Month: July 2021
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Are All Negative Emotions Traceable To The Inner Child?
Dear reader, I’d like you to test a hypothesis. It is this: all negative emotions can be traced back to the inner child. Preliminary Remark #1: The Scope of the Hypothesis I need to be specific about the scope of this hypothesis. Negative emotions are, in the sense in which I’m speaking of them, only…
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The Third Focal Point Of Karma Yoga
About karma yoga, the younger-ish and groovier Ram Dass writes in the amazingly 1970s spiritual-cultural artifact Be Here Now (1971) that the witness, a third focal point, is key: Using the stuff that makes up your daily life as the vehicle for coming to Union is called karma yoga. It is a most available yoga,…
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Sudden Awakening/Gradual Cultivation
In the Chapter Introduction, “The Immature and the Wise,” to The Dhammapada (trans. and ed. Eknath Easwaran), S. Ruppenthal very parsimoniously and elegantly describes the Zen view of “sudden awakening/gradual cultivation”: In Buddhism, enlightenment (sambodhi or bodhi) is an instantaneous experience in which mental activity is momentarily suspended completely and sleeping realms of consciousness are…
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Karma Yoga, Revisited
The Bhagavad Gita argues that one of the paths of Self-realization is karma yoga. Until recently, I had held that karma yoga was not a good path for us moderns due to the prevalance of Total Work. But I was mistaken, not least because I had believed that karma yoga could too easily be conflated…
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The 8 Limbs Of Philosophia
In The Yoga Sutras, Patanjali outlines what he takes to be the “eight limbs of yoga.” Inspired by his example, I want to ask, “What could be the X limbs of Wisdom? 1. Austerities Many traditions underscore the need for tapas (or austerities). Christian mystics speak of “silence and solitude.” Buddhists observe Noble Silence during certain…
Andrew Taggart, Ph.D. 