Atmananda’s teaching can be analogized to smoking out your prey.

You have the sense that there is some prey that’s hiding off yonder. The prey, which has yet to reveal its essence, is apparently separate from you.

You resort to cunning. In lieu of chasing after it (for such is futile inasmuch as you’ve treated it as if it were an object), you entreat it to come to you. Smoked out, the prey flees from its hiding spot and unwittingly runs in your direction.

Finally, it drops right straight into your hands. You did nothing.

And now an Atmanandian twist: what is realized is that the prey is none other than You.

The Direct Path is very much like this: it shows, over and over again, that what appears to be ontologically independent and separate is, in actuality, nothing but Consciousness. Yet this understanding is not “hardwon.” Instead, through the use of Higher Reason, one dis-covers what has been True all along. It is very neat to see that everything one tests–be it a thought, a feeling, a sensation, a desire, a perception, you name it–is none other than, and has never been anything but, Consciousness.