Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Meditation

  • More on Meditation: Worldling and Quester

    The New Zealander to whom I replied in Impediments to Meditation responds: . . . you rightly sense that there was a certain selfish ambition in my turning to meditation. Though following your post Meditation: What and Why, my stated ambition was to achieve what you called "tranquility". To use your terminology from the article, I grew…

  • Impediments to Meditation

    This just in from a New Zealand reader: Firstly let me say, your blog "Maverick Philosopher" has been truly inspiring for me. Particularly insofar as it has freed me from the sense that I need to pursue my love of philosophy and theology from within the academy. I am happy to have been of some help.…

  • Grace

    Is it possible to take grace seriously these days? Well, I just arose from a good session on the black mat.  For a few moments I touched upon interior silence and experienced its bliss. This is nothing I conjured up from my own resources. But if I say I was granted this blissful silence by…

  • A Goal of Meditation

    To bring the soul into the field of awareness and not merely believe in it like the religionist or reason about it like the philosopher.

  • Notes After a Meditation Session

    The discursive mind loves the dust it kicks up. We love distraction, diversion, dissipation, and diremption, even as we sense their nullity and the need to attain interior silence. This is one reason why meditation is so hard. We love to ride the wild horse of the mind. It is much easier than swimming upstream…

  • Minimal Metaphysics for Meditation

    Is there a better way to begin a new year than by a session upon the black mat?  No, so I sat this morning from 2:50 to 3:45.  There is a certain minimal metaphysics one needs to assume if one is to pursue meditation as a spiritual practice, as opposed to, say, a relaxation technique.…

  • Meditation Themes

    There is no end to the number of meditation themes; one must choose one that is appealing to oneself. One might start discursively, by running through a mantram, but the idea is to achieve a nondiscursive one-pointedness of attention. Here are some suggestions. 1. A Christian of a bhaktic disposition might start with the Jesus…

  • Further Questions About Meditation

     This continues the thread begun in Questions About Meditation. Vlastimil writes, I want to ask, which meditation techniques do you practice? Or rather, do they include some specifically Buddhist ones? Even vipassana/insight practice? Some Buddhists told me that doing vipassana seriously always tends one towards Buddhist beliefs. I wonder if you agree. Or if you…

  • Questions about Meditation

    An academic philosopher inquires:   As usual, I want to ask you about something (something you're free to blog about).   Since December 2015, I've practised mindfulness meditation, with low intensity. Just 20 minutes or so each or every other day, paying calm (if possible) attention to things as they were happening in my mind…

  • My Time Away: Where I Was and What I Did

    A reader sent the following about half-way through my digital fast and blogging hiatus. . . . I was hoping that when you emerge from it you might have some practical wisdom on how you went about it. What has your daily schedule been like? Have you struggled with the nagging urge to check everything…

  • Why a Philosopher Should Meditate and Why it is Difficult for a Philosopher to Meditate

    If a philosopher seeks the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters, then he should do so by all available routes.  Qua philosopher he operates in the aether of abstract thought, on the plane of discursive reason, but he cannot consistently with his calling ignore other avenues of advance.  It is after all the truth that…

  • The Proximate Goal of Meditation

    To bring the soul into the field of awareness and not merely to believe in it like the religionist or reason about it like the philosopher.

  • Contradiction and Koan

    What is a contradiction from one angle is a koan from another. In a contradiction, logical thought hits a dead end.  Discursive thought's road end, however, may well be the trail head of the Transdiscursive.

  • The Parable of the Leaky Cup

    There is no point in begging for water with a leaky cup.  Water thereby gained is immediately lost again.  First fix the cup, then beg for water. So also with the glimpses and gleanings and intimations from Elsewhere. They won't be retained in a perforated vessel.   And if they are not retained, then they…

  • Meditation is Hard

    Thoughts don't like to subside.  One leads to another, and another.  You would experience the thinker behind the thoughts, but instead you have thoughts about this thinker while knowing full well that the thinker is not just another thought. Or you lovingly elaborate your brilliant thoughts about meditation, its purpose, its methods, and its difficulty,…