Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Spiritual Exercises

  • Something Good from these Politically Trying Times?

    One positive upshot of these times that try our souls is that more and more of us will come to appreciate the hopelessness of this world and the people in it. Self-satisfied worldlings will find it difficult to retain their worldliness and self-satisfaction as civil order collapses and the tide of irrationality rises. Their naive…

  • The Lazy, the Ambitious, and the Wise

    The lazy do not work. The ambitious work hard — but for their own enhancement and advancement. The sage works, but without ambition, with detachment from the fruits of action.

  • A Part-Time Monk’s Solution to Suggestibility

    We are too open to social suggestions.  We uncritically imbibe dubious and outright wrong views and attitudes and valuations and habits of speech from our environment.  They don't appear wrong because they are in step with what most believe and say.  'Normal' beliefs and patterns of speech become normative for people.  This is the way…

  • Let it Go!

    You allow mental clutter to collect in memory, and then you repeatedly sift through it, keeping it alive and present. What good is the memorial rehearsal of failures, foibles, and fatuities, of missed opportunities, and unpleasant encounters? Let it go, not quite forgetting the details, but relaxing one's grip on them, while preserving the lessons.

  • A Philosopher’s Sign of the Cross

    In the name of the Principle, and of its principal Exemplar and Expression, and of the dialectical Unity of the Two.* "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."  In principio erat Verbum, et Verbum erat apud Deum, et Deus erat Verbum. Secundum Ioannem 1, Prologus.…

  • 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…

  • Benjamin Jowett on Grace

    A stunning formulation for your delectation from the translator of Plato and the don of Balliol College: Grace is an energy; not a mere sentiment; not a mere thought of the Almighty; not even a word of the Almighty. It is as real an energy as the energy of electricity. It is a divine energy;…

  • Knocking and Waiting

    You can knock, knock, knock on heaven's door, or you can wait for God like Simone Weil.  But if man is on his own, to allude to a title by Ernst Bloch, then knocking and waiting are futile gestures.

  • This Morning’s Meditation: Notes with the Help of Poulain

    Today's sitting  ran from 3-3:45 am.  It was focused and intense, but dry, as most sessions are. The wayward mind was brought to heel, but discursive operations continued.  I was hard by the boundary that separates what Poulain calls the prayer of simplicity from what he calls the prayer of quiet.  But I remained this…

  • The Lure of the Good

    Some of us hear the call to perfect ourselves morally, or at least to better ourselves. Whence the call? The Whence is cloud-hidden, and what is hidden may be doubted. And yet conscience intimates a reality absolute and complete that sustains and envelops this vale of transience.  The love of truth and the love of…

  • Practice the ‘Step Back’

    Keep the obtrusions of memory and perception and anticipation at mental arm's length. Practice the 'step back.' Rather than 'go with the flow' of centrifugal mind, examine whither it tends. To a place worth visiting?  Harder still, well-nigh impossible, is to examine whence it comes. Swimming upstream to the hidden Source of the stream is…

  • Postscript to Minimal Metaphysics for Meditation: Reply to Dr. Caiati

    Vito Caiati writes,  . . . while I see the wisdom in your assertion “no one is likely to take up, and stick with, serious meditation, meditation as part of a spiritual quest, unless he is the recipient of grace, a certain free granting ab extra,” I am troubled about the soteriological implications of such…

  • Minimal Metaphysics for Meditation

    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.  You have to assume that mind is not exhausted by 'surface mind,' that there are depths below the surface and that they are accessible here and now.  You…

  • Double Cultural Appropriation!

    Before this morning's session on the black mat, I read from the Dhammapada. I own two copies. The copy I read from this morning has the Pali on the left and an English translation by Harischandra Kaviratna on the right. I don't know Pali grammar but I have swotted up plenty of Pali vocabulary over…

  • Virile Ascesis

    Julius Evola (Doctrine of Awakening, 233) preaches a virile ascesis which is neither renunciation, nor worldflight, nor inaction, nor quietism, nor mortification.  Ascesis requires detachment, but one can be both detached and active in the world. The vita activa is possible without contemptus mundi. One can even be a warrior like Arjuna in the Bhagavad-Gita…