Category: philosophical counseling
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The Main Lesson Of The Upanishads
The main lesson of The Upanishads, a book I just read for the first time, is that the body must be stilled and the mind quieted in order for the ascent to Brahman, or ultimate reality, to be possible. For someone who hasn’t had any mystical experiences or who hasn’t meditated much, The Upanishads (or The Daodejing or, for…
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Tough Compassion
It’s thought that compassion is always soft and gentle, but that’s a considerable mistake. Compassion may require perceptiveness, and perceptiveness may reveal that your interlocutor is deluded about something specific. To be soft and gentle, in such a case, may allow this person to maintain this delusion and therefore to be that much further from…
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Why Is Wisdom Important?
Let wisdom be defined as right conduct flowing directly from right understanding. That is, the wise person is known through her conduct. Yet because “one swallow does not make a summer” (Aristotle), wisdom is demonstrated through countless virtuous actions. Go further: somehow it can be ascertained that each of these actions arises immediately out of the wise…
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An Understanding Of Understanding: Three Features Of Wisdom
Let wisdom, for my purposes anyway, be defined as right conduct directly flowing from right understanding. Then we can ask: how shall we enhance and enrich our understanding to the point at which it could be that from which we act? Consider but three features of wisdom: perceptiveness, considerateness, and thoughtfulness. To be very perceptive is to pick…
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The Entrepreneur’s And The Founder’s Conundrum
I speak with a good number of founders, entrepreneurs, and executives who are involved in the same kind of conundrum. How a countercultural philosopher like me came to speak with such individuals–well, that’s a story for another day. Today I’d like to tell you about that conundrum. Let me begin with an analogy from Robert…
Andrew Taggart, Ph.D. 