Category: Spiritual Exercises
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A Peace Worth Wanting? Problems with Pyrrhonian Ataraxia: Passivity and Porcinity
The Pyrrhonians see clearly that part of our misery in this life is due to our inability to attain certain knowledge. Wanting certainty, but unable to secure it, we are thrown back upon conflicting beliefs that inflame passions. The heat of the passions seems to vary inversely with the rational unprovability of the beliefs that…
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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.…
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The Eremitic Option
Monks come in two kinds, the cenobites and the eremites or hermits. The cenobites live in community whereas the hermits go off on their own. Eremos in Greek means desert, and there are many different motives for moving into the desert either literally or figuratively. There are those whose serious psychological conditions make it impossible…
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Attitude, Gratitude, Beatitude
Happy Thanksgiving to all my Stateside readers. The attitude of gratitude conduces to beatitude. Can it be said in plain Anglo-Saxon? Grateful thoughts lead one to happiness. However you say it, it is true. The miserable make themselves miserable by their bad thinking; the happy happy by their correct mental hygiene. Broad generalizations, these. They…
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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…
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Unnecessary Conversations
These include those with oneself. Limit the unproductive inner rants and rehearsals. There is no inner listening if one is talking to oneself.
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Mass Media and Spiritual Deterioration
A Facebook user told me he left it because it had become for him an impediment to spiritual growth. I concur and generalize: inordinate consumption of any and all mass communications media militates against spiritual health for all of us. Mass media content is a bit like whisky: a little, from time to time, will not hurt you,…
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Al-Ghazzali on Worldly Trifles
From The Alchemy of Happiness, p. 48: Another dangerous property of worldly things is that they appear at first as mere trifles, but each of these so-called 'trifles' branches out into countless ramifications until they swallow up the whole of a man's time and energy.
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Apatheia and the News
Why follow the disturbing events of the day, thereby jeopardizing one's peace of mind, when one can do nothing about them? Apatheia and the news don't go well together. Withdrawal and retreat remain options to consider. But on the other side of the question: The temptation to retreat into one's private life is very strong. …
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Could a Jew Pray the Our Father?
A rather obvious point swam before my mind this morning: there is nothing specifically Christian about the content of the Pater Noster. Its origin of course is Christian. When his disciples asked him how they should pray, Jesus taught them the prayer. (Mt 6:9-13) If you carefully read the prayer below you will see that…
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What Sort of Prayer is Needed by the Desiccated Intellectual?
Which sort of prayer is appropriate for the proud intellectual? Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, The Three Ages of the Interior Life, vol. I (Catholic Way Publishing, 2013), p. 535: Some souls absolutely need prayer, intimate and profound prayer; another form of prayer will not suffice for them. There are very intelligent people whose character is difficult, intellectuals who…