Category: philosophical counseling
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Everyone Is A Metaphysician–But Most Are In The Closet
The New York Times Daily Briefing includes a sentence–a telling one–about the pecking order of vaccine recipients As the virus has spread, infectious-disease experts have gained a better understanding of who among the nation’s nearly 330 million residents is the most vulnerable: nursing home residents, people with underlying conditions, and lower-income communities. While I happen…
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Spiritual Bypass vs. Insight Porn
In Bringing Your Shadow Out of the Dark (2018), Robert Augustus Masters defines a shadow as “a storehouse for whatever in us” that, because it once “seriously conflicted with our survival needs” (104), has been “disowned, rejected, marginalized, or otherwise denied” (113). A simple example would be sexual adventuresomeness. If someone’s conditioning tended to favor…
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Reading The Tao Te Ching: The Tao Is Mystery: A Meditation
The Core Taoist Teaching The core Taoist teaching, especially as it’s found in The Tao Te Ching (alt.: The Daodejing) can be reduced to five tenets. In this reading, which is, above all, a meditation, I select five seminal chapters from TTC (the Hinton translation) to illustrate this tenet. They are Chapters 1, 11, 16,…
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After I Realize The Answer, The Whole Cosmos Dances
“Who am I?” is really the first question. If true, isn’t it mysterious how easily each “I” forgets “I-self”? But it is true! When I hear, who hears? When I see, who sees? When I taste, who tastes? “Don’t be daft! You do!” “I do? Well, who am I?” When I think, who thinks? In…
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Unhook The Fixation
Excitation is not what we think it is. We think it’s a good thing, but that’s not quite right. Paying close attention to the experience shows the ordinary mind getting yanked hard in the direction of the object of excitement. It might seem as if it’s a delightful experience to think about this idea, but…
Andrew Taggart, Ph.D. 