my article

A new friend recently wrote to me asking, ‘When we do meditation on I or atma-vichara will all the previous karma be destroyed? How is that?’ The following is what I replied to him: What is karma ? Karma means action, and it is classified into three categories: āgāmya , sañcita and prārabdha . Āgāmya means fresh action that we do of our own free will, and such action bears fruit, which we must later experience. Sañcita is the store of all the fruits of our past karmas that we have not yet experienced, and prārabdha is that portion of our sañcita that has been selected for us to experience in this lifetime. For whom is all this karma ? Who is it who does āgāmya , and who then experiences the resulting prārabdha ? It is only ourself as this ego. In sleep we do not rise as this ego, so we then do not do any karma or experience any fruit. But as soon as we (this ego) wake from sleep or begin to dream, we start doing karma and experiencing the fruit of our past karmas . Therefore...

  The video "Exploring Ancient Egypt Adventure—Initiation with Sekmet"  includes a brief Kevin Ryerson channeling session. During the year 1987 there was a stock market crash , the Iran-Contra Affair made headlines, and the average monthly rent was $395 .  In January that year, trance channeling became a matter of consideration for the American television audience when Kevin Ryerson was featured in a sequence of the mini-series "Out on a Limb" adapted from Shirley MacLaine's autobiographical book.  In 1998, there were wars in Yugoslavia and the Congo , the Monica Lewinsky scandal made headlines, Matthew Shepard was crucified in Wyoming, and I attended a Kevin Ryerson trance channeling session at the Philosophical Research Society in Los Angeles.  On this occasion was heard each of the three entities who have most consistently spoken through Kevin.  Although I had never seen a professional channeler before, what I saw and...

In various comments that he wrote on one of my recent articles, Dṛg-dṛśya-vivēka : distinguishing the seer from the seen , a friend called Joshua Jonathan expressed certain ideas that other friends disagreed with, so the comments on that article include some lively discussions about his ideas. I will not quote all of his comments here, but anyone who is interested in understanding more about the context in which this article is written can read them here , here , here , here , here , here , here and here . The following is my reply to some of the ideas he expressed in those comments: The original writings of Sri Ramana express the essence of his teachings Guru Vācaka Kōvai is also an authentic and reliable record of his teachings The essence of his teachings are based entirely upon his own experience of pure non-dual self-awareness If his essential teachings are true, there are actually no ‘external factors’ that are reliable 1. The original writings of Sri Ramana express the essence...

I recently came across a very interesting paper by the research team of Gerald Reaven, an endocrinologist at Stanford.  He has long been one of the leading researchers studying insulin resistance, the metabolic syndrome, and their association with obesity.  Reaven's research, and that of many others, suggests that insulin resistance is a central part of the constellation of metabolic disturbances that are so common in affluent nations*.  We also have good reason to believe that it contributes to cardiovascular risk. All the way back in 1998, Reaven's group published a paper that should raise the eyebrows of anyone interested in cardiovascular health ( 1 ). Read more »

In the fourth section of one of my recent articles, ‘Observation without the observer’ and ‘choiceless awareness’: Why the teachings of J. Krishnamurti are diametrically opposed to those of Sri Ramana , I wrote: The important principle that he [Sri Ramana] teaches us in verse 25 of Uḷḷadu Nāṟpadu is that this ego is only a formless and insubstantial phantom that seemingly comes into existence, endures and is nourished and strengthened only by grasping form (that is, by attending to and experiencing anything other than itself), so we can never free ourself from this ego so long as we persist in attending to anything other than ourself (that is, anything that has any features that distinguish it from this essentially featureless ego). Therefore the only way to free ourself from this ego is to investigate it — that is, to try to grasp it alone in our awareness. Since this ego itself is featureless and therefore formless, and since it can stand and masquerade as ourself only by grasping ...