If we’re going to take Atmananda’s teaching seriously, we had better start at the beginning: is it true that we can only ever know, or make contact with, direct experience? Is experience really the starting point for our investigation into Consciousness?

Some years ago, my wife Alexandra and I had a one-on-one with Rupert Spira. Then I told him that my natural koan was: “Is this all there is?” The question arose some years after the death of my sister, and it was one that was quite alive to me just then.

Wisely, Rupert Spira interpreted “this” in “Is this all there is?” not as “the world” but as “the current experience.” It must have been clear to him that I was implying, in my question, that somehow “the world” or “life” was centrally at issue. Yet he didn’t bite on “the world” or on “life.” Rather, he proceeded to state something like as follows (I’m paraphrasing before I come to the direct quote): “There is the current experience, and there is, let’s suppose for now, the next experience. The question is not whether experiences come and go since quite clearly they do. The question is to whom all experiences appear. Therefore, let this be your true natural koan: ‘Who is it or what is it that is contemplating this experience?’ And then just see what happens.”

We need to revisit Spira’s deft opening move. Is he, following Atmananda, right to quickly move from “the world” or “life” to experience? Do I ever know “the world,” or do I just, for instance, see seeing? Do I ever know–that is, make contact with–“life,” or do I only know thinking?

Explore this matter (for example, do I ever touch a physical thing called “the world”? Do I have any way of independently confirming that thoughts are accurate or faithful copies or representations of “the world”? and so on) until it’s stunningly clear that I can only know, or make contact with, an experience. Once that’s clear, then Atmananda’s Higher Reason and his various experiments will begin to make a lot more sense.