Category: philosophical counseling
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Why The Therapeutic Needs The Spiritual And Vice Versa And Why They Both Need Philosophy
Think of Kyozan Joshu Sasaki, the founder and head abbot of Mount Baldy Zen Center, among many other Zen centers. To many of his male students, he was intuitively insightful. During a particular one-on-one (Sanzen), I’m told, one student who’d never met Joshu before heard Joshu say to him, “There is no God.” And: “Stop…
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‘Anything You THINK You Are–You Are NOT’
“Anything you think you are–you are NOT.” So writes Stephen Wolinksy, an expositor of the teachings of Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, a twentieth-century Indian guru in the tradition of Advaita Vedanta, in his short book The Beginner’s Guide to Quantum Psychology. Consider what Wolinksy is saying. If you think you are X, regardless of what X is,…
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What Is Nonduality?
Nonduality is the view–but then it is more than just a view–that reality is just one substance. That is, all of reality is one seamless substance. To write “just,” as I have in the opening definitional sentence, or “only” may be a bit misleading since it could be read as implying that there could be more than…
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Why Meaningful Work Rests On Folly
If the desire to do “meaningful work” above all else is a folly as I think it is, then why do we so strongly desire to do it? Because, people claim, evidence shows that individuals give 1/3 of their waking hours over 1/2 of their lives to working in some capacity or another. That is,…
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Ubi Sunt: The Death Of Heroism
Ubi sunt: where have all the heroic gestures gone? By “heroic,” I mean an act that is in keeping with the enormity of the situation at hand. A heroic act, so understood, may not be virtuous or honorable (though it may be). It may instead be thought of as “grand,” “epic,” “magnificent,” “larger than life,”…
Andrew Taggart, Ph.D. 