What Is Unitive Knowledge?
Unitive knowledge is not a doctrine that all religions are the same. It is a question about a kind of knowing that many traditions describe, and about how far their descriptions agree.
Unitive Knowledge Society
Publisher of Metanoia, Journal of Unitive Knowledge
An exploration of humanity’s search for ultimate reality.
The current issue
Beginnings
The first issue asks what unitive knowledge is, and reads the Chāndogya Upaniṣad alongside Plotinus.
The One and Brahman
Plotinus and Śaṅkara never read each other, yet both describe a first principle beyond ordinary predication. The resemblance is striking; so is the difference.
What is unitive knowledge?
Unitive knowledge is the study of how humanity has understood ultimate reality, and whether beneath the diversity of traditions there are real convergences, and real disagreements.
The Way of Unitive Knowledge
Seven essays on the knowledge the contemplative traditions put above all others: what it is, why we lack it, and the path they describe toward it, from the first turning to the return to ordinary life.
What this knowledge is: not knowing about, but knowing by becoming.
Why we do not already know what is said to be so close.
Metanoia itself: longing, disillusion and the first step.
Why every path is moral before it is mystical.
Contemplation, prayer, meditation and inquiry, and the place of grace.
The passage beyond concepts, its dangers, and the need for discernment.
What the traditions say is found, and the return to the world.
The Sevenfold Path
Seven essays on the maps of the inner ascent that the traditions draw in seven stages: Teresa’s mansions, ʿAṭṭār’s valleys, the Yoga Vāsiṣṭha’s stages of knowledge, Buddhaghosa’s purifications, the Buddha’s factors of awakening, Augustine’s levels of the soul, and what the maps share.
Teresa of Ávila’s Interior Castle: the soul as a castle with God at its centre.
ʿAṭṭār’s Conference of the Birds: thirty birds, and a king who is a mirror.
The Yoga Vāsiṣṭha: from the wish for the good to the state beyond waking and sleep.
Buddhaghosa’s Path of Purification: seven chariots, each only as far as the next.
The Seven Factors of Awakening
The Buddha’s seven qualities of a mind ready to wake.
The Seven Levels of the Soul
Augustine’s ascent from life itself to contemplation.
Why Seven?
The maps compared: one path, or several?
The Bhagavad Gītā
The Gītā’s way for those who stay in the world, and the Mahābhārata teachings around it, now in the Library’s reader.
Action Without Attachment
Must the seeker leave the world? The Bhagavad Gītā was spoken to a man who wanted to, on a battlefield, and its answer is the way of action without attachment: to act fully and give up the claim to the fruit. What that teaching asks, how the Mahābhārata tests it, and how it has been misread.
The Great Questions
Questions every tradition has had to answer. Each opens onto essays, thinkers and texts.
- What is ultimately real?
- What is the Self?
- Can ultimate reality be known?
- Is union with God identity or communion?
- Is liberation earned or given?
- Do opposites meet in the ultimate?
- Is the whole in every part?
- Is love or knowledge the higher way?
- Why would the infinite create a finite world?
- What do we owe to all living beings?
Traditions
Each on its own terms: history, thinkers, texts, and where it meets and differs from others.
- Begin Here
An introduction to unitive philosophy in five steps.
- The Rhineland Mystics
Eckhart, Tauler and Ruusbroec, and their heir Nicholas of Cusa: the birth of God in the ground of the soul.
- Persian Mystical Poetry
ʿAṭṭār, Rūmī and Ḥāfiẓ: the journey, the reed-flute and the tavern, three masters of the Sufi poetry of love.
- Grace and Effort
Pure Land Buddhism and the Śrī Vaiṣṇava theology of surrender: two traditions that ask what the self can do.
About the Society
Metanoia is published by the Unitive Knowledge Society.