Category: philosophical counseling
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Does He Actually Want Help?
Helping someone in any deep sense requires immensely sensitive understanding. This is especially so because the one seeking help is very often engaged in tacit acts of resistance. In other words, he doesn’t know that he’s fighting what is being offered or, more generally, that he’s fighting you. His mind, yes, is his biggest enemy,…
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Power And Clarity
Over a decade ago, my wife Alexandra and I met a spiritual teacher in Southern California. What puzzled us at the time was the fact that while his teaching was very crisp and clear, the energy in the room was very low. We’ve since come across teachers around whom one feels that the energy has…
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Can We Know God?
The following is a Q&A that follows my long form essay, “On Not Getting To Denmark.” Question I think it was Pope Benedict, who said “one thing that atheist and believers have in common is they will both learn the truth when they die.“ And that is so true because both sides believe a certain…
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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…
Andrew Taggart, Ph.D. 