First post

Hopefully there will be a lot of posts.

The blog is named after a student group that existed in a small college in 2006. The contributors to this blog were founding members of this group, who were at that time briefly attending the same school. When Eric Brooks and I launched the organization with the name "Gravitas" we meant that we were launching a "study / discussion" group that would make forays into depths and vastnesses including the comparative religious and metaphysical, in a way that ranged widely over world history. I think now that we were trying to constitute a self-contained "curriculum" that we would build up, as a small group of students, as we went along, hopefully gaining lasting insight while sharing studies and discussions in one tradition at a time. As "Gravitas" developed and more students became regular participants we were all enabled to sound these "gravities" more deeply and broadly.
I have beautiful memories of the group's sessions, many of which took place in the pleasant outdoor setting of the school's grounds, into mid-spring. Someone would begin each session by introducing a text, often a sacred text, and then its history, the tradition in its background, and of course its contents. People I hardly knew would soon be sharing with me the pearls of their own quiet strivings in a way uncommon in the general run of things. In fact, for me and other participants this was the last semester before graduation, and I was sorry to leave off a project that had been so consistently successful and rewarding, and wished that it could have gone on longer, that it could have started earlier.

What we intend for this blog now is not exactly to continue the efforts of the old "Gravitas," but for all that this project basically descends from our fellow-travelling in 2006. Eric has already explained what my first contributions here will be. I hope that these will engage readers and speak to some of their "graver" spritual soundings and stirrings like the old group could do, and I hope that many will be moved to follow these posts and publications as friends and fellow-travellers towards truth in its depth and vastness.