Author: Andrew Taggart
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Seeking Out Those Who Push Your Buttons
Even though, to my regret, Ram Dass doesn’t really have a theory of polishing the mirror, he does make some helpful suggestions throughout his book called (well) Polishing the Mirror. Like this one: “There comes a point where you really want to clean up your act. You start to look for the fire of purification.…
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‘Rich, I Think I’m Going To Die’
This passage is oh so very touching. Listen closely: My mother was dying in early February, 1966, in a hospital in Boston. I was sitting at her bedside. By then I had been working on understanding my own consciousness for some years. She was sort of resting. I was in a kind of meditative mode,…
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‘There Is More Ache In Life Now….’
There is more ache in life now, more poignancy in the eyes of a beloved, more pouring out of the hridayam. While it’s true that years of deep daily meditation will make you calmer, it’s truer to say that it will crack you open. Like an egg. Thump! Deep and wide. You can hear and…
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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,…