Month: October 2024
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What Is The Relationship Between Brahman And The Universe?
Swami Prabhavananda’s book The Spiritual Heritage of India provides a beautiful and satisfying answer to the question: “What is the relationship between Brahman and the world, between the One and the many, between Being and becoming?” The pith is that the question must be answered in accordance with the level of development of the student.…
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The Unreality Of The Waking State & The Unreality Of Time
You might have the inkling, or intuition, that the waking state or that time is dreamlike. What sense can we make of this inkling or intuition? Let what is truly real be whatever it is that satisfies two criteria. One, it is permanent. Two, the appearance is identical with the essence. When you feel that…
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You Have Everything You Need Right Here
One reason that I’ve rarely included sharing circles in satsang is that there can be a tendency for spiritual practictioners to keep tabs, score points, seek approval, and make comparisons. The truth is that there isn’t “anyone” with any special, non-ordinary experiences, that there isn’t “anyone” who “traveled to” a higher state. Far better to…
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The Preciousness Of Life And The Nature Of Atman
Dear W, The Eastern teaching, I feel, asks one to hold onto two proposals. One is that life–all of life–is poignantly, achingly precious. Life can turn on a “knife’s edge,” on a single diagnosis, and any tuned-in person damn well knows this. Fobbing off the knife’s edge of life is a shitty dodge, a turning…
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Why I Don’t Generally Believe In Breathwork
Even though breathwork has become fairly popular in recent years, I’m not a fan–and here’s why: 1. To begin with, we need to understand that pranayama, at its best, is one “limb” that’s naturally placed in a bona fide progressive spiritual path consisting of many limbs. In my interpretation, Patanjali’s eight limbs of yoga, for…
Andrew Taggart, Ph.D. 