Transpersonal Philosophy

  I do not teach only the doctrine of no birth (ajâta), I approve of all schools. The same truth must be expressed in different ways adapted to the different capacity of the listener. The path of ajâta says: "There is only one reality. There is no birth or death, there is no beginning or end, there is no sâdhaka (one who practices a spiritual path) nor mumuksha (one who seeks truth), nor mukta (liberated one), neither slavery nor liberation. The only thing that exists is the One." Some find it very difficult to understand this truth and ask: how can we ignore this solid and consistent world that we see around us? They are instructed to focus on the state of dreaming and are told: "Everything you see depends on the one who sees it. Regardless of the one who sees it, nothing is seen." This is the path called drishti-srishtri, or path of perception and creation. In this path it is said that one first mentally creates the world and then sees what his own ...

  Yo no enseño solamente la doctrina del no nacimiento (ajâta), apruebo todas las escuelas. La misma verdad debe ser expresada de modos diferentes adaptados a la distinta capacidad del oyente. La vía del ajâta dice: "sólo existe una realidad. No hay nacimiento ni muerte, no hay comienzo ni fin, no hay sâdhaka (el que practica una vía espiritual) ni mumuksha (el que busca la verdad), ni mukta (liberado), ni esclavitud ni liberación. Lo único que existe es el Uno." Algunos ven muy difícil comprender esta verdad y preguntan: ¿cómo podemos ignorar este mundo sólido y consistente que vemos a nuestro alrededor? A estos se les indica que se fijen en el estado del sueño y se les dice: "todo lo que ves depende del que lo ve. Con independencia del que lo ve no hay nada visto." Esta es la vía llamada drishti-srishtri, o vía de la percepción y la creación.. En ella se dice que uno primero crea mentalmente el mundo y luego ve lo que su propia mente ha creado. Al que...

    Four Principles of Zen A special transmission outside the scriptures. No dependence on words or letters. Direct pointing to the soul of man. Seeing into one's nature and the attainment of Buddhahood.

Koans are not resolved with dual thinking. In fact, koans are neither resolved nor unresolved. Just like a flower is not a matter of resolving or unresolving. Simplicity of mind cannot be achieved by trying. When we follow a spiritual path, any conceptual explanation bothers us, we want to escape from it. This desire to escape from concepts is still a conceptual trap.  We can read Kant as a gigantic German koan. Here I include a Zen koan full of fresh air. Zen Master Unmon said: “The world is vast and wide. Why do you put on your robes at the sound of a bell?”

I am pleased to include here the opening excerpt from Ramana Maharshi's Nan Yar (Who Am I?) . Ramana, along with Nisargadatta and Aurobindo, are the greatest representatives of Advaita Vedanta in the 20th century.     Who Am I? (Nan Yar?) As all living beings desire to be happy always, without misery, as in the case of everyone there is observed supreme love for one’s self, and as happiness alone is the cause for love, in order to gain that happiness which is one’s nature and which is experienced in the state of deep sleep where there is no mind, one should know one’s self. For that, the path of knowledge, the inquiry of the form “Who am I?”, is the principal means. 1. Who am I ? The gross body which is composed of the seven humours (dhatus), I am not; the five cognitive sense organs, viz. the senses of hearing, touch, sight, taste, and smell, which apprehend their respective objects, viz. sound, touch, colour, taste, and odour, I am not; the five cognitive sen...

 I have chosen a few lightnings from the great Indian Philosopher Sankaracharya. When the supreme reality is not understood, the study of the scriptures is useless, and study of the scriptures is useless when the supreme reality has been understood. What else is there to know but one's true supreme nature, Atman Itself, like space pure, imageless, unmoving, unchanging, free of within or without, without a second and non-dual.  I am neither this nor that, but the pure supreme reality which illuminates them both. I am God, the indivisible, devoid of inside and outside, complete.   I am uncomparable, beginningless Reality. I am far from such thoughts as "you", "me", and "this". I am eternal bliss, the Truth, the non-dual Brahman Itself.  I am the supreme Person and the Lord. I am indivisible awareness, the witness of everything. I have no master and I am without any sense of "me" and "mine".  

 This poem is part of the Navaho Blessing ceremony. It perfectly expresses the psychological spontaneity of the people who live in the Anima Mundi. In these verses I see the fitra that the Sufis speak of, the Original Nature of the Human Soul, seductive, powerful and delicate, like the Presence of newborns.   In beauty I walk With beauty before me I walk With beauty behind me I walk With beauty above me I walk With beauty around me I walk It has become beauty again Today I will walk out, today everything negative will leave me I will be as I was before, I will have a cool breeze over my body. I will have a light body, I will be happy forever, nothing will hinder me. I walk with beauty before me. I walk with beauty behind me. I walk with beauty below me. I walk with beauty above me. I walk with beauty around me. My words will be beautiful. In beauty all day long may I walk. Through the returning seasons, may I walk. On the trail marked with pollen ma...

  That which knows all things and is known by none is the subject. Thus it is the supporter of the world, that condition of all phenomena, of all objects which is always pre-supposed throughout experience; for all that exists, exists only for the subject. Every one finds himself to be subject, yet only in so far as he knows, not in so far as he is an object of knowledge. But his body is object, and therefore from this point of view we call it idea. For the body is an object among objects, and is conditioned by the laws of objects, although it is an immediate object. Like all objects of perception, it lies within the universal forms of knowledge, time and space, which are the conditions of multiplicity. The subject, on the contrary, which is always the knower, never the known, does not come under these forms, but is presupposed by them; it has therefore neither multiplicity nor its opposite, unity. We never know it, but it is always the knower wherever there is knowledge...

 To clarify the concept of the Volitive Soul, it is necessary to understand well what the Will is, which leads us first to the understanding of the world as an Idea and then to the understanding of the world as Will. The sense in which Schopenhauer uses the concept "Idea" is the same as that of my concept "representation."    So then the world as idea, the only aspect in which we consider it at present, has two fundamental, necessary, and inseparable halves. The one half is the object, the forms of which are space and time, and through these multiplicity. The other half is the subject, which is not in space and time, for it is present, entire and undivided, in every percipient being. So that any one percipient being, with the object, constitutes the whole world as idea just as fully as the existing millions could do; but if this one were to disappear, then the whole world as idea would cease to be. These halves are therefore inseparable eve...

“The world is my idea:”—this is a truth which holds good for everything that lives and knows, though man alone can bring it into reflective and abstract consciousness. If he really does this, he has attained to philosophical wisdom. It then becomes clear and certain to him that what he knows is not a sun and an earth, but only an eye that sees a sun, a hand that feels an earth; that the world which surrounds him is there only as idea, i.e., only in relation to something else, the consciousness, which is himself. If any truth can be asserted a priori, it is this: for it is the expression of the most general form of all possible and thinkable experience: a form which is more general than time, or space, or causality, for they all presuppose it; and each of these, which we have seen to be just so many modes of the principle of sufficient reason, is valid only for a particular class of ideas; whereas the antithesis of object and subject is the common form of all these classes, is that form...

In the Blog entries titled "Mithal or Mundus Imaginalis" we are approaching dreams from the point of view of Creative Imagination, considering them part of the Mithal ontological plane, to which not only dreams but all imaginative activities belong. The idea is to establish a continuity between sleep and wakefulness, a continuity of all human existence. In these Lightnings on the nature of dreams we are focusing on a different perspective, in a certain sense, it is a preliminary discussion about the "Reality" or "Non-Reality" of dreams. “Dream is felt to be unreal, first, because it ceases and has no farther validity when we pass from one status of consciousness to another which is our normal status. But this is not by itself a sufficient reason: for it may well be that there are different states of consciousness each with its own realities; if the consciousness of one state of things fades back and its contents are lost or, even when ca...

  Let me begin a new branch "Lightnings", with short quotations and impromptus from different authors. If then the world is a dream or an illusion or a mistake, it is a dream originated and willed by the Self in its totality and not only originated and willed, but supported and perpetually entertained. Moreover, it is a dream existing in a Reality and the stuff of which it is made is that Reality, for Brahman must be the material of the world as well as its base and continent. If the gold of which the vessel is made is real, how shall we suppose that the vessel itself is a mirage? We see that these words, dream, illusion, are tricks of speech, habits of our relative consciousness; they represent a certain truth, even a great truth, but they also misrepresent it. Sri Aurobindo . Life Divine. Chapter: The Methods of Vedantic Knowledge