Category: philosophical counseling

• January 28, 2013

  The thing desired during sitting meditation

  For the first time this morning, I came upon a criterion for my meditation practice. The criterion allows one to say, when one has hit upon the thing desired, that this is in fact the thing desired. Since last December, I had meditated without any aim apart from the continuing to do so diurnally. Now,…
• January 25, 2013

  Lightening bitter hearts

  A bitter heart can set in one day and thereafter settle in. Be vigilant therefore. Where today have you erred? What deed neglected, left unfinished? What love untold? Now write these reflections down on paper, read them aloud, and cast them thence into the night fire. Tomorrow, during morning meditation amid the quietude that pervades…
• January 24, 2013

  Loneliness and presentness

  Yesterday, in the middle of a philosophical conversation about a conversation partner’s sense of loneliness, it occurred to me that loneliness just is the experience of not being present. Loneliness is the word we typically use to designate this nebulous feeling of lack: the other is not there, the past in which love was is…
• January 23, 2013

  Good news from conversation partners

  Some good news from a handful of current and former conversation partners in my philosophy practice: One is leaving behind professional work to start an organic farm in the country. Another is, after a long hiatus, completing a master’s thesis on sustainability. Another is launching an artist retreat and craftsmanship school in 2014. Another has rented…
• January 21, 2013

  Self-sufficiency in rural Appalachia

  In rural Appalachia (the penultimate syllable pronounced like the ‘a’ in ‘apple’, not like the ‘a’ in ‘staple’), self-sufficiency is not an essential characteristic of Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover, the divine unmoved around which everything else moves. Nor is it the intrinsic property of Spinoza’s substance, that which is ontologically independent for its existence. For generation…