How to Appreciate Nature
How few know how to appreciate a flower, a sunset, a flying bird mirrored in a lake, a hill in a rainstorm, a tree in its autumn tints. Shri Dada was a great lover of nature, and his disciples loved to go out with him to the gardens in the moonlight, to the fields and…
Read MoreAl-Ghazali’s Search for Certainty
There are close parallels between the non-dual teachings and those of Sufism, or Tasawwuf, mysticism within Islam. Both are focused on the possibility of a knowledge of Reality that overcomes the division between the knower and the known and thus leads from theory to direct experience. And, according to both, the path to such knowledge…
Read MoreThe Properties of the Mind
By Hari Prasad Shastri Life acquires its climax in the human mind. Our mind is known mostly through its property of action. Life and action go together. Activity takes two forms in the higher aspects of life. Firstly, it creates something which has the appearance of being new; secondly, sometimes it transforms the crude objects…
Read MoreI Am Brahman
The visible universe is a fraction of Reality. It is just as much as is revealed to us by our empirical instruments of perception. The invisible, too, is only a limited aspect of the same Reality. That which is grasped by the mind is the invisible. It is not the whole. That which is the…
Read MoreLife Without Limits
When you no longer identify yourself with the mind, true life begins in that region of self-experience that knows no horizon. Shri Dada of Aligarh The ideas about self-knowledge, as it is understood in the non-dual philosophy, are not put forward dogmatically, but they do suggest a new way of reflecting on our own experience.…
Read MoreIs Meditation Selfish?
One of the criticisms made about meditation is to assert that the practice is essentially selfish. It is a retreat, we are told, from a healthy, constructive and compassionate participation in the life of the world. If everyone meditated and was obsessed with their own mental health, how would society advance? As one UK newspaper…
Read MoreSelf-Knowledge Journal – Winter 2019
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Read MoreA Story from the Upanishads
Retold by Hari Prasad Shastri The four great elements of nature—earth, air, fire and water, and the space, or ether, in which they abide—met in conference and each began to assert its superiority. Fire said: ‘I am supreme. There is none higher than me. I can reduce everything to ashes.’ Water asserted: ‘No, it is…
Read MoreShafts of Light from Meister Eckhart
IN LATE THIRTEENTH century Europe there emerged a spiritual teacher whose ideas and practice closely resemble those of the nondual teachings. His name was Eckhart von Hochheim, and he was born in Thuringia around 1260. When aged about fifteen, Eckhart joined the religious order of the Dominicans. He studied at Cologne and later Paris, a…
Read MoreWhat is the Spirit?
By Hari Prasad Shastri WHAT IS THE SPIRIT—that in us which transcends the limitations of body and mind? We are conscious of our body, we are conscious of the thinking, feeling and willing mechanism in us. The question is asked: what is the spirit? Many people, including Plato, have made an error confounding the spirit…
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