Category: philosophical counseling

• October 26, 2012

  Metanoia and radiance: A morning meditatio

  We are speaking again, as if for the first time or final day, about the puzzle of self-transformation. We say that self-transformation is final yet ongoing. We say also that it has an aim yet that its aim is not external but rather internal to the practice of philosophy. This makes self-transformation out to be…
• October 25, 2012

  The puzzle of self-transformation (metanoia)

  Self-transformation (metanoia) is something of a puzzle. On the one hand, self-transformation is ‘final,’ final in that it carries us into a completely new state of being. From this vantage point, we are different persons, more whole and more fulfilled. On the other hand, self-transformation is ongoing, not quite reached, always underway. Thus, philosophizing is…
• October 24, 2012

  Unstucking ‘stuckness’ (2)

  Stuckness Yesterday I argued that “stuckness” is the best single word description of the ‘place’ in which many people find themselves. Specifically, I said that being stuck involves 1. being unable to go forward toward a future state of being; 2. being unable to go backward, to return to a prior state of being; 3. having the desire to move one…
• October 23, 2012

  Unstucking ‘stuckness’ (1)

  Near the end of our conversation yesterday, John Thackara, co-founder of Doors of Perception, used the word “stuck.” So had a man in Switzerland, students at Kaos Pilots, a woman in Berkeley… For nearly two years, “being stuck” or “feeling stuck” may be the phrase I hear most often to describe an individual’s or an…
• October 22, 2012

  On eating properly and ‘two kinds of quantity’

  I don’t believe that calories–this unit of measure–is a good way of talking about food in general, of talking about ‘how much’ I need to eat or how I go about conceptualizing what it is I eat. My doubts about ‘the calorie’ are born of my wholesale rejection of what goes under the header of…