Category: philosophical counseling
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Suffering, Cluelessness, & A Closed Heart: And Three Respective Paths
Three Paths My thesis is that there are three higher paths available to us today: The Path of Awakening The Path of Wisdom The Path of Love Each is a response to either a perennial concern or to a historical predicament. Or both. 0. Non-reduction A brief objection: couldn’t all three paths be reduced to…
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Charity, Lovableness, And Lovingkindness (Metta)
And here we have quite a beautiful point about metta, or lovingkindness practice, as it pertains to one’s enemies: In his closing discussion on loving-kindness, Buddhaghosa asks, ‘What is the proximate cause of loving-kindness?’ The answer is the observation of lovableness in the person to whom you are attending. B. Alan Wallace, The Four Immeasurables:…
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Know Thyself: The Path of Sri Ramana–Part Two
Know Thyself The primary aim of life is to Know Thyself. This investigation Sri Ramana Maharshi called “Self-inquiry” or atma vichara. In The Path of Sri Ramana–Part Two, Sri Sadhu Om proposes that very few are engaging in the above inquiry. Why? Because many of us have been fixated on inquiries into the second and…
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Sri Sadhu Om’s Defense Of Ramana Maharshi’s Self-inquiry
In what follows, I’d like to bring out what I think is most salient about Sri Sadhu Om’s defense of Sri Ramana Maharshi’s approach to Self-inquiry. In doing so, I’ll set aside his fervor and bombast and come straightaway to the pith. And the pith is not only that (1) Self-inquiry gets you a two…
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The Triangular Prison Of The Mind
In The Path of Sri Ramana Maharshi: Part One–The Jnana Aspect of the Teaching, Sri Sadhu Om tells us a story about a man who is apparently imprisoned. The story goes like this: The man, believing that he is in a triangular-shaped prison, continues to search along two walls that meet–let’s say–at a right angle. Along the…
Andrew Taggart, Ph.D. 