Category: Spiritual Exercises
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Some Happiness Maxims
These work for me; they may work for you. 1. Avoid unhappy people. Most of them live in hells of their own devising; you cannot help them, but they can harm you. 2. Avoid negativity. Squelch negative and useless thoughts as they arise. Your mind is your domain and you have (limited) control over it.…
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Gratitude: A Thanksgiving Homily
Here again my annual 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…
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Kerouac October Quotation #4: Resolutions Made and Broken
Sweet gone Jack made such an effort to be a good boy, but failed so utterly as to break one's heart. Here is a Some of the Dharma entry (p. 127) written sometime between July and October 1954, before success and fame and alcohol undid him: RESOLVED One meal a day No drinking of intoxicants…
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On Praying for Christopher Hitchens
There is something strange, and perhaps even incoherent, about praying for Christopher Hitchens if the prayers are not for his recovery or for his courageous acceptance of death, but for conversion or a change of heart. Let's think about it. I do not play the lottery; I have good reasons for not playing it; I…
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Meditation: Three Baby Steps
First, drive out all useless thoughts. Then get rid of all useful but worldly thoughts. Finally, achieve the cessation of all thoughts, including spiritual ones. Now you are at the threshhold of meditation proper. Unfortunately, a lifetime of work may not suffice to complete even these baby steps. You may not even make it to the…
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Modern Media and the Deterioration of Spiritual Life
During my first visit to St. Anthony's Greek Orthodox monastery (Florence, Arizona) in February 2004, I purchased Harry Boosalis, Orthodox Spiritual Life According to Saint Siloan the Athonite. What follows is a passage to give users of the new media pause. It was published in 2000 before blogging really took off, and before texting, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter: Writing nearly…
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Pet Love as Idolatry? Problems of Attachment and Grief
I buried my little female cat Caissa at sunrise this morning in a beautiful spot in the Superstition Mountains in the same place where I buried my male cat Zeno in October of 2002. When I buried Zeno, just before leaving the burial site, I prayed, "May we love the perishable as perishable and…
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Soul Food
People are generally aware of the importance of good nutrition, physical exercise and all things health-related. They understand that what they put into their bodies affects their physical health. Underappreciated is a truth just as, if not more important: that what one puts into one's mind affects one's mental and spiritual health. The soul has…
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Mental Quiet and Enlightenment/Salvation
In yesterday's post I claimed that the proximate goal of meditation is the attainment of mental quiet, but listed as an ultimate goal the arrival at what is variously described as enlightenment, salvation, liberation, release. In a comment to the post (from the old blog), Jim Ryan raised a difficult but very important question about the connection…
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Meditation: What and Why
Here are some preliminary thoughts on the nature and purposes of meditation. Perhaps a later post will deal with methods of meditation. Meditation Defined We need to start with a working definition. The question of what meditation is is logically prior to the questions of why to do it and how to do it. The…
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Happiness and Outflow
Cogitative and seminal efflux are both in need of control, and it is reasonably surmised that control of either helps in the control of the other. It is more than reasonably surmised that control of both is necessary for happiness. But difficult it is to stem the tide of thought and seed.
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Memory and Happiness
It is we who supply the blood that enlivens the spectral vampires that haunt us from our past. A part of mind control is purgation of memory, and without mind control happiness is achieved with difficulty, if at all.
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How to Avoid God
C. S. Lewis, "The Seeing Eye" in Christian Reflections (Eeerdmans, 1967), pp. 168-167: Avoid silence, avoid solitude, avoid any train of thought that leads off the beaten track. Concentrate on money, sex, status, health and (above all) on your own grievances. Keep the radio on. Live in a crowd. Use plenty of sedation. If you…
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William James on Self-Denial
No one preaches self-denial anymore. We have become a nation of moral wimps. We need a taste of the strenuosity of yesteryear, and who better to serve it up than our very own William James, he of the Golden Age of American philosophy: Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous…
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The Demons of the Desert
The desert fathers of old believed in demons because of their experiences in quest of the "narrow gate" that only few find. They sought to perfect themselves and so became involved as combatants in unseen warfare. They felt as if thwarted in their practices by oppponents both malevolent and invisible. The moderns do not try…