Category: philosophical counseling
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Indiscriminate Benevolence In A Society Without God
When I was living in St. Louis around 2006, I re-read Theodor Adorno’s darkly acerbic Minima Moralia. I recalled, just today, one of his searing lines about “indiscriminate benevolence”: Indiscriminate benevolence towards all constantly threatens that coldness and remoteness against each, which are once again communicated to the whole. Francis Fukuyama and Phil Zuckerman (in…
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Vivarta Vada And Self-inquiry
You may have heard this line from Chandogya Upanishad: “May I be many, may I grow forth.” Hearing it, you may have fallen to wondering: “How did the many actually come from the One?” What if manifestation never really happened? In this connection, let’s consider just one doctrine: vivarta vada. This teaching draws upon the…
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Whatever Happened To Work, Friendship, & Family?
Charles Taylor argued quite convincingly in Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989) that one of the hallmarks of modernity is “the affirmation of ordinary life”: immanent goods like family, friends, and work are to be embraced. This marks the turn toward worldliness that is a fundamental feature still of the…
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Going Beyond The Student-Spiritual Teacher Framing
We need a new, more deft understanding of “student” and “spiritual teacher.” In fact, ultimately both, rightly says The Avadhuta Gita, have to go. But first the promised understanding. The student in life–be he a spiritual practitioner, an entrepreneur, or (really) anybody–tells a story in which he, the protagonist, is struggling to follow the path.…
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Personal Peace Is Not The Ultimate Aim
The contemporary spirituality scene–be it New Age or Neo-Advaita–is lacking in many respects. Two such are pointed out by Swami Satyananda Saraswati in Rikhia: The Vision of a Sage, an account of the rural development project undertaken in Rikhia, India, starting in 1989. Satyananda, presumably speaking to younger disciples, asserts, “Personal shanti may be an…
Andrew Taggart, Ph.D. 