Practical Philosophy

The folks at The School of Practical Philosophy are really quite keen on that Practical bit. They give you practices. In the first week, we got and did a thing called "The Exercise", and have done it again in the second and third classes. It's also on eight-and-a-half-by-eleven in our binders, and additionally printed on a special card. Here it is:



We were supposed to be doing it twice a day for the last two weeks. Today we did a new practice which is called The Pause. It's like The Exercise but shorter. You're supposed to be still for a moment and focus on one sense. It's a sort of micro-meditation, and well-named besides.

The main content of this class was "Levels of Awareness", although we spent a lot of time discussing attachment and sharing personal stories of trying to apply the question "What would a wise person do?" Some people shared things that I would probably have considered too private to bring out in that environment. Anyway, here are the levels of awareness from my notes:

• Higher states of consciousness
• Fully awake
• Awakening consciousness
• Waking sleep
• Dream
• Deep sleep

It was claimed that most people spend most of their allegedly awake time at the "waking sleep" level.

I had to run part of the way through Central Park to get there on time, but I did, and this time I chose to go back to the room and teacher (Roland) from my first week. He's a private school administrator, seems a little like Mr. Rogers, and is a wonder just to watch for his teacherly demeanor. Today I was particularly impressed with how he handled a participant's wildly off-topic response to a question. Without ever losing a beat he addressed the response positively, affirming the speaker, and then gently returned to the question he had actually asked. My response as a teacher in that situation might easily have been wide-mouthed and probably insulting flabergastion.

One weirdness from the day: several times Roland spoke of something taking multiple lifetimes, in a way that could be purely colloquial or could indicate a literal belief in reincarnation. Is that a part of the school's curriculum, I wonder?


Subway Philosophy
Week One
Week Two
Week Three