Tarver

With well over a decade of experience as a student of a range of meditation techniques, including Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), Shambhala, and Goenka Vipassana, Tarver now practices and teaches Shinzen Young’s non-sectarian “Unified Mindfulness.” 

He also has experience with addiction recovery and several other personal development modalities, including having served as Vice-Chair of the Board of the ManKind Project of Toronto, a men's group. 

His perspective is informed by the late Prof. Leslie Dewart’s realistic, non-reductionistic, non-dualistic, emergent, evolutionary philosophy of consciousness: Tarver sees in mindfulness an indispensable means to the end of helping the human race recover from absent-mindedness. 

Tarver also plays the didgeridoo; enjoys saunas and sweat-lodges but dislikes swimming; and loves to tinker, repair, and build things. He used to write software for IBM and persists in using Linux. He once built and published a full-scale reconstruction of the “traction trebuchet”, a human-powered medieval rock-throwing engine, for his M.A. in the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto. His blog can be found at http://tarverator.wordpress.com/.