Month: November 2024
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Going Beyond One-way Street Relationships
Question: After a meditation and during a discussion, one man said: “I want my mother to love me, and I expect her to do so. But it’s a one-way street relationship.” (Note that the following reply comes in the context of one wishing to end all suffering. For this reason, it’s not a therapeutic reply.…
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The Transient I And The Permanent I
That which rises and falls is the transient ‘I.’ That which has neither origin nor end is the permanent ‘I-I’ consciousness. –Ramana Maharshi, “Talk 268,” Talks with Sri Ramana Maharshi, p. 233. All one needs to know about self-inquiry (atma vichara) can be discovered in these two sentences. The first manifestation of the Self, as…
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Practice Is ‘Emotion Recollected In Tranquility’
One type of spiritual practice, to appropriate some words from Wordworth, is “emotion recollected in tranquility.” Rupert Spira says somewhere that a conflict with a loved one may be resolved, in part, through discourse, but there may remain a trace of that conflict “inside the body.” Over time, those traces become “deeper layers of feeling”…
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Is Meditation To Blame, Or Is It The Kali Yuga?
There’s a neat discussion of “gunk” in Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood’s commentary on Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras (How To Know God: The Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali, pp. 80-81). They observe matter-of-factly: “You never realize how much junk you have in your house until you start to clear out the attic and the cellar. You never…
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Why Do I Oscillate Back And Forth Between The Body-identity And Higher States?
Question: It’s funny how the feeling of aliveness is so deeply buried in this body. Even when I get out a level or a few [and come to higher states] and see my life beyond time, as part of a complete super-I, I am still oscillating and undulating back into a deep place within this…
Andrew Taggart, Ph.D. 