Philosophy

Swami is Vedic teacher based in Rishikesh, India.

Christopher is a celebrated scholar, author of numerous books and started the Yoga Studies program at Loyola Marymount University.

Jonathan is an activist and yoga scholar-practitioner.

Ken is an integral philosopher and prolific author.

The paradox of the Zen kōan resists in a significantly different way what Emmanuel Levinas identifies as the totalizing “way of the same.” Zen Buddhism provides a critical insight into faciality that goes beyond Levinas’s fundamentally anthropocentric view and undercuts his refusal of “paganism,” thereby providing the ground for a deeper realization of the ethical relationship between humans and animals. The question at hand is whether there exists a fundamental experience of the “original face” of the animal, which is possible only by way of a direct face-to-face encounter.

One of the great unanswered questions in the history and philosophy of science is why science arose in the West and not in the East. Scholars point to the early technological developments from China such as gunpowder and rockets and wonder how China failed to capitalize on these and other developments to establish a theoretical basis for science, as did western culture. But in these speculations, and they are no more than idle and prejudicial speculations, there is at least an inaccurate presumption if not a dangerous assumption that Chinese and other Eastern philosophies are somehow unscientific, a view which mistakenly places eastern ideas in an inferior position relative to western science.

The category of Agni related items includes everything of a hot, fiery, dry, or parching type,
while Soma-related items are moist, nourishing, soothing, and cooling. Items so classified range from medicinal herbs to mountain ranges to the seasons of the year.

Ecosophy is a broad-based movement that utilizes the findings of ecology as the foundation for philosophical reflection and spiritual practice rooted in environmental activism.