Tag: Inquiry
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The Moth & Us
The moth was fluttering its wings wildly, but it couldn’t take off. It kept trying and trying but still nothing. It couldn’t fly and, I feel, it foresaw its death. T.S. Eliot once wrote of the “objective correlative”: a writer describes a situation in such a way as to evoke a particular mood. I’d like,…
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Metaphysical Commitments In Raja Yoga & Advaita Vedanta
Which metaphysical commitments draw Raja Yoga (the path of willpower and concentration) together with Advaita Vedanta (the path of knowledge)? In Meditation and Its Practices: A Definitive Guide to Techniques and Traditions of Meditation in Yoga and Vedanta, Swami Adiswarananda tells us that there are four such principles–namely, the “divinity of the individual soul, [the]…
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Raja Yoga Prepares The Way For Advaita Vedanta
“The path of [Raja] Yoga,” states Swami Adiwarananda in his book Meditation and its Practices: A Definitive Guide to Techniques and Traditions of Meditation in Yoga and Vedanta (2003; 2012 ed.), “is suited to those in whom reason has not yet established its natural supremacy over the emotions and volitions” (p. 40). This is a…
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Does It Matter If There’s A Lot Of AI Hype?
In her book Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting (2018), philosopher Shannon Vallor rightly points to one of the central puzzles we face today. This is that there’s, in her coinage, a stunning “epistemic opacity” with regard to how technology is and will unfold and, of course, with what…
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Jeffrey Epstein, Alas, Had Thought Power
I don’t recall Swami Sivananda discussing perversions of thought power in his book Thought Power, at least not at great length. It’s clear that he’s aware of the possibility of a yogi abusing thought power, and it would have been obvious to him that ethical practices (such as the yamas and the niyamas from Raja…
Andrew Taggart, Ph.D. 