His Face At 50
In his notebook, George Orwell wrote, “At 50, everyone has the face he deserves.” The claim, in fact, is stronger than this: anyone at any age has the face that reveals “his soul.” If one only knew that one was walking around with a naked face that bore one’s deepest character, one, no doubt, would…
Does He Actually Want Help?
Helping someone in any deep sense requires immensely sensitive understanding. This is especially so because the one seeking help is very often engaged in tacit acts of resistance. In other words, he doesn’t know that he’s fighting what is being offered or, more generally, that he’s fighting you. His mind, yes, is his biggest enemy,…
Power And Clarity
Over a decade ago, my wife Alexandra and I met a spiritual teacher in Southern California. What puzzled us at the time was the fact that while his teaching was very crisp and clear, the energy in the room was very low. We’ve since come across teachers around whom one feels that the energy has…
Can We Know God?
The following is a Q&A that follows my long form essay, “On Not Getting To Denmark.” Question I think it was Pope Benedict, who said “one thing that atheist and believers have in common is they will both learn the truth when they die.“ And that is so true because both sides believe a certain…
Indiscriminate Benevolence In A Society Without God
When I was living in St. Louis around 2006, I re-read Theodor Adorno’s darkly acerbic Minima Moralia. I recalled, just today, one of his searing lines about “indiscriminate benevolence”: Indiscriminate benevolence towards all constantly threatens that coldness and remoteness against each, which are once again communicated to the whole. Francis Fukuyama and Phil Zuckerman (in…
Vivarta Vada And Self-inquiry
You may have heard this line from Chandogya Upanishad: “May I be many, may I grow forth.” Hearing it, you may have fallen to wondering: “How did the many actually come from the One?” What if manifestation never really happened? In this connection, let’s consider just one doctrine: vivarta vada. This teaching draws upon the…
Whatever Happened To Work, Friendship, & Family?
Charles Taylor argued quite convincingly in Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989) that one of the hallmarks of modernity is “the affirmation of ordinary life”: immanent goods like family, friends, and work are to be embraced. This marks the turn toward worldliness that is a fundamental feature still of the…
Going Beyond The Student-Spiritual Teacher Framing
We need a new, more deft understanding of “student” and “spiritual teacher.” In fact, ultimately both, rightly says The Avadhuta Gita, have to go. But first the promised understanding. The student in life–be he a spiritual practitioner, an entrepreneur, or (really) anybody–tells a story in which he, the protagonist, is struggling to follow the path.…
Personal Peace Is Not The Ultimate Aim
The contemporary spirituality scene–be it New Age or Neo-Advaita–is lacking in many respects. Two such are pointed out by Swami Satyananda Saraswati in Rikhia: The Vision of a Sage, an account of the rural development project undertaken in Rikhia, India, starting in 1989. Satyananda, presumably speaking to younger disciples, asserts, “Personal shanti may be an…
Why Does The Reiner Story Gnaw At Us?
Why is the Reiner story–the story about Rob and Michele possibly being killed by their son Nick–so horrifying? Why, that is to say, do some national and international stories grab us and tear at us while others do not? Aristotle knew well: the stories that really get or, even, gnaw at us are, properly speaking,…
Who Isn’t My Neighbor?
In 1991, on the day of Kartika Poornima, when the moon is brightest, God gave me a very good idea. He told me, “Help your neighbours as I have helped you.” Then I had to consider, what does the word ‘neighbour’ mean? Is it a person who lives next door or close to my house?…
On Being Post-secular
The secularization thesis held that organized religion would fade as modern science came to take hold in modern culture and so all of human life would be slowly and properly “disenchanted” or “de-spirited.” This hasn’t happened. Instead, a far stranger development, one charted by Charles Taylor in A Secular Age, has long been unfolding. More…
How Does My Heart Stay Open?
What does it take for my heart to open? And what does it take for my heart to stay open? I must give up being right. I have to stop trying to be right. And I must drop my stance by which I maintain my rightness. Rightness (to be clear: not righteousness and not truthfulness)…
Atmabhava: ‘Feeling The Pain Of Others As If It Were Your Own’
The sum and substance of spiritual life, the best teaching of Vedanta, is atmabhava, which means feeling the pain and distress of others as if it were your own, feeling the poverty, sickness and calamities of others as your own. –Swami Satyananda Saraswati, “Atmabhava” Since Satyananda alludes to Advaita Vedanta, one might be surprised to hear…
The Meeting House: A Weekly Service
At A Glance Description Quite swiftly is religion becoming less and less salient to ordinary Americans. A recent Gallup report bears this claim out: The 17-point drop in the percentage of U.S. adults who say religion is an important part of their daily life–from 66% in 2015 to 49% today– ranks among the largest Gallup has recorded…
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Andrew Taggart, Ph.D. 