Category: philosophical counseling
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Purification, Humility, And Superabundant Love In The Cloud Of Unknowing
“The cloud of unknowing,” according to the author of this Christian mystical text, is that state ‘partway’ (we might say) between our highest nature and God in himself. Unknowing is relative to what it is that human beings claim to know by drawing on “the bodily sense” and on the intellect. To not know in…
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The Cloud Of Unknowing: A Summary For Mystics
I’d like to summarize some of the main points about the Christian mystical text The Cloud of Unknowing, that is, the points that are germane to adept meditators. The Cloud of Unknowing and the Cloud of Forgetting: Sat and Asat The “cloud of unknowing” refers to that state of being that is not of the…
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‘Lift Up Your Heart Towards God With A Humble Stirring Of Love’
The opening paragraph of Chapter 3 of the anonymously authored Christian text The Cloud of Unknowing provides the earnest seeker, the budding mystic with excellent counsel: Lift up your heart towards God with a humble stirring of love; and think of himself, not of any good to be gained from him. See, too, that you…
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The Triple Silence
Silence, I’ve been saying for many years, is not or not just the absence of speech; nor is it strictly the absence of sound. It is the ineffable fullness anterior to all rustlings and ‘felt’ between and within all rustlings. Raimon Panikkar assures us that there are three forms of silence at the heart of…
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Reflections On Wisdom
The Nature of Wisdom Wisdom joins together the questions: What is real, really real, or ultimately true? What is good? What do I know? Wisdom is the knowledge of how the real courses through while activating the good. To put that definition in a different form: wisdom is virtuous conduct flowing directly, immediately, and intuitively from…
Andrew Taggart, Ph.D. 