Category: meditation
-
On not owning a couch
The best thing that fairly well-to-do parents can do today would be to refuse the temptation to buy their children their first couch. A few recent tweets tell something of the story about the American precariat: ‘Student Debt Slows Growth as Young Spend Less’ http://nyti.ms/10xd0uG (More news about status of American #precariat) ‘The Idled Young Americans’:…
-
Benedict or Cicero? Field philosophy or the monastic?
Day 1. A philosopher is neither a teller nor an adviser. Day 2. What Dancy’s Late Late Show appearance has to say about the philosopher’s disappearance Day 3. ‘Living’ philosophy: Field philosophy Scholars of Aristotle have long been divided over the answer Aristotle gives to the question of how best to live. Much of the Nicomachean Ethics points in…
-
Spiritual Exercise – 4. Measure
Measured speech is neither pithy (witticism) nor voluminous (garrulity). Measured speech is the expression of, or accompaniment to, the virtue of temperance. Let us transform ourselves. Ask yourself, Do I tend to blurt things out? Why is that? Why can’t I seem to hold my tongue? I think I have to ‘say my piece,’ but do…
-
Cultivating discipline: A forthcoming manual
I’m beginning to think about the contents of a short guide, Cultivating Discipline, which I’ll likely be using in some upcoming educational workshops. One chapter, I believe, will be on spiritual exercises, which I plan to arrange according to categories. Pierre Hadot suggests that a spiritual exercise is a meditation aimed less at informing the pupil about…
-
The rigor of meditation practice
There is a rigor involved in meditating regularly that calls me back to meditate well before dawn in spite of the passing desire to stop or the urges to make an exception today. The rigor of a meditation practice emerges only for the one who, like the Pyrrhonian skeptic, would not live according to dogma.…
Andrew Taggart, Ph.D. 