Underground Study Groups, and What Traditional Texts Assume You Already Have

When modern seekers encounter traditional spiritual texts—the Upanishads, the Yoga Sutras, Plotinus’ Enneads, the Tao Te Ching, Sufi poetry—they often experience one of two responses: either the texts seem impenetrably obscure, or they seem deceptively simple. Both responses signal the same problem: the reader lacks qualifications the text assumes are already present. Traditional teachings were …