry.
Death teaches that everything changes and nothing lasts,
that suffering comes from clinging, chasing, and avoidance.
Even if I accept the end of body and ego,
I do not personally own an everlasting soul.
Knowing this on my deathbed is inevitable.
Knowing it while I still live is wisdom.
Three ways of being
Three ways of being:
- Rolling anxiety
- Chasing cravings or goals, with brief interludes of satisfaction
- Practicing meditation, with increasing stretches of stillness and bliss
Up to you
We are a multiverse 🌀
I am a universe
You are a universe
We are a multiverse 🌀