Institute for Real God Comparative Spirituality COMP103: How To Read a Spiritual Book

OVERVIEW: To read spiritual literature with receptivity and discrimination requires us to understand several things:

• how the spiritual experience of saints, yogis, and other Realizers relates to Reality Itself;
• who are the genuine Spiritual Authorities that can establish the "ground rules" by which we can rightly understand and appreciate spiritual literature;
• the Spiritual Realization of the people and phenomena being described;
• the ground rules under which the authors write (e.g., hagiographers, scriptural deconstructionists, and New Age authors, will have completely different intentions, and will describe the same subject matter in completely different ways, and draw completely different conclusions from the same sources);
• the "textual analysis" traditions of exegesis and hermeneutics;
• the social and political forces that may have influenced or altered the source over time;
• how to read with spiritual receptivity, rather than the usual, merely conventional, skeptical mind that unwittingly robs one of spiritual opportunity.
  

REQUIRED READINGS:

• Chris Tong, Ph.D., How To Read a SPIRITUAL Book, The Practical Spirituality Press, forthcoming.

• Mortimer Adler, How To Read a Book, Touchstone Books, 1972.
• Idries Shah, Knowing How to Know, Octagon Press, 2000.
• Earl Doherty, The Jesus Puzzle: Did Christianity begin with a mythical Christ?, Age of Reason Publications, 2005.