Author: Andrew Taggart
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How Deep Sleep Dispels The View That I Am The Body
Preface Quite beautifully, Sri Sadhu Om, in The Path of Sri Ramana Maharshi: Part One–The Jnana Aspect of the Teaching, showed me how Sri Ramana Maharshi deployed “I am sleeping soundly” to unseat the “I am the body idea.” After all, most people believe that they are their bodies, that they are their minds, or…
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Buddhist Psychology On Selfish Desire
Stephen Ruppenthal provides us with a beautiful interpretation of the Buddha’s thoughts about “thirst” in The Dhammapada (trans. and ed. Eknath Easwaran). In the introduction to the Buddha’s verses on thirst (pp. 227-33), Ruppenthal begins by observing: “It has been said that Buddhism is essentially a psychology of desire” (p. 227). Eknath Easwaran’s gloss of…
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Pathways To The Tao #3: Excursus On Meditation
In the opening to “Pathways to the Tao #3: Excursus on Meditation,” I write: If one who enjoys a lesser happiness beholds a greater one, let him leave aside the lesser to gain the greater. Buddha, Dhammapada We should take the Buddha’s principle here very seriously. Even if we have the smallest glimpse of our true nature,…
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Love Is Making The Bed
Love is intending to walk to the master bathroom in order to brush your teeth, seeing an unmade bed, and making it right now. Love is not Burning Man. You see, love is evinced in all the small acts of kindness, gentleness, and care, all of which slowly chip away at selfish desire. For selfish…
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‘I’m Pretty Much Irrelevant…’
I’m pretty much irrelevant. It’s the honest-to-God truth. The path of awakening reveals to me, at almost every turn provided I observe closely, how I’m not really somebody at all. Whenever I think I’m important, significant, a stand-out, a VIP, another situation show up to show me that I’m over the hill, washed up, a…
Andrew Taggart, Ph.D. 