Taylor's soft perennialism: A primer of perennial flaws in transpersonal scholarship

Abstract

This response to Taylor's essay in this issue (p. 17) concludes that his notion of soft perennialism is unworkable and shows no promise as a theory to explain spiritual diversity. Numerous specific shortcomings of the paper are described, then it is used as basis for identifying three broad categories of error that occur in some transpersonal scholarship. Examples from Taylor's paper are supplemented with similar errors in papers by other transpersonal scholars.