Two old philosopher friends reunite for a camping trip in eastern Oregon's Outback and Nevada's Black Rock Desert.  Each night they talk about their philosophical worldviews, usually around a sage- and juniper-fed campfire.  Often soaring with whiskey (or marijuana), J.D. pushes his naturalistic philosophy, which he anchors in the Big Bang, and Carl counters with his Platonism.  They are accompanied by J.D. 's dog Sadie and, later, they hook up with J.D. 's kayaking friends for a multi-day trip down Oregon's John Day River.  J.D.'s friends are more than happy to offer their own philosophical opinions. 

This book is partly Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, with a touch of My Dinner with Andre.  But in this account, Schopenhauer's Will dominates.  Cosmic energy underlies everything and we are its embodiment.  The human need to be free, as for all of life, screams out. It is viscerally existential, and is variably used to serve the self only, to serve others, or to serve all of life.  This narrative is also about the search for meaning in what, for J.D., is a meaningless universe.

Philosophical Travels With Carl is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

We differ from our ape cousins in one crucial way: We can wonder about our existence.  That wonder rests on the same motive forces that we share with all of life - the need to survive and live well, and the fear of pain and death.

For eons, religion has told us stories about our origins and an eternal future.  Science types might not engage much.  Others turn to new age explanations.  And some live in dread, or they live by default or denial, hoping that death just goes away.  For Babu, none of these work. He anchors his worldview in the science of his time, which can be philosophically described by Schopenhauer's Will.  The Will is cosmic energy that tells us our origins and shows us our future.

Babu is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

When his religious upbringing was no longer tenable, J.D. Steens turned to philosophy to find a worldview that would work for him.  The problem he ran into was that, while philosophy seemed divorced from science, science would have nothing to do with philosophy.  In this book, J.D. Steens tries to tie these two approaches together by formulating a philosophical worldview that is based on science or at least not inconsistent with it.

The voice for this perspective comes through Graybeard, a chimpanzee, whose namesake was David Graybeard, one of Jane Goodall's first chimpanzee subjects.  Upon their invitation, Graybeard shares his own ideas with Plato, Schopenhauer, Lao Tzu, Darwin, the Buddha, Einstein, and others, in a parallel universe setting.  In this book, Graybeard links the world of science (evolutionary biology) and philosophy, in one fundamental way:  Though an animal, he and humans (and all of life) are motivated by the same forces - the need to survive and the fear of not surviving.  From this perspective, fundamental philosophical themes can be deduced.

This is the third book of Steens' philosophical trilogy.  The first was Philosophical Travels with Carl:  Freedom in the Oregon Outback, and the second was Babu, A Philosophical Quest.  Both are published on Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

Graybeard is available on Amazon.

In 1967, sitting in my house in Nepal's Tarai and having a lot of time to think about life, I started writing in aphoristic style.  Most of my journal notes are from 1967-1971 when I was in Nepal.  I continued writing in this way after returning, but much less so as I studied, and then worked and raised a family.  Later, I picked up putting these thoughts into a poetic format, which I found helped me to be concise in my thinking and writing.

Link to these are available here.