This correction is enlightenment.

Enlightenment is the removal of ignorance, is the correction of error.

Enlightenment does not make you Brahman, does not make you Atman, does not make you pure being or pure consciousness, which you already are.

So there is no beginning and end to your reality which is pure being, pure consciousness, Atman, Brahman.

Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump.

My name is Rick Archer.

Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of conversations with spiritually awakening people.

We're just about to enter our 17th season of doing this, and we have recorded nearly 750 interviews now.

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My guest today is Swami Sarvapriyananda.

He is the minister and spiritual leader of the Vedanta Society of New York, a post once held by Swami Vivekananda, who was a direct disciple of Sri Ramakrishna.

He joined the Ramakrishnamath in 1994 and took sannyasa, monastic vows, in 2004.

In 2019 and 2020, he was a Nagaraj Fellow at Harvard Divinity Swamiji is a popular Vedanta teacher.

He's spoken at various forums such as TEDx and SAND and Google and many universities including Harvard.

He often engages in dialogues with thinkers such as Bernardo Kastrup, David Chalmers, Sam Harris.

He has participated in major interfaith events including the Parliament of World Religions in Toronto, programs at the United Nations headquarters in New York and recently an event at the Vatican.

He's a prolific writer.

He makes Advaita Vedanta accessible to modern audiences through books such as these, which I'll show you, which I just read all of in preparation for his interview.

So we have Fullness and Emptiness, Mahavakya, the Essence of Vedanta, Vedanta in Practice, Dakshinamurti Stotram, and From illusion to infinity, discovering the self.

My questions today will be derived from these different books and other things as well.

In addition to listening to these, I also listened to the retreat you just gave in Rishikesh, I guess it was in October.

That was nice.

My friend Shubhata, who's a Backgap volunteer, was one of the attendees.

My last interview with Swami was nearly eight years ago, but I've been taking Zoom classes with him for most of the years since then, studying the Upanishads, the Gita, and something called Vedanta-sara.

And anyone is welcome to join those classes.

So I'll put an email address on Swami's Batgap page that you can contact to be notified of the details.

So I have a lot of questions prepared and things I'd like to talk to you about, but I'd like to start by asking you what most interests you these days.

What is your hottest topic or the leading edge in your quest for deeper understanding?

I would say the interface between Advaita Vedanta and modern consciousness studies.

I think that's the area I've been focusing on increasingly in recent years with the new twist thrown into it by the developments in AI.

That's a new twist in the whole thing.

Advaita Vedanta is something that I love and I study and practice and try to teach.

But also, as I said, its relationship with modern consciousness studies, AI.

Again, AI, I'm a little hesitant to say that because I keep getting called for these talks relating AI and consciousness.

I speak on the philosophy of consciousness from the Vedantic perspective or Indian philosophical perspective or from the philosophy of mind.

I really don't have any grounding in the technicalities of AI.

But having said that, it interests me.

There's a really good podcast that I listened to recently, it's about eight episodes, called The Last Invention.

I highly recommend it to anybody interested in AI, but it's very well produced and they interview the real founders of AI and the main influential people and their opinions range from "it's going to kill us all" to "it's going to save us all" and everything in between.

But if you want to learn more about AI, that's a good one.

I use it all the time.

It's very useful for lots of things.

For instance, I took PDFs of all your books, fed it into AI, and it gave me nice little summaries and questions.

I also read the books, but it was nice having those summaries and having little quotes extracted and things.

pertinent to your question, I attended this very interesting workshop recently in Venice.

That was my first visit to Italy this summer and it was a very interesting workshop.

It was called Towards a New Theory of Consciousness.

Federico Feigen by any chance?

He couldn't attend but we had people like Christoph Koch who is a leading neuroscientist.

We had David Chalmers who coined the term hard problem of consciousness.

consciousness.

You just mentioned AI and the leading people there.

We had the gentleman who is in charge of Google's Gemini AI, is the head of the research there.

His name is Blaze.

We had one of the leading quantum theorists in the world, Carlo Rovelli.

We had Google's head of quantum computing, Helmut.

We had Dr.

Anil Seth, a very well-known neuroscientist who has written extensively Unconsciousness and popular books that too.

We had a Taoist philosopher, we had Ram Chakraborty representing Indian philosophy and I was the monk there.

It was an amazing group brought together for five days in Venice by the organizer was equally an interesting person.

He is a Berggruen, Nicholas Berggruen.

He's a billionaire and if you google the homeless billionaire and equally the philosopher billionaire.

You will find a lot of material.

New York Times once wrote about him, the philosopher billionaire.

He has this Berggruen Institute.

One thing they focus on is consciousness studies and in a very open way.

So you bring in Eastern tradition, science, quantum mechanics, AI and see what emerges from it.

So that was the whole idea.

That was an amazing experience.

Some people think that AI is conscious or can be conscious and I've talked with people who feel like it's definitely channeling some higher entity and that they're communicating with it.

Other people say no that's just it's programming but I suppose theoretically it could become a sophisticated enough technology that it could mirror some higher consciousness or consciousness itself or maybe not.

That was exactly the topic of a big fight I had with one of the leading AI experts of the world today.

I was very happy to meet with him and I was personally very enriched by that encounter.

And the fight was of course, I'm just calling it a fight, it was a very nice but prolonged argument which resulted in something very positive.

So it was this gentleman I just mentioned, Blaze, who is the head of Google's Gemini AI, brilliant person.

So the background is that in this workshop, one of the very interesting formats they had, I mean apart from the usual paper presentations and you know across the table discussions was that they paired you up and the two of you would go for a walk alongside Venice's canals or once we went for a walk in the garden of a 12th century Italian monastery and by the Mediterranean and then you get one hour to talk, you can fight, you can discuss stuff, then you come back and tell others how your position shifted or it did not shift and why it shifted or did not shift that was very productive at least two of those conversations gave me new stuff to think about one of them was this argument with this AI researcher and first of all I found him very open-minded and extremely quick on the uptake as you would expect from someone of that caliber so within 15-20 minutes he had the basics of Advaita Vedanta in his his brass pen.

So he pointed out that his position was AI can be conscious if it's not already conscious it can be conscious.

My position was it cannot be conscious.

I won't go into the arguments but it was very enriching.

If people are interested they can look it up.

The result of it all was that there was a paper, Consciousness in Three World Views, Advaita Vedanta, Quantum Theory and AI.

If you google it, it's available freely as a pdf online.

He was an author, I was a co-author and to top it all Carlo Rovelli was one of the leading quantum theorists in the world.

He was a co-author.

He came in the middle of the conversation and he brought in a quantum theoretic perspective on what consciousness could be and then he's the one who suggested we should put it all together.

This is like brilliant stuff.

We should put it all together in paper, the argument, the chains and three world views without committing.

I mean nobody's being asked to commit to Advaita Vedanta anything.

So that was very interesting.

Yeah, I think I might have a copy of that, but if I don't, I'll ask you to send me a link or something so that I can put it on your Batgap page and people can read it.

But I mean, Hindus believe that mountains can be conscious or the sun is Surya, you know, is on a subtle level, the sun is a conscious entity and it's not just a fusion reaction and things like that.

So maybe it's not that much of a stretch to believe that AI could be conscious in some respect.

Right and that's the line this AI expert took with me.

He said look it's your Advaita Vedanta which makes it much more probable that AI is conscious.

He asked a few basic questions.

From the Advaita Vedanta perspective let's put aside pure consciousness, Atman, Brahman for the aside for the time being.

Just look at the way we think about consciousness in consciousness studies in in the dictionary in our day-to-day usage.

You know I am seeing or hearing, I'm thinking, I'm feeling I have all these experiences and that's what I call consciousness.

Let's just talk about that.

That's what Advaita would call reflected consciousness.

So he asked a few basic questions.

Where in Advaita Vedanta, where would you find this reflected consciousness?

And I had to say in the mind.

That's the only place you find this reflected consciousness.

Then he asked the question where would you find a mind?

And I said I guess in living beings.

And then he went into the computational theory of life and ask me questions like does life have to be carbon based, can it be silicon based, if it, so I mean he's talking about artificial life, if there's artificial life why can't there be an artificial mind and if there's an artificial mind why can't it reflect consciousness just like your or my mind does and so this all pervasive consciousness see now by the way it becomes easier for AI to be conscious because AI doesn't have to produce consciousness it just has to access or channel the existing or reflect an all-pervasive existing consciousness so why would it be so difficult that was his position yeah interesting yeah I mean in Vedanta everything is consciousness and but then the question is well if everything is consciousness does that mean everything is conscious to some degree people like Mayor Baba I think I argued that even a rock is conscious in some way and then as you go up the evolutionary chain consciousness gets reflected with more and more fullness and complexity.

Yes that distinction is important at least to begin with we should make the distinction that even if Advaita Vedanta claims that everything is all pervasive consciousness so in some sense there's consciousness in everything it does not claim that everything is conscious.

The difference is between the presence and absence of what Vedanta calls reflected consciousness.

And reflected consciousness is exactly the kind of consciousness with which we are familiar in our own minds, in our own experience.

Right now I am conscious and you are conscious too.

And this consciousness which we feel, which gives us subjective experience of sensory experience, of thinking, of feeling, of memory, of ourself all of this is what is called due to reflected consciousness.

And this reflected consciousness requires the presence of a mind which is a part of what Advaita Vedanta calls a subtle body, sukshma sharira in Sanskrit.

So all these physical things, they may be called, they are physical entities but they don't become a body until there is an indwelling subtle body which makes it a sentient being.

The moment there is a subtle body, a mind, then there is reflected consciousness and then you would call it a sentient being.

Otherwise, rocks and planets and stars, their consciousness is there in a very absolute sense in the sense that they exist in that sense alone.

But they are not conscious beings like us.

So this is the difference.

And this makes all the difference between you and the table and chair you're sitting on.

Physical body is living body and living body supports a mind and the mind supports this reflected consciousness.

like to give an entirely different example, Sun and the Moon.

At night, the sky would be all dark, even though sunlight is spread across space, but we would not see it unless the Moon were there to reflect that sunlight.

Then you see the Moon glowing with moonlight.

So if the Moon was not there, there would still be sunlight, but it would look like dark space, nothing would be visible.

Similarly, without a reflected consciousness, it would just be a physical entity, a material entity, which we look out and see these entities.

There is no inner being there, there is no inner consciousness there.

I think some would argue though, just to pursue this a little bit further, that since there is a subtle level of everything as well as its gross manifestation, such as Mount Arunachala for instance, there's a subtle level to it.

Perhaps even though it's inanimate on the gross level, on the subtle level, perhaps there could be an indwelling entity of some sort that occupies that mountain as its abode, as Ramana seemed to think, or Mount Kailash in Tibet or whatever.

And in that case, it's not like the mountain is conscious, but there's a consciousness, and not just pure consciousness but some impulse of consciousness indwelling in many many things if not all.

That's certainly the Hindu belief.

So for example because consciousness is all pervasive in some places you would find consciousness identified with what would seem to be a physical body say like the sun you mentioned the sun earlier the surya from the vedic perspective its consciousness is just like here is is consciousness with the Swami's body.

There is consciousness with the body of the Sun.

So there is a conscious being behind the Sun.

I'm not saying that it's a general all-pervasive Brahman.

But these are the deities which the Vedic Rishis would worship, pray to.

So that kind of thing is there.

It's a bit like, I would say, I'll give another example, our dreams.

So in our dreams, everything in the dream, every entity in the dream, living and non-living in the dream, is actually our mind.

Our mind has produced all of them or is appearing as all of them.

Now in our dream there could be a human being, a dog and a rock or a wooden table.

So in one sense the wooden table or rock is non-living, non-conscious and the dog and the human being is conscious.

Yes, and for all purposes in the dream that's what it would appear like, but we know a deeper truth is that there is the dreamer's mind underlying all of them.

It's basically all mind.

In that sense.

Okay, so here's a curveball question for you.

Traditional Hindu...

I just thought of this this morning when I was out in the yard filling the bird feeder.

Traditional Hindus believe that the Vedas are primordial and universal.

If there are intelligent civilizations scattered throughout the universe, and I think there trillions.

Do you think they have Rishis who cognize the same Vedas that the human Rishis have cognized and that in their body of knowledge there would be something akin to Advaita Vedanta?

I'm sure they would.

Not that they would have the Sanskrit Vedas themselves.

So there are two views on this.

There are the absolutely traditional pundits who would say the Vedas are these Sanskrit books.

Not physical books but at least the mantras themselves in Sanskrit.

And the The Rishis are defined as those who saw the mantras, literally had an experience of the mantras.

In the very fabric of creation and its foundation.

Yes.

Rishaya mantra-rashtara.

This is the Sanskrit definition of a Rishi.

Rishis are those who are the seers of the mantras.

A more general and maybe a more reasonable view today would be what Vivekananda said as this body of spiritual knowledge, spiritual laws, which is there across the universe, is foundational to the universe and one expression of that would be the Vedas we find in Hinduism but so would be the core spiritual texts and teachings of every religion and he said there are there will be more to come also so this body of spiritual truth whether discovered or not discovered whether codified or not codified yet whether present in books or whether in Sanskrit or Latin or Greek whatever it is the core knowledge that is the one which is the real Vedas, the real eternal spiritual law.

You need not even call it the Vedas.

Vedas just literally means knowledge.

So in that sense, that makes more sense to us, you know, scientific people of this day and age.

Otherwise we think how can a book be eternal?

No.

And there were long debates.

There's a reason for these seemingly strange doctrines.

Among one of the schools of the ancient Indian philosophers was called the Mimamsakas and they were the ones who specialized in the Vedas, in Vedic interpretation.

One interesting argument they gave is that any conscious being is fallible except God and so the Vedas are not produced by any conscious being so it they're not written down by a being that leads to a very strange position where you have a book which was never written down I mean which was never composed by anybody so it's a book that has eternally existed now you can say it was something given by God which would be like revelation in say in Judaism, Christianity or Islam or you can say as the Imam Shaikh has said, the knowledge was with God.

It's not even God gave that knowledge.

It exists along with God.

So it's an eternal body of spiritual knowledge.

There are different doctrines.

Interesting.

They all have interesting insights.

Yeah I think Mozart said that sometimes a whole an entire symphony he would just flash in his mind and then he'd have to take weeks actually writing it down.

But the whole thing, boom, was there as if it were just given by some news or higher source.

There is, that's a very important point, there is something to that.

It's, whether you go back to Plato's forms or these ideas of, the Vedic ideas of an eternal spiritual truths or great artists and composers like Mozart, as you just said, they seem to access an existing reality.

Before the 20th century, poets would say that it came to them like the muse.

It's something that you catch and you write it down.

They would not even take ownership or authorship of it, almost.

What has happened in the 20th century is because of our humanism and grounded in a kind of materialism, we ended up worshipping creativity.

So the The heroes of the 20th century and the 21st century are writers and poets and artists.

We have replaced the saints and mystics of past ages with this new hero worship with a dreadful consequence.

There was a speaker, I forget who she was, a writer.

She said that the increased incidence of mental illness, suicide, unhappiness among creative people.

One reason for that is that we have arrogantly taken possession of the creative process and say that I created it.

I am this great, cool person who has written this book or has painted the masterpiece and then you expect the modern capitalist system expects this person to keep producing bestsellers and masterpieces and you forget that true creativity seems to come from some kind of eternal existing reality and access to something transcendent that is covered over and you turn this person into a best-seller writing author.

And that's a tremendous consequences for the psyche of this person who is already sensitive and already delicately balanced.

So the point being, great scientists, I've heard a mathematician, especially pure mathematicians, they have said more than one.

And I have heard it from award-winning top-level mathematicians, a mathematician who is a monk, a friend of mine, he's one of India's leading mathematicians today, he said his greatest discoveries where you get the intuition of something already existing, you see that, then you come back and you work it out step by step, that takes a long time, but you've got the basic intuition, and when you've got that basic intuition, it's not that you came up with it, rather you discovered something, you didn't invent it, you discovered something existing then you worked it out just like Mozart writing it down with a lot of hard work over days just like a poet getting an intuition then composing a poem and then working it and you know refining it that takes expertise and hard work so in each case notice one thing that they have all an intuition of accessing an existing transcendent reality not inventing it yeah there's so many interesting examples Paul McCartney dreamed the song yesterday and when he woke up he knocked it out on the piano a little bit and then he went around to John Lennon and his and Paul you know George Martin and people like that say have you guys heard this song and after about two weeks he said well I guess it's mine.

It was original, it came in a dream.

That's uh that's you know very um I would say evocative because I live one block down from the Dakota.

John Lennon was right here.

I know you told a funny story one time when you're walking past there and there are all these hippies sitting outside because that's where John Lennon lived and died and some guy came up to you and said, "Whoa man, you look like you know where it's at." Yeah, I know some of them.

They sing John Lennon songs all day long.

Right here, There's this place called Imagine, named after the song Imagine.

It's part of the Central Park and there's a circle with Imagine inscribed on the ground and people come, they take photographs with that and somebody's always, even in the midst of snow right now, there's somebody with a guitar sitting and singing John Lennon songs.

And on his birthday and the day he passed, there are people who will come and put roses there and hold impromptu concerts.

Nice.

Okay, so here's a question that was sent in by a friend.

I have enjoyed listening to many of Swami Saurabh Piyananda's talks, but one concern I have is that he makes it seem like awakening is still extremely rare.

I don't think that is either helpful or accurate.

I don't like the word "enlightenment," but the falling away of identity is a very real potential for all of us.

That represents a finality, the total end of the seeker.

The word enlightenment and even the notions of awakened or unawakened are completely obliterated.

I have a client who had an initial shift nearly two years ago.

Just this past week, identity fell away.

I know of about 40 people now who have gotten this far in the awakening process.

In a way, it represents a radical new beginning in the life of the person.

In the years to come, if humanity survives, I think we are going to learn a lot more about this evolutionary stage.

So based on what she said, I have some questions for you.

What is enlightenment?

How common do you think it is?

Over the past century or more, how many of the monks in the Ramakrishna order do you think have attained it?

Is the falling away of identity or a sense of personal self a feature of it?

Okay, that's four questions.

Alright, let me start with the last one, the falling of the sense of identity.

First of all, I agree with the person who has written these questions entirely.

In fact, even from a traditional Advaita Vedanta teaching perspective, when she was writing that it's not helpful to speak about enlightenment or awakening, rather it's better to speak about falling away of identification, of personal identity.

Absolutely, it was in my mind, I was just listening to, I was just recalling the words in Hindi of a monk teaching, saying in Hindi that, "Anant banne ki jeet mat karo" - don't be stubborn about trying to become infinite, you know, like forcing with "I am the infinite" or "I am Brahman", that doesn't work.

Rather, he says, focus on what you are not.

See very clearly, here is the body, indubitably here is the body, and see that you are not the body.

Let's make a beginning where the problem really lies.

Here is the mind.

That's what we are most identified with.

And see that even the mind is not what you exactly are.

So body and mind are both, you can call them arisings in consciousness, at least very clearly they are something that is experienced in consciousness.

So yes, but the first point, the last question, I entirely agree with that.

It is more helpful to precisely, when you give the instructions to a spiritual seeker, don't chase trying to become infinite, trying to become limitless consciousness or limitless being Brahman or Atman, but focus on what comes earlier, that I am not the body.

What does it really mean to be I am not the body?

Because even when you are not the body, the body is still present.

when I say I am NOT this piece of cloth.

It's all around me, it's wrapped around my body but I am NOT it and I am very clear in what sense I am NOT this piece of cloth which I'm wearing right now.

Similarly with the body being fully present, fully active, you're fully embodied and yet in what very clear sense you are NOT the body.

And then go on to the even more tremendous understanding that we are not the mind.

So yes that point which she made I accept that completely and that's instruction I have been giving people I've been telling people once in a while that try to see very clearly what you are not rather than trying to become Brahman or become the infinite or something.

Okay when you try to do that yeah.

By the same token you're you're not the ahamkara, you're not the I sense.

But so when you realize your true identity is consciousness, obviously the body doesn't cease to exist, the mind doesn't cease to exist, but does the I sense cease to exist or is it there as a faculty and yet you no longer identified with it as being who and what you are?

What you said cease to exist just as the body doesn't cease to exist and the mind doesn't cease to exist.

at the end.

So the I sense does not I mean, if one became enlightened, it's not that your kidney or your heart or lung would suddenly stop functioning or cease to exist.

No.

Just as the body continues exactly as it has, the mind with all its faculties, with all its capacities, the memory, the intellect, and in Vedanta the ego is also a capacity or a faculty of the mind.

are precise definitions of what is an intellect, what's a memory, what's the ego and in Vedanta ego is defined as the the appropriating or unifying faculty of the mind.

Lots of things are going on here in this very complex body-mind system and you need something which unifies it into oneself and that's again one more function of the mind.

There's talking going on and I say I talk.

Now the I sense is a function of the mind.

It doesn't talk at all.

It can't talk.

It's just a thought in the mind but the talking is being done by the lungs and the voice box and the tongue and you know the language circuits in the brain all of that gets together to do the talking and the eye sense comes in and appropriates it and says I am talking and that's a vital function that's how it we function as a unit as a single living being so after enlightenment the eye sense still stays there but there's a huge difference.

We don't think we are the ego and we don't feel that we are the ego.

You can see it just as you clearly see that I'm not the body it's an object I'm not the mind it's a set of subtle objects in the very same way I'm not the ego.

The ego doesn't denote denote us anymore.

Earlier before that I and the ego were one and the same thing.

What are you?

I am I and what's this I?

It's me!

So this is absolute identity that's exactly who I am and we have this kind of a sense of right here if you want even you can locate it a sense of me right behind this face inside this skull somewhere because of the way I've been taught about the brain generating consciousness maybe and for very good reasons somewhere in the face in behind the face because the face has all these sensory organs it's it's very sensitive therefore it's very natural that you have a concentration of the feeling of the self somewhere in the region of the face and the skull yet it's an illusion it's not you it's very easy to see through Vedanta and meditation that it's something that's also something appearing in consciousness it's in me it I am NOT in the skull the skull, the body, the thought, I, they are all appearing in me and disappearing in me.

So yes, the ego, we are not the ego.

The question about what constitutes the enlightenment and awakening.

Vedanta has a precise definition.

It is the realization I am Brahman.

Right now the realization is I am this guy, Sarva-prayananda, this body, this mind.

would be enlightenment.

It would be a shift in the understanding of what I am.

Not this body-mind, not in the ego, but this one limitless consciousness in which body-mind-ego are appearing and disappearing.

That would constitute enlightenment.

And also living it.

Because when I identify with the body and the mind, it's not just a realization, it's not just an epiphany, "Oh I am the body.

No, I actually live as the body.

That's the whole problem.

I behave like I am the body.

Whatever happens to the body is happening to me.

And so if I'm enlightened and I realize I am pure consciousness, I should also be able to live like that.

So that would constitute full awakening or enlightenment.

And then the question is how common is it?

And like I asked, you know, in the history of the Ramakrishna order, what percentage of the monks who would be prime candidates for enlightenment do you think attained it?

Yes and the person wrote that...

She thought it's very common and that you're making it sound more rare than it really is.

Yes and I've been accused of exactly the opposite.

That you make it sound so easy that it's not so easy, it's really really difficult.

The truth lies somewhere in between.

that I've heard it said by, there are some spiritual traditions which say things like, "Oh, enlightenment is not possible anymore in this day and age, in this age of Kali, you have to be born many, many, many times and then eventually you'll attain to perfection." So, not right now.

- Right, and some have the gall to say women couldn't attain it.

- Women couldn't attain it, and stuff like that.

Or monk, only monks could attain it and non-monastics could not attain it.

They would only have to wait for a male birth next time or becoming a monk the next time or becoming a Brahmin and things like that.

So there are the Jain monks for example, among the most austere even till today, the most austere monastic orders in India.

There are these two categories.

One those who do not wear any clothes at all.

They remain nude all in rain and cold and all the time.

And those who wear the flimsiest of white clothes and the monks, the naked ones, have this thing you know that only we are going to get enlightened and free.

Because you're wearing clothes you can't get enlightened and free.

By that logic a lot of hippies would have gotten enlightened.

Yeah.

So, no, none of that really counts for much.

People from a wider perspective, because you are that, what can stop you from realizing what you already are and what you always have been.

So enlightenment is possible for everybody.

In fact Vedanta would say that's the whole point of this existence to become enlightened about our real nature.

Now how common is it?

Neither uncommon nor very common.

It is rare.

It's rare mostly, the real reason why it's rare is because very few people are seeking it.

Among the billions of people existing today, very few are actively seeking enlightenment.

Among those who are seeking enlightenment, if they do it seriously, it's not all that rare.

You would expect to make, certainly make some progress in this lifetime itself towards enlightenment, and many would have what you might call enlightenment experiences.

Now, is it rare?

Yes and no.

There are fewer than one might think and there are many more than one might think.

In the Ramakrishna order, I know for a fact, as far as I understand, to the extent to which my understanding goes, there have been many.

Does everybody become enlightened in the Ramakrishna order?

I would think not.

But is there nobody today who is enlightened?

Again, the answer would be no.

No, there are people who are enlightened and I am not just saying it as a possibility.

I have this feeling of among a few people have sensed it or felt it.

Now there are a whole range of enlightenment experiences, genuine, lasting.

One characteristic of an enlightenment experience would be it would last.

There are all sorts of mystical experiences, genuine mystical experiences which come and go.

They don't last.

a very valuable memory for example, something, one of the peak experiences of life let us say, most valuable.

It might be a dream, it might be a vision, it might be some kind of epiphany and that would last in the sense the memory would last and it would contribute to our spiritual life but the experience itself will come and go.

But in the Advaitic sense the enlightenment experience, the breakthrough would be a permanent shift like this person has said the dropping away of the self.

It will not come back again.

If it's genuine, it will never come back again.

It will be a shift in what we mean by "I".

When I say "I", right now it goes almost instinctively to this body, to this personality.

For the enlightened person, "I" will go directly to this background consciousness.

They may behave like a body-mind just like the rest of us, but if you poke them, if you push them, "Really, are you this body?" They would have to say with a smile I guess.

No I am not.

I can clearly see that I am not.

So that's one.

It is possible.

However, the reason why I am careful about this is, well let's be conservative.

Let's be conservative about this.

If I am enlightened, then to claim that I am not will not do me any harm.

If I am not enlightened, to claim that I am enlightened will do me harm and do harm to others.

Nothing will stop you in your spiritual progress.

If you claim that I am not enlightened, you'll still go on.

You're a spiritual seeker, you're advanced, you will go on.

Personally, from our perspective, why should I stop short of what was promised to me?

Transcendence of suffering, being deeply fulfilled, the life which will become more and more saintly.

I should see those results come in my life.

Until then, why should I stop and say that okay I've done it, I'm there now.

Why?

Why do that?

Why not get the full benefits which were promised?

Yeah.

One teacher I interviewed years ago coined the term "oozers" for people who ooze gradually into awakening rather than in a sudden dramatic shift.

Do you think such people could have achieved a significant abiding awakening without even having realized it?

I think both are true.

One is there is generally a dramatic shift and awakening and coming to understand oh I see that kind of aha moment what exactly it is can will differ widely from person to person tradition to tradition however even in those cases which are which see dramatic shifts that oozing is there in many cases there's a general development up to that point spiritual evolution and afterwards also there's a spiritual revolution.

The journey still continues except that earlier it might be what I'd like to call we are spiritual seekers and after that moment we are spiritual finders.

We no longer really have any doubt about it at all.

We have found it and it's an obvious fact but the problems are not yet over and the problems are the same problems which were there earlier, struggles in the mind now instead of trying to seek it we have found it but how about deploying it to solve our problems so that journey continues that's why I love Vivekananda's very simple definition of spirituality he called it the manifestation of the divinity already within us very carefully chosen words manifestation the manifestation is not just knowing something it's also expressing it living it and the divinity already within us it's not something that we have constructed or we have brainwashed ourselves into believing it's rather a discovery of what was something amazing which is already there within us so that is manifested manifestation requires both a dramatic paradigm shift in who or what I am and also a gradual slower or faster manifestation of what we might call saintly qualities.

I'd like you to tell the story of Totapuri and his brass pot and then I'm going to ask you a question about it.

Yes, Totapuri was Sri Ramakrishna's Advaita Guru.

He was himself an enlightened being but Sri Ramakrishna noticed that he would meditate every day.

He would be in deep meditation for several hours every day.

He was this traditional wandering monk, a very tough, from all accounts a huge man.

Usually he would go around naked and he He would travel with his, they would have the brass water pot and the tongs for lighting and kindling the holy fire.

The kind of monk, even now there are a few like this, but they were more common maybe a hundred years ago.

Traditional wandering Vedantic monk.

Now he would meditate every day under a tree on the bank of the Ganga there in the temple garden of Dakshineshwar.

So Sri Ramakrishna asked him, "You are enlightened, you have attained Nirvikalpa Samadhi, you have realized the truth, why do you need to meditate every day?" And Droddhapuri said, "What you are saying is right, but look at this brass pot.

I have to scrub it every day, otherwise it loses its shine.

Similarly, the mind, if I do not meditate, if I do not center it in Brahman, which I have realized, which I know that is the reality, I am that, if I do not center it in that and immersed it in Brahman, it will lose its shine.

So it's like the samsara puts a layer on it, so you have to scrub it every day.

And that's why I meditate.

Sri Ramakrishna said in reply to that, "What you are saying is right, but if the pot were made of gold, you wouldn't have to scrub it every day.

It would retain its shine regardless." And Tothapuri smiled.

That's the story.

So gold would represent what, an avatar or something?

So the gold would represent what?

That is not easily explained.

I saw it as someone like an avatar.

Like Sri Ramakrishna, we consider him an avatar.

He really doesn't need meditation for enlightenment and to be a Jeevan Mukta free of evil living.

Whereas the rest of us do.

So maybe he is a golden pot and we are our minds are brass pot.

or staying within the bounds of Advaita Vedanta because Sri Ramakrishna would guide people along their lines of spiritual development.

Since Totapuri was an Advaitic monk, what message does this gold pot and brass pot have for him in Advaita?

It would mean that this mind which you think is getting a layer of samsara and you need to center it in samadhi daily to keep it pure and bright and clear reflecting the truth of I am Brahman.

This mind itself is Brahman even the so-called impurities you think are impurities coming the whole thing there's nothing but Brahman and once you realize that and center yourself in that and see that you actually cannot be thrown off that center you are it.

This This idea that I am centered in Brahman but sometimes because of the forces of samsara, ups and downs of life, I am thrown off my game and I need to center myself, this is also a question put up by the mind.

This is not a question put up by Brahman because Brahman is always centered in Brahman and you are Brahman.

This is not just a logical play on words, it's a vital spiritual truth.

As long as you think I need a regular course of meditation to be centered in, yes I'm but I need to be centered in Brahman and a regular course of meditation is what I need.

There is something still missing there.

And it's not that once you realize I am always Brahman regardless of whatever happens, that means I'll stop meditating.

Oh no, I would probably meditate, maybe even better.

But I would not say that anything, from my perspective, anything depends on that meditation.

Well, you know, if an enlightened person is completely sedentary and never exercises, his muscles are going to atrophy.

If he doesn't eat, he's going to become emaciated and maybe starve to death.

So maybe by the same token, a little something or other that polishes the pot is necessary for that dimension of his existence, for the mind, to just keep it shiny.

that goes without saying and in these subtle matters it's always better to look at the lives of the Saints those who are held to be enlightened in the traditions across the world and in your own tradition will be in Buddhism, Advaita, Vedanta whatever it is if you look at their lives we get light on we get an answer on to these questions so did the Saints meditate and the answer would be an overwhelming yes they did.

Even after enlightenment, yes, they did.

So in that case, there you are.

There's the answer.

Yeah.

The reason I found that story interesting is that it does imply that enlightenment can be tarnished like a pot, but by the same token, probably it can be burnished, made more full and refined.

And that leads me to a quote from Swami Vivekananda who said, "Eternal progression is eternal bondage," meaning that the never-ending pursuit of improvement, spiritual growth or progression, keeps one perpetually bound, always a seeker but never a finder.

But then you commented that true spiritual realization is the end of seeking, but that further progress in worldly or personal terms becomes welcome.

It is no longer bondage, it becomes the natural expression of the divinity within you.

And I'll end that with a quote by St.

Teresa of Avila who said, "It appears that God Himself is on the journey." So which is paradoxical, what St.

Teresa said, God obviously cannot be in the journey because by definition God is perfect.

I think she was saying that even God might be evolving in some way.

Maybe but God is also perfect all the time otherwise wouldn't be God in the traditional theological terms.

So the word manifestation I think solves this issue.

You could realize you are Brahman and you are perfect, but there can be degrees of manifestation.

Clearly in the lives of the saints, Vivekananda and Brahmananda and Sivananda, the other disciples of Sri Ramakrishna, they were clearly not the same.

Were they equally enlightened?

Yes, in one sense, they all knew that they were Brahman.

They were equally enlightened.

But the display of spiritual power and the kind of lives they led were different from each other.

So there can be degrees of manifestation and the degrees of manifestation can be an endless progression.

There's no problem because in your real nature you are Brahman, you are one with God, you are the Atman, you are the Buddha nature.

Once you realize that, there is peace.

This question about eternal progression, even Sri Ramakrishna challenged it.

Somebody was speaking in front of Sri Ramakrishna that this is an endless path and he was waxing poetic.

Sri Ramakrishna cut him off sharply and he said, "No, where there is peace, that's the end." So if there will be a point, you will find final peace and that is the end.

Yeah, here's another quote from one of your books.

"Experiences do not improve or degrade the Sakshi, the witness, the pure consciousness, just as mud does not influence the sun that is reflecting off a mirror." But mud certainly influences the reflection.

In fact, it may influence the reflection so much that there is no reflection.

The most violent, evil people who have ever lived had pure awareness at their core, as all beings do, but their reflections were very distorted and polluted.

The answer to that is in the observation itself.

Swami Vivekananda says in one place, one place all that we can do is polish the mirror and that sort of explains it and we must polish the mirror we must polish otherwise it'll get clouded yeah or polish the pot if you prefer pot analogy yes polish the mirror polish the pot and out of sheer self-interest because if it does get clouded then you lose the benefit of enlightenment you don't feel it anymore and you begin to suffer and then create trouble for other selves.

Rick: That, yeah, which I was going to say, it's not just self-interest because you'll create trouble for others, so it's in their interest as well.

David: Yes.

Rick: Yeah.

My friend Emmeline Lambert, who was on BatGap in October, sent me a question to ask you.

She said, "Could you unpack a paradox here?

In Advaita, if enlightenment is realizing oneself as limitless, changeless awareness, How can it meaningfully be called an experience or an event, which by definition has a beginning and an end?

Is enlightenment better understood as the end of all event chasing and the infinite relaxation of the seeker into what is already the case?

If so, then what is the true place of surrender?

Is surrender simply the culmination of the journey or is it a necessary attitude at every stage of spiritual life, practice, awakening and post-awakening integration?

And how would you describe that surrender in practical terms for a Vedanta practitioner?

There are two parts to this.

One is the role of surrender in Vedanta.

The other is could there be a beginning of enlightenment since it's an eternal thing?

Yes.

Alright.

So what is an eternal thing is our real nature.

Atman, Brahman, pure consciousness, the Buddha nature.

It's always there.

Whether you're seeking it or not seeking it, whether one is enlightened or on the way to enlightenment, whether one is the worst of sinners or the greatest of saints, it's equally there for all of us because that's our real nature, that's at the heart of reality, that is reality according to the Vedanta.

Now the problem is we don't at all see that.

So Vedanta says the very fact that we don't see it, this is what Vedanta calls ignorance.

So there is a veil of ignorance.

Even worse, it's not that we just don't know.

What we know is entirely wrong.

We think we know.

So it's not just that we do not see ourselves as Brahman, but we actually actively see ourselves as these bodies and minds.

We see ourselves as this person.

And therefore, a correction is necessary.

A correction to our wrong notion that we are bodies and minds and a pointing out to the reality that we are limitless consciousness regardless.

So this correction is enlightenment.

Enlightenment is the removal of ignorance, is the correction of error.

Enlightenment does not make you Brahman, does not make you Atman, does not make you pure being or pure consciousness, which you already are.

So there is no beginning and end to your reality which is pure being, pure consciousness, Atman, Brahman.

But there is a certainly there is a point at which this enlightenment occurs.

I felt that before this I did not see clearly my memory tells me that now I do see but then it becomes unimportant the the ignorance prior to enlightenment and the correction due to enlightenment all of this becomes part of the play of Maya and as this author has written the questionnaire very beautifully that you have this deep relaxation I like that phrasing deep relaxation but into what we already are yes that would that that would be putting it beautifully and you can see this as surrender but surrender is is a great thing to practice at all levels wherever we are in our spiritual journey surrender is a great spiritual truth there is really very little up to us it's only when we do not struggle we think that's a lot up to us.

When we really struggle, then we begin to realize how little is up to us.

And that does not mean we backslide or we become hopeless.

No, we realize that there is a very great power working in our favor.

Call it God or Allah or Ishwar or Shiva or Devi, whatever you call it, there's a great mystical power in this universe which is driving us forward in our spiritual lights.

So surrender becomes a great, a wonderful spiritual practice at every level.

Just one thing here, Sri Ramakrishna gave this nice parable about surrender, about the bird who sat on the mast of a ship and without knowing, the bird didn't know that the ship sailed out into the ocean.

When the bird realized that there's water everywhere, in alarm it flew to the east, didn't find land, came back, sat on the mast, recovered, then flew off to the west.

No land, came back, north, south, no luck.

Again it came back to the mast of the ship and utterly exhausted it just gave up.

It just sat there and the ship took it to land.

Now this is the nature of spiritual practice and surrender.

It's a pretty deep parable.

It requires you to tire out, as Ramakrishna would say, tire out your wings.

You must tire out your wings.

If you even have the sense that, ah by doing this I will become enlightened, go ahead and try it.

You will become enlightened but not quite that way.

The enlightenment will come but it comes from the other side, not from your efforts.

But our efforts are necessary, as she said, to tire out the wings.

There is a corollary to this parable.

Once a young monk to Swami Turiyanandaji, a disciple of Sri Ramakrishna, great Vedantin, was in Benares in his old age.

The young monk heard this parable and in excitement he said I will not fly anymore I will just sit on the mast I understand now I'll surrender I sit on the mast and Duryananda ji he said when did you fly you didn't even fly you haven't tried it out yeah surrender it sounds easy surrender is the biggest thing I am ready to surrender it sounds a lot easier easier than hard spiritual practice?

No, it isn't.

Because if I do try to surrender after some time, the very Rajasic nature of the mind, which also is sort of deeply convinced that I can do this, that and the other thing, will act up and force us out into various kinds of activities.

It's much better to actually be up and doing spiritually.

Pray and meditate and serve and study and inquire and do all of that.

As Mahasarada said, you have hands so why don't you count the name of God, Japa, on your hands.

That's what the hands are for.

Which is indicating us that everything that we have got, a body, prana, energy and a mind and a heart to feel and intellect to think and understand, all of them can be connected to spiritual life.

You can do Jnana Yoga, the path of philosophical inquiry one can do Raja Yoga the path of psychic control on meditation one can do Bhakti Yoga which is a devotional the path of love of God and Karma Yoga of service and one can feel and one should fill one's life with these pursuits and then surrender will will become clear what surrender really means yeah and all those things can be enjoyable then they're not necessarily a chore they're gratifying.

That is a sign of a sattvic seeker.

Initially it might seem hard because our pull is more to the world whereas after a little bit of purification over a lifetime the test is if somebody tells me well if it's so hard stop don't study don't meditate don't serve don't worship and we will say no no no those are the most precious things in my life I can't give them up that shows that we've already developed a taste for them.

And then you're really lucky if you've developed a taste for it.

Well, I wouldn't have called myself a Sattvic seeker, but when I learned to meditate not far from you, a building on 123 East 78th Street in 1968, it was relief and gratification from the first sitting.

It's like a ton had been taken off my shoulders.

And I never skipped it ever since then, even though I was a crazy, druggy, high school dropout kind of a guy, it just grabbed me because it was so enjoyable.

Yes.

That, you would say, there are clearly some scars of previous lives.

You've taken to it.

You've taken to it.

Yeah.

And that's a great blessing, really.

Yeah, it certainly was for me.

On the same theme, I've heard you say that the yogic path is difficult.

I'm wondering here what you mean by the yogic path, but I'll let you say answer that in a second But Jesus said my yoke is easy and my burden is light and the Gita says no effort is lost No obstacle exists.

And as I just said, it's never been difficult for me maybe there's a better word than difficult like All consuming or that it requires a lot of discipline or a strong level of commitment or something And one could argue actually that a life outside the yogic or the spiritual path is difficult But once you get on the spiritual path, you're walking back home.

Problems tend to diminish, life gets easier.

All of that, a big yes to all of that.

It's just the yogic path is difficult in the sense of discipline and commitment.

If I'm used to flowing downstream with my senses, as my mind goes out into the world, my senses go out into the world, and I don't restrain them at all, then the path becomes difficult.

whereas if I'm attracted to the path, if I like loving God, I like the serenity and stillness of meditation, then as I said, you're blessed because it's good for you and if what is good for you is also pleasant for you, nothing like it.

Usually the problem is what is good and what is pleasant, they go in opposite directions.

What is pleasant, it's not in the long run good for me.

What is good for me is at least not initially pleasant for me and that's just because, not because of the problem with the paths.

Those are really, as you said, they are wonderful, very pleasing, very fulfilling activities, prayer, meditation, study.

It's just that we haven't developed the taste for it yet.

So when you do develop the taste for it, like anything, you know, whatever requires cultivation, could be art, could be high literature, classical music.

Initially, one might not take to it, but with a little bit of training and a little bit of control, one sees the beauty in it and it's a far greater beauty than crass sense enjoyment.

Yeah, I'll say.

I'm going to take this opportunity to ask you a bunch of questions that have come in, and so topic-wise we'll probably be jumping around for a few minutes because they're not all related, and then we'll get back into a lot of questions that I've prepared for you.

This one is from Ravichandran Swaminathan in India.

Question.

Sri Ramakrishna said that only a person who can say "I am not the body" even when his limb is cut can follow Advaita.

For others, bhakti is the path in Kali Yuga.

There are claims that Adi Shankara never mixed bhakti with Advaita and bhakti hymns were not written by him.

As an Advaita proponent who suggests a good mix of bhakti on the way, how would you explain?

I think in this day and age after Sri Ramakrishna, the answers to these questions are much easier.

Notice how Sri Ramakrishna smoothly moves between jnana and bhakti, between I am Brahman and thou art everything.

Often in the same, the gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, in the same page, he is talking about sat-chedana the existence consciousness place and then smoothly moving into devotion to Krishna or to the Divine Mother.

One would think it's much easier to say that Adi Shankaracharya was somebody like that and therefore the commentaries on the Upanishads, the highest Advaitic conclusions, there is no conflict between that and the huge output of Bhakti literature which he has written.

of our Swamis was joking, Tota Puri who was a very one-sided non-dualist, he would be sitting with Sri Ramakrishna at the end of the day talking about non-dualism.

Suddenly Sri Ramakrishna would start clapping like this and singing Hari, Hari, Krishna, Krishna, Govinda, Govinda.

That's the way he would, you know, at the end of the day he would take the name of God.

And his way of deciding what's the end of the day, that evening is coming is if he could count, if he could not count the individual hairs on his hand, that means It's getting dark.

It's now time to clap and take the name of God.

But Toghzapuri would have none of it.

Toghzapuri said to him strictly, scolding him, "What are you doing?

Are you making chapatis?" In the north of India, even now in the villages, you will see in the evening, they start making this flat bread, the chapati.

They would do it like this in front in the fire, like this.

So are you making chapatis?

And Sri Ramakrishna, of course, indignantly said, "I'm taking the name of God and you are saying I'm making chapatis.

what you mean.

Now one of our Swamis, I heard him recently, he said that is so when Shankara, Adi Shankara is a daily chapati maker because he's always making chapatis, he's written the the most wonderful body of devotional hymns.

Now you would have to go to the extent of saying all of that is not Shankara, just the commentaries on the Upanishads are Shankara because that's our understanding of Advaita.

One shouldn't blame a person for that because someone like Totapuri would also think that.

But Sri Ramakrishan does not seem to think that.

The Ramana Maharshi, one of the greatest exemplars of Advaita Vedanta in the 20th century, he doesn't seem to think that.

For him, mystical devotion to Arunachala, to Shiva and the realization of the Self, they are one and the same thing actually.

So yes, Advaita and Jnana and Bhakti are not contradictory.

They may seem to be initially.

They are different approaches to the same reality.

When Sri Ramakrishna is saying that if you don't bother, if even your hand is cut off and you don't even say "ouch" then only you're fit to practice Advaita, then there will be very few takers for Advaita at all in the world.

I think he's just saying that in context to people who...

One way of understanding Sri Ramakrishna, Vivekananda, Mahasarada is, they were tremendously practical.

They wanted you to become spiritual and become enlightened, God realized, in whatever way possible.

And there is evidence for this.

Somebody wrote to Swami Turiyanandaji, a monk of our order, very well read, what was the philosophy of Sri Ramakrishna?

Was it Advaita?

Was it Vishishtadvaita?

Was it Dwight?

Was it knowledge?

Was it devotion?

What was the philosophy of Ramakrishna?

There's a beautiful long letter from Swami Turiyananda and the end he says, "But if you press me to choose one, say this is the philosophy of Sri Ramakrishna." I would have to say, become enlightened by whatsoever means as soon as possible.

That was the philosophy of Sri Ramakrishna.

That's good.

Yeah, those examples he gave, same is true of Nisargadatta and Papaji and many others.

They had these devotional sessions and kirtans and bhajans and all that stuff in addition to their discourse.

Exactly.

You think of someone like Nisargadatta, who is radically non-dualist.

Everybody loves his, what is that book?

I Am That.

I Am That.

And yet if you would go to him, every day there would be an arati, which you see almost in many Indian homes you would see that in his room also and Aarati would be performed.

There would be Kirtans.

Somebody who reported this would probably be called by modern scholars would say ah there are two Nisargadattas.

There's the devotee Nisargadatta and there is the Jnani Nisargadatta.

That's what scholars do.

They look for differences then they reify those differences and they write papers about it.

Now I have discovered something amazing.

You know there was quite clearly there were two Vivekanandas or two the Sarkar Dattas or two Shankaras, one who wrote the non-dual commentaries and one who wrote the Bhakti hymns.

Note the Advaita tradition in India coming down from Shankara.

They regard the devotional compositions of Shankara, they hold it in high regard and they have no issue at all with it.

Nor do the Advaitic practitioners today.

If you go to the Shankara Mathas, there are ritualistic worship going on and nobody there will tell you that Bhajagovindam was not written by Shankara, they would be astonished at such a thesis.

So with the example of someone like Sri Ramakrishna, one can now look back to Shankara and say that yes, Shankara would have been something like that.

Sri Ramakrishna had a predilection for bhakti, Shankara would have been someone like that with a predilection for jnana because that's the kind of milieu he came into.

Towards the end of his life, Nisargadatta said, "Forget I am that." said I've realized so much more since then.

I can read that.

I could send you the quote.

That could be shocking for people who have been hung up on the IMF.

It makes sense, you know, I mean we don't just have intellects, we also have hearts and other faculties and you know a doctor has very skilled intellect and he has his skills as a doctor but he comes home and he plays with his children and you know his heart gets engaged.

So I don't know, it just doesn't seem contradictory to me that one of these great Gyanis like Shankara would also be a Bhakta.

Exactly.

It never seemed contradictory to me.

It didn't seem contradictory to someone like Vivekananda or Ramakrishna.

It doesn't seem contradictory to those who follow Shankara's tradition.

It would be the heights of arrogance for us to say that, "Yeah, yeah, you don't understand Shankara.

Shankara is actually only the non-dual part.

the devotional part that is being ascribed to Shankara or somebody else later.

These are people who have been in Shankara's tradition for the last 1200 years.

It's the heights of arrogance, you don't understand Shankara, now suddenly I do.

Okay, more questions.

I have about five or six of them, so let's try to go through them more quickly because I want to ask you so many other things.

But next question is from Peter DeGrazia, whom I've seen in your Wednesday night classes.

He's from Connecticut.

If AI is consciousness, does the statement, "I am none other than Brahman, the world is an appearance in me," need to be changed to "appearance in AI"?

Not sure I get the question.

I guess he's saying if AI is consciousness, and we didn't say AI was consciousness, did we?

Then he's making AI and consciousness synonymous, but I don't think you have, neither of us has suggested that, and the AI experts aren't suggesting that.

No, what the experts are suggesting is the argument which I had with an AI expert was that his position was that AIs can become conscious if they're not already conscious, the sense that we are conscious, the sentient beings.

And Vedanta would say everything is consciousness because consciousness is the only reality there is.

So in that sense AI, but why go all the way to AI?

Even a rock, even a stone or a wooden chair is also that same consciousness from an advaitic perspective.

Okay, so you wouldn't say the world is an appearance in AI anymore than you'd say the world is an appearance in a rock.

I mean you could just because a rock happens to be consciousness.

The world is an appearance in consciousness.

Consciousness appears as the world in Advaita Vedanta.

Yes.

Okay, next question is from Eric Weiberg from a location called Sfergi.

Sounds like it's Scandinavia someplace.

Is there something beyond experience?

In other words, if there was something saying, "Wow, this is beyond experience," then that itself would be experience or prompted by some experience.

So if there is more than experience, what could it be?

Where is this something else?

I can give a very precise answer to that.

Yes, there is.

It's like this.

What is experience?

All experience is consciousness plus an object.

There is that which experiences and that which is experienced.

When you bring them together, you will get experience.

that which experiences is consciousness that which is experienced is object bring them together you have got experience consciousness plus object is experience C + O is E.

Now this consciousness which is the basis of experience which experiences or makes experience possible that is beyond experience because you may remove the object but consciousness would still exist it would illumine the absence of objects and arguably then only consciousness exists with the absence of all objects that is beyond experience yes now there's a very subtle wrinkle to all of this consciousness in Advaita Vedanta or in any many of the systems is said to be self luminous even if there are no objects even if nothing is being experienced and I mean that literally what is what are you experiencing not a chair or a table I'm experiencing in the place of chairs and tables I'm experiencing nothing in the sense of the absence of everything the absence itself now becomes the object of experience then consciousness remains by itself without anything else would it be experienced and the answer there is nuanced yes and no consciousness never becomes the object of its own experience never and and yet it is not beyond experience because it's self-luminous you can say sort of crudely it reveals itself to itself there is another way of putting this issue that if for all experience even for consciousness to know itself if an object is necessary unless I see something the moment I see something the object becomes an object of my consciousness and I also become aware of that which is experiencing.

So in that case someone might ask so even consciousness needs an object because without an object consciousness would not become aware of itself as consciousness the answer there in Advaita is no consciousness does not need an object for two reasons one first of all the object itself in Advaita Vedanta is nothing other than consciousness consciousness is projecting itself as its own object so it's not that consciousness depends on the object is rather the object depends upon consciousness.

Second, even quite apart from the object, consciousness being self-luminous is evident to itself.

Let's put it that way.

So the term Aparoksha, awareness, being being aware of awareness, right?

What you're saying is that when that happens, consciousness is aware of itself without creating a duality.

Somehow it almost seems like some subtle duality would need to be created.

That's why it's a very subtle point.

There's no duality there.

That's why it doesn't feel like, "Oh, I am consciousness, now I'm consciousness, I'm conscious of consciousness." No, that will never happen.

But it's also false to say that it will be utterly unknown.

It's the strangest of things.

Consciousness really does not depend on the object for these two reasons.

One, in Advaita Vedanta, object also is ultimately none other than in consciousness and consciousness is self-luminous.

Good.

Next question.

Okay, he just wants us to mention his first name, not his last.

Okay, so his first name is Carlos and he's in Bucharest.

Question.

In modern discussions on consciousness, many thinkers such as Bernardo Kastrup or Donald Hoffman explore deep ideas about mind and reality, but without an explicit interest in moksha or liberation.

They are interested in so many ideas.

I enjoy these talks very much, but I wonder, can this kind of inquiry distract from the direct pursuit of liberation as Vedanta understands it?

Yes, it can.

One might get caught up in multiple theories.

Recently, I think, Robert Lawrence Kuhn, he released this survey of various theories of consciousness.

160 something of them.

325.

Oh, 325.

325 theories of consciousness, yes.

So imagine that and you could spend a lifetime or lifetimes discussing the subtleties of these theories and which sounds more reasonable or less reasonable.

So it can be distracting.

It's just like in ancient India also, when people were pursuing moksha even single-mindedly, they would still get caught up in philosophical debates and in winning debates and defeating the opponent and so on and so forth, which would quite far from becoming enlightened.

So Shankaracharya says in one place, the philosophical discussions are this vast forest in which one can get lost without attaining to the goal.

In another place he says, these philosophical disputations are for the enjoyment of the learned but not for enlightenment.

So yes, one can, one should in fact, if we are spiritual seekers, most of us here are spiritual seekers, to have a home tradition, remember all of these traditions can take you to liberation, to freedom and make that the backbone of our lives.

That's what we are doing, that's our main project.

At the same time, it's reasonable to be open to, we are the children of this age, we are the children of the 20th and 21st centuries.

this is the age of quantum theory and AI and consciousness studies.

Why should we be dumb?

Why should we be, you know, ostrich, the head in the sand?

Just as Shankara and Vivekananda and Buddha were certainly very well up on what was going on in their age and doing the best they could with the knowledge that they had at that time.

We should also be open, well-informed, have opinions on these and It doesn't take much.

Yeah.

Both ways.

I love Robert Lawrence Kuhn's podcast.

I listen to it regularly.

He's the one who wrote that consciousness paper that you just referred to.

But I've heard him say, "I've never really meditated." It's very intellectual for him.

Yes.

But he does such a great job.

And Bernardo, I moderated a panel discussion at one of the S.A.N.D.

conferences with Bernardo and another guy.

And Bernardo is such a brilliant guy.

but he said in public in this conference, he said, "Despite all my study of consciousness, "I'm really afraid of death." It hasn't eliminated that fear.

- Yes.

We should proceed very carefully here because these are huge issues.

They could be spiritual practitioners with decades of spiritual practice under their belt and yet be shaken by impending death.

I could be.

Even Yogananda said that when his Guru realized he was about to die, he kind of shuddered with just the biological impulse of attachment to life.

Right.

There is a story about this.

I heard it from a monk.

It's a simple and rather crude story, but for what it's worth, I'll tell you here.

a parable about the three friends who went to the nearby village for a feast and they dressed up in their finery and one of them was very fat and the clothes clung to his body and he was very attached to the clothes also.

The second person was not attached to this finery, he was quite free of attachment to his finery, his clothes, but he was plump and the clothes clung to his body.

The third person was not attached to his possessions and he was lean and fit.

Now all three were attacked by robbers in the forest.

They wanted to strip them of their fine clothes.

Now the three of them had different reactions.

First one, to whom the clothes clung closely and who was very attached to his finery, he wept and pleaded and had great difficulty stripping off his clothes and surrendering to the robbers which earned him a beating from the robbers.

The second one who had no attachment he said okay take the clothes away and he tried to take them off but he was he was heavily beat and he could he found it difficult to take off his shirt and give the shirt away that earned him a thrashing from the robbers too although he wanted to give it to them.

The third one let go of the clothes very easily and walked away unconcerned neither physically nor mentally troubled.

Now what's the point of this story?

The point is if I am very worldly in the sense that I have really no spiritual interest whether it's Advaita or Buddhism or devotion in a Christian or a Hindu sense all of which help me to overcome death help me to overcome this this connection to this earthly body.

If I don't have any of that, then confronted with the greatest of challenges which is physical death.

I will cling to this body.

I will not want to give up and even giving it up will be extremely difficult.

It will be a painful process.

I'm talking about not the physical pain of it, the emotional inner pain of it.

The second person is a spiritual person who knows I am not the body but has not meditated, has not been able to surcharge the mind with that feeling of I am not the body I am a spirit or I am centered in God believes all of that understands all of that but when confronted with death which is what wants to snatch away his final his body this person will still find it difficult and to be a struggle and it will be suffering giving up the body even with all the knowledge this person has even with the convictions the third person is the person who has got clarity I am NOT the body I'm completely convinced and has led an austere, devout, meditative life over years so at the point of death it's much easier for me.

Good.

Okay, moving along, here's a question from Sven Bergman in Germany.

Which method or practice did enlightened people in the Ramakrishna order use to become enlightened?

Our primary method of sadhana now, by now I mean post Ramakrishna, Vivekananda, the direct disciples of Sri Ramakrishna, post that, from that time onwards now, our mainstream method is mantra and deity meditation.

So the guru initiates you into a mantra which they have got through a lineage of teachers going back to Sri Ramakrishna and before that.

The bija mantra?

There's a whole, it's called an Ishta Mantra which includes a Bija Mantra and the Guru initiates into that and gives you the description of the chosen deity and how do you meditate in the Lotus of the Heart Chakra so everything, how do you sit, how do you visualize, how do you meditate, how much do you meditate the repetitions of the mantra, how to repeat the mantra, all of this and other visualizations So it's a whole system which incorporates devotion, which incorporates yoga, incorporates tantra and mantra, and yes, the core Vedantic ideas also.

That's the primary practice which we do.

But the results of that can be startlingly varied.

For some, they attain the vision of the chosen deity and samadhi.

For some, they attain the impersonal Brahman, the realization and the limitless consciousness, not the vision of the deity which they were meditating upon.

For some, it may be the presence of the Divine, the feeling of the presence of God, with even eyes open in the poor and the sick and the people they serve, a Divine presence permeating everything.

It can be varied, but they're all born of that mantra practice.

So that's the primary practice which we do.

Good, thank you.

The next one is from Lalkrishna Joshi in Germany.

I'm practicing four yogas.

For me, karma yoga is the most unpleasant and difficult, but how can I succeed unless I purify my mind by the karma yoga path?

How can I sustain a spiritual life given that I find karma yoga very difficult?

Before you answer that, I just want to throw one thing in and have you respond to that as well.

You know, it says, what is it, chapter 2, verse 48 of the Gita established in yoga perform action.

So you have karma and yoga in the same sentence.

And I would suggest that that is karma yoga where you actually there's some yoga involved, some union involved, and then you perform action.

Then, you know, yoga is skill in action.

A couple verses later on, so it needn't be difficult.

So we don't know exactly what he means when he says he's practicing karma yoga or why it's difficult.

Oh, it could be difficult too.

I mean, I'll take take the opposite of it.

We do a lot of karma yoga when we come into the monastic order.

There is a lot of work to be done in the ashrams.

We have school in India.

We have schools and hospitals and what have you.

Lots and lots of work.

The problem with that is initially it seems to be non-spiritual.

It's a school.

It's a computer.

You're typing a letter.

These are children.

You're teaching them social sciences or physics or mathematics.

Where is God in all of this?

Where is meditation in all of this?

Where is Advaita in all of this?

Because our idea, mine too, and most of us as youngsters going into the monastic life, our idea was we're going to do high philosophy, we're going to memorize Sanskrit verses, we're going to sit long hours, morning and evening in deep meditation and yes, perform ritualistic worship, maybe sing bhajans, all of that seems to be spiritual, whereas a lot of the work in the ashram seems to be secular.

So that's why, that's the kind of conflict we have with Karma Yoga from our perspective and that is something you have to overcome.

It takes some time then you begin to see that these are spiritual activities and that is a secular activity.

This is a superstition the superstition born of long dualistic practice.

There is a necessity for that otherwise being what we are we would just be secular we just be materialistic So the spiritual had to carve a place for itself.

A place, a time, a practice.

This practice is spiritual, not the others.

This place is a temple or a church.

This is spiritual, not outside.

And this is the time, early morning and evening.

These are the holy days.

These are spiritual, not other times, not other places.

This is a way of carving out a place for people who we are sort of irredeemably materialistic.

over time if Advaita is at all true then it must be true that every activity can be spiritualized whether it is physical, mental or intellectual, emotional all of it has to be spiritualized.

As Sri Ramakrishna put it so beautifully when I close my eyes God is there when I open my eyes God is not there what kind of God is that?

So Karma Yoga is that bridge even if it's unpleasant.

See the four yogas as he said I practice the four yogas you will find inevitably we will all find one of them seems alive and interesting and genuinely fulfilling for us well at whatever stage we are and the others not so much.

That's a problem with our mental makeup this is how we have built ourselves up over lifetimes.

So maybe for me I'm primarily intellectual jnana yoga the texts and the study and the inquiry and the thinking it through appeals to me.

There are others for whom primarily devotional.

Whatever the theory or philosophy it doesn't really matter.

I want to feel and love God and that's a vital need for me in my life.

For them bhakti yoga seems alive.

Others are eminently practical.

I want to do and serve and achieve stuff in the world.

the rest of it seems just theoretical you're just spending time in by yourself what good is that?

You're sitting quietly with your eyes closed what good is that?

You are singing along what good is that?

But here you're actually transforming lives and worshipping God in the flesh.

So any one of those yogas will probably seem alive to us but Vivekananda said that a holistic spiritual life, a safe spiritual life, a wholesome spiritual life and in fact an An easier spiritual life is where we have all four components.

We'll find very soon if we hold on to one, it will become difficult very soon.

There are these other aspects of our being.

So for example, I am very devotional and I neglect reason, logic, philosophy.

Very soon the unsatisfied intellect will throw up skeptical questions and shake my foundation of belief or faith.

soon my body, my existence in the world, I will call into question and say what a useless life I'm leading.

There are people in the world, some are serving others, some are earning a million bucks on Wall Street.

What am I doing?

So this is where the various faculties, the faculties of willing, faculties of understanding, cognition and the faculty of feeling, if they are not engaged in our pursuit of God, they will create problems and we will lose that power also.

So all four yogas together doesn't matter if one of them one or more of them seem mechanical.

That's what I think he means by saying it seems difficult for me or unpleasant for me.

It seems mechanical.

Swami Ashokanandaji who was the head of the Vedanta Society of Northern California in the 1950s and 60s in one of his letters clearly the lady who had written to him said that he didn't like karma yoga.

So he writes back, "Madam, you have said that perhaps the Swami does not think me fit for meditation.

That's why he's recommending karma yoga for for me.

Well, you may feel that.

I will show the Swami." And he writes, "Indeed you will show me, madam, but not in the way you think." So what he means by that?

You will stumble very soon in the way of meditation, without the necessary purification of the mind.

Karma Yoga is very powerful.

I mean I can go on and on.

If you divorce Karma Yoga from spiritual life, what will happen is our work life and family life, they demand so much from us, time and energy.

Very little time and energy will be left over for spiritual life.

so spiritual life will be bereft of time and energy and our work life, our family life, our so-called secular life will suffer because it will seem meaningless after some time, pointless, meaningless.

When we combine the two, my life in the world and my life in the meditation mat are the same life, I'm living one life, not two lives, then our life's spiritual practice becomes powerful and progress becomes quick and the bridge is Karma Yoga.

One of Maharishi Mahasayogi's favorite phrases was living 200% of life, 100% inner spiritual, 100% outer material.

I never heard that, that's beautiful, that's important.

I didn't accept all this when I joined the Order.

I remember I was sort of mildly grumbling to a senior monk, I was a novice, a few months and into monastic life.

I said I don't mind the work in the office or in the school but I really think I like the work that that that what I do in the temple, the meditation, the devotional practices, the ritualistic worship and he said really when I type a letter I feel I'm meditating he told me.

I remember all these decades ago and I didn't believe him.

I thought he was just you know making a point being rhetorical how could it be?

Typing a letter is just work and meditating is so cool you know that you're meditating after all it's sophisticated, it's advanced, there are books and books on it.

And now I realize he was entirely right, he was entirely, entirely right.

I didn't understand meditation, I didn't understand karma yoga, that's why I thought that way.

Yeah and just a personal preference that I'd like to throw in here, I live in a town where a lot of people have been meditating for many decades and some of them have perhaps been meditating too much and not attending to the physical enough and they seem preternaturally old and having all kinds of health problems.

So I'm just a big believer in getting vigorous exercise for a certain amount of time every day in addition to, you know, if you want to sit for a couple hours and meditate, great, but get the body moving, get your blood moving.

Absolutely, absolutely.

All four, meditate, philosophize, love, serve.

All four.

Yeah, good.

Okay, shifting gears.

So this, I hope, is a deep question and it's one that I've been thinking about for a long time as I've been taking your classes.

As I understand it, the individual, jiva, is consciousness limited by individual ignorance, while God, Ishvara, is said to be consciousness associated with maya, cosmic illusion, according to Vedanta philosophy.

So from this perspective, it seems like God is relegated to being a product of illusion or a result of illusion.

And I'd like to just pose a different perspective and see whether you can stomach it, which would be, what if God is at the rock bottom of it all, the foundation, and Brahman, as we use the word, is synonymous with God, and just as we say Brahman contains a sort of a quality of maya that results in the manifestation of Ishvara or personal God, perhaps this Brahman God as I'm proposing it is a field of all possibilities, an ocean of consciousness which contains in unmanifest form certain qualities such as energy, intelligence, bliss.

Of course, that's said to be a characteristic of Brahman, Sat-Chit-Ananda.

But this would mean, if this is valid, firstly, God is not really a product of maya.

God is sitting at the hub of the wheel of creation, and the whole creation is God and is a manifestation of God.

Do you see the distinction between God being at the very foundation of things as opposed to being a, what's relegated to what seems to me to be a subsidiary position of being a product of Maya.

So don't think of God as a product of Maya.

Think of God as the ultimate reality viewed through Maya.

So we for example, in Advaita Vedanta, who are you or who am I?

We are Brahman, we are the Absolute.

So the absolute now under limitation and that limitation is an apparent limitation.

We still continue to be the absolute.

Now my point is if we are the absolute, if Rick is the absolute and Salva Priyanka is the absolute and it's the same absolute, can God be any less?

Of course not.

God is not a product of maya, God is the absolute.

But through maya, the absolute now appears to us as the God of the universe and the absolute through a portion, tiny portion of Maya, ignorance, appears as Rik and Sarvapriyananda.

So if Brahman is real, the world is an appearance, and the individual being is none other than Brahman, but you are an individual being, sentient being, I am a sentient being, we are none other than Brahman, God is also none other than Brahman.

And you are right, in Advaita Vedanta also, also.

God is at the foundation of the universe.

God is described as the instrumental and material cause of the universe.

But what Advaita says is, there is a reality which is utterly transcendent.

There is no universe, no sentient being, no God.

And that is the ultimate reality.

We We are constrained to think in this way because we are sentient beings and we clearly we are inhabiting a universe and then we project a God.

So Advaita first says all three are appearances of an underlying transcendent being, nirguna brahman.

And then when you go, you are that nirguna brahman.

From the perspective of a nirguna brahman, you can say this entire display, God, individual being and universe is an appearance or even it's not there.

All that there is is this non-dual problem.

Yeah I suppose you could bring physics in here too because you could say you know this this book is paper but then it's carbon but then it's just molecule just um you know subatomic particles but then it's just quarks and electrons but then it's just strings you get down to nitty-gritty enough and there's nothing there but then again there is something here.

It's a book, yes.

Yeah, so, I guess I haven't fully understood this.

It'll be something I'll probably chew on for the rest of my life.

But here's another question that might relate to it and might embellish what we've just discussed.

You say in one of your books, "It is to enjoy the limitless joy of jivananda, or jivanmukti, that Brahman becomes a jiva." So might we say that the expansion of happiness is the purpose of creation?

And before you answer that I want to throw in another response from my friend Emeline, whose question I asked earlier.

She said, "I'm so interested in the above.

What is the purpose of life?

To create more life, better life, more intelligent life, a life more aligned with God, with Source, what Plato calls beauty.

Could Swamiji therefore speak to evolution and the role of evolution in life's creative process and unfolding?" Yes, you're right.

In fact, this is how Adwaita understands it.

Think about the ultimate reality which is characterized as existence consciousness bliss.

Now what would be existence if it did not manifest itself as existing things?

What would be consciousness if it was not manifest as conscious experiences?

I mean you can think of a bare consciousness but then it's so much more beautiful when that bare consciousness makes it possible to see, hear, smell, taste, touch, enjoy, suffer, feel, what would be Ananda, bliss, if it were not the extraordinary ranges of pleasure, happiness, joy, all the way up to spiritual joy, the joy of devotion and meditation.

So yes, Sat-Chit-Ananda, the basic, the ground appears as this display as the Buddhist Tibetan Buddhist put it in ignorance this primordial ground appears as samsara in knowledge in enlightenment the same primordial ground appears as nirvana so it is that the basis and what Advaita Vedanta would add to it is make it explicit you are that primordial ground you are the ground of that is happiness the goal of it all yes in one sense it is ananda is the reality and its manifestation is happiness.

Consciousness is the reality and its manifestation is conscious experience in the world all knowledge and experience.

Sat being is the reality and its manifestation is every existing thing in the universe.

Yeah somehow this whole thing of Maya this way makes it some people interpret it to mean that the world is a mistake of some sort it's total illusion and the whole goal of life is to get enlightened and get out of here as quickly as possible.

Yes and no.

If you want that, you'll get it.

In fact, you'll get it in the sense that once you immediately, what you realize that it's a mistake.

It's a mistake in what sense?

Advaita usually calls it a mistake.

It's a mistake in the sense that we think there is a real existing world as it looks right now to us and we are these bodies and minds.

That is a serious mistake.

And until we correct that, we are bound to suffer even saying that mistake does not mean doesn't exist a mistake also exists after all if you mistake a rope for a snake you do see something like a snake so in certain sense a mistake still exists but it has to be corrected but after correction it's not that you go to some other place rather that's a very dualistic way of thinking look at the lives of the all these enlightened people they were right here after the correction of if there's a mistake they corrected it became enlightened they're right here in the body amongst the rest of us as enlightened beings and they seem to think it's perfectly all right and that going back to the earlier quote that the goal of life the to experience the joy of jivan mukti that's why Brahman has become embodied this is from Swami Turiyananda I've forgotten the original Sanskrit Swami Turiyananda disciple of Sri Ramakrishna in his early days I think right after some time after Sri Ramakrishna passed and they were engaged in intense meditation and spiritual practices, austerities, the young monks.

One day Turiyananda was very troubled by this question.

If as Advaita says we are all Brahman, Brahman is the only thing that exists, then why all this?

What I was hearing, none of them seemed really deeply satisfying.

And then this verse, he came across this verse, it is to experience the extraordinary joy of enlightenment, enlightened living that you need this embodiment and it seems that I guess you have to wait for the full manifestation of that joy to see whether the whole journey has been worthwhile that yes it's really worth it to be to be a Jeevan Mukta and live life like that to be Brahman and yet be a body-mind and yet be a sentient being that sentient being is the Jeevan Mukta Yeah, value added as they say.

I'm going to read a quote from your book and then have you comment on it.

This is from "Fullness and Emptiness," page 47.

Nagarjuna adds, "Without taking refuge in conventional truth, no one can attain ultimate truth.

This is vital.

Let us not dismiss conventional reality as just a dream, all false, or illogical and non-existent.

We will never attain enlightenment that way, because the Buddha, the teachings, and even the concept of emptiness itself all operate at the conventional level.

And then I want to read a little bit more from the book itself that I didn't type down.

The difference between that, the difference between what is negated and the person is important.

In their rush to deconstruct the self, many Buddhist teachers dismiss all notion, notions of the person as illusory.

This was not merely a theoretical error but had practical consequences.

Tsongkhapa noticed a moral decadence among the monks and traced it back to careless teaching about emptiness.

Tsongkhapa, taking his cue from the Chandrakirti, defends a robust sense of the conventional.

He understood that metaphysical nihilism, epistemological skepticism, moral relativism go together?

Do the objects, people, and other living beings exist at all?

Or are they all illusions?

If all the practical life is a mere illusion, then what is the difference between correct knowledge and falsity?

Finally, what is the difference between moral and immoral?

Between Dharma and Adharma?

And why should one be compassionate towards beings who are no more than figments of imagination?

Why should one make an effort to be discipline to study to practice meditation yes so I found this remarkable parallel between these two systems of thought the Buddhist school of emptiness Shunyavada Madhyamaka which is the central philosophy of His Holiness the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan Buddhists that's their plank the spiritual the philosophical plank, the basis.

And in Hinduism, Advaita Vedanta.

In one, there's a teaching of emptiness, in other, there's a teaching of Maya, everything is Maya and appearance.

Now danger, it's interesting, both of these schools independently over centuries, they ran into the same hurdles.

On one hand, in the emptiness school, there would be people who stressed the emptiness so much that the Buddha is empty, the teachings are empty, meditation is empty, all of that which is all technically correct but the results were devastating.

The result is at the metaphysical level you say there's nothing, nothing exists really, it's all illusion, it's all emptiness or whatever and then in that case at the epistemological level, at the level of knowledge, every knowledge is false in that case, whatever you know science and religion it's all worthless, the art and philosophy it's all empty, it's all hollow at its core, it's all illusion and therefore knowledge is worthless and kind of universal skepticism.

And the devastating consequences for personal life.

So Tsongkhapa was dealing with monastic reform about 400 years ago I think in Tibet.

He's a central figure in Tibetan Buddhism.

So he found a lot of problems with large monasteries abounding in the high mountain plateau in various mountains of Tibet.

A kind of monastic decadence and looseness, laziness and outright immorality, sometimes parading as tantric rituals.

So he traced it back to this kind of, at the heart of it all was a philosophical misunderstanding, dismissing of everything as emptiness.

It goes all the way back to Nagarjuna.

Nagarjuna himself warns that those who misunderstand emptiness.

Emptiness is a medicine for the ills of samsara but those who take emptiness to be the reality for them there is no medicine there's no cure and he says in Sanskrit "Yathad Sarpo Durghrihita" as a serpent grasped wrongly.

If you don't know how to catch a snake expert snake catchers know how to do that if I don't know how to catch a snake and I catch it but the wrong end I'm going to get bitten so if you misunderstand something as potent as emptiness and the result it can be devastating for one's spiritual life and so as a as a medicine as a correction Tsongkhapa one of his achievements was at the philosophical level introducing a robust sense of the conventional reality world, body, objects, morality, science, art, whatever it is, medicine, all of those are real.

They work.

They appear to us.

We experience them.

There's a right way and a wrong way to do things.

There are consequences.

Most of all, karma is real.

There are consequences to it.

Yes, you can call it appearance, but it works.

And it has consequences.

You can feel it in your lives.

And then he traces it back to Nagarjuna nearly 2000 years ago.

He says the Buddha taught two truths.

One the Paramartika which is the same word used in Advaita, second one Samvritti.

In Advaita we use the word Vyavaharika which means the same thing, transactional or relative.

And then Nagarjuna says without taking recourse to the transactional truth no one attains to the ultimate reality.

The Sanskrit is, this is from Nagarjuna's Moola Madhyamaka The Sanskrit is "Sambhrittim Anashritya Paramartham Nadigamyate" Without taking refuge in the conventional truth, nobody realizes the ultimate truth.

The same problems you find in Advaita Vedanta.

They had lost contact with each other.

Buddhism disappeared from India during the Islamic invasions and Islamic rule.

And Tibet became sort of self-contained and isolated from the plains of India.

India so they developed in parallel but what fascinated me was both traditions faced similar problems.

In Advaita Vedanta you'd have dismissal of the word so I don't care for the word it's an appearance, an illusion.

Why should I care for politics?

Why should I care for earning wealth?

It's all illusion anyway, it's a figment of Maya and that kind of thinking extends to one immediately to one's personal life, our sense of morality and let me give a concrete example there was a monk Srirama Krishna found he was telling lies and he got hold of him you're a monk why do you tell lies and the monk said in exasperation the whole world is a lie why are you picking on me why is my life so the whole world is a lie it's Maya why are you picking on me and there was another monk who was having an affair with a woman and secret obviously it be condemned otherwise and Sri Ramakrishna catches him and says why are you doing this and again the same reply that it is all Maya or why are you picking on me and Sri Ramakrishna had a harsh reply for that he said I piss on such Vedanta so this this is the fatal weakness and The philosophical way of showing up, of giving support to Madhyamaka Buddhism, Sankhapa did it by giving a strong sense of the conventional.

Take all of it very seriously.

If you really want to realize Bodhi, Nirvana, the true nature of emptiness, in that case, you better follow all the rules of monastic life.

You better be disciplined, you better get up early in the morning and meditate.

All of that.

and the same thing applies to Vedanta also.

There's a quote from Pabba Sambhava that I've quoted many times.

He said, "Although my awareness is as vast as the sky, my attention to karma is as fine as a grain of barley flour." You told me, yes.

I told you that already?

Yes, you told me.

That is so precise.

I like that.

I was so careful about it.

I heard similar warnings from Tibetan masters.

Although it is true that the Buddha nature is everywhere, never miss an opportunity to go for a retreat.

Although it is true that it is the Buddha nature with eyes open and eyes closed, never miss your daily meditation.

Although it is true that the same Buddha nature dwells in your Guru and yourself, never forget to show respect to the Guru and so on.

Multiple series of warnings.

Well, and in the same light, Jesus said, "Whatsoever you do unto the least of these, you do unto Me." and so you know you can dismiss the world as illusion like those deluded monks were doing but actually you're dismissing God you know because the world you I often love to think that God is hiding in plain sight you want to find God you're looking at him yes Ashokanji would say where will I see God foolish question where will you not see God yeah yeah but that's what Karma yoga does.

Yes, over time.

It's by serving God in the human form then the living presence of God becomes palpable.

Even in the scientific sense we started this conversation about with discussion of your fondness for consciousness studies and the brain consciousness interface and so on and so forth but it always seems to me that it's amazing that a scientist could be an atheist because they're looking so closely at mechanisms of nature that are so unbelievably intricate that they could not possibly be random or accidental.

There's got to be some kind of an intelligence orchestrating the whole thing from the cosmic to the microscopic.

Yes, I remember a monk, a friend of mine who's a doctor, and he says in medical school, this is one day in class, he can never forget it, the professor came in and was showing them the cross-section of the human liver I think and he says look upon the cross-section of the human liver and tell me there is no God.

Yeah beautiful that's great yeah or the functioning of a single cell if you look on YouTube you can do it you can do a search for an animated version of what's going on in a cell and it's just mind-boggling I mean It's like this Rube Goldberg contraption, if you're familiar with those.

And there's trillions of them in our body, and in everybody's body.

It's a kind of inconceivable intelligence working there.

Yeah, yeah.

So that to me is always awe-inspiring.

Walking down the street, looking at a blade of grass, thinking, "Wow, what's going on in that blade of grass?

It's beyond my...

It's so vastly profound." I again I'm sorry I'm jumping keep jumping back to the karma yoga one more insight yeah it's I'm beginning to see it now so my friends with whom we started the monastic journey more than 30 years ago I noticed something now in the recent years there are some of us me I was always the bookish kind books where my refuge, my delight.

There were some, a rare few, who were deeply meditative.

But there were others who were dynamic and active.

Ramakrishna Order in India, we have a lot of work, a lot of ashrams which have schools, hospitals and so on.

I've seen some of my friends who are monks, the ones who sacrificed, who were relentlessly hard-working, who took responsibilities on their shoulders beyond above and beyond the call of duty who did more than what was expected by the daily routine of the ashram who always put others first and their own health their own spiritual practices all of that secondary basically Karma yogis over time I noticed their power power in the sense of competence character they have become big people big people in the sense of big heart you know it's a wonder to see because I've been seeing them for 33 decades now and I noticed one common thing among these ones the few who I see this tremendous growth in all of them worked very hard they did a lot of Karma Yoga mm-hmm they may not have read as many books they may not have spent hours months or years in meditation in the Himalayas but they worked very hard yeah which is true of a great many Saints some of them are you know they go 20 hours at a stretch doing some intense thing and you know indefatigable everybody else is dropping like flies and they keep going Recently I heard the Pope the new Pope who's American, from Chicago, Pope Leo he was asked about his spiritual practices and he recommended this book the practice of the presence of God brother Lawrence who's a simple monk all All his life he worked in a kitchen.

All his job was to cook and feed hundreds of other monks.

So all the groceries and this is a huge enterprise.

I know, I've seen ashrams.

So, there's a monk in the kitchen is a sight to behold.

And he became one of the most spiritual saints of...

great saint.

So Pope Leo recommends that book.

Yeah.

It's his favorite.

There's also the story of Trotakacharya.

Shankara's other three disciples were the bookish types and sitting around with Shankara.

Trotaka is down at the river washing the laundry.

And he got enlightened and came marching up from the river singing this beautiful tune that no one had ever heard before.

Which is now known by his name.

Trotaka meter.

But anyway, I mean that's not to say everyone should become a workaholic.

Obviously everybody has their dharma, their tendencies, their proclivities.

You got to be who you are.

I would say do what comes most naturally to you and don't skip the Karma Yoga.

Right, right, right.

Don't skip anything.

I think from what you've said, you know, you can drag a table by one leg, but maybe if you pull all four it's going to come along more easily.

more easily.

There's an essay called Yoga Vigna, the obstacles to yoga, written by a great monk of our order, Swami Premesananda.

And he tells you what kind of trouble you can expect on the path of Jnana Yoga, the path of meditation, the path of devotion, and the path of Karma Yoga.

You read that you feel like, thank God I don't do any of that.

I won't have to face any of it.

But no, I'm joking.

And there he says the best is to do all of them because they counteract each other.

And you know, workaholic, you like working in the office in the school in the hospital but you have to go for evening meditation and that is good it balances it out.

Who loves meditation but is selfish to the point that you know when the other brothers are working and I won't do my bit because after all it's my meditation hours but no this is karma yoga time you have to put in your work there.

I like devotion I hate studies or philosophy dry but no you have to study that it it balances it out and it makes for a more harmonious spiritual growth.

Good well as I said in the beginning I've got enough notes here that we could go on for another four hours but I won't impose that on you certainly so I really appreciate the time we spent together and I look forward to continuing to attend your classes and you know absorb whatever I can and I appreciate everything you do.

Do you have any final thoughts?

I mean that was a pretty good final thought you just stated but is there anything that you didn't get a chance to say or some event coming up that you want to announce or anything else?

That final point you made you know I appreciate everything that you do.

Recently I'd asked spiritual masters about I won't name him but he is a very well-known person across the world.

"Look at me, give me some advice, what should I do?" He said, "You're alright, you're doing what is good, just keep doing more of the same." Now, that is wisdom there.

For spiritual seekers, we sometimes worry and fret.

So the mind plays these tricks.

Either it will try to drag you away from spiritual practice, or it will scrutinize the spiritual practice and say, "Oh, you're not making progress, so there's something wrong with this, something that you can add to this." One good thing is to, when you found something good, which is meditation, study, devotion, just keep doing it.

It's a marathon, it's not a sprint.

And don't keep modifying it.

You know, this modern day of age of continuous upgrades.

Our phones are continuously upgrading themselves, downloading new patches, this and that.

Don't do that for spiritual life.

What your guru has given you decades ago, that is good enough.

That has taken thousands across the ocean of samsara, and it will do the same for us also.

It says something like that in Yoga Sutras, doesn't it?

About long, consistent practice over time, and it pays off.

In place of continuous upgrades.

Right.

Yeah, you'll get the upgrades.

Just do the routine, do the practice.

Upgrades come automatically.

Thank you so much.

I enjoyed our time.

Time flew.

Who knew?

It's two hours now.

Yeah.

All right.

So thanks to those who've been listening or watching.

We'll see you for the next one.

And if you wish to do so, go to the BatGap website and explore the menus because there's a bunch of interesting things.

Speaking of AI, I have an AI BatGap chatbot, which Nippun Meta has graciously helped to accomplish, if you know Nippun.

And it contains hundreds of thousands of spiritual documents, including 1700 of the world's sacred texts in its data corpus.

It's an interesting thing.

We're continuing to develop it and add things to it and improve its capabilities as AI itself continues to improve.

I can't think of anything better to use AI for.

It's the highest task, the highest blessing that AI can give us.

Yeah, we can create one for you guys too if you want, for Dante's Society.

It could have transcripts of all your talks and everything in it.

Let me know if that interests you.

Right, I will do.

Thank you.

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