Atmananda Krishna Menon: Advaita Vedanta, Nonduality

Atmananda Krishna Menon: Spiritual mentor of Jean Klein and indirectly, Francis Lucille.

At the age of 10, Krishna Menon was visited by a sage, sannysin who gave him japa, initiation into a form of mantra yoga. He practiced for several years without success, returned to school, became a lawyer and, while lieing awake at night tormented over the need for God, abruptly ran into the same sannysin whom he had met as a child who told him he would meet a mahatma shortly.

Meeting another sunnyasin not long after, named Yogananda, not to be confused with the other popular export guru, all of his questions were answered in one night. Yogananda implored him to once again to undertake devotion to Krishna as well as jnani yoga and Menon objected. Yogananda replied: “I appreciate your reluctance to take to the preliminary courses of devotion and yoga and I admit you are quite right, for mere realization of the ultimate Truth, the last course, namely the jnana path, is alone necessary. But I want you to be something more, which you will understand only later on. Therefore please undertake them first. It won’t take you long to finish them both.”

Eventually, Menon achieved a break through self realization, which could be described as a penetration of the root of attention and the ego-I in jnana samadhi, also known as Witness consciousness. His awakening matured into sahaj, the continual realization of Consciousness. Later he said that “it was necessary to understand the world through the mnd’s intellignence.” “The original Mind is to be recognized along with the working of the senses and thoughts; only it does not belong to them, nor is it independent of them.”

The final realization is, as Paul Brunton explained: “"There is no subject and object, whereas in the witness there is still subject and object, but the subject no longer identifies himself with the object as the ordinary man does.”

More divine wisdom: “You first listen to the Truth direct from the lips of the Guru. Your mind, turned perfectly sattvic by the luminous presence of the Guru, has become so sensitive and sharp that the whole thing is impressed upon it as if it were a sensitive film. You visualize your real nature then and there. But the moment you come out, the check of the presence of the Guru being removed, other samskaras rush in and you are unable to recapitulate what was said or heard. But later on, whenever you think of that glorious incident, the whole picture comes back to your mind – including the form, words and arguments of the Guru – and you are thrown afresh into the same state of visualization you had experienced on the first day. Thus you constantly hear the same Truth from within. This is how a spiritual tattvopadesha helps you all through life, till you are established in your own real nature.”

Lucky be the one who has found his guru.

Read free books by Shri Atmananda Krishna Menon by clicking here. 

With thanks to Peter Holleran,  whose beautifully researched work is presented here.