Month: November 2022
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On Spiritual Temperaments
To simplify to an extreme, it could be said that spiritual temperaments come in three basic types: experimenters, lovers of knowledge, and lovers of the sacred. We need all three, but only the last two are totally legitimate. Experimentation implies an openness to submit your questions to practical tests. Up to a point, this is…
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A Brief Summary Of Paragraphs 1-10 of Sri Ramana Maharshi’s Nan Yar (“Who am I?”)
I provide a brief summary of what I take to be the main line of argument from Paragraphs 1-10 of Sri Ramana Maharshi’s Nan Yar (“Who am I?”). The following points, it should be understood, do not directly map onto the paragraphs from the main text. For an excellent translation of Nan Yar, go here.…
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Living With The Question: From Socrates, Via Jean Klein, To Atmananda
In a section entitled “Living with the Question” from Jean Klein’s The Book of Listening, we find the beginning of a fertile conversation: Q. I would like to ask you what you mean exactly by “the question”? Jean Klein: The question is the answer. Before the question was formulated, the answer was already there. The…
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‘The Body Is Only Energy’
In The Ease of Being, a student asks the teacher Advaita Vedanta teacher Jean Klein: “If the body we see is not our real body, what is” (my emphasis)? He replies, “The body [the subtle body] is only energy. The moment there is tension, the moment there is reaction, this energy becomes static, fixed as…
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Jean Klein: A Certain Poetic Sensibility
It can be helpful to be able to summarize the teaching of nondual teaching masters in a single sentence. Sri Ramana: “Inquire or surrender, then just be still.” Nisargadatta: “Abide in the ‘borderland’ of ‘I am.’” Atmananda: “Reduce all apparent objects to Consciousness and trace the I back to the I-principle.” I find, at least…
Andrew Taggart, Ph.D. 