Author: Andrew Taggart
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Is It True That I Can Only Ever Know Experience?
If we’re going to take Atmananda’s teaching seriously, we had better start at the beginning: is it true that we can only ever know, or make contact with, direct experience? Is experience really the starting point for our investigation into Consciousness? Some years ago, my wife Alexandra and I had a one-on-one with Rupert Spira.…
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Three Steps In The Direct Path
One way of understanding Atmananda’s Direct Path–and it is not the only way–is to move in three steps. In Step 1, one takes one’s stand as witnessing awareness. This means that it’s clear that every single experience–perceiving, sensing, and thinking–appears to me, witnessing awareness, and only to me. For a while, it seems as if…
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Something Is, I Am, And I Am Aware That Something Is
You have to admit that you don’t know what is appearing to you, thought you do know that something is. After all, a visual perception may be colored by any number of perceptive mistakes. This epistemic doubt, however, cannot touch the self-evident fact that something, whatever its content may actually be, is. You also have…
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Finite Mind Is A One Way Street Going Outward
The finite mind, necessarily, is a one way street going outward toward objects. Necessarily, thought cannot turn around and go back to its source. Realizing this, the finite mind relinquishes all attempts both to find the Self as an object or to wait for that Self to appear as an object. What does this realization…
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Suppose That Only The Infinite Mind Exists
Suppose that there only exists the Infinite Mind. Since, in this thought experiment, only the Infinite Mind exists, nothing else can exist in its own right, can come into being from somewhere outside of the Infinite Mind, or can pass out of the Infinite Mind. That is, only Being is; non-being, necessarily, is not. Suppose,…
Andrew Taggart, Ph.D. 