Atmananda (Krishna Menon) - Philip Renard. Atma-Darshan and Atma-Nirvriti.6 These books are Atmananda’s brief summary of his teachings.

This book has now been translated into English: It is available from Amazon in paperback and Kindle formats: Paperback: ($17.00) (£11.00) Kindle: ($5.94) (£4.59) Visit. Link to entry in See the section on the teaching of. Whatsapp Plus Themes Zip File Download. The following article constitutes part 3 of 4 entitled 'I' is a Door'. The other parts may be read at his.

In the two preceding parts of “‘I’ is a door” 1 attention was paid to the remarkable phenomenon that the word ‘I’, may be referring to a limited and bound entity, as well as to That which is infinite Light, sheer Freedom. In the preceding articles both Sri Ramana Maharshi and Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj spoke about this phenomenon. Now we will discuss the third one of the ‘Great Three’, the three truly great Advaita teachers of the twentieth century,: Sri Atmananda, or Sri Krishna Menon. Krishna Menon was born in 1883 in Peringara, near Tiruvalla in the state of Travancore ( now a part of today’s Kerala). After completing a study of law he became a Government Advocate and Inspector and District Superintendent of Police. He once said that in his early life he prayed at length to encounter a Sat-guru, a Teacher in the true sense of the word. One day in 1919 he met such a teacher, one Swami Yogananda, who lived in Calcutta.

2 They met during the course of one night only. Krishna Menon was particularly touched by the utmost humility of this teacher. He later stated, “This paralyzed my ego.' Because of this encounter, he started a sadhana, which contained both bhakti- and raja-yoga as well as pure jnana.

Later on having become a teacher himself, he would pass on to others only the jnana-aspect, and even criticise both the bhakti and raja yoga aspects. 3 In 1923 he came to realise his true Nature. He assumed the name Sri Atmananda and began teaching. He continued to work in the Police Department up to 1939.

Later on, he once said that a profession within the police or the military offers an ideal foundation for a spiritual sadhana, because such a profession offers in particular the maximum obstacles and temptations. 4 In 1959 Atmananda died at Trivandrum, the capital of Kerala. One of the ways by which Atmananda’s approach became known in the West was through the book The Nature of Man According to the Vedanta by John Levy. He was an English pupil of Atmananda who had stayed regularly with him. Levy rephrased Atmananda’s typical approach in a somewhat more Western style; though he did retain Atmananda’s particular and unique way of dealing with logic. 5 I got to know of Atmananda while a pupil of the late Alexander Smit, a Dutchman who had been a pupil of Atmananda’s pupil Wolter Keers. Bulk Mailer 8 2 Keygen Software here. Alexander gave me a copy of two small books by Atmananda, Atma-Darshan and Atma-Nirvriti.

6 These books are Atmananda’s brief summary of his teachings; they have been written in his mother tongue Malayalam and translated into English by himself. For two years Alexander Smit thoroughly dealt with these books. I am grateful having had the privilege to attend to these meetings; owing to this opportunity I became familiar with Atmananda’s specific approach. What is specific to his approach? It is his own special linguistic usage, his particular logic (or ‘subjective’ logic, see note 5), his way of reducing all things to their ultimate nature, and in particular his entire emphasis on what he called the ‘I-Principle’.

To him this ‘I-Principle’ was a synonym of Ultimate Reality, the Absolute – there is nothing which precedes it; it is what is truly meant with the word ‘I’. He said for instance: “Pure consciousness and deep peace are your real nature. Having understood this in the right manner, you can well give up the use of the words ‘Consciousness’ and ‘Happiness’ and invariably use ‘I’ to denote the Reality. Don’t be satisfied with only reducing objects into Consciousness.

Don’t stop there. Reduce them further into the ‘I-Principle’. So also reduce all feelings into pure Happiness and then reduce them into the ‘I-Principle’.” 7 Although Atmananda loved to use words like Consciousness and Happiness in order to refer to the Ultimate, a quote like this shows that ultimately he preferred the term ‘I-Principle’ (he once even said that compared to the I-Principle the word Consciousness can be called theory! He did so because he considered that the word ‘I’ has the least chance of being misunderstood. Everything that can be perceived can be subject to misunderstanding, however that which can be called ‘yourself’, that which cannot be perceived, ‘I’, cannot cause misunderstanding. 9 He considered the I-Principle to be everybody’s true goal, because it is in fact contained in each endeavour. 10 The use of the word ‘Principle’ by Atmananda should not be considered a mental or philosophical attempt to understand or frame the ‘I’.