Tag: Spirituality
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And What Are You Willing To Give To The Path?
Not long after my eldest sister died in 2014, my wife Alexandra wrote to a Zen teacher living in Kyoto to ask about various religious paths. Notably, she and I had crafted that email in such a way that it included criteria whose goal was to help her to determine what could be a suitable…
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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…
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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,…
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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…
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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…
Andrew Taggart, Ph.D. 