Evan Thompson Professor of Philosophy, University of British Columbia in Vancouver. I am a philosopher who works in the fields of cognitive science, philosophy of mind, Phenomenology, and cross-cultural philosophy, especially Asian philosophy and contemporary Buddhist philosophy in dialogue with Western philosophy and science. In July 2013 I moved from the University of Toronto to the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, where I am Professor of Philosophy. In 2013 I was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. I am the author of Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy (Columbia University Press, 2015), Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind (Harvard University Press, 2007), Colour Vision: A Study in Cognitive Science and the Philosophy of Perception (Routledge Press, 1995), and the co-author of The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (MIT Press, 1991; new expanded edition, 2015).

Edwyrd Burj11 months ago

He reiterates the need to extend scientific meditative research to the movement arts. He seems to suggest that movement mediation, which perhaps activating the same brain areas, means something very different via its enaction than sitting meditation. So it is not the same meta-cognitive experience with the two forms. Having done both kinds I find moving meditation activates and refines the spatial-temporal bodily image schema in a way that sitting meditation does not. In so doing it literally gives multiple views of objects within an immediate field of attention, thereby opening to multiple points of view rather than a fixed point of reference in sitting. However the attention in sitting meditation, while opening to whatever arises, be it a sound or a thought, or even by focusing one one object, is still within a fixed center or perspective, this notion of a bare attention that theoretically has no center or ego reference. But that rests on an assumption that bare attention itself is beyond reference or perspective, while moving meditation's sort of bare attention makes no such assumption given its ever shifting physical perspective. It seems that sitting mediation is literally fixated while moving meditation is multi-perspectival with no fixed center. Just some biased ruminations that are sure to fire up the sitters! Have at it.

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