Interview with Swami Sarvapriyananda

Summary

The discussion clarifies Vedanta and Advaita Vedanta, including how nonduality differs from dualism and qualified nonduality. It also explores how devotion, religious plurality, consciousness, and modern physics relate to nondual insight.

Questions This Interview Explores

• What is Vedanta and how does Advaita Vedanta differ from other schools?
• What does nonduality mean in relation to God, the world, and the individual?
• How can dualistic devotion and nondual understanding coexist?
• Is consciousness more fundamental than matter?
• How should modern physics be compared with spiritual teachings about reality?

Key takeaways

• Advaita teaches that the individual self and ultimate reality are radically identical.
• Dualism, qualified nonduality, and nonduality offer different perspectives on the same spiritual reality.
• Devotion can deepen nondual understanding rather than contradict it.
• The many forms of the universe are appearances of one underlying consciousness.
• God alone is ultimately real; the world has no separate independent reality.
• Physics may parallel Vedanta, but neither field should be reduced to the other.
• Consciousness may be fundamental and prior to all objects known within it.

Transcript

Welcome and introduction

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people. I’ve done hundreds of them now, and if this is new to you and you would like to check out previous ones, please go to batgap.com and look under the Past Interviews menu.

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My guest today is Swami Sarvapriyananda. He is the minister and spiritual leader of the Vedanta Society of New York. So, welcome, Swamiji.

Swamiji: Thank you for having me.

Rick: Yes. You know, I often say this at the beginning of interviews: I really enjoyed preparing for this interview. It was so delightful to listen to your talks—so clear and eloquent and inspiring and deep. I highly recommend that anyone who enjoys this interview go to Swamiji’s YouTube channel and listen to some of his other videos. The Vedanta Society also has an audio podcast that you can subscribe to and listen to a bunch of things on there.

So, a little bit more about Swamiji. He joined the Ramakrishna Math and Mission in 1994 and received sannyas, which is a monastic vow, in 2004. He has served as an Acharya, a teacher of the monastic probationers’ training center at Belur Math. He has served the Ramakrishna Math and Mission in various capacities, including being a teacher, vice principal, principal, and registrar of various schools run by the Vedanta Society.

So, just out of curiosity, how old are you now in human years?

Swamiji: Yes, I have to think about that. I will be 48 now.

Rick: You’re well preserved, and you seem younger. I hope that’s not considered an irreverent question, but I was just curious. My wife and I were—actually, she was asking me how old you are, and I said, “I really don’t know. He seems like he’s in his 30s.”

Swamiji: Actually, I had read this thing about a rabbi who comes to a congregation, and he’s very young. The people in the congregation complain to the chief rabbi that he’s too young to be a rabbi. The chief rabbi writes back, saying, “You’re right. Youth is a disqualification for a spiritual teacher, but give him time; he’ll overcome it.”

Rick: That’s great. (Laughter) There was some joke by Ronald Reagan on this account, but I’m not going to try to remember it right now.

What Vedanta and Advaita mean

In any case, I thought we might start with the basics, and we’ll go way beyond the basics, I’m sure, in this interview. I think many people listening to this interview will already be familiar with many of the terms that you’ll be using, such as Advaita and Vedanta, Brahman, and so on. But let’s get our definitions straight so that we make sure we’re in agreement as to what these things mean.

So, first of all, how would you define Vedanta?

Swamiji: Vedanta is the philosophy embodied in the Upanishads. The Upanishads, again, are texts found in the core religious texts of the Hindus, the Vedas.

In the Vedas, towards the end of them sometimes, and sometimes scattered in the middle of those bodies of ancient Sanskrit texts, you find these spiritual and philosophical texts called the Upanishads. So, Vedanta is a philosophy constructed out of these Upanishads.

Vedanta comes in many, many flavors, but basically, if you were to ask, “What is the philosophy of Hinduism?” you would probably say Vedanta today. The particular brand or flavor of Vedanta to which I and our order subscribe, or toward which we lean, is Advaita Vedanta, nondual Vedanta. That would be set against other varieties of Vedanta, like dualistic Vedanta, Dvaita Vedanta. There are other schools, such as qualified monistic Vedanta, Vishishtadvaita. They are all different philosophical positions.

I would say we lean toward Advaita Vedanta because we are not exclusive in that sense. We recognize that there are truths in all of these approaches.

Rick: So, my understanding is that the word Vedanta literally means “end of the Veda,” right?

Swamiji: Yes. If you take it literally, anta would mean “end” and Veda would mean “the Veda”—the end of the Vedas. But I can imagine my Sanskrit teachers rolling their eyes: “End” not in the physical sense. Here, “end” would mean the highest wisdom of the Vedas or the final conclusions of the Vedas.

Rick: Yes, and Veda, as I understand it, means “knowledge,” right?

Swamiji: Literally, again, Veda would mean “knowledge,” but the way the word is used, it refers to the collections of ancient spiritual and religious texts of the Hindus.

Rick: Right. So then Vedanta would mean the highest knowledge, or the end of knowledge, or the final knowledge, or something like that.

Swamiji: Exactly. Exactly.

Rick: Okay, good. And then Advaita means literally “not two,” right?

Swamiji: Not two. Dvaita means “two,” so Advaita means “not two,” nondual.

Rick: I don’t mean to put words in your mouth, but I’m just making sure we’re on the same page. This “not two” refers to—is signifying what?

Swamiji: Yes, that’s an important distinction to make, because sometimes when I address audiences outside India, especially those with a Judeo-Christian background, when you speak about dualism and nondualism, it actually means different things to different people.

I think a Christian pastor told me to make it clear that dualism here does not mean the dualism between good and evil. Rather, in an Indian philosophical context, a Vedantic context, dualism means an ontological separation. That would mean that ultimate reality, we sentient beings, and this universe we inhabit—if you take them as independent realities—are all separate, independent realities. That’s dualism.

Nondualism and the Unity of Reality

There’s a fundamental difference between you and God, for example. That would be dualism. Nondualism would mean exactly the opposite: There is no second reality apart from the Absolute, or Brahman, and you are that Brahman. So, the difference that appears to us—we experience difference—that difference would only be on the surface, so to say. Deep within the nature of reality, there is one nondual reality, if that helps.

There’s a fundamental difference between you and God, for example. That would be dualism. Nondualism would mean exactly the opposite: There is no second reality apart from the Absolute, or Brahman, and you are that Brahman. So, the difference that appears to us—we experience difference—that difference would only be on the surface, so to say. Deep within the nature of reality, there is one nondual reality, if that helps.

There is no second reality apart from the Absolute, or Brahman, and you are that Brahman.

Rick: That helps. A few years ago, I interviewed a guru from Gujarat. I forget his name; it evades me. His fundamental philosophy seemed to be that you are separate from the creation, and you are free and eternal and unbounded and all that, but the creation is something other than you.

We bantered that back and forth a little bit, but I could sort of never get an acknowledgment that perhaps, more fundamentally, there is a complete unity, and that which appears separate from you couldn’t possibly be separate from you, because there can’t be two ultimate realities, and so on and so forth. But we never quite resolved it. What would you say to that?

Swamiji: I immediately see where that guru is coming from, because in a dualistic approach to Vedanta, in the dualistic schools of Vedanta, you can think of it as a triangle with three vertices. The three vertices would be God, the world, and you. If they are separate realities, you have dualistic Vedanta.

God is an independent, separate reality, and you are something separate from God. Even ultimately, you retain your separateness, and the world is something separate from you. That’s one position.

The second position would be a qualified monism, which would mean you seem to be separate, but you are actually parts of an organic whole of an underlying unity. The unity would be something like the parts of my body: hands and feet and head. They are all separate, different entities. The head is certainly not the feet, and the feet are not the hands, but they are parts of one body.

In that same way, we are all parts of the body of God, so to say. That’s one more approach. So, that’s not strict dualism, but it’s not strictly nondualism either. It’s called qualified monism, Vishishtadvaita, and there are many who subscribe to that point of view.

To distinguish nondualism from all of this, nondualism would insist that there is a radical identity, not even a unity. The body, for example, is a unified whole, but nondualism says it’s not that you are a part of God; there is no difference between you and God.

The famous equation is Tat Tvam Asi: “That Thou Art.” Now, if you really consider that, you’ll see how radical it is. “That Thou Art” means, if I were to translate it, “You are none other than God.” That would mean, for example, you are not a body; you’re not an individual being. You are none other than God, God being defined as the Absolute—pure being, pure consciousness.

And the reverse is true, too: There is no God apart from you. So, you and God are a radical identity, not even a unity. I’ve heard one Swami in the Himalayas put it in terms that would be shocking for a conventional Hindu: Vishnu and Narayana and Shiva—there is no Vishnu, no Shiva, and no other God, none of the entire pantheon of different forms of God in Hinduism. None of them are real other than you, the Absolute.

So, you and God are a radical identity, not even a unity. That’s nondualism.

Rick: When I hear you describe these different flavors of Vedanta and so on, I find myself able to agree with all of them, even though they may appear contradictory, because they’re just different. It’s like the old blind men feeling the elephant: They’re all right. The elephant is like a snake; it is like a tree; it is like a wall. But the totality of the elephant is more than all those individual perspectives.

Swamiji: Absolutely. That’s a very Hindu perspective. It has been so in India for thousands of years. There’s this statement in the Rig Veda: Ekam sat vipra bahudha vadanti, which means, “The truth is one, but the wise speak of it differently.”

This has been a kind of saving grace for Hinduism for thousands of years. The common Hindu in a village might not be able to quote the Sanskrit back to you, but that’s certainly what he or she feels: The ultimate truth is one, but its expressions can be many. You can have different forms of gods, different forms of the Absolute, which explains the variety of Hindu gods and goddesses, different names, different practices, different philosophies—even something that seems to be apparently so contradictory as dualism and nondualism.

You can affirm both, not at the same time, but depending upon your spiritual perspective. Here’s an interesting story about Hanuman, the great devotee of Rama. Rama was an incarnation of God. He asks Hanuman, “What do you think of me? What do you understand about me?”

Hanuman says, “When I think of myself as a body, as Hanuman, then you are the Master; I am Thy servant. You are the Lord, and I am Thy servant. When I think of myself as a sentient being, then you are the whole, and I am thy part. You’re the whole; I’m a part of you. And when I think of myself as pure consciousness, then you and I are one. This is my final conclusion—not that one of these three is my final conclusion, but all of them are my final conclusions.”

Vedanta and the Levels of Physical Reality

Rick: That’s nice. I think in this day and age, modern physics comes to our rescue because, for instance, you have a level on which Newtonian laws are perfectly applicable and predictable, and so on. Then you have a deeper level at which those laws no longer apply.

That doesn’t make the Newtonian level wrong. It just means it’s a particular stratum of creation that has its own laws of nature that govern it, but there are deeper strata where those laws no longer apply.

Swamiji: Absolutely. For example, many people ask, “You are nondualists, but when we go to your main monastery in India or come to the Vedanta Society, we see quite a lot of practices that seem dualistic. You have pictures, you have songs, and you often have ritualistic worship.”

What has to be understood is that the fundamental reality being nondualistic does not contradict a dualistic experience. When you learn physics, you realize that the sky is not really blue. There’s no real blue color out there; it’s an effect of optics, the scattering of light. But when you look up again after reading all that physics, you still see a blue sky, and you enjoy it, knowing full well it’s not blue.

In the same way, you see this pluralistic universe—men and women, plants and animals, nonliving things—in this vast, apparently pluralistic universe, and you know full well there is an underlying oneness to all of it. You enjoy the plurality of expressions of that oneness. It becomes more beautiful that way.

✨ God, consciousness, and the world

Rick: Apparently, Shankara said the intellect imagines duality for the sake of devotion, and all the great nondual teachers, contemporary and ancient, seem to have been great devotees as well as extremely articulate exponents of Advaita.

Swamiji: Absolutely. If you look at Shankara himself, the great teacher of nondualism, he wrote so many beautiful hymns to Vishnu and to Krishna, to the Ganges, and so on. That particular verse you are referring to goes something like this: bodha-prāk dvaitam mohay—before enlightenment, duality or plurality can throw you into delusion; it can create delusion and bind you in samsara. Prapte manishaya, bhakti-artham kalpitam dvaitam, advaitad api sundaram—upon enlightenment, the duality conceived for love, for enjoying bhakti, is more beautiful and more sublime than nonduality. That’s the attitude of a nondual teacher.

Rick: That’s nice. My former teacher, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, once said it’s like if you’re lying in a bathtub and lying still. After a while, the water doesn’t feel warm anymore, but if you slosh around a little bit, then you feel the warmth. So it’s as if duality stirs up the bliss.

Swamiji: That’s a nice way of putting it, yes.

Rick: On the point we were discussing a few minutes ago about these different schools of Vedanta, and whether duality is ultimately one or not, if I were speaking to someone who insisted that reality is ultimately not one, I might ask, “That which is not ultimate, what is that made of?”

Let’s say he says the world is not the ultimate, but the world has some kind of intrinsic ultimate reality to it, in addition to the absolute itself having an ultimate reality. Okay, well, what is the world made of? Then you have to start boiling it down, as a physicist might do. If you boil it down deeply enough, it seems to me you get to the same ground, the same ultimate reality.

Swamiji: True. If you ask a nondualist who insists on the reality of the absolute—pure being or pure consciousness—but if you ask this question, it’s an interesting approach you take: “Okay, leave the absolute aside for the time being. This world we are experiencing—what is it made of?”

If you ask that question, the preliminary answer is, “It’s made of the five elements: space, air, fire, water, and earth.” Or, if you are more modern, you might say, “How many? A hundred and eighteen or so elements in the periodic table.”

Then, if you ask further, “What are those five elements made of?” or “What are those hundred and eighteen or so elements made of?” the Vedantist would say, “They are all reducible to Maya, the inconceivable power of God, if you will.”

What is Maya, then? Ultimately, Maya is nothing different from the absolute whose power Maya is. So, ultimately, the answer would be that this seemingly dualistic universe, which seems to be as far from God as possible, is actually nothing other than God.

You would not say that it is God, but it’s nothing other than God. There’s a very interesting distinction. Mary Hale, one of the disciples of Vivekananda in the late nineteenth century, wrote in a poem to Vivekananda, “You have taught us that all is God.” Vivekananda wrote back, “I have never taught such a strange doctrine that all is God.” She said, “You said it.” He said, “No, I never said that. God only is; the all is not,” which is an important distinction in nondualism.

Rick: It is a subtle distinction. I’m not even sure I completely understand the distinction. Maybe you could elaborate a little bit more.

Swamiji: For example, the best way to understand it is if we take the example of our dreams. In a dream, I might dream that, while I’m sleeping safe and sound in my bed, I’m taking a walk here in Central Park in New York, just outside. I can see people and trees and the lake and the sky—so many entities.

Yet when I wake up and realize, “Oh, it was a dream,” I see that all those people, the sky, and all those living and nonliving beings and everything—not one of them was a second, independent reality outside my own mind, outside the dreamer’s mind.

Exactly in the same way, what Advaita wants to say, or claims, is that there is this underlying pure being, pure consciousness, apart from which none of these manifestations are real. All of them are, in some way, expressions or appearances of the real. They are not a second, independent reality.

God only is; the all is not.

✨ Science and the hard problem of consciousness

Rick: Looping back a minute to what we were talking about regarding the elements, I think a physicist would say that, ultimately, all these hundred-and-something elements can be reduced to up quarks, down quarks, and electrons. That’s all they’re composed of.

Some physicists would go deeper and say that underlying those there’s a sort of unified field or vacuum state, something that doesn’t have any manifest distinctions, out of which all the manifest distinctions arise. I just want to throw that in. I’m sure Vedanta would say something very similar.

Swamiji: You know, Rick, it’s interesting to compare Vedanta and the latest discoveries of particle physics, for example. But I remember a cautionary word that one of my teachers told me—a very senior swami in the Ramakrishna Order, who now happens to be the president of our order.

He was teaching us the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, and we were novices. As an aside, he threw this at us and said, “Look, nowadays it’s fashionable to compare the latest discoveries of particle physics, for example, with Advaita Vedanta. I think the safest thing that you could say is that there are remarkable similarities, remarkable parallels, but don’t merge them yet.”

“I remember one scientist saying that you are trivializing both, so one has to be a little careful about saying that they are the same.”

Another perspective here: another senior teacher of Advaita, a traditional teacher, was told that maybe if one day physicists could come up with a final grand unified theory—one thing to explain everything—then wouldn’t that be nondualism?

The swami used a Hindi word, jada advaita. It would be the nonduality of all insentient things. But all this insentient order appears to consciousness, and you would have to integrate all this back to the witnessing consciousness.

After all, put it this way, very simply: it’s only in the physicist’s understanding, in his or her consciousness, that he or she is finally integrating different equations and understanding that all of this appearance is one integrated whole. But that still appears to consciousness. What Advaita would insist on is that consciousness is prior to all of this.

Rick: There are physicists who say that, too. Also, there are plenty of physicists who tear their hair out when they hear spiritual people trying to co-opt their field to explain spirituality or nondualism.

But there are physicists—I’ve interviewed some—who conjecture or posit that consciousness is the so-called unified field, and that those who have taken a spiritual approach to knowing consciousness or knowing that field, and those who are taking the approach of physics, are just using different tools to try to get at the same thing.

Swamiji: In fact, I would interject here that the recent interest in the so-called hard problem of consciousness is relevant. David Chalmers, who is in fact right here at NYU, is now proposing an idea called panpsychism, which says that consciousness is fundamental.

He says we really cannot solve the hard problem of consciousness by trying to reduce everything to brain states or states of neurons. We may have to admit, finally, that consciousness is fundamental, like space, time, and matter-energy. Consciousness is a fundamental reality of the universe.

Even there, that would be very much like Sankhya philosophy. It still is not nondualism. Sankhya proposes a dualism of consciousness and nature. But my point here is that, in an interview, David Chalmers said, “If you think long and hard enough about consciousness, you either end up being a panpsychist—you regard consciousness as fundamental; you see it cannot be solved in any other way—or you go into administration.”

Rick: That’s funny. There’s another term similar to panpsychism, which is panentheism. Some people are talking about evolutionary panentheism, and as I understand the term—and I wish I had looked it up before this interview, because I didn’t know we were going to talk about it—it has to do with the injection of the idea of intelligence into the whole matter.

So this gets us into a discussion not only of the fundamental nature of reality, but of the qualities of that fundamental nature of reality, and, by extension, a discussion about what God may actually be.

Swamiji: True. As far as I remember, panentheism is a closer idea to Advaita Vedanta than pantheism. Pantheism would say that these tables and chairs and rocks and what have you—all of these—are what God is. But that’s not exactly what Vedanta is saying.

Vedanta is saying that these are appearances of the reality, which is pure being or pure consciousness. In fact, one of the verses in a text called Drg-Drsya-Viveka says, “What is the universe?” It says the universe is a network of names and forms spread over pure being, pure consciousness, and pure bliss.

The example is very interesting: it’s like foam on the surface of the ocean. That was very evocative. I had heard a talk by Lawrence Krauss, who is a strange person to invoke in a spiritual discussion. He is an out-and-out atheist, and he says that the latest ideas of physics, for example, describe the visible universe as quantum foam.

I’m sure physics means something very different from what Advaitins mean, but the use of the same term—you know, the universe is like foam on the surface of an unseen ocean of being, and the universe is quantum foam—struck me as very interesting.

Rick: Yeah. Atheists are sometimes some of the most interesting people to listen to, especially the really smart ones, because you want to debate them in your mind as you listen to them and see, “Now, where is the chink in their armor?” There are definitely holes in the logic.

Swamiji: I enjoy listening to Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and Richard Dawkins. I enjoy them thoroughly. It’s interesting to note that Sam Harris, in one of his books, Waking Up, is an out-and-out atheist, and I admire his cool logic and incisive intelligence.

In this book, he says, “I still don’t believe in most of religion. I regard most of it as superstition, and it should be dismissed as soon as possible.” But he points out two traditions which he has investigated closely. One is Madhyamaka Buddhism, the philosophy behind Tibetan Buddhism, and the other one is Advaita Vedanta. He says, “I have to admit that both of these contain a core of truth which we cannot easily dismiss,” and he says they contain the same core of truth. They are pointing toward the same thing, which is very interesting.

Rick: Yes, he’s also an ardent spiritual practitioner who’s spent years in deep spiritual practice. I sometimes think of him like a man who has one foot on the dock and one foot in the boat, and the boat is starting to slide away. If he keeps up his practice, later it’s going to crack his atheism.

If I were to talk to Sam, I would probably say, “Well, I don’t believe in the same God you don’t believe in, but let’s really define what we mean by God here,” because he sets up these straw-man arguments about the conventional religious definition of God and then shoots those down pretty easily.

Swamiji: Yes, I regard Advaita Vedanta as maximally supporting religion. The difference here is that Sam Harris’s approach would be a minimalist approach to religion.

Another approach right now is Robert Wright’s, for example, whose new book is Why Buddhism Is True. I hear it’s flying off the shelves at Barnes & Noble. But that’s a minimalistic approach to religion, good as far as it goes. He says that meditation definitely works, and not only that, the Buddhist worldview matches very well with a Darwinian worldview. In fact, he puts the two together in his new book. He’s an expert in that, so he puts the two together.

These are what I would call minimalist approaches to religion, where you dismiss most of religion and try to take a core of religion which can be naturalized, so to say.

Advaita Vedanta, on the other hand, provides you with a foundation for all of religion. Religion is imagined, or understood, as instrumental—as a path to ultimate enlightenment. For example, God in Advaita Vedanta would be this absolute existence, consciousness, and bliss—your own reality, but in a cosmic sense, in association with Maya.

The technical definition of God in Advaita Vedanta is Brahman, the Absolute, with Maya. Brahman with Maya is God. Brahman, the Absolute, limited to one body and mind, is me or you. But at the foundation, we are one reality.

Rick: Let’s continue on the God topic for a minute. I’ve said this on this podcast before, but my understanding—and, to whatever extent, my experience—of God is that God is hiding in plain sight.

Speaking of atheists, how they can conceive of the universe as being some kind of random, accidental event is incomprehensible, because if you just look closely at it in any way—look at your finger and look at a cell in your finger, which is about as complex as Tokyo, and can repair and replicate itself—you have a hundred trillion of them, and that’s just you. The whole thing continues on like that.

There is just this immense intelligence permeating and orchestrating everything. That’s my concept of God, and I think that it is ultimately very clearly experienceable.

Swamiji: True. They do have a tendency to shoot down a straw man. They put up the silliest possible arguments or the most simplistic positions, and then they target that.

There is an interesting book by a Christian theologian of the Eastern Christian Church, I think. This gentleman writes probably in England or the USA, and the book is God as Being, Consciousness, Bliss. The names of the chapters are Sat, Chit, and Ananda—pure being, pure consciousness, and pure bliss.

He says this concept is obviously borrowed from the Vedanta in India, but he says this is the core idea in all the great religious traditions of the world—in mystical Christianity, in mystical Islam, and so on. He says this is what the atheist needs to consider and respond to intelligently, not a sort of layperson’s or folk conception of God.

Rick: Yes. It’s too easy a target, that’s all. They’re debating, and I’ve heard conversations with Deepak Chopra trying to go up against some of these guys. It gets very emotional, but they’re talking past each other because they haven’t really defined their terms or what they’re actually arguing about.

Swamiji: There’s one thing I would like to mention here. Religion comes in two distinct brands or species, if you will permit the term. Some religions—or many religions—are God-oriented, and some, with Buddhism immediately coming to mind, are actually—I won’t say self-centered, because that sounds bad—self-inquiry-based.

If you consider the great Vedantic dictum “That Thou Art,” Tat Tvam Asi, “That” stands for the Ultimate Reality, or God, and “thou” stands for the individual being. The ground of “that,” your reality, and the ground of “thou,” God’s reality, are one and the same reality. That’s what Advaita wants to say.

Devotional and Knowledge-Based Spiritual Paths

But if you look at the world of spirituality and religion, you will find these two distinct approaches. I have asked spiritual seekers all my life—young men who want to become monks and join the monastery—what draws them to this path, and I get two kinds of answers.

One group says, “I’m searching for God.” Very good; that’s one group. The other group says, “Well, God is fine, but I am really interested in who I am or what I am.” It’s an inward search.

If you look at the bigger picture, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and many varieties of Hinduism, like Vaishnavism, Shaivism, and Shaktism, are all God-oriented. They’re searching for a reality behind this entire universe. That’s one approach to religion.

The other approach is something like Buddhism or Jainism, or in Hinduism, approaches like Yoga or Sankhya, where the primary inquiry is into the self: What is the reality of the self? They come up with different language and different answers, but primarily it’s an inquiry into the self.

Do you want me to go on with this stream of thought? There are interesting observations.

Rick: Yes, I am listening carefully, and I am enjoying it. Please.

Swamiji: I do tend to run on with this because it’s one of my favorite themes.

Rick: I tend to run on with my questions, so I’ll try to get in with you.

Swamiji: Okay. Both of these approaches—the God-centered approach and the self-inquiry-based approach—have advantages and disadvantages.

The disadvantage of the God-centered approach, straightaway, is that it begins with faith. You are asked to believe, and that’s what people struggle with, especially today, in the 20th and 21st centuries. We struggle with the possibility of the existence of a deity.

For example, in these religions—in Christianity or in dualistic Hinduism—you will find attempts to prove the existence of God. Nobody seriously attempts to prove his or her own existence. What we are is open to question, but we are something, and that is not open to question. It’s obvious to us.

So it’s based on faith, and that problem does not apply to the self-inquiry-based approaches, where obviously you do exist.

The advantage of the God-centered approach is that if God exists, he, she, or it obviously has no problems. God is omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, and magnificent, if God exists.

On the other hand, I certainly do exist, but that doesn’t do me any good, because my little, indubitable, certain existence is beset with all sorts of problems and limitations. I certainly exist, but my existence is miserable, open to suffering and death.

Whereas God, if God exists, has a doubtful existence, but God has no problems at all.

The beauty of Advaita here is that it puts the two together and overcomes the limitations of each one in a very wonderful way. If Advaita is at all to be taken seriously, then our certain existence is the proof for the existence of God, and God’s infinitude removes our limitations.

So what Advaita points toward is a certain and infinite existence—a certain infinitude. It helps you overcome the doubts associated with dualistic religion and the limitations which we perceive about ourselves because of our identification with body and mind. I am done, so this is a very interesting insight.

Religion is realization. Religion is not belief.

Rick: Yes, my sense is that people gravitate toward different paths—devotional or belief-based, or this or that—based upon their inclinations, their makeup, how they’re wired, and their stage of development. All paths are valid, though they’re not necessarily all equally efficacious.

The Gita says that because one can perform one’s own dharma, the lesser in merit is better than the dharma of another. But the key phrase there is “because one can perform it.” People are attracted to something that resonates with them, and maybe later on they’re attracted to something different. You probably concur with that.

Swamiji: Absolutely. That’s one very important teaching which we stress at the Vedanta Society: all the approaches are valid.

Sri Ramakrishna, Vivekananda’s teacher, said, “All religions are true, and they are all paths to the same realization.” It’s not important which particular path you follow, but you must follow a particular path. You must follow something till the very end.

It does depend on the inclination. If you look at the God-centered religions, you would find that they generally tend to be devotional. They tend to be about temples, churches, mosques, and synagogues—devotional and sometimes ritualistic, oriented toward bhakti, toward worship and love.

On the other hand, if you look at the self-inquiry-based religions, such as Buddhism or Sankhya, they tend to be more introspective, more intellectual, and more meditation-oriented.

Which one is better? As you said, it depends on the mental makeup of the seeker. You would find one more acceptable than the other. Yes.

Rick: Also, if you live in Iowa and you want to fly to some place in India—let’s say Kathmandu, which is not in India, but let’s say you want to fly there—you have to get on a plane first from Cedar Rapids to Chicago. Then maybe you can take a plane from Chicago to Delhi, and then Delhi to somewhere else.

None of those planes is better than the others. It’s just that each one is appropriate to a particular leg of the journey.

Swamiji: Absolutely. When we talk about the different practices in Vedanta, Vedanta is primarily the path of knowledge, a path of inquiry into what we are. But the practice of devotion, the practice of meditation, and the practice of selfless action—the four well-known yogas of Swami Vivekananda, Karma Yoga, Bhakti Yoga, Raja Yoga, and Jnana Yoga—none of them are optional, actually. None of them are dispensable. Each plays an important role.

In fact, if you look at the teachings of the ancient masters of Vedanta, whether it’s Shankara, Ramanuja, or Madhva, they all taught different varieties of Vedanta, if you will—dualistic and non-dualistic—but all of them emphasized the importance of knowledge, devotion, meditation, and selfless action. Only the order in which they emphasized them, and the importance they gave to each one, differed from teacher to teacher.

🕊️ Renewing religion for the modern world

Rick: You know how in the Gita Lord Krishna says, “When adharma flourishes and dharma is in decay, I take birth age after age”? Do you acknowledge a cyclical nature to knowledge—that it’s lost and crumbles down, everything gets pretty bad, and then it’s revived, there’s an upsurge, everything gets better, and that cycle repeats itself?

Swamiji: True. The Hindus are big on cycles. (Laughter!) For example, the entire universe is supposed to go through cycles. So there is creation, and there is existence of the universe, and it evolves and changes. Finally, everything is again sucked back into the unmanifest, into the inscrutable power of Ishwara, or God.

But that’s not the end of the story, because again there is creation, and this goes on again and again and again without any end. So within creation, within our universe, things go through cycles. Empires go through cycles, and religions go through cycles—ups and downs. Knowledge and teachings are given fresh and powerful and insightful by Masters, and then they tend to get overlaid by rituals and dogma and organization and politics and fanaticism, until what we might call social reformers or incarnations or great teachers come and teach the core teachings again in their pristine form. That’s true.

Rick: Yeah, there is a story about God and the devil walking down the road. God sees something on the ground, picks it up, and puts it in his pocket. The devil says, “Hey, what is that you picked up?” And God says, “Oh, it’s the truth.” The devil says, “Oh, give it to me; I’ll organize it for you.”

Swamiji: Yes. That’s true. That’s what the devil does. It’s no fault of the teachings themselves or the teachers; it’s a human weakness. We have to admit it, and we have to be open to it, that these religions we have are magnificent structures, but they’re old. They’re really, really old, and they have all kinds of encrustations of history over the centuries.

I think, in fact, there are three things that we should look for in spirituality in the 21st century. One is the harmony of religions. One thing that has given religion a bad reputation, if you will, is the violence and the arrogance—the idea that my path is right and everything else is wrong. That has to go. That really has to go. It’s high time that we accept and enjoy the truth of all religions. That’s one.

Second, this contradiction with science has to go. If there are things in our religions that contradict accepted and well-understood teachings or discoveries of science, then we must be big enough to let those ideas go or relegate them to being symbolic or stories. We don’t have to hold on to them fanatically.

Religion, Democracy, and Human Rights

And the third thing that religion and spirituality must do is find themselves in harmony with modern values: democracy, gender equality, human rights, and so on. These values are very central to our modern society, and religion must be fully in tune with them.

Rick: That’s great. The astronomer Carl Sagan said something like, when religious people are confronted with scientific understandings that contradict their beliefs, many of them protest. In a way, they say, “No, no, my God is a small God, and I want to keep it that way.” You know, the Earth is 6,000 years old. The universe couldn’t possibly be 13.8 billion years old. God put fossils in the Himalayas to test our faith, and things like that—fish fossils, that is.

I have this attitude, and this is one of my pet themes. I gave a talk on this a few years ago at the SAND Conference: science and religion both have something very valuable to share with one another, and in sharing, each will become more complete.

Religion provides methods of exploration into deeper realities that are far more sophisticated than any particle accelerator or anything science has been able to devise. Science brings the scientific method. Even though there is all sorts of pettiness and conflict among scientists, in its pure form, at least, the scientific method takes everything somewhat lightly—as a hypothesis for exploration rather than as a belief that you need to adhere to and fight over.

Taking that principle, anything that any religion has come up with about God, about angels, about—I don’t know—anything else, UFOs, whatever you want to consider, is an interesting hypothesis. Some hypotheses have much better evidence than others, and some are pretty sketchy, but there is still a possibility they may be true. We need to investigate.

Swamiji: That’s right. In fact, going back to the people who are fundamentalist about their beliefs, I understand their fear. You see, if we depend entirely on a text and then we are being asked to let go of a particular part of the text—a particular story, perhaps about creation—then the fear is, “If this thing is wrong, the rest could just as well be wrong, and then I’m terrified.”

So the easier option is to be fanatical, hold on to it, and shut my eyes to the evidence. It’s an emotional reaction; it’s not an intellectual reaction.

The answer to that would be the realization that religion is experience. Religion is realization. Religion is not belief. When Vivekananda came to the West more than 100 years ago, to the World Parliament of Religions, one big thing he did was keep hammering on this point: if God exists, then I must be able to experience this God. If I have an immortal soul, then I must be able to experience this and know this and realize it and derive benefit from it. It’s not just subscribing to a belief.

Now, if you deal with religion in that way, then it becomes a strong contender for the truth, and you do not always feel cornered by science. You feel much more confident about saying, “Okay, I think evolution is a very good idea, and there is tremendous evidence in favor of evolution, so I will accept evolution. All my creation stories are just that. They have symbolic value, maybe. They have literary value, but I will not insist. I wouldn’t be fanatical about that.”

So that’s what happens. I think it was Monier Williams, the first one who wrote an English dictionary for Sanskrit, who said, “I find that the ancient Hindus were Darwinists a thousand years before Darwin.” So they accepted the possibility of evolution. That was sort of built into Hindu thought.

Rick: Those listening to this interview might enjoy my interview with Michael Dowd, who started out as a kind of fundamentalist Christian and now considers things very similarly to what you’ve just been saying. In a way, science is the new religion, and it gives—not exclusively or alone, but it brings and enhances—our understanding of how great God actually is, because it’s showing us such wonders and marvels. It should only increase one’s appreciation for the intelligence that is orchestrating this universe.

Swamiji: You know, one question I’ve asked myself is, why does this conflict arise? What is this whole thing between science and religion? The answer is quite disturbing.

The answer is disturbing because science has truth on its side. You see, what science claims is that we proceed by the scientific method. We are quite open to truth in whatever form it comes. We are evidence-based; we are experiment-based.

Rick: Based on the principle, although it doesn’t always work out, because some of them are a little bit dogmatic.

Swamiji: There is a difference between a scientifically proven law or hypothesis—which becomes a law when it is supported by tremendous evidence—and a scientific materialistic worldview. That’s a different thing altogether. The latter is generated on the basis of whatever scientific knowledge we have, along with the tendency to reduce everything to matter and energy. That’s the scientific worldview, and often the clash is between the scientific worldview and religion.

That’s why an experience-based religion—religion where we take our stand on something that is indubitable—is important. For example, I find that when Sam Harris talks about an indubitable core of truth in Madhyamaka Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta, there you find something so obvious: our real nature is consciousness.

If you, in fact, make an attempt to understand Advaita Vedanta or even Madhyamaka Buddhism, you begin to see that what they are doing is not claiming anything. They are, in fact, pointing to an evident fact, something that is always available to us. So there, science will have to come around and maybe change its paradigm to incorporate that.

Rick: Yes, I think that in a few hundred years, the distinction between science and religion, or science and spirituality, will have disappeared.

Swamiji: I think sooner than that.

Rick: Yeah, maybe so. I mean, things are moving at a fast pace. It’ll just be considered that we have different tools in this toolbox. Some are objective means of gaining knowledge—the Large Hadron Collider or whatever, and the Hubble telescope—and others are subjective means of gaining knowledge.

Actually, the human nervous system is more sophisticated than any collider or telescope. It’s a marvelous instrument, which I don’t think science fully recognizes the potential of, but which ancient spiritual traditions have recognized and have made great strides in understanding the nature of reality through its use.

Swamiji: I think, coming back again to the hard problem of consciousness, that is a really promising area. Just imagine: 25 or 30 years ago, scientists were not seriously interested in consciousness at all. Now, today, consciousness studies is big. It’s a multidisciplinary field. Papers are being published, books are being written, conferences are being held, and there is a fierce debate going on all the time.

How does the hard problem of consciousness go? How is it resolved? Or, even if it is not resolved, how do scientists make sense of why it is not being resolved? That can open up new doors to understanding, because something like Advaita or Madhyamaka Buddhism or even Sankhya is very consciousness-based.

I think they are poised to contribute a lot to this debate at this point, and this is going on right now in different universities—a new openness to these ancient ways of thinking.

Rick: Yeah, and I would suggest that it’s not just an academic issue that is interesting to contemplate or speculate upon, but that it has tremendous societal implications. If people in larger numbers begin to realize their true nature and embody that and radiate the effect of that in and through their lives, then that is naturally going to change the whole chemistry of society.

If we regard the world as it is now, with all of its problems, as a reflection of the sum total of human consciousness, or levels of consciousness, then we can imagine a society in which some significant percentage of people have become enlightened or realized their true nature. What impact will that have on society? I think it will have a marvelously positive impact.

Swamiji: I absolutely agree with you. In fact, even scientists, social science researchers, and psychologists know that religious faith, even of the conventional sort, has many good effects on the human psyche. It prevents mental illness, sustains good family life, and provides many positive benefits. The benefits of conventional religious faith are well documented.

Now, the challenge is that science, or the scientific worldview, seems to say, “Yes, yes, there are all these benefits, but what good are benefits if they’re all derived from a central lie that God does not exist at all?” So, a conventional way of putting religion is open to these charges.

Now, as you said, if it changes into a more consciousness-based language—the same religious understanding expressed in a more consciousness-based language, as is already available in Advaita or many Buddhist approaches—then we have something which gives all those benefits and is true to boot. It’s also evidently testable, stands up to scientific inquiry or investigation, and would have tremendous benefits for society.

Rick: I think scientists are justified in being critical of a belief-based language or belief-based approach, which in many cases has led to very bizarre and unusual beliefs. But if we’re talking here about an experiential approach, which, as you just said, is verifiable, testable, and so on, then we’re talking about something scientists do for a living. Brought into the field of consciousness, that’s the way they function, and they should be able to appreciate that.

Swamiji: An advantage of this new, newfound interest in the study of consciousness is that even the concept of verifiability, and the verifiability of practices, is now being stretched. They no longer say that it has to be verified by an instrument. Instead, they take the reports of the individual subjects. They’ll take your views or your experiences and turn them into data, and that’s really good.

It doesn’t have to be a spike on a particular scanner. It can be a report from the subject under investigation—the first-person report.

Rick: Yes, the instrument. Now, the question is, how can we standardize that instrument? If you do a scientific study, at the end of the study you list all the instruments you used and how you used them, and so on, so somebody else can replicate your study and see if you’re right or not.

It’s a lot messier when it comes to spiritual techniques and practices. There’s so much individual variation in our makeups, in what we’re actually practicing, and so on. It’s a much more daunting task to standardize.

Swamiji: I think the reason it seems messy or daunting is because we’re taking instruments and procedures designed to deal with the objective world, and now we’re trying to apply them to the subject.

Rick: I’m also referring to the human nervous system as an instrument and the way in which that is used. The techniques that are practiced, or the variation in the condition of the instrument from one practitioner to the next, introduce a lot of variables that are hard to control.

Swamiji: Complexity is undeniable, but the recent trends are very encouraging. For example, when they would do studies on meditators to determine how effective meditation is, they would take a general population. Now they understand that, to get at the heart of the effects of meditation—to really see what meditation does—you need to study a population of veteran meditators, such as Tibetan lamas or Himalayan yogis, no matter how small that population may be, instead of conducting a standard population-wide study.

So, yes, my point is that because of this interest in the mind and in consciousness, even the scientific method itself is adapting to a somewhat more subjective approach.

Rick: A couple of questions have come in. They’ll probably make us jump around a little bit in our discussion, but let’s just ask them, and then we’ll probably get back into the groove of what you and I are doing here.

Here’s a question from someone named Dwayne; location not given:

“Sri Ramakrishna was a practitioner of Tantra as well as Advaita Vedanta. How do the two traditions complement each other, if at all? One is a psychosomatic practice focused on action, and the other is predicated on using the intellect to get closer to nondual realization.”

Swamiji: Yes. Sri Ramakrishna, and Hinduism in a wider context, always recognized that there could be different paths to enlightenment.

For example, Mantra Yoga uses sound and words—the repetition of sacred words—to take you to the breakthrough that gives you enlightenment. Bhakti Yoga uses emotions, emotions of love and adoration, to take you to enlightenment. Raja Yoga uses the power of concentration and focus to make the breakthrough.

Tantra uses our own psychosomatic instrument, as he said, especially the drives and instincts. Instead of suppressing them, you channel and sublimate them in the search for the Divine. All those energies work in your favor in your spiritual quest.

Jnana Yoga, or Advaita Vedanta, uses the intellect to simplify the process into an investigative inquiry into what I am.

What Ramakrishna found was that all of them finally lead to the same enlightenment. They have different forms, different languages, and different techniques. He also gave his famous Bengali dictum, “Yato mat, tato path,” which means, “As many faiths, so many paths.” In fact, that’s not even a precise translation. A more precise translation would be, “As many opinions, so many paths to God.”

So, yes, Ramakrishna practiced a wide variety of disciplines: Tantra, the Vaishnava path of devotion, paths of meditation, the path of Advaita Vedanta taught to him by the monk Totapuri, and so on.

Rick: Was he the one who actually went through all the different religions and dove into them? He became a Muslim for a while, and a Christian. He kind of did the full run on every path.

Swamiji: Yes. In fact, he practiced Christian mysticism for some time and Islamic mysticism for some time, and he found that all of them led to the same enlightenment.

When he did that, he was not eclectic. When he practiced a Muslim way of prayer, he removed all the pictures of Hindu gods and goddesses, dressed like a Muslim, and emptied the bucket, as it were, and refilled himself with a new way of thinking and acting. He came to the same conclusion: all these paths lead to the same reality.

Rick: Of course, he was already enlightened, so it was easy for him.

Swamiji: Right. That’s an important point. Experientially, if each path leads you to a breakthrough that is similar, even though the paths themselves are very different, then, standing from that point of view, you can say that they are all valid. You don’t have to fight. They are paths; religions are not ends in themselves. You don’t have to fight over them.

God is like the central sun around which the planets orbit. The different religions orbit around that central sun. That is the importance.

Yes, he did practice Tantra. That’s true.

✨ Enlightenment and the enlightened person

Rick: Here’s another question, from Brad Stephan in Kearney, Nebraska. He asks, “Within the Ramakrishna Order, is there a formal process for certifying and/or celebrating when a monastic attains moksha?”

Swamiji: No, the answer is no, because in the Advaitic tradition, it’s problematic if you claim moksha. It’s problematic if you claim enlightenment, except for the great teachers of humanity—the avatars, the masters of each path.

Rick: Probably they need to say it because it was obvious.

Swamiji: Yes, and in general, the teacher or practitioner would be hesitant to claim spiritual enlightenment.

For example, in our own monastic order, I know that if some monk claims, “I’m enlightened,” the reaction will be, “Yeah, yeah, but you go and cut the vegetables. You have to go to work in the kitchen anyway.”

That’s a healthy attitude, because in the Upanishads, for example, there’s a saying in the Kena Upanishad: “The one who says he knows does not know; the one who says he does not know knows.”

Rick: Yeah. Or he may not know.

Swamiji: There’s a fundamental philosophical problem involved there. Nisargadatta, the author of I Am That, was a great enlightened nondualistic teacher in the twentieth century. Somebody said to him, “You are a knower of Brahman,” expecting that he would be pleased. He was a rough man, so he burst out and said, “You are insulting me.”

The other person was shocked. “The knower of Brahman” is the highest praise you can give in India. He said, “I called you a knower of Brahman. How is that an insult?” Nisargadatta said, “I am Brahman. I’m not a knower of Brahman.” That’s an important point.

Rick: Yeah.

Freedom from the Individual Self

I put it this way. It’s from some Christian mystic or Sufi mystic: “The person does not get enlightened. The person does not become free. You become free of the person.” For the person to claim enlightenment is therefore, in principle, wrong somewhere.

Swamiji: I put it this way. It’s from some Christian mystic or Sufi mystic: “The person does not get enlightened. The person does not become free. You become free of the person.” For the person to claim enlightenment is therefore, in principle, wrong somewhere.

The person does not get enlightened. The person does not become free. You become free of the person.

Rick: Even for someone to say, “Although I know my language is limited, and so please forgive me, I have become free of the person. I’ve realized my pure, essential nature, and it’s not I who have realized that; it has realized itself”—you go round and round trying to get the words to do justice to it.

I suppose it would be considered inappropriate for someone even to proclaim that in your tradition.

Swamiji: There seems to be no need, actually. The whole point is that my realization does not directly help you.

I remember a nice story I heard from a monk many decades ago in one of our ashrams. There was a gentleman who was a seeker and who devoted his whole life to spiritual seeking. He stayed in the ashram until the end of his life. He loved going to different monks and finding out about their life stories and attainments.

He would come back and tell the abbot of the monastery, “I went and saw this Swami. I went and saw this yogi. This one has this power, and that person has that vision.”

One day, the abbot said to this seeker, “My dear boy, if everybody in the world were to turn into Ramakrishna—an incarnation of God, perhaps—if everybody were to turn into an incarnation of God tomorrow except you and me, then, at the end of our lives, what good would all that be to us if, at the end of our lives, we still remained the same? Everybody else would be enlightened.”

It would be a fantastic world to live in, no doubt about it. But what matters is that, at the end of our lives, we are still alone, and we go out with our own enlightenment and our own spiritual progress.

Rick: Was Ramakrishna considered to be an avatar?

Swamiji: By some. Increasingly, after his death, he was considered to be an avatar by some. He was considered to be a great saint by many in Calcutta. People would go to see him, and he was considered to be absolutely crazy by others, too.

Rick: Yeah, I guess that’s pretty much par for the course for avatars or great saints.

Here’s another question that came in from Francis Bennett, a friend of mine:

“Does absolute nondualism imply or advocate a passive and apathetic attitude toward all issues in the world, like famine, disease, and war, similar to the Neo-Advaita view? I want to talk to you about Neo-Advaita. My feeling is that a qualified nondualism would be closer to the truth, where it still makes perfect sense to be concerned about the suffering that exists in the world and to do something about it. Could you comment on it?”

Swamiji: That’s a very good question, and the straight answer to that would be no. It does not recommend passivity. It does not imply being passive toward human suffering. But yes, the question is not irrelevant. It has been understood in that way, maybe by Neo-Advaita and by very strict monastic Advaitins, nondualists, in ancient India too. It did lead to a kind of passivity regarding society, where your society might be a colony under a foreign power, there might be illiteracy and famine and disease and backwardness and superstition, and you still might ignore all of that because, after all, it’s an appearance, the Absolute is the reality, and you are the Absolute after all.

Now, one must notice that Vivekananda, the source of our order and the source of a lot of modern Vedanta, in fact, was a staunch activist, a very strong activist. When he went back to India, he took with him the message of character-building, education, and religion. He said, “I don’t believe in a religion which can’t provide a piece of bread to a hungry man here, and cannot wipe the tears of the widow, and which promises me heaven afterward. I don’t believe in such a religion.”

When one of our early monks, Akhandananda, was criticized by a traditional Vedantic scholar—“Why are you monks going around establishing schools and hospitals? Aren’t you supposed to meditate on the Atman and beg for your food? At the most, your only engagement with society would be to teach Vedanta”—the Swami’s reply was fantastic. He wrote a fiery letter. He said, “The very same Atman you talk about appears to me in the form of the hungry man. It appears to me in the form of the illiterate, the superstitious, and the diseased person. I shall not cease to work on their behalf, who are my very own Atman. If, for that, I have to go to hell, I am resigned to going to hell a thousand times.”

That seems to have really changed the Vedantic view in India itself. Not just our order, but many of the new orders that have come up in the last 100 or 150 years—it’s a kind of renaissance, a new look at Vedanta—they all are socially engaged. Today, a typical Hindu in India, if he goes to an ashram, one of the questions he would likely ask is, “What are you doing for the poor, for the sick? Are you doing something for society?” That’s a big change in a hundred or a hundred and fifty years.

Levels of reality and compassionate action

Rick: That’s nice. There’s a nice article that I just reread recently by my friend Timothy Conway, whom I’ve interviewed a couple of times. It’s about the three simultaneously true yet paradoxical levels of nondual reality. It can be broken down in different ways, but he broke it down into three.

There’s the obvious conventional level, where we have diseases and wars and this and that, and all that stuff needs to be dealt with. We need medicines, we need peace treaties, or whatever. Then there’s the kind of more Divine level, you could say, where all is well and wisely put, and everything is divinely orchestrated in perfect justice. Then there’s the absolute level, where nothing ever happened.

You could take refuge in any of those three and deny the others, but a more balanced view would be to incorporate all three and to render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, to give each its due in terms of the way you live your life. Nisargadatta, whom you just quoted, once said that the ability to appreciate paradox and ambiguity is a characteristic of spiritual maturity.

Swamiji: Absolutely. If you want it all neat and ordered, you have to give up the truth. The truth usually is complex. One way of looking at it is the Jivanmukta, the enlightened person. It’s interesting that there are three categories of this enlightened person, corresponding to the three categories you just spoke about.

In one article by Swami Gambhirananda, the eleventh president of our order, he says, “How does the enlightened person look upon the world?” He finds three possibilities by looking at actually enlightened people in the history of religion.

One is complete indifference to the world. If an enlightened person is completely indifferent to the world, we have no right to criticize that person. That’s an attitude, and it’s a possible attitude. There have been such people, and they have been enlightened. We have to admit that that’s a possibility.

The second attitude is that the person would look upon the world—not completely ignore it, but look upon the world as a play of God, both good and evil as manifestations of Maya. There was, for example, a yogi who stayed in the Kali temple of Dakshineshwar when Ramakrishna was there in the late nineteenth century. Ramakrishna narrates how the yogi would stay in meditation almost all day long, but once in a while would come out and look at the world—the sky and the river and the temple and the people—and would say, “How wonderful, how wonderful!” He would dance in joy and go back into his meditation.

These are the crazy people of God. They seem mad to us. They look at the world, but they look upon it as a magic show.

The third category would be those whose hearts melt with love and compassion for the suffering in the world, and they would want to show us the way to enlightenment. They would want to remove our sufferings. That’s also a very valid way, and the great teachers of religion and spirituality have always belonged to the third category.

Rick: So maybe it depends on what your dharma is, which of those categories you end up in. You have different functions to play.

Swamiji: True. If you look at the story of the Buddha after his enlightenment, he wondered whether he should go and teach what he had found. The last temptation, I think, was: “You are enlightened. I have no further power over you. But then you go into Nirvana, give up the body, merge into bliss, and don’t bother about them. They won’t understand what you are saying.”

But the Buddha luckily decided that some would understand, so he would go and teach them to remove their suffering. So you have all the teachings of Buddhism. That’s the third category: those who become masters of humanity.

Rick: Yes. Here’s a question. This is sort of reminiscent of something we discussed a few minutes ago. You may not want to answer this, but this is from Jaime Rivera in Lakewood, New Jersey. He asks, “Would Swami comment on how he experiences life? Do you experience life as awareness? Do you feel yourself to be a separate person?”

Swamiji: I think the answer would be yes, more and more. The more and more I investigate Vedanta and stay with this, I don’t even see it as a great achievement. I begin to see it more and more as a statement of fact. It’s true for all of us—for you and me and every other being in this world—that we are this consciousness, and we experience ourselves as limited individuals experiencing a world. But behind both the individual and the world that individual experiences, underneath, or the ground of both, is this awareness, and it’s constantly available to us.

You don’t even have to become that. You just have to acknowledge that, own up to it, and recognize that. Basically, there are two stages. One is when you become more and more alive to the very possibility of such a thing: that the Absolute is right here, right now, and it is you yourself. That’s stage one.

The Three Stages of Self-Recognition

Stage two is what I call the shifting of the I. When I say “I,” it automatically refers to this thing. When you become aware of that background awareness, then instead of saying, “It’s a background awareness,” say, “I am that, looking upon this.” Then the body-mind becomes this.

Finally, the third stage would be to integrate the entire appearance—the world itself—into this background awareness. The first stage is the possibility of Brahman, the Absolute. The second stage is, “I am that Brahman.” The third stage is, “So is everybody and everything else.”

I don’t see this as something to be achieved, or as something particularly great either. The sooner I do it, the better for me and everybody else.

Rick: Yes. Interesting, those stages you just mentioned, because Maharishi used to talk this way too. First, he would say, “Okay, meditation: You experience Turiya, pure consciousness, and then, through repeated exposure to that, it eventually gets stabilized and is maintained throughout waking, dreaming, and sleeping.” Yet the world is seen as different from that. There’s a sort of duality set up in that.

Then he said—and I won’t elaborate too long—but eventually the world, which is seen as different, begins to be appreciated in its essential nature as that. The difference kind of melts into a unity, where one sees everything in terms of that, in terms of the Self, in terms of consciousness.

Swamiji: Absolutely. Perfect. I mean, this is exactly the three stages. First, you stumble upon or discover that it’s real. It’s not something I’ve read about or heard about. It’s real, it’s available to me all the time, always was available, is, and will be, and it’s my real nature. It’s who I am. So that’s the first one.

Going to the second stage, the I is shifted now from the body-mind to what you have discovered. Finally, everything else—the body-mind and the entire universe—is sort of resolved back, in your understanding and in the way you look at life, into that reality which is your own Self, which you are.

Even the language of “myself” or “that” is still distancing. Let’s be bold enough to say “I.” That’s the real meaning of the I.

Rick: Yes, and that final stage would seem to really be what Advaita is, because then there really aren’t two. One can experience a unified foundation to the universe and yet see the universe as different from that. That’s a duality; that’s not Advaita.

Swamiji: Exactly. And that relates to what we spoke about at the beginning, about science beginning to discover a grand unified theory, or a unity underlying all this appearance. But that still would be duality, because that’s an intellectual understanding appearing to the consciousness of the scientist who formulates or understands that equation.

Here, it’s a real nonduality, where there is no entity apart from you—that nondual Brahman.

Rick: Yes, and that has become a living reality, not just a concept or an understanding. Speaking of concepts and understanding, we alluded briefly to Neo-Advaita recently. Have you run into the whole Neo-Advaita phenomenon?

Swamiji: That is true. I’ve read some of the books, and thanks to the internet, I’ve watched some of the sessions. Yes, it has its roots in, I would say, Ramana Maharshi and, in the twentieth century, maybe Papaji and Nisargadatta, and then a host of other teachers who learned from them and are now teaching all over the world. Yes.

Rick: Yes, although I don’t know if Ramana Maharshi, Papaji, and Nisargadatta would fully approve of what goes on in the name of nonduality, or even in their name, since they’re often attributed as the sources of inspiration for these teachers.

There are things that people like that say, such as, “Call off the search. You’re already the Self. No need to seek for it. No need to make any efforts or engage in any practices. Practices just reinforce the notion of a practitioner. You just realize you’re that. You’re already enlightened,” and so on.

Personally, I don’t resonate with those kinds of sayings. I think that they can cause a lot of confusion. Maybe they’re applicable and useful for a small percentage of people, but I think—well, it doesn’t matter what I think. What do you think about it?

Swamiji: When I see those sessions, well, let me back up and say first of all that those sayings—that you are already the Self, so why are you meditating?—are actually not new. Even if you call them Neo-Advaita, they go back centuries or millennia. For example, the Ashtavakra Gita and the Avadhuta Gita are texts of a very radical Advaita, and they say things like, “Your only bondage is that you’re trying to meditate.”

Things like that are true in a very ultimate sense. The Mundaka Upanishad, the Mandukya Karika, and Gaudapada, the teacher of Shankaracharya, say that the ultimate truth is that there is no one who is bound, there is no one who has been freed, there is no creation, and there is no cessation of creation. This is the final truth.

Now, is it true or not on a philosophical level, in a logical sense, in a strictly nondualistic sense? Yes, it is true. But when you come down to the brass tacks, to the practicalities, I have noticed that sometimes it’s not helpful.

In some of these sessions, I have noticed that the teacher, in many cases, has an opening and an enlightenment. But when he or she is trying to communicate it to large numbers of people who are sitting looking at the teacher quizzically, with yearning and with a genuine need for this, two things are happening.

One is that if the teacher has even a little bit of an opening or grasp of this, there is a power to what he or she is saying. That power is felt by everybody who’s there, and they sense a deep truth here. But there is no bridge to the truth.

It’s like if I cross over and there is a narrow little bridge that helps me cross a chasm or a ravine, and then I cut the bridge and say, “Come over. You don’t need the bridge. This is the truth.” But they need the bridge, and they need things to do. They need practices to practice and belief systems to hold on to, while at the same time knowing that these are part of the path and are not the end. They should not be mistaken for the end or for anything absolute.

In fact, if you look at the traditional teachers of Advaita, Shankara himself strongly recommends selfless action. First of all, he strongly recommends an ethical life. This is one part of the teaching that’s missing.

If I’m not ethical, if I tell lies, if I go counter to my own inner sense of values, then there itself I have ruined my chances of further progress. If I keep telling myself—or if I keep suffering from guilt, for example—then the calmness and clarity of mind that are required for a breakthrough in nonduality will not come.

So, an ethical foundation is very important. Selfless action and unselfishness are very important. Traditional devotion to a deity is very important. It could be a Christian kind of devotion. Vedanta is very liberal that way. It could be a Muslim kind of devotion, or devotion to Krishna or the Divine Mother, whatever. But devotion to God is very important.

I have heard traditional teachers in the Himalayas tell me that a nondualist can only benefit from bhakti. One of the reasons is that, on the path of nondualism, understanding is not so difficult. If you persist with this, very soon a kind of intellectual clarity comes.

Vivekananda himself said this is the direct path—the path of knowledge—but many people come to an understanding on this path, and few people realize. The reason is that our affections, emotions, and desires are all directed toward this pluralistic, dualistic world. These have to be purified, collected, and focused on our search, and bhakti is a very powerful way of doing that.

It cleanses the heart and focuses our love and desire Godward, and then the path becomes much easier. Otherwise, what happens is that the brain and the intellect agree: “Yes, there is such a thing as pure consciousness, and yes, in a real sense, I am that.” But the mind rebels, the body rebels, and the emotions rebel.

If there is an unpurified body-mind structure that has not gone through rigorous sadhana, it will pull in a different direction. So bhakti yoga is very useful. Meditation, Raja Yoga, is extremely useful. Focus is one thing that we are lacking in an increasingly distracted world.

So meditation is extremely—I would say almost—necessary for knowledge. This is what many, though not all, Neo-Advaita teachers seem to ignore, and those who follow them exclusively do so at their own peril.

I think what happens to many of them—the followers, not the teachers—is that after some time they end up in a kind of stagnation. “I know all the teachings. I can repeat them, and I’m completely convinced, but I’m still suffering. I’m still in the midst of suffering.” That’s where they end up.

Rick: Yeah. I think what often happens is that an intellectual understanding is mistaken for realization. In fact, there’s a Tibetan saying: “Don’t mistake understanding for realization.”

It can become very convincing and hypnotic when you drill something into your head enough that you can repeat it. You think, “That’s it. I’ve got it.”

And I think even with the teachers, in some cases you give them more credit than they’re due. When you’re sitting up in front of a crowd saying this stuff, something lights up inside. You become brighter or clearer than you ordinarily are, and so even then you feel like you’re teaching from a kind of enlightened or awakened state. But is that really maintained twenty-four seven? Does the rubber really hit the road? Is your behavior throughout your life consistent with that supposed realization?

Swamiji: That actually explains the reluctance in traditional monastic orders to claim enlightenment. It’s much better to say, “I am a seeker.” Even if a person has enlightenment, if that person says he or she is a seeker, all credit to him or her.

The worst case is the opposite: when a person is not enlightened but wants to claim the status of an enlightened master. Then the disaster begins to unfold.

Rick: Yeah. I mean, it’s like a guy running around saying, “I’m a king, I’m a king, I am a king.” He convinces himself that he’s a king. He’s still begging on the street, but he’s convinced himself, and then there’s no chance of ever becoming a king because he thinks he already is one.

Swamiji: Right. One test I have personally is: Has a person been able to solve his or her own problems? I say that if you are enlightened, then you don’t have a right to complain.

Rick: And by “solve,” I don’t mean to say that Ramakrishna and Ramana Maharshi both died of cancer, so it’s not to say that they solved that. But they solved it in the sense that they realized themselves as something untouchable by that.

Swamiji: They realized themselves as transcendent. There is a really important reality within you, which you are, that transcends these. These are superficial. These are on the surface.

It’s interesting that you would mention Ramakrishna’s cancer. There’s a story about how a young man who later became Swami Turiyananda came to Ramakrishna while he was suffering from throat cancer, in great pain, and asked him, “How are you today, sir?”

Sri Ramakrishna weakly said, “This hurts. I can’t eat.” And this young man said, “But, sir, I see that you are full of bliss.” That is a cruel thing to say to a cancer patient. Ramakrishna burst out laughing and said, “Oh, the rascal has caught me. He has seen through me.”

What does that mean? It’s very interesting. Does that mean that he’s not suffering from the pain? Oh, yes, he is, just like any other cancer patient. But what he has that other cancer patients do not have is an awareness of this deeper dimension to his own being where there is no cancer, no possibility of disease, decay, or death. He knows that’s his real identity.

Rick: A person named Rohit sent me a question saying, “Some of the enlightened sages seem to be active after death. Do they get another subtle body after death?” You know what I mean by that. You hear all these stories of various masters, like Jesus or Ramana or various others, coming to people and interceding. In many cases, the person has never even heard of that person.

I’ve spoken to people who had never heard of Ramana, and Ramana comes to them. Then years later they see a book with his picture, and they say, “That’s the guy I saw.” So what’s going on there? Your opinion?

Swamiji: I believe that’s possible. The traditional idea in Vedanta, in Advaita Vedanta, is that the moment you are enlightened, that’s the end of the game. As long as this body persists, you remain as an enlightened person, a jivanmukta—one who is liberated while living. When this particular body dies, you don’t have any more karma that will produce new bodies.

Nature basically brings the game to an end as far as you are concerned, because that’s the whole purpose of the game of nature: to make you enlightened.

But in the less strict versions of Vedanta—the more dualistic versions of Vedanta—I would say—there are any number of stories and teachings about masters who choose to retain their individuality so that they can go on guiding humanity for centuries to come. And I do believe that.

That does not contradict strict nondualism either, because strict nondualism has these tiers of reality. There is absolute, paramarthika reality, where Brahman alone is real. And there is vyavaharika reality, a relative plane of reality, where you admit God, you admit the saints of God, you admit reincarnation, and you admit the possibility of an enlightened master continuing even after the death of one physical body in subtle bodies for a long period of time, guiding disciples and seekers all over the world.

Certainly, I think that’s quite possible.

Rick: Yes. Apparently, someone once said to Ramana Maharshi—they told him about the Buddhist notion, the Bodhisattva vow, where you’re going to keep coming back until all sentient beings are realized. Ramana laughed and said, “It’s like someone saying, ‘I’m not going to stop dreaming until everybody else stops dreaming.’”

Swamiji: That’s one perspective, definitely. That’s a very strict nondualistic perspective. And yet Ramana Maharshi, in other moods, you would see, was full of compassion. He even gave bhakti teachings to some people whom he felt would benefit from that.

And as you said, Ramana has appeared to others. It might not be the individual Ramana, because Ramana never thought of himself as an individual once he attained enlightenment. So it could be something in the cosmic mind where such names and forms as Jesus, Ramana, Ramakrishna, or Krishna are conduits for spiritual wisdom.

The same teaching might appear through these forms to certain seekers. The important thing there would be to take the teaching, practice, and become enlightened oneself. That’s the really important thing.

Rick: Yeah. So what you said about the cosmic mind: It may be that there’s actually nothing left of the being we referred to as Ramana when he was in a body, but the cosmic mind creates a projection or an image, a hologram of someone who really looks like Ramana, in order to have a certain teaching effect on the people who see it.

Swamiji: Quite possible. And our whole question arises because of a fundamental misconception on our part. When we say “Ramana,” we mean this person sitting blissfully in a cave, based on the pictures that we have seen. But that’s not how Ramana sees himself.

Ramana completely sees himself as one ocean of existence, consciousness, and bliss. So now we have this question: This person is Ramana; after the death of this body, will this person persist? We forget that this person does not exist even now in that body. It’s difficult for us to grasp.

We have the concept of an enlightened person, whereas the enlightened person himself or herself would not consider, “I am an enlightened individual being.” I’m one with Brahman.

Rick: Yeah. I guess to pursue it a little bit further, let’s say this person doesn’t exist. Now, in Ramana’s case, we might say, well, his body exists in a sort of a nitya kind of way—as a dependent; it’s an appearance. And so, even though ultimately it doesn’t exist because nothing ever manifested and all that, could it be that even after enlightenment, just as the body apparently at least continues to exist, there’s some kind of nugget, some kind of essence of individuality, which makes that ultimate reality a living reality—a lesha avidya concept—and that continues to exist in an individuated form as a vehicle through which that enlightened consciousness can continue to function, even if the physical body drops off? I realize this is all kind of speculative, but I think…

Swamiji: Absolutely. What you are saying tallies well with the traditional Advaitic account of how an enlightened Master is possible, because the moment you are enlightened, all your karma is destroyed.

Backing up a little bit, the idea in Vedanta is that these bodies are produced by my past karma. I’m an individual sentient being right now under ignorance. I don’t know my real nature is Brahman, and I have gone through many lives, generated a lot of karma, and those karmas keep producing these bodies.

Now, enlightenment is supposed to wipe out all these karmas. If karmas are wiped out, then there’ll be no further bodies. But then the question arises: How is Ramana’s body persisting even now after enlightenment? To answer this question, the lesha avidya theory, which you mentioned, came up. It’s a kind of speculation, a sort of philosophical back-calculation.

Rick: Define the term, just for people to understand what that term means.

Swamiji: Okay. If enlightenment removes ignorance, and all karma is generated from ignorance, then ignorance is gone. You realize you are this infinite ocean of being and consciousness; you have no more karma and no more ignorance. Then how does the body—the one you are existing in—continue? Do you die immediately?

If you remember the background philosophy, this body is fueled by my past karma. If all karma, past and future, is wiped out, then this body should die. But that would be very strange. In that case, enlightenment would be tantamount to suicide. I mean, if you are enlightened, you have to die. That would not be very attractive at all.

Not only that, what Advaita would say is that it leads to the serious problem that if enlightenment leads to the immediate death of the body, then all those who are living and not fully enlightened—so no teacher would be a fully enlightened teacher—would run out of teachers very fast.

So, to explain all this, they said that all ignorance and all karmas are destroyed except the one which is already giving results right now. The example they used is of a bowman shooting arrows. Suddenly, he decides not to shoot anymore, so he can throw away all the arrows in the quiver. He can even put down the arrow which he was putting on the bow. But the one which he has released and which is flying toward the target, he can’t do anything about; that persists.

In the same way, this particular body, in which karma has been activated for this particular life, will continue to give results. The body will live for its natural term, and the enlightened person lives on as an enlightened person. He lives on as a jivanmukta. That’s the traditional explanation.

It explains how enlightened gurus are possible and why the body does not die, and so on and so forth. But Shankaracharya, in his text Aparokshanubhuti, contradicts this flat-out. He says this is an explanation given to us because of our fundamental mistake: We see the body and we want an explanation for that.

But he says there is no continuation of past karma. Why? First of all, you, as Brahman, were never under the influence of karma. When you become enlightened, you see that the general way we understand enlightenment is, “Oh, I was an individual sentient being going through many lives and deaths. Now I realize I am Brahman; I have no further lives, no further births.” This is the idea of enlightenment.

Shankaracharya says it is wrong. This is not what happens. When you wake up to your reality, you realize you had never been born. There were no past lives, and there will be no further life. There is not even this one life. You are Brahman, and everything is a manifestation of Brahman.

If that is so, there is no karma either, and so the whole theory of some part of karma living or staying behind to fuel the body of the enlightened person falls down.

So, what is the explanation? The explanation is that, from the point of view of Brahman, all this world, including the body of the enlightened person, is Maya. They’re all appearances. They were appearances, and they continue to be appearances. It’s not that a real body-mind exists along with the realization that “I am Brahman.” That would be dualism.

Maya, mithya, and the value of relative life

Rick: Yeah. So, from Shankara’s perspective, as you just articulated it, nothing ever happened. There is no universe, there is no body, nothing. It’s just all Brahman, and we have, again, foam on the surface appearing to be something, but it has no substantial reality.

As I understand it, the term mithya kind of relates to this. You have pots, and they’re made of clay, and you could say there’s only clay; there are no pots. And yet, in an apparent, more conditional, more expressed way, you appear to have pots. You can put beans in them or water, use them as drums, or whatever.

Even though that’s not ultimately true, it’s kind of relatively true. To completely dismiss it again seems to be a little bit too much—not all-encompassing, too much like taking refuge in one level of reality to the exclusion of the others.

Swamiji: You’re right, and Shankara does not do that. In fact, Shankara fully admits the importance and the value of a relative reality, if I might call it that.

In Advaita Vedanta, this is fully recognized: at least three tiers of reality. The really real, absolute reality, which is Brahman; and the relatively real, the transactionally real, the empirically real, which is where you are, Rick, and I am the Swami, and we have the computer and we are talking to each other. Here is a world. All this is admitted by Shankara.

He says that, in this world of relative reality, we follow morality, follow religion, and follow all the codes of conduct. It’s important, because your whole Vedantic quest starts from this level; you don’t start with Brahman.

And he talks even of a third level of reality, a lower level of reality, which we might call illusion, dream, and error, which is also experience. When you see a snake in a rope, it’s not a snake, but you did see something. When you see a dream, you wake up and say, “Oh, it didn’t happen,” but you did see the dream, even if it’s only a dream.

Advaita’s Three Levels of Reality

So, three levels of reality: pratibhasika, which literally means illusion or appearance; vyavaharika, which means transactional, empirical, or relative; and paramarthika, which means the absolute.

So, the relative level is fully admitted by the traditional nondual teachers. In fact, I’ll cross over to the other side, to Mahayana Buddhism and Tibetan Buddhism. The great Nagarjuna, who is at the heart of the Madhyamaka philosophy, says in one of his verses in the Mulamadhyamakakarika that there are two levels of reality, and the Buddha taught two levels of truth.

He says, “Paramarthika and samvriti.” Paramarthika means absolute. Samvriti means empirical or relative. Now, he says, “Samvriti manashrutya paramarthikam na dhikam yete”: Without taking refuge in the relative truth, one cannot realize the absolute truth. So, he admits the value of the relative truth.

He would say it’s empty, and Shankaracharya would say it is mithya; it is ultimately false, but it has value in use. You can store water or milk in a pot, though it is only clay.

Rick: Yeah. So, without taking refuge in the relative truth, you cannot realize the absolute truth—you just said. And as you said that, the way I interpreted it was that you have to give appropriate attention and care to your relative life and your relative faculties if they’re going to serve you as vehicles for realization of the absolute truth.

In other words, if you don’t eat, or if you just totally do whatever damages your nervous system and pollutes your mind, and so on, and you say to yourself, “It doesn’t matter because it’s all Maya,” then you’re not going to realize the absolute truth. Is that the implication of that statement?

Swamiji: Absolutely. The relative world we inhabit is extremely valuable for spiritual life, even for nondual spiritual life. As one of our senior Swamis used to say, “Don’t abuse the horse you can’t dismount from.” Don’t abuse any horses anyway, but don’t abuse the one you cannot dismount from. That’s the body. That’s one way of putting it.

Another thing is, we need to ask ourselves: What are we experiencing right now? If I don’t think I’m an enlightened person, what am I experiencing right now? The answer from a student of Vedanta might be, “Oh, you are experiencing the world. This is the world.” Meaning, somewhere implicit in the mind of that person is that Brahman is something else.

That’s not true. What you are experiencing right now is the world laced with Brahman; it is the world on a foundation of Brahman. You are experiencing the world and Brahman together right now.

What Vedanta enables you to do is to separate the two in your understanding. In fact, Vedanta says that what ignorance does, what Maya does, is that inside us, it hides the reality that we are Atman. We think we are only body and mind. Outside us, it hides the reality that Brahman is everything. We think it’s a world.

But both inside and outside us, Brahman is there, ever-present, ever-presented to us. So, right now we are seeing the world plus Brahman. Don’t dismiss this. If you dismiss this, you’re throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

But both inside and outside us, Brahman is there, ever-present, ever-presented to us. So, right now we are seeing the world plus Brahman. Don’t dismiss this. If you dismiss this, you’re throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

In fact, we can put it this way: Falsity in itself is weak. A lie, an error, or falsity in itself is weak. What is deadly, what is lethal, is falsity laced with the truth. What we are experiencing now is Maya on a foundation of Brahman. That’s why it seems so real to us.

Rick: Yeah, it kind of sounds like the term “disinformation,” which is often used in political discussions or something. There’s falsity laced with the truth, which makes it sound credible, but which actually makes it all the more insidious.

Swamiji: Right, and dangerous. Yes, you must learn to separate the two in your understanding.

This experience will still continue even after enlightenment. If you have a body and a mind, you’re going to open your eyes and see forms. You’ve got ears; you’re going to hear sounds. If you have a mind, you’re going to think. You’ve got a tummy; you’re going to feel hungry.

But all of this appears as name and form, and the background reality is understood to be Brahman. Right now, reality and name and form are mixed up, so that this seems real. This seems real for a very real reason: You, the reality, are present right here. You are lending it reality.

Kashmir Shaivism and the richness of manifestation

Rick: So, here’s a question from Declan Cooley from Krakow, Poland. He asks, “Would Swami mind saying something on Kashmir Shaivism and its relationship to Advaita Vedanta, as this has been a major influence on me via Rupert Spira and others? Can you recommend good books and authors on Vedanta?”

Two separate questions there.

Swamiji: All right, Kashmir Shaivism is a traditional philosophical, mystical, and spiritual tradition from Kashmir, which originated about 1,200 or 1,400 years ago. The central and most important texts are the Shiva Sutras, and then you have texts like the Spanda Karika and Vijnana Bhairava.

It’s a very powerful, nondualistic system, so in that sense, it’s very similar to Advaita Vedanta. I have seen many nondual Advaitins become very interested in Kashmir Shaivism. In fact, there was a book by Professor Candradhara Sharma on the nondualistic traditions of India, and there he included Advaita Vedanta, Kashmir Shaivism, Vishishtadvaita Vedanta, Vijnanavada Buddhism, and Madhyamika Buddhism. So, he included five traditions as nondualistic traditions.

Before you plunge into Kashmir Shaivism, if you’re coming from a nondualistic, Advaitic background, you need to know the differences first, before you see the similarities. Straight up, the most important difference, I would say, first of all, is that the world is real in Kashmir Shaivism.

Kashmir Shaivism says the ultimate reality is Para Shiva, the absolute Shiva, as they call it. Shaivism means the teaching, or path, of Shiva. So, the absolute reality is called Shiva, and the world is a vibration of the consciousness which is Shiva. Being a vibration of Shiva, it’s real. It’s not maya; it’s not an appearance, but a manifestation of Shiva—a real manifestation of Shiva. That’s one difference.

The second thing is that Brahman is pure consciousness, existence, and bliss in Vedanta. If you can say something, you can say this much, but it actually goes beyond that into silence. In Kashmir Shaivism, however, it is not just pure consciousness; it has the ability to be reflexive. It is aware; it is self-aware. That is, “I am pure awareness, and I am aware of myself too.” That gives it the potential to vibrate and produce the universe.

Prakasha—the word prakasha means “light”—could be a very good way of defining Advaita Vedanta, Brahman: You are light itself. Light means not physical light, but the light of consciousness. Whereas in Kashmir Shaivism, the term they use is Prakasha-Vimarsha. Prakasha is consciousness, and Vimarsha is a reflexive awareness of itself.

So, these are some fundamental differences. But what is attractive about Kashmir Shaivism is that Advaita Vedanta seems to be the path of knowledge par excellence, whereas Kashmir Shaivism says we can start at different levels, depending upon the seeker.

They speak about four ways. One way is Anupaya, the no-way way, where you are spontaneously awakened. You hear of teachers being spontaneously awakened—something like Ramana Maharshi, for example. He really did not go through a particular tradition before he became awakened. So, that’s the way: the highest way, where you can spontaneously become awakened. But it’s no use sitting and waiting around for that.

The next one they say is Shambhavopaya, the way of Shambhu, or Shiva, which is very close to Advaita Vedanta. It’s a path of knowledge, where your own nature as consciousness is investigated and pointed out, and you are enlightened.

The third one is called Shaktopaya, the way of Shakti, where you have the importance of meditation and the importance of mantras. The whole science of mantras is developed, which Advaita Vedanta really does not go into. So, we have the whole science of mantras.

Then you have the fourth way, which is ritualistic, where you are regarded as an individual being. It’s a very common-sense, practical approach, where all kinds of rituals and practices are recommended. It’s a step-by-step, slower approach to enlightenment. This is very attractive for many seekers, because you have a wealth of techniques.

For example, the book Vijnana Bhairava gives you 112 techniques of meditation, many of which are very interesting. We talked about a pot. Imagine a clay pot. One of the techniques is to look into the clay pot and concentrate on the space in the clay pot. Then, in your mind, dismiss the enclosing pot. That’s supposed to make your mind free of conceptions.

If you do it intensely enough, it removes limitations and conceptions from your mind, making it conceptionless, or allowing you to transcend thought. There are many interesting techniques like that in Vijnana Bhairava.

So, that’s my take on Kashmir Shaivism. I could go on and on. As you can see, I’m not a Kashmir Shaivite, but I’m an enthusiast.

Rick: Yeah, actually, that leads into something I’d like to discuss in our remaining minutes. We probably won’t really have a chance to do justice to it, and we’ll have to have another talk one of these days.

It seems to me that an emphasis on the world as maya, in a way, doesn’t do justice to the beauty of it, the intricacy of it, and the amazing, marvelous, vast intelligence that seems to be intrinsic to every little bit of it. I alluded to that earlier in terms of my understanding of what God is. God is hiding in plain sight, and everything we see is just such a marvelous play and display of divine intelligence that to dismiss it as total illusion almost seems disrespectful to God, and perhaps unrealistic.

It also implies that creation is just sort of a mistake that you want to get out of as quickly as possible, as opposed to a divine play that is profoundly meaningful and purposeful, and necessary. So, that’s enough. That’s not really a question, but I’m sure you can respond to those thoughts and just give your perspective.

Swamiji: In fact, the maya doctrine has often been misunderstood. A great teacher said this about the maya doctrine: It’s a methodology. It’s a methodology with two purposes.

The first, preliminary purpose is to take your mind away from the world and plunge it into the inquiry into what you really are, into the discovery of Brahman. That’s the first thing. Otherwise, if you’re too entranced with this world of names and forms, you’ll never proceed with that inquiry.

But the deeper meaning of the doctrine of maya is very interesting. Maya literally means that this, here, right now, is Brahman.

What does maya say? Things are not what they seem. This world is an appearance. But an appearance of what? Of Brahman. The snake is an appearance, but an appearance of what? The rope.

If the snake is false and the rope is true, let me ask you: Where is the rope? Right where you see the snake. So, where is Brahman? Right where you are seeing people and animals and plants and the world and problems. Right here, right now, this is Brahman.

To say that the world is maya is also equivalent to saying that the world is Brahman. In fact, if you did not say it is maya, if you said this world is real, then you would have to have another real thing called Brahman. Right now, the doctrine of maya actually tells you that the presence you are living in is Brahman.

One way it has been put—and I think very powerfully—is: Where is God most present? The answer was given by a teacher: Not in Banaras or in Jerusalem or Vrindavan or Mecca. There, God is present, no doubt—a powerful presence—but more than that, God is present here, where you are, because you are Brahman.

When is God most present? In heaven after death, or on holy days like Shivaratri or Christmas or Eid? Yes, those days are holy, and you can feel the presence of God more at those times. But even more than all of those holy days combined, God is most present right now, because you are present right now.

And where is God most present? Is God present in temples or churches or pictures? Yes, God is present there, but God is most present in you. Most present in you, most present now, most present here—this is what maya actually means.

Most present in you, most present now, most present here—this is what maya actually means.

Rick: It seems to me that when we think about what we are actually looking at, and about how much science has told us about what happens when you’re looking at a flower, there’s an amazing miracle in the fact that you’re actually seeing it and in how a flower operates.

We’re looking at this vast, incomprehensible intelligence doing its thing, and it seems to me that what that implies is that the Brahman quality, as it were, of Brahman is vast, infinite intelligence.

If we equate Brahman with God, with consciousness—all those terms being equivalent—then we’re saying that Brahman isn’t, again, some plain-vanilla ultimate reality, but is just brimful of potentiality and intelligence and creative potential, and so on. Maybe I’m getting more into Kashmir Shaivism territory than Vedanta, but that’s the kind of thinking I resonate with.

Swamiji: In fact, Advaita Vedanta, in its final analysis, does not actually dismiss the world. What Advaita does is make you limitless.

You see, in a dualistic form of thinking, there is a limit, a boundary: God and world, sacred and secular. If both are real, then there must be two separate things. If both are not real—if one of them is real and the other is not—then what we consider to be the world is pervaded by this one intelligence, one existence, consciousness, and bliss.

Now, if you look at it in a dualistic way, you might ask, “Am I going to be a scientist or a saint?” In a dualistic way, you have to be a saint, because after all, if you want to be a spiritual seeker, that’s the thing to do, and the scientist is something different. He is of the world, and you are of heaven.

But if it’s nondualistic, you can be a saintly scientist or a scientific saint. The limits are dissolved.

If it’s nondualistic, you can be a saintly scientist or a scientific saint. The limits are dissolved.

Closing

Rick: Good. Well, we’d better wrap it up. You have to eat lunch and get over to Princeton.

Swamiji: Yes. Thank you, Rick.

Rick: I don’t want you to speed, or your driver to speed, and there’s so much more we can talk about. For instance, you inspired me to read the Ashtavakra Samhita, which I did, and I took three pages of notes. So, we can have another conversation one of these days and go into that and other things.

Swamiji: Absolutely. I will look forward to that.

Rick: So, let me make a couple of quick wrap-up points, and then we’ll conclude. Those who have been watching or listening have been watching or listening to an episode of Buddha at the Gas Pump, an ongoing series of conversations with spiritually awakening people.

There have been hundreds of them so far, and if you dive into our archives, you can check all those out. Hopefully, God willing, there will be hundreds more.

So, stay tuned. Come to the website, if you like, batgap.com. Sign up for the email, check out the other menu items, and you’ll see what is there to see.

Thanks a lot, and Swamiji, thank you so much. I really enjoyed this conversation.

Swamiji: Thank you very much. Thank you. You take care.

Rick: You too. Have a good day.

Swamiji: Thank you.