Category: philosophical counseling
-
Subration: Concerning The Relative And The Absolute
In Advaita Vedanta: A Philosophical Reconstruction, Eliot Deutsch suggests that subration refers to “the mental process whereby one disvalues some previously appraised object or content of consciousness because of its being contradicted by a new experience.” The process is described at greater length a page later: On the relative level, this process aptly describes what…
-
Let Us Just Be
I’d like to share with you the beautiful final words with which Michael James’s fine book Happiness and the Art of Being: An Introduction to the Philosophy and Practice of the Spiritual Teachings of Bhagavan Sri Ramana concludes. I do so below the “*.” * This world and everything that we experience in it, including…
-
Administering Electric Shocks Or Sitting With One’s Thoughts?
1 In 2014, a study published in Science declared something that, to the researchers concerned, was quite surprising: In 11 studies, we found that participants typically did not enjoy spending 6 to 15 minutes in a room by themselves with nothing to do but think, that they enjoyed doing mundane external activities much more, and…
-
Only Practice In Atma Vicara Makes Perfect
One elegant, and very intuitive argument, from Michael James’s Happiness and the Art of Being: An Introduction to the Philosophy and Practice of the Spiritual Teachings of Bhagavan Sri Ramana is worth sitting with: Only practice [in atma vicara, i.e., self-inquiry, self-investigation, or self-abidance] can make perfect. By repeated and persistent practice of turning our…
-
The Truth Of Being Here Now
As Richard Alpert tells it in his now famous book Be Here Now, he went to India as a late–almost last–ditch effort after he realized that taking psychedelics, even heroic amounts, always left you down, always left you more or less where you were before. Such was–is–the nature of samsara. In India, Alpert met a…
Andrew Taggart, Ph.D. 