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I just love it when I come across the very best of a spiritual tradition. One can safely ignore 95% of most of any spiritual or religious system as having no merit whatsoever. There is not even one of them worth learning, except as an academic curiosity, and as part of ‘divine negation practice’.
Then you get a fellow like Nisargadatta, who is so far beyond his tradition, that his original tradition just got in the way.
I find it interesting that Nisargadatta’s teacher was of the Navnath Sampradaya, a sub-tradition of the larger Nath Sampradaya, which is primarily associated with Hatha Yoga and Tantra.
However, the Navnath Sampradaya, while rooted in the Nath tradition, is diverse in its practices, and a later, very influential branch emphasized a path closer to Advaita Vedanta (non-dual knowledge).
So no wonder Nisargadatta was free. He sproinged from nondualist tantra (a seeming contradiction) just like one could view Platonic Surrealism
as a nondualist tantra, though that is just excess cultural baggage that only gets in the way.
To use a metaphor from Nietzsche, we all follow the path of camel (a robot of toxic culture), the lion (a champion of saying no to toxic culture) and the child, one who stands free and who generates NEW CULTURE, of a non-toxic nature.
‘Consciousness’ is of the corruption, while only AWARENESS is free.
This video at the end describes this well.
Really, if you don’t understand the difference between AWARENESS and CONSCIOUSNESS, you don’t understand anything of value, at least if you
want to become free and whole.
AWARENESS is simply the field behind CONSCIOUSNESS, AWARENESS
independent of any contents.
None of the contents have innate value (red wagon sparkle), though we do
interact with them quite extensively for purposes of divine play.
They are not despised nor called maya; they are also us… but one must become
free of being captured by even one conscious thought…. It’s not hard.
One can also go:
“What is the eye behind the eye that sees?”
I did that practice a number of years ago. I don’t know where it’s from,
I just knew it.
It’s not meant as divine negation or neti neti actually… it seems to just
‘wake up’ the awareness behind consciousness for those who are attempting
some hide and play and not seeking.
I know that I get a lot of crap for bashing traditions, but traditions are like gooey
black tar — all of them. If you hide in words, someone else’s are the worst, or even
your own, you’ve accomplished nothing.
In the lion phase you rip up everything.
In the child phase you create anew.
Even if someone mastered PS and became ‘free’, they would have to also
rip it up and to create something new.
PS knows this and welcomes this.
I hope this was helpful.
Kevin Cann
Public Domain
9/29/2025