Mindfulness in behavioral health
January 1, 2016
Rick Repetti
27 citations
Mindfulness is a quality of consciousness opposite to mindlessness, cultivable through practice and almost always beneficial to those who develop it. This response counters critics who oppose secularized mindfulness on grounds that it is not authentic Buddhism, that it is Buddhism, or that it serves neo-capitalist exploitation. The author argues mindfulness has universal value as a quality of awareness that improves well-being and personal development, not as a religious practice or tool for exploitation.
Handbook of Transformative Philosophy
January 1, 2026
Rick Repetti
Awareness is a concept with a deep history in Western thought and remains philosophically challenging, especially in contemporary philosophy of consciousness where defining it raises the hard problem. This chapter traces the transformative power of awareness from its Western historical roots, then uses analytic philosophy to clarify its meanings and problems. Awareness is shown to be presupposed in nearly everything that matters to people and plays a transformative role in themes such as wonder, imagination, will, decision, experience, understanding, feminist consciousness, love, self-esteem, meaning, and happiness, as well as in meditation, aspiration, and transformation itself.
Interdisciplinary Research in Counseling Ethics and Philosophy - IRCEP
December 24, 2025
John Vervaeke, Rick Repetti, Christopher Mastropietro et al.
Two group philosophical practices—Dialectic into Dialogos (DiD) and the Socratic Search Space (SSS)—are described and contrasted with Nelsonian Socratic Dialogue (NSD). NSD aims for consensus by extracting a virtue concept from personal experiences, then testing it through Socratic questioning, making it a 'cataphatic' or positive practice. DiD instead leads participants into aporetic engagement with a virtue concept, making it 'apophatic' or negative. SSS integrates elements of both, balancing cataphatic and apophatic approaches. DiD and SSS are designed to induce dialogical flow states (Dialogos) that afford transformative experiences of distributed cognition, described by practitioners as a 'secular séance' that ignites Heraclitus's metaphorical fire associated with Logos, the intelligibility of ultimate reality. The paper presents cognitive science, philosophical, and practical supports, ethical considerations, and relevance amid the AI revolution and meaning crisis.
Filozofija i drustvo
January 1, 2025
Rick Repetti
A philosophy of meditation must address distinctions between meditative practices, states, and traits; the role of religion-based traditions; contemporary practices and research; whether meditation qualifies as a philosophical practice; critiques like 'McMindfulness'; the possibility that such practices reveal metaphysical truths or lead to enlightenment; and how physics or metaphysics might explain paranormal corollaries of mystical experiences. The author argues that meditative practices are among the most powerful forms of spiritual and philosophical practice, drawing on personal experiences and speculative hypotheses.