Month: February 2021
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Contemplating Emptiness
A very beautiful meditation is called “contemplating emptiness” (no-thing-ness/boundlessness/openness). According to Chan master Sheng Yen, one simply allows the attention to fall on any object–a thought, a physical sensation, a perception, or an emotion–and then passes on, letting it gently go. Simply, one dwells in awareness, where awareness is “behind” and “beyond” agile attention. In…
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The Fourfold Process Of Discovering Who I Am
In the midst of an especially lucid exposition of Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj’s teachings, Timothy Conway writes: The Maharaj’s quintessential spiritual way for any visitors and disciples ripe enough to fathom was awakening to this Universal Consciousness and even beyond that unto the Absolute Awareness or Open Divine Reality. The specific method was a radical disidentification from the dream of “me…
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Ramana Maharshi on “Who Am I?”
Yesterday I re-read Ramana Maharshi’s brilliant and clear “Who Am I?” It’s really an astonishingly limpid dialogue about self-inquiry, or self-abiding. The excerpt is quite short; you should read it in its entirety. Here, I comment on a very brief section: 5. Will [the questioner asks] there not be realization of the Self even while…
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If I Am Not The Body Or The Mind, Then Am I Something Else?
What We’re Looking For There comes a time when we realize that we’re not ultimately looking for a new job, a new house, better relationships, a different place to live, a fitter body, an abler mind. We can’t be truly looking for being better, doing more, or being different. For don’t we come to recognize…
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Is The True Self An Inference Only?
Here’s the scene: in I Am That, a questioner is pressing Nisargadatta (Maharaj; below “M”) to provide epistemic proof about the jnani, the self-realized one. In what follows, I use “[A]” to indicate that I = the Absolute and I use “[R]” to indicate that I = the relative. Quoting: Q: Is the knower [the…
Andrew Taggart, Ph.D. 