Cultivating Human Sovereignty through Perception, Meaning-Making, and Agency

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Developing human sovereignty is essential to navigating the complexities of contemporary challenges. This involves three key capacities: perception, meaning-making, and agency. Perception is well-practiced by meditators. Meaning-making requires the ability to adopt and transition between various mental models to find the most suitable perspective for a given situation. Agency reflects the ability to take action in the world. As societal meta-narratives fracture, individuals must become adept at skillfully shifting between different ways of understanding and interacting with their environment.

On this episode I'm joined once again by meditation teacher and author Rob Burbea. For this conversation Jamie Bristow and I talk with Rob about his approach to emptiness, and how it can be a route beyond postmodern nihilism and into a vibrant and sacred participation in the world. We talk about: An overview of the ‘ways of looking’ approach to emptiness, the participatory nature of perception & the world, how perception gets fabricated through our participation, the limitations of a purely cognitive deconstruction ala postmodernism, how Rob would define emptiness if asked about it at a cocktail party, How emptiness reveals a path beyond post-modernity, how hidden commitments limit our ability to explore perspectives, the unavoidability of participation and the impossibility of neutrality, the middle way between existence and non-existence, how this approach to emptiness offers a way forward in a ‘post-truth’ world, how your experience right now is constellated by your way of seeing (whether you know it or not), and the necessity of practice to realize the deeper dimensions of emptiness. Seeing that Frees [Amazon] Rob on the Deconstructing Yourself Podcast 2009 Emptiness Retreat Dharma Talks