Author: Andrew Taggart
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‘Lift Up Your Heart Towards God With A Humble Stirring Of Love’
The opening paragraph of Chapter 3 of the anonymously authored Christian text The Cloud of Unknowing provides the earnest seeker, the budding mystic with excellent counsel: Lift up your heart towards God with a humble stirring of love; and think of himself, not of any good to be gained from him. See, too, that you…
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Reflections On Wisdom
The Nature of Wisdom Wisdom joins together the questions: What is real, really real, or ultimately true? What is good? What do I know? Wisdom is the knowledge of how the real courses through while activating the good. To put that definition in a different form: wisdom is virtuous conduct flowing directly, immediately, and intuitively from…
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The Triple Silence
Silence, I’ve been saying for many years, is not or not just the absence of speech; nor is it strictly the absence of sound. It is the ineffable fullness anterior to all rustlings and ‘felt’ between and within all rustlings. Raimon Panikkar assures us that there are three forms of silence at the heart of…
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Three Minus One Paths To God
Raimon Panikkar observes that there are three paths to God or the ultimate: By means of knowledge (jnana): through the effort of the intelligence to transcend itself: God is seen as an I. By means of love (bhakti): through the heart’s desire to seek what can fill it: God is seen as a thou. By…
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The Second Axial Age: Three Paths In Need Of Synthesis
The First Axial Age Karl Jaspers famously argued that the Axial Age, occurring between 8th and 3rd BCE, introduced the conceptual framework that has been with us since. Most notable among other discoveries was that of transcendence, and so we find The Upanishads speaking of liberation from the bondages brought about by suffering, the Presocratics…
Andrew Taggart, Ph.D. 