The Fundamental Experience: The Origin of Spirituality

An essay on the forgotten origins of spirituality, in which we start from the common source of religions and spiritualities, in which we see that it was lost, and in which we finally return to it in full awareness. The Fundamental Experience, by Jean Benoit, free to download here.

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The Fundamental Experience

Before doctrines, an experience

A monk of the Egyptian desert, a Taoist sage on the banks of the Yellow River, a yogi in the Himalayas: three languages, three eras, three ways of telling it. And yet, beneath the words, something in them is recognizable, before they even have a system to explain it.

That is the starting point of The Fundamental Experience, an essay by Jean Benoit that works its way back, tradition by tradition, to this shared experience, the one each doctrine later dressed in its own way, sometimes at the risk of covering it up entirely.

The book begins with the first prehistoric sages and moves through Buddhism, Taoism, the Upanishads, Sufism and Christian mysticism. It doesn't compare them term by term: in each one, it looks for what comes before the name it was given. The map is not the territory, and it is the territory, the experience itself, that this book goes back to, behind the map of each tradition.

37 chapters, five parts, one question running through them all: why do so many different paths lead, in the end, to the same place?

Download the book for free, as a PDF, here

If you have any questions, please write here:

madhyama.marga@gmail.com

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