Month: June 2024
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The Spiritual Path: In 4 Stages
STAGE 1: Suffering Is Personal And Unbearable In the face of adversity, I feel that I’m a victim, perhaps a unique one. “Why is this happening to me?” I can’t bear it. STAGE 2: Suffering Is Personal And Is Regarded As A Challenge In the face of adversity, I take it as a challenge–one to…
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What Is It About Thoughts That Seems To Give Rise To Suffering?
Preface Sri Atmananda shows that it’s only by believing that thoughts can refer to real entities that there is suffering. This belief is, in fact, the source of all suffering. Argument 1. There’s no suffering in just perceiving–in just seeing or in just hearing, for instance. (“The world”) 2. There’s no suffering in just sensing:…
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Are You Clean And Pure, Or Unclean And Impure?
1. So long as you feel that there is trauma or, in any case, acute psychological suffering, you’d do well to seek out healing. 2. So long as you feel that there’s a lot of psychological stuff to clean up, you’d do well to clean up. 3. However, there comes a time when an insight…
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Happiness Can’t Be Observed–Then What Is It?
1. All of us have had experiences during which we were happy; we felt, in fact, that this state of happiness came on “for no apparent reason.” In lieu of brushing this experience off as if it were simply a fluke, why not inquire into what it tells us about the nature of happiness? 2.…
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Reckoning With Unbelief: Nature, Morality, & Mystery
How did modern agnosticism as well as modern atheism become an option for Westerners? How did the “sacred canopy”–in the words of the sociologist Peter Berger–fold up? And what existential significance do these questions have for us today? I won’t take these questions up today, at least not in full, but I will say a…
Andrew Taggart, Ph.D. 