Author: Andrew Taggart
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An Experiment In The Direct Path: Exploring A Feeling
1. Nobody wants to suffer; everybody wants to be abidingly happy. 2. But most of us are suffering. A lot. 3. The key to suffering is to see that what we essentially are has gotten to be all mixed up with what we aren’t. 4. The direct path teaching offers ample ways of disentangling. 5.…
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The Blessedness Of Self-knowledge
Astavakra sounds positively Shankarian when, in Chapter 18: “Peace,” he states, The ignorant person does not attain liberation through repeated practice of control of the mind. The blessed one through mere knowledge becomes free and is unaffected by change. (Astavakra Samhita XVIII.36, trans. Swami Nityaswarupananda). 1. The pointing, the sloka, is almost shocking in its…
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How An Ordinary Hike Is Turned Into A Nondual Teaching…
You go for a hike. The sand, silt, or dirt crunches beneath your boots. You see the path stretch out before you. And you get intrigued. The direct path teaching invites you to investigate all of these things to see whether seeing or touching provides any evidence that there is, for instance, an objective world…
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Can Anything Ever Be Hidden From Experience?
The direct path teaching of Sri Atmananda is, in many respects, especially counterintuitive at first. Let me write about just one respect in which this is so in what follows. Most of us have felt that there’s something that may be hidden yet still existent. We may have thought: “I’ve definitely looked and looked for…
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All Suffering Falls Away Even Before Enlightenment
Near the end of After Awareness: The End of the Path (2016), a book about the direct path teaching of Sri Atmananda, Greg Goode states that once one knows that one is the “transparent witness” all suffering falls away. According to this subtle yet still provisional model, awareness is a transparent witness to which arisings…
Andrew Taggart, Ph.D. 