Author: Andrew Taggart
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Happiness Is Knowledge Or Love Of God
Happiness is knowledge or love of God. This is, as it may first appear, not a poetic formulation only. It’s a definition of happiness. And happiness, it’s implied, can be none other than knowledge or love of God. Consequently, all other candidates–popularity, wealth, status, pleasure, experiences, desire satisfaction, wealth, status, accomplishments, worldly success, a certain…
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Frithjof Schuon: On Getting To The Trailhead
In the “Introduction” to Frithjof Schuon: Messenger of the Perennial Philosophy, Michael O. Fitgerald cites Schuon’s wife Catherine: [Schuon’s] function in the world is really to bring peopleback to practice their religion . . . to bring them back to a path that leads to God. . . . [M]any people have gone back and…
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Is The World Real? A Dialogical Meditation
Overview “Is the world real?” In this Dialogical Meditation, we investigate (a) whether the world is permanent and (b) whether the world is self-existent. Through the inquiry, it soon becomes clear that the world does not qualify as sat (in Sanskrit): meaning being permanent as well as self-existent. To Learn More Nonduality Newsletter Meditate with…
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Ethical Practice As Purification
The Eightfold Path picks out Right Thought, Right Speech, and Right Action as the foci for ethical practice. This is wise. I’d like to begin with where we are, however. We engage in wrong, unwholesome, negative thought patterns; and we react, in wrong speech and in wrong action, out of these unwholesome thought patterns. In…
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Huston Smith On The Buddha’s First Noble Truth
I find myself returning often to the Buddha’s First Noble Truth. I do so because it is a noble attempt to articulate the human predicament in so few words. Huston Smith on Dukkha The simplest, though not terribly helpful, formulation is: “Life is dukkha.” According to Huston Smith in The World’s Religions, Dukkha… names the…
Andrew Taggart, Ph.D. 