Jeffrey Wattles, Ph.D.
A sevenfold path to love passes through science, philosophy, spiritual experience, the beauties of nature, the arts, religion’s moral mandates, and character achievement. This path expresses a philosophy of living that guides thinking, feeling, and doing into the ways of truth, beauty, and goodness. This is the path to which Jeffrey Wattles devoted his professional career in philosophy and religion.
Truth, beauty, and goodness are qualities of divinity which we can live. Wattles created experiential, project-centered courses for thousands of students, of whom an estimated two-thirds reported transformative experiences. The key to transformation is first to work with high concepts, or modify them as needed, until one has something that one feels good about putting into practice. Second, one creates an experiential project by applying the resulting concept to one’s number one growth need or front-burner issue.
Philosophy, spirituality, and religion all need a well-developed philosophy of living organized around these values. But this piece of the puzzle was missing until the 2016 publication of Wattles’s Living in Truth, Beauty, and Goodness. The book includes informative and inspiring profiles of Darwin, Socrates, Jesus, Bach, and other world-class leaders, not to entertain and perhaps overwhelm us with achievements beyond our reach, but to show us ingredients for our own growth projects.
Wattles’s previous book, The Golden Rule (Oxford University Press) has been influential in recent scholarship, which has transformed our understanding of the multi-cultural and interdisciplinary richness of what it means to treat others as one wants others to treat oneself.
Having culminated his career in philosophy, Jeff is now creating a new form of evangelism, which places spiritual teaching in a wisdom context tuned to the needs of the present generation. His weblog is UniversalFamily.org.