The Wisdom Home Companion

This book is for students of Wisdom, especially non-experts. It is not meant to be read by itself, but in conjunction with another book. Its purpose is to help you read that other book by explaining names of people and places, concepts, and specialized language that you are likely to encounter in serious books about Wisdom - things that are likely to be unfamiliar to you if you're not a scholar or an expert in some aspect of Wisdom or history or foreign languages. It's a glossary - a kind of encyclopedia and dictionary, all-in-one - that is focused on a single subject area: Wisdom.This book contains brief definitions and explanations for over 800 entries (from 'abiding' to 'Zoroaster') from 20 different languages (Abkhazian to Turkish): words, names, and ideas that students found difficult in any of about 60 Wisdom books by some 40 authors. So if you're reading a book that has the word Wisdom in the title; or perhaps esoteric, hidden, inner, lost or secret; or maybe even the Dead Sea Scrolls or the Nag Hammadi Library, this book may help you. It could be a book on Anthroposophy, Baha'i, Buddhism, Christianity, Gnosticism, Gurdjieff, Hermeticism, Hinduism, Islam, Jainism, Judaism, the Kabbalah, Mysticism, Sikhism, Sufism, Taoism, Theosophy, or Zoroastrianism. Or it could be a book by authors such as Cynthia Bourgeault, Matthew Fox, Kabir Helminski, Thomas Keating, Thomas Merton, Jacob Needleman, Elaine Pagels, Richard Rohr, Huston Smith, Richard Smoley, Alan Watts, or Ken Wilber. If anything in all that matches up with what you're reading, this book will help you understand it.