Tag: Consciousness
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Raja Yoga Vs. The Direct Path
The difference between the Direct Path of Advaita Vedanta and, for instance, raja yoga is that what the latter takes for granted is drawn into question by the former. Allow me to unpack this statement. Quite understandably, raja yogis will say, “You need to take these forms–the gross body, the energy body, and the mental…
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What’s So Special About Self-inquiry
What’s very special, it could be said, about Self-inquiry is that it’s an inquiry. But what sort of inquiry is it? Not, to be sure, a philosophical inquiry whose point is to come to unimaginable clarity in the mode of thought (see The Art of Inquiry). Usually, the conclusion of a philosophical inquiry is a…
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Metaphysics And The Technique Of Self-inquiry
This individual is not altogether unreal; he is not so in the same sense as the barren woman’s son is unreal. The Real Self is present as the Substratum on which the sense of an individual soul is superimposed, and hence even though unreal, he is taken to be real. The element of Reality of…
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What Is Higher Reason?
One can, with good reason, by puzzled by Sri Atmananda’s frequent mention of Higher Reason, an “organon” he distinguishes from lower reason. Lower reason is easy enough to understand. It’s concerned with objects, it starts with perception, and it operates according to inference. In short, we’re in the field of logic–the logic, perhaps, that we…
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Ego Detection
Ego As Target Ego is the target of many spiritual traditions concerned with one’s directly seeing that one is the Self, or consciousness, or awareness, or universal love. To its credit, the direct path teaching of Advaita Vedanta has elegant, philosophical ways of honing in on this target in order to see whether there’s actually…
Andrew Taggart, Ph.D. 