Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Spiritual Exercises

  • Abstain the Night Before, Feel Better the Morning After

    Do you regret in the morning the spare supper of the night before or the foregoing of the useless dessert?  Do you feel bad that you now feel good and are not hung over?  You missed the party and with it the  ambiguity and unseriousness and dissipation of idle talk.  Are you now troubled by…

  • Time Apportionment as Between Athens and Benares

    If a philosopher who meditates spends five hours per day on philosophy, how many hours should he spend on meditation?  One corresondent of mine, a retired philosophy professor and Buddhist, told me that if x hours are spent on philosophy, then x hours should be spent on meditation.  So five hours of philosophy ought to…

  • Re-collection

    Recollection is a flight from the diaspora  of animal inclinations and social suggestions.  One collects oneself.  Life is one long battle against the centrifugal pull of these two.  Time too flees and flies not just by passing unaccountably but also by losing itself in the diaspora of its own modes, past, present, and future.  What…

  • Lot, Loot, and Light

    It is in keeping with our lot that we should seek, not the loot of the lottery, but the light of the Lord. Related articles After Aristotle

  • A Limit to Self-Reliance

    Among our fellows we ought to be as self-reliant as possible.  But in matters moral and spiritual we ought freely to confess our exigency  and ultimate inability to help ourselves.  Honesty demands it.  But to appreciate properly the need for outside help, one ought first to try to go it alone.  When the self-therapeutics of…

  • Meditation: How Long and What to Expect

    A student from Northern Ireland writes, I've recently been contemplating practising meditation. I decided to look up what you had to say on the subject, and I was happy to discover the "how to meditate" post. I was just wondering though, how long should a person meditate, and what should a first timer like myself…

  • Useless Rehearsals

    Rehearsals are for a future performance.  Why then are you 'rehearsing' that altercation with so-and-so from twenty years ago? Do you plan to bring it back to the stage?

  • De Magistro

    Seek the Teacher deep within.

  • Letting Go of the Past

    Since the past is no longer, to let go of the past is to let go of thoughts of the past.  But these thoughts, like all thoughts, are in the present. So we are brought back again to the importance of cultivating the ability to let go of thoughts  here and now.  Mind control in…

  • Ego, Sin, and Logic

    Ego is at the root of sin, but also at the root of obsessive preoccupation with one's sinfulness. If the goal is to weaken the ego, then too much fretting over one's sins in the manner of a Wittgenstein is contraindicated. There is such a thing as excessive moral scrupulosity. Though Wittgenstein's ego drove him…

  • The Mind’s Centrifugal Tendency

    Meditation is a battle against the mind's centrifugal tendency.  In virtue of its intentionality, mind is ever in flight from its center, so much so that many have denied that there is a center or a self.  The aim of meditation is centering.  To switch metaphors, the aim is to swim upstream to the thought-free…

  • Gratitude: A Thanksgiving Homily

    We need spiritual exercises just as we need physical, mental, and moral exercises. A good spiritual exercise, and easy to boot, is daily recollection of just how good one has it, just how rich and full one's life is, just how much is going right despite annoyances and setbacks which for the most part are…

  • No Fool Like an Old Fool

    It is a foolish old man who fails to make use of his waning libido to achieve the spiritual and moral progress that he couldn't  make when it was in full flood.

  • Asceticism

    A reader writes, I am a philosopher and a conservative (in many ways) and I enjoy your blog very much. One thing I find rather puzzling (and interesting), though, is your extreme asceticism. Recently, you said: "Well, we know that drinking and dancing won't get us anywhere.  But it is at least possible that thinking…

  • Is Neuroscience Relevant to Understanding Prayer and Meditation?

    One aspect of contemporary scientism is the notion that great insights are to be gleaned from neuroscience about the mind and its operations.  If you want my opinion, the pickin's are slim indeed and confusions are rife. This is your brain on prayer: A test subject is injected with a dye that allows the researcher to study…