If there’s one piece of clear evidence that the Middle Way is a universal principle, not just a Buddhist one, it’s found in Jung. Carl Jung’s extraordinary Red Book is a record of his self-induced visions, and reflections on those visions, going back to an intense period during 1913–14 but…

Do we hold people responsible, without feeling responsible? Social media storms, political campaigns, and organizational disputes often focus our attention on holding others to what we see as their responsibilities. Perhaps we think they have been negligent or incompetent, or even broken the law — and that is fair enough…

The mention of the name of Sangharakshita, founder of the Triratna Buddhist Movement, tends to produce two very different kinds of reaction. From many in Triratna there is still reverence — uncritical for some, increasingly hedged by reservations for others. From many outside Triratna, there is an immediate dismissal due…

What does it mean to adopt an embodied view of the world? The actual experience of your body — for instance developed through yoga or mindfulness — is of course vital to this, but it’s not enough. Some radical and critical thinking is required as well, because otherwise it’s easy…

Like Gautama the Buddha, Jesus also left home to go out into the wilderness. Just as the Buddha is depicted as being tempted by Mara (the narrow and obsessive voice of ego within him) on the verge of a breakthrough, so is Jesus depicted as tempted by Satan to egoistically…

If your dog is hungry, should you feed him? In practice, as an embodied human being, you are likely to feel that you should. From the disastrous disembodied perspective pushed by analytic philosophers (and followed by many others), though, these two points are seen in complete isolation from each other…

What is the value of engaging with the stories, ideas and practices of great figures from the past — particularly the founders of great traditions such as Buddhism, Christianity or Islam? In long study and reflection on these, I have not lost my sense of their value (if anything, it…

The story of scepticism is a story of hijacking. It begins with uncertainty as a basic human state. Uncertainty is simple enough, you might think, but easy to forget when we get attached to absolute assumptions in the press of our lives. Sceptical arguments were devised, going back thousands of…

The Middle Way is the common focus of all my work over the last twenty years as an independent philosopher and author, including around twenty books. In this article I’m aiming just to give you a quick and accessible introduction to what it’s all about. You may associate the Middle…