Category: Spiritual Exercises
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Unnecessary Conversation Avoided
Whether it is haiku or not, it is 17 syllables, and a good addition to the Stoic's armamentarium: Avoid the near occasionOf unnecessary conversation. Avoiding the near occasion is not always practicable or even reasonable, but pointless conversation itself is best avoided if one values one's peace of mind. For according to an aphorism of…
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Why Control Negative Thoughts About Other People?
Negative thoughts are of the other, but in oneself. They cannot harm what they are of, but they can pollute and disturb what they are in.
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Knowing God Through Experience
A mercifully short (9:17) but very good YouTube video featuring commentary by name figures in the philosophy of religion including Marilyn Adams, William Alston, William Wainwright, and William Lane Craig. Craig recounts the experience that made a theist of him. (HT: Keith Burgess-Jackson) As Marilyn Adams correctly points out at the start of the presentation,…
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A Warning
Apropos of my last entry, a warning to those may be thinking of heading for the desert. The following observation from a November 2009 post, "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…
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My Time Away: Where I Was and What I Did
A reader sent the following about half-way through my digital fast and blogging hiatus. . . . I was hoping that when you emerge from it you might have some practical wisdom on how you went about it. What has your daily schedule been like? Have you struggled with the nagging urge to check everything…
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Monkish Haiku
Avoid the near occasionOf unnecessary conversation.
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The Big Unplug Starts Today
Starting now, I will unplug from this hyperkinetic modern world for a period of days or weeks. How long remains to be seen. I will devote myself to such spiritual exercises as prayer, meditation, spiritual reading, hard-core philosophy and theology pursued for truth as opposed to professional gain, and the exploration of nature. I will…
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Waiting for St. Benedict. Various Withdrawal Options
Alasdair MacIntyre's 1981 After Virtue ends on this ominous and prescient note: It is always dangerous to draw too precise parallels between one historical period and another; and among the most misleading of such parallels are those which have been drawn between our own age in Europe and North America and the epoch in which…
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Worldly Enough
We must be worldly enough to secure for ourselves a place in the world whereat to practice unworldliness.
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The Useless Rehearsal of the Useful
Avoid not only useless thoughts, but also the useless rehearsing of useful thoughts.
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Negativity and Animality
Negativity is more difficult to subdue than animality. No surprise: the mind is more difficult to control than the body.
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The Proximate Goal of Meditation
To bring the soul into the field of awareness and not merely to believe in it like the religionist or reason about it like the philosopher.
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Desiderata
To live beyond society, beyond the need for recognition and status. To live in truth, alone with nature and nature's God and the great problems and questions. There are the ancient dead ones for companionship. They speak across the centuries. With them we form a community of the like-minded in nomine scientiae.
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Thomas Merton on Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche
I read the seventh and final volume of Thomas Merton's journals, The Other Side of the Mountain, in 1998 when it first appeared. I am currently re-reading it. It is once again proving to be page turner for one who has both a nostalgic and a scholarly interest in the far-off and fabulous '60s. But…