Category: philosophical counseling
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Only One Experience Can Arise At Any One Time
Advaita Vedanta advances the upaya that only one experience can arise at any one time. In this line of inquiry, it assumes that time exists, and it doesn’t take up non-ordinary cases. These will be revisited at the appropriate time. Assume for the time being, then, that time exists, and assume for the moment that…
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Do I Have To Concentrate (Hard) In Order To Meditate?
When we think of meditation, what often comes to mind is some technique that teaches one to concentrate on an object and to set all other experiences off to the side. I want to argue that while there is value in this kind of meditation technique, there is also–such becomes clear in due course–something wrongheaded…
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Practice, Understood As Action, Cannot Remove Ignorance
Advaita Vedanta takes very seriously Shankara’s claim in his little textbook Atma Bodha that “[a]ction cannot remove ignorance; but knowledge disperses it as light disperses darkness.” This, effectively, rules out karma yoga as “a way” of coming to Self-knowledge directly. But can we pull out more from Shankara’s statement? In the hands of Atmananda, we…
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Does Pain Hurt Me?
The basic distinction in Advaita Vedanta–namely, that the Seer is different from the seen–can be restated thus: the Witness is different from all objective experiences. Now, if the Witness is different from all objective experiences (namely, thinking, feeling, perceiving, and sensing), then It can’t be affected by the content of any objective experience? To explore this,…
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Do I Have To Clean Up All My Psychological Baggage Before I Can Hope To Wake Up?
I have to Clean Up all of my psychological suffering before I can even possibly Wake Up. Isn’t that right? No, the Direct Path teaching would point out that that view is precisely courting ignorance: implicit in what’s written is the deeply held belief that one is a vigilant doer who must “do all of…
Andrew Taggart, Ph.D. 