Category: philosophical counseling

• February 20, 2025

  Awareness Doesn’t Guide Your Life

  Dear M, Question 1: What Are Thoughts? How can we embrace our thoughts without fighting or clinging on to them? Find out what thoughts are. Go step by step: S1. Thoughts rise and set within you, awareness. S2. Awareness is the support–that which is continuously present–throughout the thought’s “itinerary.” S3. Just as water pervades a sponge,…
• February 14, 2025

  Elizabeth Holmes On Hell & The Nondual Teaching On Perfection

  A recent profile in People Magazine of Elizabeth Holmes, who was convicted of fraud in 2022, shows the nature of the mind at work. What Is Hell? Key to the story is not the monastic schedule she follows–for many “secular monks” today follow similar enough schedules outside of prison. Nor is it her stated commitment…
• February 13, 2025

  Mind Is Motion, Motion Mind

  “Padam is the Self Supreme, the perfect truth. Activity is possible only at the conceptual level.” —Muruganar, Padamalai: Teachings of Sri Ramana Maharshi Recorded by Muruganar (ed. David Godman), p. 39 “The truth of not doing anything is the truth of one’s real nature. Action or doing can only be seen from a relative point…
• February 12, 2025

  You Can’t Reach Awareness Since You Are It Already

  Question: When going through a guided meditation with you, I find that knowingly being awareness is self-evident. However, when I go off to work, I feel as if I need to ‘keep trying’ to come back to awareness. This is one of the commonest questions voiced by those on a nondual spiritual path: if awareness…
• February 10, 2025

  Diversity (Which Is Not) And Oneness (Which Is)

  The finite mind projects a diversity of objects (e.g., the body, the world, other minds, etc.) and then assumes that reality is such that it conforms to this diversity. As a result, when the finite mind “goes in search” of the Self, it posits twoness: its own independent existence as well as that of the…