Category: meditation
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Two boo’s for ‘living in order to work’
I Call me puzzled. I can’t help but recall a wealthy man I used to tutor while I was living in New York City. He was an heir to a famous American dynasty and was doubtless so wealthy that none of his grandchildren would ever need to work. Despite this, he worked very long hours, founding and co-founding companies,…
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Openness, wonder, and joy
Philosophy is not for those who presume to know all there is to know. Nor is it for those who, being bourgeois, take life to be wholly self-explanatory. ‘The commonplace mind,’ writes Josef Pieper in ‘The Philosophical Act,’ ‘rendered deaf-mute, finds everything self-explanatory’ to the point at which ‘”wonder” is no longer there.’ Now that must be…
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Letting others be: A fictitious admonition
No words must needs be addressed to him if what he is doing does not accord with what I think he would be better off doing. Let him be. That there may be other ways of doing something, some incontrovertibly or demonstrably better than this one he prefers or seems to anyway: what of it, man? Am I…
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In Stillness: A 10 minute chant and meditation
Before leaving for Denmark where I taught a course at Kaos Pilots, Aleksandra and I recorded a 10 minute chant and meditation, which I have included below. One morning before dawn we sat as usual on meditation cushions. Aleksandra held an iPhone up to her mouth and chanted this two stanza poem. An earlier version of the…
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Making perspicuous the connections: Cheerfulness, surprise, and marvel
1. It dawns on me that there is a particular kind of person that I have been trying to describe over the past couple of years. There are three sets of terms that bring this kind of character more sharply into focus: dispositional terms, aesthetic terms, and an occurrence term. 2. The dispositional terms are…
Andrew Taggart, Ph.D. 