Question: Aren’t Atmananda and Ramana Maharshi essentially saying the same thing, and can’t their direct path approaches be regarded as versions of the Witness teaching?

Excellent question! And just the right one.

In short: No!

Atmananda’s teaching can be divided into “the lower” and “the higher.” The lower teaching employs the Witness in order to slowly allow one to take one’s stand as that to which the world, the body, and the mind all appear. At which point, the lower teaching has you investigate the status of this duality–between the Witness and objects–in order to reveal that there’s, in the final analysis, no such distinction.

Unlike his lower Witness teaching, Atmananda’s higher teaching goes straight to reduction. Here, he wants you to directly see that the world (the senses), the body, and the mind are all made of Consciousness, or the I-principle.

In both cases, it could be said that Atmananda’s teaching is “quasi-Tantric,” since he wishes you to use any experience that’s “ready to hand” in order for one to grasp, as he puts it, that “Pure Consciousness is mere experience.” 

In contrast with Atmananda, Ramana Maharshi offers a “quasi-yogic” approach to the nature of the I. His first observation is that everything else–the body, the world, the God concept–hangs or rests upon the rising of the I. Once this is clear, then one goes to this keystone assumption and begins to investigate just this. But how? By setting aside “everything else” (all objects) and by concentrating only on the sense of I. He urges you to make “an intense effort” to investigate, or scrutinize, this sense of I since he knows that without any of its objective supports, the I can’t be anything but the real and only I (“I am that I am”). 

Rarely, in brief, does Ramana Maharshi ever make reference to the Witness. Whereas Atmananda might ask, as he does in Atma Darshan, one to see that the Witness witnesses “the embodied being” (jiva) and, from here, to rest as Awareness, Ramana wants you to hold vigorously onto this I so that one can find out what the I essentially is. 

Atmananda plays a “slow game” (slowly does everything come to shine as Awareness) while Ramana, like Zen masters, urges a “leap of faith” as the false I (so to speak) “dies” in the revelation of the true I that shines unbrokenly.

For both, it’s true that “I is a door” (Philip Renard), but that doorway is sketched in a very different manner. One can embrace both styles of the direct path teaching without conflating either.