2022/05/01

HarperCollins 100 Best Spiritual Books of the Century | Book awards | LibraryThing

HarperCollins 100 Best Spiritual Books of the Century | Book awards | LibraryThing




Book awards: HarperCollins 100 Best Spiritual Books of the Century

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Works (98)
Titles Order
  1. Alcoholics Anonymous by Alcoholics Anonymous
  2. And There Was Light: Autobiography of Jacques Lusseyran, Blind Hero of the French Resistance by Jacques Lusseyran
  3. I and Thou by Martin Buber
  4. Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda
  5. The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X
  6. The Autobiography of Saint Therese of Lisieux: The Story of a Soul by Saint Thérèse of Lisieux
  7. An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments With Truth by Mahatma Gandhi
  8. Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux by John G. Neihardt
  9. The Candle of Vision by George William Russell
  10. Celebration of Discipline: The Path to Spiritual Growth by Richard J. Foster
  11. Centuries by Thomas Traherne
  12. Christ and Culture by H. Richard Niebuhr
  13. Christianity and Culture by T. S. Eliot
  14. Collected Poems by W. B. Yeats
  15. The Collected Stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer
  16. The Cost of Discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer
  17. The Courage to Be by Paul Tillich
  18. Crossing the Threshold of Hope by Pope John Paul II
  19. Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism by Chogyam Trungpa
  20. The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac
  21. The Diary of a Country Priest by Georges Bernanos
  22. Duino Elegies by Rainer Maria Rilke
  23. Enthusiasm by Ronald Arbuthnott Knox
  24. The Epistle to the Romans by Karl Barth
  25. Essays in Zen Buddhism by Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki
  26. Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot
  27. Gitanjali: Song Offerings by Rabindranath Tagore
  28. God in Search of Man : A Philosophy of Judaism by Abraham Joshua Heschel
  29. The Golden String: An Autobiography by Bede Griffiths
  30. The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna by Ramakrishna
  31. The Gospel of Thomas: The Hidden Sayings of Jesus by Marvin W. Meyer
  32. A Guide for the Perplexed by E. F. Schumacher
  33. I Have a Dream: Writings and Speeches That Changed the World by Martin Luther King, Jr.
  34. The Idea of the Holy by Rudolf Otto
  35. The Immense Journey: An Imaginative Naturalist Explores the Mysteries of Man and Nature by Loren Eiseley
  36. In Search of the Miraculous: Fragments of an Unknown Teaching by P. D. Ouspensky
  37. In the Heart of the Seas by Shmuel Yosef Agnon
  38. Journal of a Soul: The Autobiography of Pope John XXIII by Pope John XXIII
  39. Letters and Papers from Prison by Dietrich Bonhoeffer
  40. The Lord by Romano Guardini
  41. The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien
  42. Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book by Walker Percy
  43. The Love of Learning and The Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture by Jean Leclercq
  44. Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism by Gershom Scholem
  45. Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl
  46. Markings by Dag Hammarskjöld
  47. Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism by Anonymous
  48. Meetings with Remarkable Men by G. I. Gurdjieff
  49. Memories, Dreams, Reflections by Carl Gustav Jung
  50. Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis
  51. Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres by Henry Adams
  52. Mount Analogue by René Daumal
  53. My Guru and His Disciple by Christopher Isherwood
  54. Mystical Dimensions of Islam by Annemarie Schimmel
  55. The Myth of the Eternal Return: Or, Cosmos and History by Mircéa Eliade
  56. The Nature and Destiny of Man: A Christian Interpretation by Reinhold Niebuhr
  57. New Seeds of Contemplation by Thomas Merton
  58. Night by Elie Wiesel
  59. Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton
  60. Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life by Thich Nhat Hanh
  61. The Perennial Philosophy by Aldous Huxley
  62. The Phenomenon of Man by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
  63. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard
  64. The Pillar and Ground of the Truth: An Essay in Orthodox Theodicy in Twelve Letters by Pavel Florensky
  65. The Plague by Albert Camus
  66. The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins by Gerard Manley Hopkins
  67. The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
  68. Practical Mysticism by Evelyn Underhill
  69. Prince Caspian by C. S. Lewis
  70. Raissa's Journal by Raissa Maritain
  71. The Razor's Edge by W. Somerset Maugham
  72. The Reign of Quantity & the Signs of the Times by René Guénon
  73. The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values, and Spiritual Growth by M. Scott Peck
  74. The Sabbath by Abraham Joshua Heschel
  75. Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry by Owen Barfield
  76. Seeing the Form (The Glory of the Lord : a Theological Aesthetics) by Hans Urs von Balthasar
  77. The Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton
  78. Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
  79. Silence by Shūsaku Endō
  80. A Simple Path by Mother Teresa
  81. Something Beautiful for God by Malcolm Muggeridge
  82. Spiritual Letters by John Chapman
  83. The Spiritual Teaching of Ramana Maharshi by Ramana Maharshi
  84. The Star of Redemption by Franz Rosenzweig
  85. Taking on the Heart of Christ: Meditations and Devotions by John Henry Newman
  86. Tales of the Hasidim by Martin Buber
  87. A Testament of Devotion by Thomas R. Kelly
  88. Think on These Things by Jiddu Krishnamurti
  89. The Thirteen Petalled Rose: A Discourse On The Essence Of Jewish Existence And Belief by Adin Steinsaltz
  90. The Transcendent Unity of Religions by Frithjof Schuon
  91. The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James
  92. Waiting for God by Simone Weil
  93. The Way of All the Earth: Experiments in Truth and Religion by John S. Dunne
  94. Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor
  95. The World's Religions: Our Great Wisdom Traditions by Huston Smith
  96. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values by Robert M. Pirsig
  97. Zen Flesh Zen Bones: A Collection of Zen and Pre-Zen Writings by Paul Reps
  98. Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind by Shunryu Suzuki


Award description

This list was compiled by Philip Zaleski and published in November 1999. All books on the list had to be published in English for the first time in the twentieth century.

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Gardner, L. Ron,THE EXOTERIC PERENNIAL PHILOSOPHY, PART 1

Meditation-Consciousness-Spirituality

 Meditation-Consciousness-Spirituality
9 February 2017 at 21:25 ·

THE EXOTERIC PERENNIAL PHILOSOPHY, PART 1

[For more articles, like this one, on esoteric spirituality, check out my blog: electricalspirituality.com.]

If you Google “the Perennial Philosophy,” you’ll find that two names dominate the search results: Aldous Huxley and Frithjof Schuon. This article, Part 1 of a two-part piece, will focus on their explications of the Perennial Philosophy. 
In Part 2, I will consider the explications of other exponents of the Perennial Philosophy, including Rudolph Otto, Rene Guenon, and Julius Evola.

Why have I titled this article “The Exoteric Perennial Philosophy”? Because, in my opinion, none of these Perennial Philosophy exponents has done the “Esoteric Perennial Philosophy” justice. In other words, to this point in time, not a single Perennial Philosophy expositor has tied together the common deeper, or esoteric,
aspects of the Great Spiritual Traditions. Sans an Esoteric Perennial Philosophy, it is not possible to synthesize into an integral whole the various descriptions of the “higher” dimensions of the En-Light-enment project found in the Great Traditions.

 The key component to such a synthesis is radical (or gone-to-the root) Trinitarianism; but because none of the renowned exponents of the Perennial Philosophy “cracked the cosmic code,” none of them figured this out. Hence, none of them could explicate an esoteric Perennial Philosophy.

Below, in order, are my Amazon reviews of 
  • Huxley’s “The Perennial Philosophy” (four stars) and 
  • Schuon’s “The Transcendent Unity of Religions” (one star) and 
  • “The Essential Frithjof Schuon” (two stars). 

These reviews make clear my view of their writings and explain some of my criticisms of the Exoteric Perennial Philosophy.

A NOBLE EFFORT
In "The Perennial Philosophy," Aldous Huxley, the celebrated novelist, turns his attention to spiritual philosophy and attempts to explicate and elaborate the Perennial Philosophy, which he considers the "Highest Common Denominator" found in the "higher religions"--Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Taoism, Judaism, and Islam. He argues that at the mystical core of these religions is "the ethic that places man's final end in the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all Being." And because this book is an anthology, he provides excerpt after excerpt from the "Great Traditions" to buttress his argument.
I have the utmost respect for Huxley, a brilliant thinker, writer, and humanitarian; and I applaud him for his noble effort in this book, which, in my opinion, generally, but not completely, succeeds in explicating and elaborating the Perennial Philosophy.
Positively, Huxley continually points to the divine Ground, the Godhead--the God of Being rather than becoming--as the alpha and omega of true, or mystical, spirituality. Negatively, his thesis is "flattened" by his "Vedantaized" approach, which places the essence of the higher religions under a single, staid umbrella.
At the time Huxley wrote this book, 1944, he and fellow great writer Christopher Isherwood were deeply into the Hindu Vedanta teachings of Swami Prabhavananda. While I like Prabhavanda's writings--I've read books by him
on the Bhagavad Gita, the Upanishads, Patanjali, and the Sermon on the Mount--there is a certain exoteric flatness to them, which makes them more suitable for beginners and intermediate students of Truth than for esoteric mystics; thus Huxley's book is brought down a notch by this conventional "Vedanta-ized effect."
This "Vedanta-ized effect" manifests itself in the topics and extracts Huxley chose for this anthology. In short, these topics and extracts emphasize the themes of moral purity (of heart) and self-emptying (poverty) as the keys to the Kingdom of God. One who reads this book will, mistakenly, think he has to become a self-nullified saint in order to become Self-realized, and few will find this demand enticing or possible.

Huxley misses the boat relative to God-realization because he didn't "crack the cosmic code." Hence the "astrolabe" he emphasizes for "locating" the Divine is essentially apophatic; and he essentially ignores the positive, or cataphatic, means to the Godhead, which is the practice of (Plugged-in) Presence, or Divine
Communion. The integral spiritual astrolabe is a dialectic, with Plugged-in Presence representing the thesis, self-emptying the antithesis, and reception of Divine Power the synthesis.
Because Huxley didn't crack the cosmic code, he reveals his spiritual-philosophical limitations in several places throughout this text. For example, he doesn't understand the Buddhist Trikaya (or "Triple Body"), which is
analogous to the Christian Holy Trinity; and some of his philosophizing falls flat. For example, he writes:
9+ 9+ 43 


Meditation-Consciousness-Spirituality