Category: philosophical counseling

• July 2, 2013

  The quietness of the intelligent man

  Kenko does well to stress the intelligent man’s quietness in company. Nobody likes a know-it-all. Some men, out of pride or vanity or ennui, profess to be experts in some esoteric subject while not a few others add to the dullness of the evening by having an opinion about everything passed around the table. They…
• July 1, 2013

  Why is Kenko disillusioned?

  All around Kenko are signs of late autumn. The flowers, irregularly strewn yet carefully placed, so completely matches Kenko’s  aesthetic ideas of simplicity, irregularity, and incompleteness–not to mention his ascetic notion of the value of exclusion–that he is taken aback. That a man could live like this is… if not wisdom, then at least admirable.…
• June 29, 2013

  Reconsidering discipline and discipleship

  Let us begin with Henri Nouwen’s careful reflections on the mutual dependency of discipline and discipleship. Discipleship, he writes, calls for discipline. Indeed, discipleship and discipline share the same linguistic root (from discere, which means “to learn from”), and the two should never be separated. Whereas discipline without discipleship leads to rigid formalism, discipleship without…
• June 28, 2013

  The skeptic’s lukewarm mood

  A brief excerpt from a forthcoming guide, Cultivating Discipline Lightly, which is to serve as a companion to the course I am teaching at Kaos Pilots from Sept. 9-13. Enjoy. *  In all of this, it is evident that the skeptic, an allegorical figure of Estrangement, is absolutely unwilling to play along. Out of hubris, she…
• June 27, 2013

  ‘Now being seen off, now seeing off…’

  Kenko writes, ‘In all things, it is the beginnings and the ends that are interesting.’ A greeting, a farewell; a fresh hello, a tender adieu. In Robert Aitken’s translation of Basho’s haiku, we observe the farewell at its most elemental: ‘Now being seen off, Now seeing off–the outcome: Autumn in Kiso.’ What is of interest, of…