Soul Spirit Self
A Journey Within
What's worth reading
Stories from consciousness research, contemplative practice, and the wisdom traditions, curated as they surface.
Sarvapriyananda takes Vedanta into the AI conversation
The resident minister of the Vedanta Society of New York delivered a sold-out lecture at Asia Society Texas, placing the Mandukya Upanishad at the centre of the question every AI lab is circling: what is consciousness, and can it be built? Sarvapriyananda engaged Chalmers and the hard problem directly, then showed that the Vedantic position is not a mystical add-on but a rigorous alternative starting point. Consciousness first, matter as appearance within it.
The spiritual core of the hard problem
A peer-reviewed paper in Frontiers in Psychology proposes that consciousness is ontologically primary, not an emergent property of neural processes but the foundational reality from which mind and matter arise. The study draws on Advaita Vedanta, Tibetan Buddhism, and transpersonal theory to argue that first-person and participatory ways of knowing deserve standing alongside third-person neuroscience. The hard problem dissolves once you stop assuming matter came first.
Ramanasramam brings self-enquiry to the Statue of Oneness
Dr. Venkat S. Ramanan, President of Sri Ramanasramam, spoke at the Ekatma Dham festival in Omkareshwar, a four-day gathering dedicated to Advaita Vedanta held beside the 108-foot Statue of Oneness. He presented Bhagavan Ramana Maharshi's "Who am I?" as a practical method rather than a philosophy. A quiet moment: the living ashram carrying its teaching out to a new venue, then returning to Arunachala.
Brown's contemplative studies programme, profiled
A Brown Daily Herald profile describes the university's contemplative studies concentration, where students work in Judson Brewer's lab studying meditators' emotional states and then sit on the cushion themselves. The curriculum draws from Buddhist, Hindu, Christian, and secular lineages, treating each as living tradition rather than historical curiosity. A programme built on the conviction that these traditions cannot be understood from the outside alone.
Living teaching, on screen
Traditions of nondual recognition
Each tradition is a distinct articulation of one recognition, reached along its own road and carried in its own vocabulary.
Advaita Vedanta
The teaching that all is one undivided awareness. From the Upanishads through Shankara to Ramana Maharshi, a continuous lineage of pointing back to what already is.
Enter →Christian Mysticism
A continuous lineage of contemplatives within the Christian tradition who pointed past doctrine and image to a direct encounter with the ground of being.
Enter →Buddhist Nonduality
From the early discourses of the Buddha through the Mahayana sutras to the koan literature of Zen, the lineage of awakening that asks practitioners to look directly into the nature of mind.
Enter →Gnostic Christianity
A contemplative current that ran alongside the canonical New Testament in the first three centuries of the Christian era, preserved in the Nag Hammadi codices, the Pistis Sophia, and the Hermetic dialogues.
Enter →Modern Nonduality
A loose lineage of late twentieth and early twenty-first century teachers, drawing variously on Advaita Vedanta, Zen, the Direct Path, and Christian mysticism, who have brought the recognition of nondual awareness into ordinary contemporary English.
Enter →Lift up thine heart unto God with a meek stirring of love.
The Cloud of Unknowing