Sublime

This is repeatedly taught in the Brihad Aranyaka Upanishad (e.g., in 4.2.4): “About this self, one can only say, ‘Not this, not this.’ It is ungraspable, for it cannot be grasped.” This maxim, based on the Sanskrit neti neti, is a “rule of substitution,” negating any words that might follow. Brahman is therefore “not this” and “not that,”

Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa used to say, “Forget all you have learned; become a child again. Then it will be easy to realize that wisdom.” Sometimes, learning becomes an obstacle if you don’t know what and how much to learn. So, limit your reading and put into practice what you read. Just select one or two books—anything that will remind you of

Sri Ramana's God is not a personal God, he is the formless being which sustains the universe. He is not the creator of the universe, the universe is merely a manifestation of his inherent power; he is inseparable from it, but he is not affected by its appearance or its disappearance.

Bhagavan does not ask us to blindly believe what he teaches us, so he begins his exposition of this philosophy of pure non-duality (advaita) by asking us to critically analyse our own experience of ourself in our three states of waking, dream and sleep, in order to understand why we cannot actually be what we now seem to be.

As Foucault tried to tell us, any dissemination of information—which the dharma is—is inherently an exercise of power. As such, any claim that “I’ve got the answer” is also a claim of authority, of “listen to me.” Yet for all the venerable guru traditions in Buddhism, I am struck by how different the Buddha himself was when it came to questions of

To the religious mentality of the modern West, this entirely negative approach to Reality is almost incomprehensible, for it suggests only that the world is based on the shifting sands of nonsense and caprice. For those who equate sanity with order this is a doctrine of pure despair. Yet little more than five hundred years ago a Catholic mystic was