Category: Sage Advice
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The Vital Imperative
Live Well, Live Now.
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On Taking Abuse
Everyone gets abused verbally in this world and one had better learn how to take it. There are bigots everywhere — liberals are among the most vile, their tendency to project psychologically rendering their bigotry invisible to them — and sooner or later you will encounter your fair share of abusers and bigots. A fellow graduate student called your…
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Safe Speech
"No man speaketh safely but he that is glad to hold his peace. " (Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, Chapter XX.) Excellent advice for Christian and non-Christian alike. Much misery and misfortune can be avoided by simply keeping one's mouth shut. That playful banter with your female student that you could not resist indulging…
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The Importance of Self-Control
There is so much to learn from the Trayvon Martin affair. One 'take-away' is the importance of self-control. If Martin had been taught, or rather had learned, to control himself he would most likely be alive today. But he didn't. He blew his cool when questioned about his trespassing in a gated community on a rainy…
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After Aristotle
The proprietor and author of the weblog After Aristotle writes, Having retired after decades as an academician in various capacities, both administrative and professorial, at a small college in Massachusetts, I am dedicating the next three decades or so of my life to the fullest exploration possible of all that philosophy has to offer. Bravo! Wise move. …
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Be Kind . . .
. . . but know how to reply in kind.
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Happiness Maxims (2013 Version)
These maxims work for me; they may work for you. Experiment. The art of living can only learned by living and trying and failing. 0. Make it a goal of your life to be as happy as circumstances permit. Think of it as a moral obligation: a duty to oneself and to others. 1. Avoid unhappy…
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Of Food and Philosophy
JH writes, I'm curious as to when you eat breakfast in relation to when you do your early morning studying, meditating, hiking, or running. I know you've mentioned a few times that you've done these activities before meeting folks for breakfast, so I am curious to know if eating affects your mental and/or spiritual…
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Let It Lapse
If a relationship has a troubled past, no future, and a present that is merely the transition from the one to the other — let it lapse.
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Be Here Now
"But how could I fail to be?" By not minding your being here now. The rocks on the trail are here now but they cannot attend to their being here now. They can't appreciate or appropriate or affirm their being here now. As the existentialists rightly pointed out, to be for a human being is…
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Appreciate What You Have
Appreciate what you have while you have it. An actual shack is better than a remembered or merely imagined or expected or merely possible palace. Do not allow the present and actual good to suffer diminution by comparison to the modally and temporally and spatially elsewhere. This is it. This is your life. Right here…
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A Prudent Assumption
It is prudent to assume that what can be taken the wrong way will be.
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Worldly Success: How Much is Enough?
You have enough world success if it enables you to advance the project of self-realization on the important fronts including the moral, the intellectual, and the spiritual. The vita contemplativa cannot be well lived by the grindingly poor, the sick, the politically and socially oppressed, the sorely afflicted and tormented. Boethius wrote his Consolations of Philosophy…
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How to Get Rich Quick!
John Blofeld, Beyond the Gods: Buddhist and Taoist Mysticism (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1974), p. 153: For the sake of wealth, people already well above the poverty line slave all their lives, not realising that withdrawal from the rat-race would immediately increase rather than diminish their wealth. Obviously anyone who finds the full satisfaction of…