Category: philosophical counseling
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Have You Ever Seen Your Own Brain?
On Experiencing No Brain “Have you ever seen your own brain?” This could have been a question that Bernardo Kastrup could have posed in his book consisting of popular essays: Science Ideated: The Fall Of Matter And The Contours Of The Next Mainstream Scientific Worldview (2021). Obviously, you haven’t experienced your own brain–because you can’t. On…
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‘That Which Rises as “I”… Is The Self, Is It Not?’
Questions about Self-inquiry A visitor at Ramanashram asks an especially helpful question that reveals a common confusion. “A little while later Ramamurti [a visitor] asked, ‘That which rises as ‘I’ within us is the Self, is it not?’” Ramana Maharshi replies, “No; it is the ego that rises as ‘I.’ That from which it arises…
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Is The World Real? Some Arguments To The Contrary
Advaita Vedanta teaches the young, earnest disciple to deny that the world is real. Common Sense The commonly held belief that the world is real can be broken down into two parts: The world is a separate, independent (or independently existing) thing. The world is quasi-permanent (quasi-sat in Sanskrit). In today’s post, I touch on…
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How Can We Discern Progress In Spiritual Practice?
Context This is a question raised by earnest spiritual seekers. It’s clearly not a question for ignoramuses–that is, for those, strictly speaking, who are ignorant and who are ignorant of their ignorance–nor is it a question for fully realized beings (for whom there can be no question of progress or the lack thereof). It’s only,…
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Five Delusions Discussed In Advaita Vedanta
The translator of Kaivalya Navaneeta: The Cream of Emancipation offers us a clear, if also tantalizing, gloss. When the disciple states that he is “now free from the delusions of mind,” Swami Sri Ramananda Saraswathi, the translator, inserts a footnote: “The delusions [he is referring to] are of five kinds: (1) that the world is…
Andrew Taggart, Ph.D. 