[Music]
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.
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My guest today is Swami Mettananda. I'm going to read his official bio here because it packs
in a lot of details of what he has accomplished so far in his young life. He seemed pretty
Swami Mettananda is a monk of the Ramakrishna order and an academic philosopher, currently
serving as Senior Research Fellow in Philosophy at the Vedanta Society of Southern California
in Hollywood.
He is also the Hindu Chaplain at both UCLA and the University of Southern California.
He is Section Editor for the International Journal of Hindu Studies, overseeing submissions
in Hindu and cross-cultural philosophy of religion.
From 2010 to 2021, he was Associate Professor and Head of the Program in Philosophy at the
Ramakrishna Mission Vivekananda Educational and Research Institute in Belarmat, West Bengal.
He received his PhD in 2009 from the University of California at Berkeley, where he specialized
in German aesthetics.
He was also a Fulbright Scholar at the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin and a visiting student
at Oxford University.
His current research focuses on global philosophy of religion, the epistemology of mystical
experience, cosmos psychism, Indian scriptural hermeneutics, and Vedantic philosophical traditions,
especially the philosophies of Sri Ramakrishna, Swami Vivekananda, and Sri Aurobindo.
He's the author of three books, Swami Vivekananda's Vedantic Cosmopolitanism, Infinite Paths to
Infinite Reality, Sri Ramakrishna and the Cross-Cultural Philosophy of Religion, and
third, The Dialectics of Aesthetic Agency, Re-evaluating German Aesthetics from Kant
to Art Adorno. He is the editor of the Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Vedanta and co-editor
of Panentheism in Indian and Western Thought, Cosmopolitan Interventions. He is also the
editor of two special issues of the International Journal of Hindu Studies, one on Swami Vivekananda
as a cosmopolitan thinker and one on Vedantic theodicy.
How do you pronounce it?
- Theodicy.
- Theodicy, okay.
He has published over 30 articles in leading academic journals.
He's currently working on two book projects, Karma and Rebirth in Hinduism, and An All-Embracing
Oneness, Sri Aurobindo's Integral Advaita and the Legacy of Sri Ramakrishna.
And I would like to try to cover all that stuff with him.
We'll see how we do because it all fascinates me.
I've listened to quite a few hours of his talks, mostly while shoveling snow or skiing in it
for the last couple of weeks, and I felt like I've learned a lot, actually.
Listening to his talks has really broadened my perspective on certain things, which we'll
be discussing, and I hope to find the time to read three of his books, which he sent
me, which I've already named the titles of, in the coming year when I'm not busy preparing
for other interviews, because I feel like I'll learn a lot more if I read them.
Okay, that's your formal stuff. Now, one thing that puzzled me when I first started listening
to your talks was why you didn't seem to have any kind of an Indian accent, and then I discovered
you were born in Boston, and you know, you don't even have a Boston accent.
Maybe you've been around too much, and that's worn off. But in any case, let's get into just
a little personal bio for a few minutes, as contrasted with the academic bio that I just read.
So, born in Boston, how old are you now?
I am 43.
43. I remember a story you said your parents used to drag you to the temple on
worship days or something. You'd be out in the yard playing football with your friends
and you were an agnostic. How did you go from that to the life of a swami that you now live?
That's a great question. Born and raised in Boston as a Bengali American. So I spoke Bengali at home
and my parents would take me to Bengali school on Sundays. So I learned how to read and write
Bengali from age 6 to about 12, which I'm very grateful for now. At the time I found it boring
because a lot of the texts in our spiritual tradition are in Bengali, actually, in the
original. And I was agnostic for much of my early adult life. Part of the reason was because I was
raised Hindu in this generically Hindu sense, or you might call it culturally Hindu sense,
which meant a couple times a year going to pujas, big grand kind of worships of different
forms of God. So there's a Durga Puja, that's a form of Divine Mother, Saraswati Puja, and others.
And nobody explained to me what the deeper spiritual significance of what these festivals
were about. What does it mean when I'm bound down to an idol? How is that related to the
one infinite God? How do these different deities relate to each other? Is Hinduism polytheistic?
Is it monotheistic? Is it monistic? Is it some combination? Nobody was there to answer these
questions. I wasn't equipped to answer these questions for myself. So I found it all very
uninspiring to be honest. And as a result, yeah, I would play football outside with my friends and
just go in for the kichuri. Kichuri is a famous food made on, I'm sure you know, it's good.
Rice and dal.
Yeah, yeah, it's great. So I'd go in for that and then come back out and just talk to friends. So
yeah, that was my childhood. And then in college, I studied philosophy pretty deeply, Western
philosophy. And at the same time, I had a deep interest in religion. And so I was having lots
of debates with friends who are all along the spectrum. I mean, some are religious, some are
agnostic, some are atheists about religion. And I just felt like if religion is true, then it's
got to be extremely important. But then there's this question of which religion is true. So I
started reading around in the world's religious scriptures. This is in my first and second year
undergraduate. And third year, I was at Oxford. And I went even more deeply into these kinds of
Studies and thinking on my own really it was kind of extracurricular
And so I was reading buddhist scriptures the bible the gita bhagavad gita was the first hindu scripture
I read that really inspired me and even as an agnostic it really resonated with me
I just kind of ignored the bhakti side of the gita, which is very prominent now
I see i'm teaching the gita now and I see that that's kind of the keynote but at the time I just kind of ignored
devotion
God, but what I loved is the idea of
Attaining a kind of transcendental peace
Shanti, through renunciation of worldly attachments and worldly pleasures.
This Vedantic idea that we are eternal souls, an eternal spiritual self separate from the
body-mind complex, and that all suffering stems from this misidentification with the
body-mind complex. So those ideas resonated with me even as an agnostic, and that was my
kind of entry point into spirituality, we can say. And it was only later when I joined the PhD
program at Berkeley that I started studying the life and teachings of Sri Ramakrishna and Swami
Vivekananda. And when I did, my ideas about spiritual life became a lot clearer. But I have to say that
even before I knew anything about either of those spiritual personages, I had already decided I'm
going to finish my PhD, move to India and be a sannyasi. Which is interesting. I mean, it had to
come from previous life samskaras or something, you know, because I don't know where it would come
from. There were no spiritual gurus to guide me or any, I never met really any monks in my life.
but I just knew that I had to be a monk in India specifically. And toward the end of my PhD,
I was getting so restless about leaving the country. I was itching to get rid of my western
clothes and just give them to Goodwill and get the heck out of here. And ironically, by divine
dispensation, I'm back here where I grew up, but with a different attitude, I'd say. So, yeah,
hopefully more mature. Yeah. Okay. I've been having conversations with an old dear friend
named Curtis. And he's an atheist, although he has years of meditation under his belt,
and used to be a gung-ho believer, but, you know, various things caused him to shift to
his current perspective. And I just love our conversations, and he does too, because we
love and respect each other, have completely opposite points of view, and we go at it trying
to find common ground. And Curtis and I have worked out a question, which I'm going to
start with here. This is Curtis speaking.
It seems improbable to me that anyone could achieve a state of mind that reveals the fundamental
nature of reality.
How can people making this claim demonstrate to others that their personal insight is more
than just that, a personal insight?
It may be unreasonable to demand scientific proof, but it is entirely reasonable to expect
some evidence that this internal state aligns with ontological truth more credibly than
the claims of people who feel that their personal beliefs do so. What do you say to that?
David No, that's a great question. I mean, this is a huge question in epistemology,
in philosophy of religion. And it's a question of do putatively mystical experiences have epistemic
value? That's the technical question. I mean, exactly what he's saying, except put in technical
terms. The idea is a mystic, an alleged mystic claims to have an experience of ultimate reality,
call it the self, call it nirvana, call it god. And the question is, well, why should we even accept
that? It could just be a kind of subjective experience, it could be a hallucination.
I want proof. So I've done a lot of work on this. I'll just mention a couple of the references,
but chapters five and six of my latest book, Swami Viknanda's Vedanta Cosmopolitanism,
is about this very issue and about how Swami Vikranda answers this question. And chapter
six of my book on Ramakrishna, Infinite Paths to Infinite Reality, is about the same issue.
So I'll just talk about a couple things that I discussed there in much more detail and rigor
in those books. So, the first issue is, let me turn the tables on Curtis. Let me turn the tables on
Curtis for a second here. Prove to me that your experience of the laptop or the iPad or the phone
on which you're watching this podcast is not just your own personal experience. Prove to me that it
makes some connection with an ontological reality. Okay, I'll be Curtis for a second. The fact is that
10 people could be in my room here and they could all see my laptop if I had one or my phone or my
clock or something. So there's some kind of subjective agreement among the people. We all
see the moon. The problem with that is all those people occur in your perceptual field.
So that's also part of the subjective perception. Imagine you're in a dream. And I'm wondering
whether this tree I'm seeing is a real tree or a tree in a dream. And then I asked these
eight dream figures around me, am I dreaming? Or is this really a tree in front of me? They go,
yeah, it's a tree. It's a real tree. And then lo and behold, five hours later, I wake up and
and I realized all those people who are cross-checking my experience of the tree were part of the dream.
Okay. Do you think that argument really applies?
Because dreams are so subjective and hallucinatory and everybody dreams differently.
The moral of the story is not that. It's not that everything is a dream.
The moral of the story is that Curtis, you, and almost everybody else in the world who's sane,
accepts that when we perceive something, like a laptop in front of me, or a microphone, or a tree,
that that thing actually exists and that I'm actually making contact with an objective reality, right?
David Right.
David Even though we can't prove it to anybody,
there's no non-circular way of proving that. So, it makes no sense to hold mystics to a higher
standard than we hold ourselves with respect to sense perceptions. That's the lesson.
David One way I think of it is that if everybody
experienced what mystics experience, then we would take for granted those realities,
just as we now take for granted the realities of cars and trees. But the fact is that those
experiences are so comparatively rare that it's not part of the popular understanding.
And so it's easier to dismiss them as aberrations or as lunatics or as hallucinators or whatever.
But what I would say sometimes to people, and see if you agree with this argument, let's
say do the experiment. You don't believe that, you know, God exists? Okay, do X, Y, and Z
for 15, 20 years or whatever, and you may arrive at that experience. So that there's something
scientific about that. And you might compare it to like the Higgs boson. They say they've
discovered the Higgs boson. I kind of believe them because they seem like they know what
they're talking about, but I couldn't confirm that for myself unless I went through decades
of study and special expertise and had particular intellectual abilities to confirm it for myself.
But you know, that's the way science works. There is a kind of a collective agreement based upon
what the experts say, and it's always open to challenge.
Absolutely, and I think that's another part of the answer, which is what you just said,
which is that go ahead and follow these methods, which are pretty tough.
It's not as easy as mixing this chemical with this chemical, but if you do it, if you put
in the time and the effort to establish the ethical and spiritual kind of prerequisites
needed for that spiritual experience, then you should have the same experience that I'm
having.
So that is a kind of cross check, but it's more complicated and elaborate, maybe more
challenging than like typical cross checks.
Another factor is, observe the life of the person who claims to have undergone that spiritual
experience or that alleged spiritual experience.
Does that experience seem to have transformed him or her?
I think that's a very important criterion.
As Swami Vivekananda used to say, a person going into a very high state of samadhi, spiritual
experience, will come back a saint, even if he goes into it as an ordinary person.
So that's another criterion.
You can just look and see whether that person is really saintly.
If he or she is not, then you have some reason to believe that maybe it was not a genuine
But again, that's not hard and fast because some saints actually hide themselves and behave
like ordinary people so as not to attract attention.
There's also that factor.
David: That's an interesting point because these days there have been so many examples
of famous gurus and other spiritual teachers behaving reprehensibly, usually secretly so
until eventually it's discovered.
There's one guy, Chogom Chomper Rinpoche, who died of alcoholism in his 40s and others
have been womanizers and this and that. And I've actually had arguments with people, they keep
coming up, where they say, "That has nothing to do with awakening. You can be an awakened drunkard
or an awakened womanizer or whatever." And to me, when somebody says, "I had an awakening,"
or "I'm awakened," or something, I think, "What actually are you talking about?" You know,
we really need to define that term. David Absolutely. I can say a couple
things. I mean, I'm going to give a lecture on Sunday called "Self-Deception in Spiritual Life,"
And this is a cardinal example. I hope you put it online. I'd like to listen to it. Yeah, it'll go on youtube
Yeah, yes and stay tuned for that, but i'll give you an incident from the life of shram krishna
Shram krishna was an indian mystic in the 19th century
And a monk a sadhu from a different state of india came to that area and shram krishna heard about him
But he also heard that this monk had fallen and that he is actually having an illicit
Relationship with a woman even though he's supposed to have taken a vow of celibacy
So he approaches that monk and he says, "Hey, what's this I hear about what's going on?"
And he says, "Oh yes, yes, let me explain." He was a follower of Shankara. Okay, so he says,
"You see, everything is maya. So how can just my affair with that woman alone be real? That's also
part of maya." And then Sri Ramakrishna in response said something in very strong language which has
been kind of like watered down in translations, but the original Bengali really meant, "I piss on
on your Vedanta. So I think that's the perspective that I think you and I share, which is that,
you know, what's the good of a so-called awakening if you're leading a worse life than ordinary
people? What does awakening mean? I think that's part of the question. What does it mean? In
Vedanta, it means awakening your true nature, which is completely free from any selfish
qualities and egoistic qualities. So if you're still indulging in those things, then it means
that you haven't really had the awakening.
I'm glad you brought that story up. I actually have it in my notes. I was going to bring
it up. I heard you tell it a couple of times because I've actually had people argue that
very thing with me. "Oh, I'm not doing it, God is doing it. God is sleeping with all these
women in my sangha," or "It's just bodies having physical sensations. I am not the doer,
yada yada." It kind of gets my goat because I do feel that spirituality is so precious
and so important for individuals and the world, and this kind of stuff disillusions people
and it gives the whole thing a bad name.
These are just bullshit alibis.
If that's enlightenment, you can have it.
I don't want it.
Let me open this very big can of worms because I think it's
important. I don't think it's discussed enough.
This is a big issue in what's called Neo Advaita.
Okay, here's the issue.
Let's go back to Shankara.
Shankaracharya.
He is one of the great, he's not the founding father of classical
Advaita Vedanta, but he's one of the earliest figures.
I mean, before him was Gaudapada, there were probably others.
But in any case, we have his commentaries on the scriptures, the Upanishads, Bhagavad Gita, and the Brahma Sutra.
In his commentary on the very first sutra of the Brahma Sutra, 1.1.1 Athato Brahma Jijnasa,
and now we begin our inquiry into Brahma.
He has a long commentary saying, "Who is eligible to study Advaita Vedanta?"
Very important question.
And his answer is, only those who are perfectly equipped with the sadhana chatushtaya, the fourfold sadhana.
Viveka, perfect discrimination between what's real and what's unreal, what's self and what's not self.
Vairagya, intense dispassion, intense detachment toward everything in this world, all worldly attachments and pleasures.
Third, Shat Sampad, the six treasures in spiritual life. Perfect self-control, perfect sense control, perfect control over the mind, so on and so on.
there are many other qualities and then finally intense mumukshutva which means an intense longing
for liberation. He says so long as you have not attained perfection in this fourfold sadhana,
this fourfold spiritual practice, you are not eligible to practice advaita vedanta, you are not
qualified to practice it and what's happened is that more recently Vivekananda and others have
kind of opened the floodgates to many people. I mean Vivekananda for instance taught advaita to
everybody. But there's an open question about exactly what's the nature of his
Advaita philosophy. And that's complicated and so I wrote an entire
book kind of trying to understand what exactly Vivekananda's Advaita philosophy
was. But Neo-Advaita is even more recent than that. They take their inspiration
from certain great Advaitic saints like Ramana Maharshi. I'm not saying anything
about Ramana Maharshi himself. He was a great saint, there's no doubt. The danger
is when people who don't have his level of ethical and spiritual fitness try to
do what he did and then they end up falling flat on their face or deceiving
themselves and others. That's the danger. So I'll give you another anecdote here
from my own life. 2010, just months before I joined the Ramakrishna order in India, I
was doing a six-month pilgrimage and during that pilgrimage I visited a hill
station in South India in Tamil Nadu called Kodaikanal and I walked into a
bakery and I was wearing white clothes signifying that I'm a Brahmachari which
means I'm kind of on the way to becoming a monk and a lady working there who
might have been the owner. She looked at me and she said, "Oh, you know, what do you
plan to do?" I said, "Well, I'm planning to join the Ramakrishna Order and I'm
planning to be a sanyasi, this and that." And she was very interested and then she
said, "Oh, why go to all that trouble?" She says, "I'm a follower of Ramana Maharshi and
he taught that we should just dive into the Atman. So why don't you just dive
into the Atman?" And I said, "I wish it was that easy, but it's not." I think this is important
because there's a big question of who is eligible to practice Advaita Vedanta and
And if you're not, Shri Ram Krishna used to say that those who are not eligible to practice
Advaita Vedanta and who nonetheless try to, end up deceiving themselves and deceiving
others.
And Nirodvaita lifts the eligibility requirements, as far as I can tell.
They say that eligibility requirements is also part of Maya, so forget about it.
I mean, there's no need.
I think that's where the problem is.
If you downplay, if you under-emphasize the eligibility requirements for practicing these
high-level spiritual disciplines, you end up with self-deception and hypocrisy.
Yeah, O'Neill, I'd like to people tend to say things like, "There is no personal self,
and spiritual practices are unnecessary, and practicing them will only reinforce the notion
of a personal self, because there's a practicer."
And then they draw other conclusions such as, "Well, since there's no personal self,
there couldn't be any reincarnation, because there isn't anything to reincarnate, and,
you know, all you have to do is get it, realize that you are that, and you're done," and
so on and so forth.
and we can take issue with all those points.
But another thing though is that like you,
you know, you give talks in Hollywood
and a lot of people come to your talks
and then they go online and thousands of people watch them
and the same is true of Swami Sarvabhihananda
and other legitimate teachers
and probably only 1% of the people who are watching these talks
meet Shankara's qualifications that you just outlined.
So how do you deal with that?
I don't teach Shankara's Advaita Vedanta.
That's how I deal with it.
So that's the key difference, arguably, between Sabarpayanji's approach and mine.
It depends on... I mean, you can ask him about how he teaches it, but I don't.
That's why I don't. I teach Shri Ramakrishna's philosophy, which I take to be Vijnana Vedanta.
And I see that as much broader than Shankara's philosophy.
It doesn't say that Jnana Yoga is a higher practice than Bhakti Yoga or Karma Yoga.
Here are the main tenets of what I take to be Shri Ramakrishna's philosophy.
Number one, what's the nature of ultimate reality?
Brahman and Shakti are inseparable.
Brahman is the nirguna brahman of Shankara's school.
Nirguna meaning without qualities?
Impersonal, non-dual, pure consciousness, which is our true nature.
Vijnanavidanta fully accepts it.
But this is the key sticking point with respect to classical Advaitins versus our tradition,
Brahma Krishna.
He says that that nirguna brahman is just the static aspect of this infinite divine reality,
which is Shakti in its dynamic aspect.
and define Shakti? The personal God. Like Saguna Brahman? Saguna Brahman. So Sri Ramakrishna used to say
when I think of God as inactive, nishkriya, then I call it Brahman. When I think of that same reality
as creating, preserving, and destroying this universe, then I call it Shakti or Kali. So that's the first
fundamental ontological or metaphysical tenet of Vijnana Vedanta and that already differs from
Shankara's, I think, narrower philosophy because he only accepts the ultimate reality of Nidguna Brahman
and not the ultimate reality of Shakti.
So that's a crucial difference.
And then, second, what's the status of this world?
On Shankara's understanding,
"Brahma Satyam Jagat Mithya"
this world is an illusory appearance.
And he uses the example of rope and snake.
There's a rope.
I see it as a snake.
When I realized that that was actually a rope,
I realized it was a rope all along.
It wasn't that it transformed into a snake
for a certain amount of time.
No, it was a rope all along.
It was a mistaken perception.
Exactly like that.
We are misperceiving Brahman
as this world of names and forms.
but in fact none of these names and forms exist by themselves. Okay, whereas by contrast,
Sri Ramakrishna's position is that Brahman actually manifests as everything in this world.
Every name and form in this world is a real manifestation of Shakti. And then third,
what are the implications for spiritual practice? Shankara, not surprisingly, and I think very
logically, because of his metaphysical assumptions, privileges one spiritual practice over all the
others. He privileges jnana yoga, the path of knowledge, which is meditation on your true
nature as non-dual pure consciousness. Every other practice he relegates to a lower level.
Karma yoga is good. That's the path of selfless works. It's good so long as you have an impure
mind and the goal of karma yoga is not liberation because it can never give you liberation. It's
purification of mind. It makes you eligible to practice jnana yoga. Likewise for bhakti yoga,
the path of devotion. It's a lower practice for inferior spiritual aspirants who have not attained
sufficient purity of mind. Once you attain sufficient purity of mind, you stop those practices,
karma yoga and bhakti yoga, and then you practice jnana yoga alone, and then you can attain liberation
because the only direct path to liberation is jnana yoga. By contrast, because Sri Ramakrishna
accepts the ultimate reality not only of non-dual pure consciousness, Brahman, but also Shakti, the
personal God. He can place all the four yogas on an equal footing. So bhakti yoga, the path of
devotion, karma yoga, the path of selfless action, they're not on a lower footing than jnana yoga.
And the beauty of it is spiritual life becomes that much richer because then you can practice
any one of the four yogas to your heart's content. You can even combine them. Whereas
Shankara is against this idea of what he calls jnana karma samutra. He says this is a no-no.
You cannot combine jnana yoga with karma yoga because it presupposes different fundamental
assumptions. Karma Yoga presupposes doership. Jnana Yoga says I'm the self which is the non-doer,
you know. So, he says they're meant for different aspirants, but no. Vijnana Vedanta says that
you can practice all these at the same time and make maximal spiritual progress in a given day.
You might feel like let me practice Bhakti Yoga in the morning, Jnana Yoga in the evening,
you can do that too. And so, I think it's much richer and more flexible. So, that's a short
answer to your question. Good. I have two or three questions that spring from all that.
One is I thought of an analogy or metaphor for what you just said.
Let's say I want to fly to India. I have to take a jumbo jet, but I can't take a jumbo jet from
Fairfield, Iowa. I first have to drive to the airport, and then I have to take a small jet
to Chicago, and then I can take a jumbo jet to India. Now, none of those means of conveyance
is inferior, really. You have to use all three. Getting to the airport in Iowa is just as
important as flying from Chicago to New Delhi. Now obviously driving in my car
isn't gonna get me to New Delhi. I'm gonna have to get on a jumbo jet and so that
might be kind of the Shankarite argument that Karma Yoga is not gonna get you
to liberation but it'll get you to a faster conveyance. Does that hold up or
am I just supporting Shankara's view? Even that metaphor still shows that on
Shankara's view, Karma Yoga and Bhakti Yoga are only indirect paths to liberation.
They can't take you directly to liberation. That's the key difference
So it's Ramakrishna's philosophy because each of the four yogas is a direct and independent path to liberation
Exclusively you could do just karma yoga and you'll get liberation. Absolutely
Is that a matter of one's proclivities or one's nature and some people are wired to be a karma yogi, etc
Sure, absolutely
I think and are there better honors human nature and the diversity of human beings and temperaments and is there proof for this are there?
examples
The thing is he practiced these different paths and realized that and realized the divine in different forms and aspects through all these different paths
But he was already realized when he started to practice Christianity for instance
He didn't go from a to Z. He was already at Z and giving Christianity a try. Let's take a broader view
I think if you're a serious committed follower of Shankara school, you have to say that these great Christian mystics
There are one or two possibilities who claim to have realized God right like Meister Eckhart and you know, st
Francis and other, Saint Augustine. Either the experiences they claim to have had are not the
ultimate kind of experience, they've stopped short of realizing the highest truth which is
impersonal Nirvana Brahman, or they have to say that Meister Eckhart was a closet
Advaitin and that his realization was not Christian actually but actually non-dual.
And I think in either case you're really doing violence to the self-understanding of mystics
and all these great traditions. There are countless saints who claim to have experienced God,
the personal God, some form of the personal God, or even the formless personal God,
through the path of devotion. Do we want to grant them that it's possible that they actually had
this experience? Or do you want to say that they're on a lower footing, that they're still
on the way, but they haven't quite gotten there? Do you see what I mean? So if you just look at
all the mystics across the world, and then we get this very broader swath of people to deal with,
like empirical samples, data to deal with, and then to account for it.
- And actually, as I understand it, one of Shankara's four primary disciples,
Trotikacharya. He was down at the river washing laundry when he got awakened. He wasn't intellectual
like the other three. He was just doing his seva and feeling his devotion and boom he woke up.
I'm always wary of stories because India is notoriously bad on history and you have no
idea whether anything that's in these books are true. I know that Shankara wrote these commentaries
on the Upanishads, Bhagavad Gita, and Rama Sutras, so that has authenticity to me. So I place my
evidence on what he actually said rather than on pseudo-legendary stories about what his disciples
did or what he did. I mean, there are weird stories about how he entered a king's body and did all...
I heard that one, yeah.
Yeah, so I don't know whether it's true or not, but I wouldn't put much weight on those
kinds of stories, to be honest. Yeah, there's a story that Hanuman
picked up a mountain and flew it to Sri Lanka with it, you know that?
Yeah, agnostic. I'm not atheist, but I'm agnostic about all that stuff.
That's a good attitude, I think. I mean, I kind of treat everything as a hypothesis,
which means I don't totally believe in it or totally rule it out, but it's like, all right,
How much credibility does this have? How much evidence can we find for that?
I think, I mean, the reason why I say this is because when I present my case for how
Sri Ramakrishna's Vidyana Vedanta is broader than, notice I say broader than, Shankara's philosophy,
there are a lot of people who are up in arms who are followers of Shankara, who object,
and the first thing they say is, "Well, Shankara was a great devotee, because he wrote these great
devotional hymns, Bhaja Govindam, and this and that." And my response is, "We don't know whether
whether you compose those devotional hymns, that's number one.
Okay, we really don't know.
This is a very common practice in India.
Once somebody becomes extremely famous and prestigious,
everybody wants a piece of him.
And so if an author has just composed a beautiful hymn,
the easiest way to get popularity is to ascribe it to Shankara
or ascribe it to Pandali.
So Pandali or Vyasa and so on.
I don't trust this.
Okay, even if you wrote it,
then there's another problem.
Try to reconcile the devotional sentiment in Bhaja Govindam,
for instance, this devotional hymn,
with his uncontroversial statements about bhakti in his commentaries, which are known to be his.
And then you end up with prima facie contradictions. And then you have to somehow try to reconcile what
he says about devotion and bhakti yoga in his commentaries and the Upanishads, Bhagavad Gita,
Brahma Sutra, what he's saying in these devotional hymns. So even then you're not out of the woods,
even if you accept it as his, it's still problematic. Or finally, there's a third
possibility, which is that he composed these devotional hymns for inferior spiritual aspirants
who are not ready for the heights of Advaitic practice. Okay, one thing I like about your
attitude is that it's kind of scientific in a way because you're not adamant about something
being true just because you happen to believe it, but you're kind of open to all possibilities.
I like that. But then, you know, you obviously do have beliefs. You believe that Sri Ramakrishna
was an avatar, and many people are going to think, "Well, who knows? Maybe. I don't know."
A lot of people say they're avatars these days. Would you stake your life on something
like that, or do you feel like it just makes sense to you based on everything you've learned
so far that he seems to have had that status?
My principle is follow the evidence.
And I'm skeptical by nature, I'm a philosopher, and I try to follow the evidence to the best
of my ability.
That's why for people who disagree with my views, I just ask them for evidence for their
view.
And usually it's not forthcoming, or the evidence is really bad evidence.
But in my case, yes, I mean, that's not, you know, I'm not going to try to persuade anybody
that Ramakrishna is a Navatana.
That's my assessment of the evidence that has been made available to me, that I've accessed.
He said it himself, his character matches the statements other people have attested to his
divinity, those kinds of things.
I mean, that's all kind of part of this cumulative case from Krishna as an incarnation.
Yeah.
Another thing I found interesting in listening to your videos was all the different flavors
of Vedanta because I had pretty much just always heard about Advaita Vedanta and Shankara's
view and I had kind of imbibed that to a great extent.
But then, you know, you're talking about all these other different aspects which are somewhat
different or even completely contradictory to one another. Vedanta means the end of the Veda,
supposedly, well, it means the Upanishads, right? But it also means, I guess, the highest
pinnacle of knowledge because it's the end of this whole huge means of gaining knowledge, the Veda.
And yet, have all these different founders of these schools of Vedanta ended up on different
mountain peaks which are of equal height? Most of them would argue that their view is correct
and the other ones are lacking in some way. You can talk about Vijnana Vedanta and I understand
Ramakrishna tried to reconcile and harmonize all this into a larger basket using the blind man and
the elephant metaphor. So, why don't you go and explain that a little bit.
David There are two metaphors. The blind man and
the elephant is more well known and it's not original to him. And there's a chameleon parable,
which may very well be original to him, but I don't know exactly whether there's a precedent
for that. But let me start with the blind man and the elephant. Yeah, there are five blind men
touching different parts of the same elephant and they're all bickering among themselves about what
is the true nature of this elephant and then one person who can see the whole elephant adjudicates
and says well wait a minute you're all right you're all wrong you're all right because you're
touching different parts of the elephant but you're wrong because you're all touching different
parts of the same elephant the elephant is all those things at once and the question is who is
the person with vision in the story the vignani the person who has had a more expansive realization
of ultimate reality not only in one form or aspect but in multiple forms or aspects.
Chameleon parable that he also is fond of reciting. He says there's a chameleon on a tree and one
person goes up to the tree sees a chameleon sees it as blue comes back to his friends and says hey
i saw this beautiful blue chameleon go check it out. Second friend goes sees it as yellow says why
is my friend lying to me what is he pulling my leg goes back says give me a break it's blue it's
yellow. Third friend goes to confirm and it's turned out to be colorless. They start fighting
with each other under the tree. There's a guy living under the tree who says, "Hey, hey, calm down.
This thing is a chameleon. It doesn't have one color. It changes colors throughout the day.
Sometimes it's colorless." So there are a couple lessons here. Number one, again, who's the person
sitting under the tree? It's the big guy, the person who's had a more expansive realization
of ultimate reality in multiple forms and aspects. But secondly, the colorless chameleon is no more
real or somehow truer than the yellow chameleon or the blue chameleon or the green chameleon,
which means that "antvayate vidhanta," that realization of nirguna brahman, is not put on
a higher footing than theistic realization of a personal god. So you're saying in a sense that a
vigyani, the guy sitting under the tree, is more mature in his understanding or experience than
those who, you know, are locked into the chameleon being one particular color or the elephant being
one particular thing, like a snake or whatever. I don't know if the word "mature" is the best word,
to be honest, I like the word expansive. He just has a broader... I've been to several continents,
whereas other people might have only visited one continent. It's like that.
Right. But if Vedanta is supposed to be the highest realization or the pinnacle of Indian
spiritual thought, then it would seem that it would be the Vijnanis' perspective. It would be
all-encompassing. And these guys who were just locked into a particular flavor of it
are not grasping the whole truth.
Yeah, but they don't need it. That's the key. There's a key difference. I make this distinction
very sharply in my work, my academic work. There's a difference between a particular spiritual pad's
salvific efficacy, its ability to afford the highest kind of state of salvation. Salvation
is very Christian, call it liberation if you want, in an Indian. And doctrinal truth, whether it's
only a partial vision of truth or whether there's a philosophy that has a fuller vision of truth.
So we need to keep these two things separate. The Vijnani has a broader, more expansive
conception of ultimate reality. But the Christian realizing God as Christ or the Sufi mystic
realizing God as Allah or the Vaishnava realizing God as Krishna or the Advaitin realizing Brahman
as non-dual pure consciousness, they're all realizing that's the ultimate goal for them.
There isn't anything higher than that for them. It's not mandatory for them to then go on to
realize. Sri Ramakrishnan never says the Advaitin has to then finally accept the reality of Shakti.
That's silly. He doesn't need to. In fact, what he says instead is,
there are two fundamentally different paradigms of the ultimate state of liberation.
One is eating sugar and the other is becoming sugar.
And he says, Advaita Vedantins are people who want to become sugar.
Let them become sugar. They want to be Brahman, let them be Brahman.
Bhaktas don't want to become sugar. They want to eat sugar.
And eating sugar for them is sufficient. And there's no need for them to become sugar.
The Vijnani has both become sugar and afterwards also enjoys eating sugar.
That's a very unique thing and it's that's just a kind of a very rare soul who can do that and who
wants to do that. But most people neither want it nor do they need it. So you're saying that liberation
doesn't necessarily conform to a clear comprehensive understanding of the mechanics of creation.
Let me read something I wrote down. I said the fact that many different schools of Vedanta
offer perspectives that differ from and even contradict one another leads one to believe
that they are all propounding beliefs or at best hypotheses which might conform with their
subjective experience but which don't represent a fundamental universal reality. One school of
Vedanta might say Krishna or Vishnu is the ultimate reality and the impersonal is just like his big
toe or something and the others are saying it's all impersonal reality and God is just a result of
Maya which is an intrinsic property of Brahman and so on. You're just kind of implying that both of
these proponents could be defined as liberated, having achieved liberation, but they have very
different concepts of what even ultimate reality is, what to say of relative reality.
David I think that's true. And I think, you know,
the way I like to think about it is, I think Sharon Christian conceives the ultimate state
of liberation as a many-roomed mansion.
Pete Jesus said that too. He said, "In my father's house, there are many mansions."
David Many mansions. There are different ways of interpreting that. So, my Vedantic way would be to
say the liberated Christian will dwell in the Christian room of that many-room mansion.
The liberated Muslim will dwell in the Muslim room, the Jannah, they call that heaven Jannah.
The Advaita Vedanta, they will object to the language of rooms and they'll say that's dual,
not, you know, dualistic or whatever. But in any case, they get their Advaita Vedanta and they can
live happily together except they're not all inhabiting the same literal space because they
don't want to be inhabiting the same space. The Advaitins don't want to dwell with Christ in heaven.
Are you talking about post-mortem outcomes? Okay. Yeah. So, even there, I mean, who knows?
These are all just like, maybe Christians go and end up seeing Jesus, or maybe they get a
rude surprise and it's Christians standing there. All this is speculative to me. I mean,
I do believe something happens after you die and all these ideas of different lokas and all
resonate with my intuitive feeling, but who knows? Yeah, again, I would say it's not quite that
bleak, I think, in terms of like a total lack of evidence. I think that near-death experiences are
a very important source of evidence these days of people of varying beliefs, whether Christian or
agnostic or atheist, who sometimes they're atheists who are converted on the spot after a near-death
experience to believe in a higher power, and I think that we should take that evidence seriously.
There are mystics who claim to be able to just inhabit these post-mortem realms while still in
the body, but in a mystical state of consciousness. And they come back and say, "Hey, I saw these
divine beings dwelling in these higher realms." And you might be like your friend Curtis and
be skeptical of that, but again, as I said, then you should be skeptical of this external
world because how do I know that my perception of this microphone and this laptop is not
a subjective hallucination? You know, you can't prove it. Descartes proved that a long time
ago.
Yeah, I hear you. It's just that some things are more readily provable than others, I suppose.
more universally verifiable. Anybody can come and see your microphone.
Oh, there's you have to remember, remember what I said about that.
It's exactly what Descartes said to any of the crosscheckers,
anybody else confirming it could be part of the dream and you can never rule it
out. That's part of the problem. There's no independent crosscheck.
There's nobody who can come from outside your dream to verify that it's not a
dream. Yeah. Okay. No problem. I mean,
so you end up with epistemic circularity. Okay. Let's see here.
Here's a question that I wrote down. Well, this is kind of rehashing the same topic, but let's see if it brings out anything more.
So Vedanta's been around a lot longer than science, of course. So reportedly many have realized what it promises.
But it's an individual subjective exploration, so one person realizing Brahman doesn't do much for everyone else trying to realize it,
unless doing so enlivens Rupert Sheldrake's morphogenetic field and helps all the other aspirants, which I think it may.
Science, on the other hand, is a shared objective like exploration, so everyone benefits from
anyone's discoveries, although that might not yield the kind of experiential fulfillment
that Vedanta promises.
You know, one thing I'd say to that is, I'm not a scientist, and I often do accept what
scientific studies conclude, but not on the basis of my own verification of what they're
saying.
I'm not equipped, I don't have the qualifications, I'm not going to go to a lab and verify whether
How many of us actually verify the results of scientific studies?
Almost none of us.
But we actually benefit from the outcome of those studies very often.
Our cell phone...
If you accept it, why should we accept scientific testimony?
Why?
You know what's called the replication crisis, right?
It's a massive problem.
People are making up data.
Scientists.
Scientism is this huge thing now.
What's happening is that science has gained so much prestige now
that if a scientist says it, it must be true.
If a mystic says it, "Ah, bogus."
It's just subjective.
And so, Vivekananda in the late 19th century,
he said that these scientists, they become like popes.
He says these popes of modern science
say the most outrageous and wonderful things,
but people will swallow it without any questioning.
I think that's part of the problem,
is that we don't verify these scientific claims
on it for ourselves,
but we still accept it because it's scientific.
Vivekananda says,
religion is equally scientific in this way.
And if we accept the claims of natural science,
why is it that we're so hesitant
to accept the claims of spiritual science?
because it's equally based on verification and it's inviting you to verify.
Most of us don't take the trouble or the effort to actually do the verificatory process,
but that doesn't make it any less of a science. That's what we've come to understand.
Yeah, I agree. And I have this hope and thought that science and spirituality can,
and may eventually will, merge into a kind of a collective enterprise,
and that each of them as they now exist has something really valuable to offer the other.
science can perhaps save spirituality from being too imaginary and fanciful and by encouraging
people to use an empirical attitude in their spiritual path. And spirituality, on the other
hand, can probe all kinds of realities that science either denies exists or doesn't even
dream exists. I think that's a great way of putting it. I think that the way that spirituality can
help science and kind of push back on science is to prevent science from collapsing into
a scientism in a dogmatic way. And that's just another way of saying what you just said.
Yeah. Here's a question from my friend Kanta Dadlani in Mumbai. All the monks from the Ramakrishna
mission infuse their teachings with flavors of Christianity, while the source of all religions
is one. Many, whom I know, have observed this. Is it to make their Western audiences embrace
the teachings more comfortably? I should add, Yogananda did this too. If yes, why? After
if the message is clear, people will be drawn to the teachings without any doubts.
Yeah, I'd be cautious about any kind of sweeping generalization about all Ramakrishna mission
monks say this or that. It's just not true. I like to bring in Christian teachings, and the reason is
because our founder, Sri Ramakrishna, taught the harmony of religions. Isn't Christianity one of
the great world religions? And so doesn't it make sense to bring in Christianity as much as it does
to bring in Sufi mysticism and Buddhism? I talk about Buddhism, I give lectures on mindfulness.
I worry that that kind of question is coming from a place of possibly right-wing hindutva kind of stuff
Trump just didn't really include christianity in the harmony of religions, right?
You know that kind of a thing but no yes
You can be a christian and you can realize the highest goal to the path of christianity
And so why be embarrassed to bring in religions like christianity, especially when you when we're preaching without in the west
Where people are familiar with christianity many people are practicing christians. It seems like a no-brainer to me
Yeah, and I would say the reason that many Eastern spiritual teachers have done this is
not just as a kind of a marketing technique to a Christian audience, but because it
helps people find the deeper values of their own tradition without conflicting with it.
Absolutely. And then, you know, I gave a lecture near Christmas called "Did
Shri Ramakrishna Really Practice Christianity?"
I've listened to that one.
Yeah, and I said, I consider myself Christian as much as I'm Hindu.
My fundamental orientation is Hindu, Vedantic, but as a Vedantic, I can fully embrace Christ as an
incarnation of God. A large part of my spiritual practice is listening to Christian spiritual music
of the great classical composers like Bach and Buczka Guta and Mozart and others, who put these
wonderful psalms and other Christian themes to music. I just don't see any problem. It's hard
for me to understand or be sympathetic to the standpoint from which that person is posing the
question, I guess. I have to know more about the person and why he sees it as a problem.
It's a she, Kanta.
Yeah, so why does she even see it as a problem? That's what I don't know.
Maybe she'll ask a follow-up question, but here's another question from her. She said,
"In a recent discussion between Bernardo Kastrup and Michael James," Michael is a
devotee of Ramana Maharshi, "Michael reiterated the fact that we see and believe events because
we identify with them. Bernardo refused this on the premise that the recent massacre of
innocent Jews was real and did not agree with Michael. Your thoughts?"
Yeah, I mean, again, I'm not a follower of Ramana Maharshi. I accept him as a great saint,
but I'm a follower of Sri Ramakrishna. And so, on my understanding of Ramakrishna's philosophy,
we don't think that this world is a dream. We say that everything is God. So, these poor
Holocaust victims were all manifestations of God who were actually suffering in the concentration
camps. Yeah, and that's also the Ashinki referring to October 7th, the Hamas attack on Israel.
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, the whole idea that the world is an illusion is kind of problematic. If you're
about to get hit by a bus, you better take it seriously. I mean, this whole the Albuquerque
idea, right? Yeah. Transactional reality. But a lot of confusion comes from mixing the two
standpoints, the ultimate and the empirical standpoints. Yeah, I think that mixing comes
more frequently when people lift the eligibility requirements and think they're already eligible.
I'm already Ramana Maharshi and you know that's where the problem is. They're fully embedded in
empirical reality and yet they're kind of talking big about being the Atman and that's where the
problem started. Yeah, there's an old Tibetan saying that don't mistake understanding for
realization. That's a huge problem in Neo-Advaita in my opinion. Yeah, mine too, having interviewed
a bunch of them. Well, here's the line of thought. Shankara says the world is an illusion.
Sri Ramakrishna says the world is a manifestation of God and is real, as a divine manifestation.
The Gita says the unreal has no being, the real never ceases to be. I think maybe Shankarites
would argue that the unmanifest can't manifest because manifestation implies change and the
impersonal non-dual can't change. It can't convert itself into something else. And if it has done so,
So what is that something else actually made of, if we look closely enough?
Aditya: Absolutely.
And that's why the key sticking point between classical Advaita Vedanta and Ramakrishna's
Advaita is the nature of ultimate reality.
It's because the Advaitins accept only Nirvana and Brahman, non-dual pure, impersonal, non-dual
pure conscious as the ultimate reality, that they end up with that logic, and that the
world therefore has to be unreal.
Because Sri Ramakrishna starts with a different metaphysical premise, which is that Brahman
and Shakti are inseparable, a person can conceive to the classical advice and say, "Yeah,
you're right.
Non-dual Brahman can never actually transform into anything."
And yet, Shakti does, because Shakti is the dynamic aspect of one and the same infinite
divine reality.
And it's Shakti that manifests as everything else.
It's not non-dual Brahman.
Brahman is completely transcendent.
So the ultimate reality, therefore, has components.
Components, aspects?
I don't like components.
Aspects.
Yeah, aspects, absolutely.
There's this tendency to want to boil it all down to one unified field or one essential
ultimate constituent of everything, you know, and not to find multiple constituents.
Yeah, and it is. I mean, that one fundamental is the divine, the infinite divine reality,
which has the capacity to manifest.
Okay, let's take water, for example. So, water is a manifest thing, and we can drink
it, we can drown in it. And if we look at it closely, we see, well, actually, I mean,
if we let's say had Superman's microscopic vision, we'd say, "Oh, actually there is no water
per se, it's just hydrogen and oxygen." And then if we look at those more closely, we'd
say, "Well, there's actually no hydrogen and oxygen, it's just quarks and electrons or something."
And then even more fundamentally, "It's just super strings." So, it's almost like we take
the manifestation of the world as real in a way because we don't have the kind of microscopic
perception that we theoretically could have, and if we had it, we would see that the world isn't,
in fact, what it appears to be. It's just all this primordial soup of possibilities.
>>Burak: Yeah, like some physicists call it strings, right? They call it different things,
like what that ultimate bedrock kind of reality is. Nonetheless, that still differs from classical
advaita, right? Because they don't say that those strings are unreal. Physicists, I'm saying. We're
still far away from the classical advaitic view that everything is an illusion. I mean, if that's
I don't know what exactly where you want to move in this argument.
I'm not sure where I want to move either.
I'm just pondering it.
Maybe one way of treating the word illusion is that things are real,
but they are not what they appear to be.
Sure.
Yeah, and I think classical advice and say that they say that this thing
looks like a snake, but it's not a snake.
It's a rope, right?
I mean, you're misperceiving the rope as a snake, right?
Exactly like that.
I'm misperceiving this laptop.
I'm misperceiving Brahman as this laptop.
I'm misperceiving Brahman as this microphone, right?
Ramakrishna will say it's not a misperception.
Brahman as Shakti lovingly manifest to us in these different forms.
So every mystic is right, right?
The Christian mystic, God will lovingly manifest to the Christian mystic as Christ or as Mary.
God will lovingly manifest to Muslim mystics as Allah.
God will lovingly manifest to Vaishnavas as Krishna.
And they can all be true.
But you see, so that's not subjective.
You're explaining it from the side of God.
used to use the term in Bengali, "Bhokto Bhocho", God is "Bhokto Bhocho",
meaning He's a lover of His devotees. So He'll lovingly manifest to different devotees,
different spiritual aspirants, in the form that they love, that they cherish. That's the idea.
You know, I'm just playing devil's advocate with you a little bit just to kind of
get this stuff out of you. But I resonate with what you're saying.
You might say one more thing, which is, I mean, it's useful in the context of Vedanta to go back
to the original scriptures. And in our case, the Upanishads are authority, or the authoritative
scriptures and so Chandogya Upanishad does it talk about ropes and snakes? No. What does it talk
about? What kind of metaphors does Chandogya Upanishad use to explain the relationship between
the ultimate reality Brahman and this world of names and forms? I want to highlight two. Clay
and pots, gold and ornaments. I can give you the passages later if you're interested. But that's
what it is. How does Brahman manifest in this world? The Upanishad answers just as a potter
will shape this formless clay into differently sized and shaped pots. How does Brahman manifest in this
world of names and forms? Just as a goldsmith will take molten gold and shape various golden ornaments
out of it, whether they're bracelets or earrings or necklaces. Now tell me, how in the world are
you going to get the world as an illusion from this, from these metaphors? It's far more plausible
to see this world, to take the Upanishad and be saying that this world is a real manifestation of
of the divine.
David: And it would be true to say two things.
You could say, "There's only clay in this room," and you could also say, "There are
pots in this room," and both things would be right.
David: Exactly.
Without the either/or kind of thinking that Advaita's, I think, fall prey to, which is
that because it's nothing but clay, therefore, the pots never existed.
That's absurd.
It's absurd.
It's absurd to say that an ocean, when it forms into a wave, and then when the wave subsides
after a few seconds, that the wave never existed.
Of course the wave existed, but it's temporary.
exactly what this world is. One thing I always find fascinating, and I often ponder it even
as I walk the dogs down the street, is to consider the miracle of what you're actually looking at.
Every blade of grass, a single cell if you could actually see what was going on in it,
how much intelligence is lively in every particle of creation. Even if you go way out in intergalactic
space somewhere and look at a cubic centimeter of it, there are all these waves passing through and
various laws of nature on display. So, it's like the whole universe is just this ocean of
intelligence, and we take that for granted. That to me evokes a kind of a religious sentiment when
I contemplate that. I think that lends itself better to the Vijnana-Vidhanta paradigm than
to classical philosophy, to be honest. I do too. Just the sheer wonder of this world, yeah. Yeah,
I mean, it almost seems kind of crude to just dismiss it all as mere illusion when you ponder
the magnitude or the beauty or the majesty, the mystery of this so-called illusion.
>> Absolutely, absolutely. >> Okie dokie, here's another question.
This might be from Curtis. For some reason, the name says "Curtis Not." What he means by that?
He says, "I am not claiming to reveal absolute reality in my perception of the world. I am
wrong all the time." Yeah, this is Curtis. "I would never claim to have that kind of epistemological
solidity from my perceptions. Statistics may reveal things we are confused about. We use
tools. What are the tools in Vedanta that support such a grand claim of the absolute
reality?
I want to push back a little on the very first part. Look, you use example of if a truck
is coming towards you, what do you do in that context? If you perceive a truck coming toward
you and you're in the middle of a street, are you really going to start, Curtis, saying
like, "I don't really know whether there's a truck coming toward me." Of course you
know there's a truck coming through, that's why you get the heck out of the way.
Did you ever hear that story of Shankara and the elephant?
No, go ahead.
Quick story and then resume what you're saying.
So according to the story, Shankara went to visit some king or something and the king
decided to test him by letting loose a wild elephant.
So the elephant's running along, Shankara climbs up a tree and then the king says, "Hey,
if the world is an illusion, why'd you bother climbing the tree?"
And Shankara said, "Well, the illusory elephant chased the illusory me up the illusory tree."
Right, I see.
Yeah, that's helpful.
that's helpful. So the point is, I mean, this is in the context of why should we take mystical
testimony as genuine or legitimate? Why not just see it as subjective? But in my pushback on that
was, why should I take your perception of this laptop or you're listening, you're on, you know,
audio listening to the podcast, or visual one as valid, they're all on an equal par. And what he's
saying is, well, no, but I'm not 100% sure that this is real. And that's fine. And I think many
mystics don't claim 100% certainty either for their spiritual experiences. I distinguish in my work
between what philosophers call self-authenticating mystical experiences from mystical experiences
that are not self-authenticating. And the difference is a self-authenticating mystical
experience is one which by the very having of which you can't doubt its genuineness.
And the interesting thing is that mystics like Saint Teresa of Avila, the great Catholic mystic,
Shri Ramakrishna, they themselves will classify their different spiritual experiences within
these two categories. Some of them are self-authenticating, some of them are not.
I don't want to speak for most mystics. I want to say that there are many mystics who don't claim
that all of their spiritual experiences are self-authenticating, so that it would be inaccurate
to say that. Some of them will say, "It certainly feels as real, if not more real to me than my
perception of this external world, but I can't be 100% sure." And then there are these very,
very lofty, what these mystics consider to be the absolutely ultimate apex of spiritual experience,
which they say, which they tend to say are self-authenticating. You can't doubt them,
logically. At least the person experiencing them can't doubt them. Others can doubt all they like.
Yeah, of course. And of course, you know, you could have fundamentalist Christians who said,
"Well, Jesus saved me and it was a huge experience for me and I absolutely believe it and it's true
and I'm going to heaven and all that stuff." That's wonderful. They have that, that's wonderful,
yeah. More power to them. Yeah, whether or not that actually happened or it was just a big mood.
God knows, is what I say. God knows. Right. Okay, okay, here's another question. This is
is from Prachi Dixit in Torrance, California. Do you agree that God or even spirituality
is a very personal experience and that no matter what path we take, it is all going
to one ultimate truth?
>>Kaustubh: Yeah, I think so. It just depends on what you mean by personal experience. I
mean, is that deflationary or is that... It's an intimate encounter with the ultimate. And
yeah, our tradition is all about how different people, different spiritual aspirants meditating
on the divine reality in different forms and aspects, all ultimately reach the same goal
of spiritual realization of the divine in some form or aspect. And because we haven't really
brought into play doctrines like karma and rebirth and universal liberation, but that's
also an important part of the overall package.
David: Yeah, let's get into that a little bit in a minute. All right, so Curtis just
sent me, this is the Curtis interview, Curtis sent a follow-up question just in my personal
email. He says, "Thanks for getting our question in. Well done. I think you also had excellent
follow-up perspective and this is a little confrontational but you can take
it. What he tried was to shift the burden of proof. It was a tactic not a
philosophical response. The fact is that science and my own claims are not that
we know the ultimate reality of life. That is the claim that requires support. If I
am challenged on being wrong about anything I am never surprised. He is
saying that since we can't be sure about our perceptions we have no right to ask
for proof of a claim to ultimate reality, false equivalence. He is representing a tradition that
makes a very exciting claim, the ultimate reality of life. The answer to "where's the beef?" cannot
be "I know you are, but what am I?" I get the drift away saying, yeah, it's because I haven't
introduced. There are some key principles that I talk about in detail in my scholarly work.
So I'll just, I'll introduce them now. Richard Swinburne, this very prominent philosopher of
religion, he's still living, but he's very old at this point. I think he's in the mid 80s or
or something at Oxford. He presented what he considers to be bedrock epistemic principles.
One of them he calls the principle of credulity. That may not be the best language to use.
Other people like John Hick calls it the principle of critical trust. But in any case, what is
the principle? The fundamental principle is this. It is reasonable for me to take what
I perceive to actually exist. You might think, well, duh. Well, yeah, it should be duh, right?
But now, interesting implications follow if we accept this epistemic principle of credulity.
follows. Any perception I have is by itself in the absence of reasons for doubting that
perception. If I'm on drugs, I have a good reason to doubt that that's a veridical experience.
But if I can rule out any reason for thinking that this perception might be bogus, it's
reasonable for me to take it at face value and to think that what I'm perceiving actually
exists. If we accept that principle, it applies equally to all perceptions across the board,
whether sensuous or super sensuous. This is the key principle that needs to be introduced
to kind of complete the picture that I'm...
'Cause what he's saying about the tactic, it's true.
That's just, it's just a response,
but that's the kind of prelude to bringing in
the positive epistemic principles.
So this is the first principle.
Second principle, the principle of perceptual testimony.
It's reasonable for us to accept
the perceptual testimony of others in the absence of doubt.
We accept both of these principles
all the time in our daily life.
Newspapers, history books, science textbooks.
When my father says, "Hey, take an umbrella,
raining outside, it's raining outside today for instance in LA, it's a rare occurrence.
If I know it's April Fool's Day and my dad has a tendency to kind of pull my leg on April Fool's
Day, then I'm not going to accept that principle on this occasion. Otherwise, you're going to accept
it. Now, if we accept those two epistemic principles, the principle of credulity and
the principle of perceptual testimony, and which we do, and I don't think Curtis is going to argue
against these principles because that would be crazy and you'd lose any sense of rationality if
you did. If you accept those principles, those principles equally apply to super centrist
perceptions and essentialist perception. The perception of this mic, of this microphone and
laptop, just as much as a mystic's punitive perception of God or the Atman or Nirvana.
That's good. I wish I could talk like that. Yeah, it's funny, actually. There's been such a spate
of conspiracy theories going around, especially the last few years, it seems like. And I've
actually tangled with people who believe the earth is flat and that everybody's lying to you. And of
And of course, people who try to debunk conspiracy theories say that the larger the conspiracy,
the more improbable it is that it's a valid theory. So, the fact that the Earth is flat,
there'd have to be millions of people in cahoots hiding something from us, or that the moon
landings were faked, and so on and so forth. And actually, this leads to a good question,
which I've come more and more to appreciate the importance of developing critical thinking
skills on the spiritual path because I've seen so many examples of people who have been on
spiritual paths for decades even who are kind of off in la-la land in terms of the clarity
and rigor of their thinking and are susceptible to brainwashing and all kinds of magical thinking.
Absolutely, I think that critical thinking is essential for all spiritual aspirants. I gave a
lecture a few months ago, you can look it on YouTube, it's called "We Are All Philosophers"
And I think that there's a common mistake made by a lot of spiritual aspirants, which is that like
there's like a small minority of super smart and intellectual spiritual aspirants who are into
philosophy, who are kind of nerds about philosophy. And so philosophy is for them, but not for us. We
don't need it. And I push back on that and I think that that's a mistake. First of all, I think it's
important to recognize that the Buddhist, the fundamental Buddhist spiritual practice is the
noble eightfold path. And the first factor in that eightfold path is samyagdhrishti. It's the right
view, right understanding. It's the foundation for all of the subsequent spiritual practices,
for everything else. Because without a right understanding of this world, no matter what
you do, it's like rowing a boat in a completely directionless way. You need to know where
you are now, where you want to go, and how to get from point A to point B. All of that,
you can only arrive at that through critical thinking and through some philosophical inquiry,
however rudimentary. And every tradition gives you a different philosophical roadmap, so
So you have to have some understanding, even if you just take the name of God, which is
a standard devotional practice.
Who is God?
You don't need to be Aquinas and go into the theological subtleties, but have some basic
understanding.
Is God a supreme person who loves me and who responds to my prayers?
Or is God non-dual pure consciousness?
Doesn't that matter to your spiritual practice?
Shouldn't it matter?
I mean, surely it does.
But these are philosophical questions and they're things that you arrive at through critical
thinking.
Critical thinking takes many different forms.
So I just mentioned one form which is philosophizing, but there are many other forms.
For instance, viveka, the Sanskrit term viveka, often is translated as discrimination.
These days discrimination has a bad connotation, so people say discernment.
But in any case, that itself is a form of critical thinking.
That's also important to keep in mind.
And that's fundamental in every path, apart from the path of knowledge.
But viveka, this idea that you have to discriminate between what is real, what's unreal, what's
permanent, what's impermanent, what's eternal, what's non-eternal.
non-eternal. It kind of reminds me of the whole Shravanamana and Nididhasana thing where you
hear it, you really think about it deeply, you do something to confirm it experientially
or explore it experientially. And I think sometimes there's an imbalance in people's
spiritual development where they favor one of these things more than the other and it
doesn't have a good outcome. Along similar lines, Swami Sarvarma Prananda, with some
friends I started this organization a few years ago called the Association for Spiritual Integrity
to try to popularize the importance of ethical behavior on the spiritual path, which is often
lacking in contemporary circles. And Swami Sarvarpriyananda addressed our group one time
for a webinar, but I appreciate hearing your thoughts on that because as I mentioned it's
very often left out in modern spiritual teachings and yet it's very much a pillar of the more
traditional teachings. Absolutely and I 100% agree and I think part of the problem with
so-called neo-advaitins is that they don't read their source texts. They don't read Shankara's
commentaries in general. They're only reading Ramana Maharshi. Even Ramana Maharshi will
sometimes emphasize eligibility requirements and if you look at his life of course you saw that he
was just obviously an extraordinary soul, right? And at the age of 16 his uncle died I think and
then he just lay flat on the floor and then he just had the enlightenment experience. But that's
because he had already attained perfection in previous births, right? That would be the Vedantic
understanding. So I think it's absolutely essential. I personally think that it's dangerous to teach
classical Advaita Vedanta to the masses precisely because of this problem. You can teach Advaita
Vedanta in a different form. That is, in my understanding, Vijnana Vedanta because it's
still Advaita. There's only one reality. But this is not an Advaita that says this world is an
illusion. It doesn't say that the path of knowledge is the only direct path to liberation. Those are
are the things that are I think more problematic in this context. I interviewed a woman about a
year ago named Jessica Nathanson or Jessica Eve, she sometimes calls herself, who has been on a
campaign to help people who've actually been damaged by neo-invite. People who are householders
by nature, they have families, jobs, etc., are becoming cynical, unmotivated, their family is
an illusion, they may even become suicidal and so on, and she's become like a clearinghouse for
these horror stories. Wow, that's interesting. I didn't know that it went that far, but I think
that the key term here is spiritual bypassing. I think that's what's happening in a lot of these
cases. It's people who are frustrated in their home life or their whatever work life and they
take to Advaita Vedanta as this spiritual quick fix to avoid thinking about their psychological
and daily mundane issues. I think that's a huge problem. All right, playing off of this,
you just said that it's not good to teach Vedanta to the masses, but that maybe Vijnana Vedanta
would be okay. So, reiterate, if you've already said some of it, in what form do you think Vedanta
should be presented to a larger audience? And part of the question is, what are the actual mechanics
through which studying Vedanta in the way you're going to describe brings about realization?
So the first part I actually kind of answered, but I'll just remind you of the three main
tenets of Vijnana Vedanta.
Right.
Number one, ultimate reality.
It's not only personal and it's not only impersonal.
So it's already differing from the traditional schools of Vedanta in that way.
Because all the bhakti schools of Vedanta are saying that God is only Vishnu, God is
only Krishna, or that other forms of God are lower than Krishna and all this stuff.
Advaita Vedanta is saying ultimately ultimate reality is only Brahman and the other things
are just lower forms of reality.
Shrampus's philosophy says, Vighenamadhyatha says, that ultimate reality is equally Brahman and Shakti.
Equally impersonal and personal.
Equally with and without form.
That one infinite divine reality manifests in different forms and aspirants to different mystics and spiritual aspirants.
So if a householder hears that, for instance, he's not going to be inclined to give up his family and lose interest in the world.
Exactly. Exactly.
Whereas he might with a more Shankarite emphasis.
Absolutely. And number two, number two tenet.
What is this world and how does it relate to ultimate reality?
Shri Ramakrishna says this world is a real manifestation of the divine, of Shakti.
Another reason for not abandoning your family is that you can't abandon God.
Where are you going to go? You're going to leave God for God.
So stay where you are and do your duties and do it as a loving worship of God by
serving your wife, serving your children and going to work, doing your Karma Yoga
And whatever you do, your 9-5 job or whatever it is, do it as an offering to the Divine,
who is omnipresent and both transcendent and immanent.
You know, I edited a volume on panentheism, so it's the panentheistic view that God is
both immanent in the world and transcendent, also beyond it.
And third, how does that affect our understanding of spiritual practice?
Well, I think it affects it radically.
Because instead of privileging one path like Jnana Yoga, which is again part of the problem
for neo-Advaitins, because a lot of them look down on people who follow bhakti, you know,
devotional traditions and they say that's based on blind faith.
Our path is the only rational one and we have greater lucidity than you do and they can
be very patronizing and condescending.
I've seen that from my own experience from encountering different, even some monks and
but also many devotees.
Vijnanamadhyatmas don't do that.
Why?
Because they put all of the different yogas on an equal footing and they say that it's
a matter of temperament.
Which yoga you take to the most and you can even combine them to your heart's content
if you want.
it fosters a much richer and more expansive spiritual life where you don't have to feel
first of all the danger of the spiritual superiority complex like i'm on the fast path the
the fast track to liberation whereas these other fools are kind of it might take them a thousand
more lives to come to where i am and you you don't have that condescending attitude and secondly
you don't have to just practice one yoga at the expense of the others you can actually combine
them in creative ways and there isn't any one way to do it there are many ways make your spiritual
path your own. Vivekananda used to say, "No person is born into a religion. Each person has a religion,
a kind of custom-made, individualized religion, in the depths of his or her soul." And the first
step in spiritual life is discovering what that custom-made, individualized religion is. You can
make it for yourself, and Vignanadana gives you the tools to do that. That's good. Actually, you know,
Ramana Maharshi, as I understand him, and Papaji, you know, H.W.L. Punja, who was one of his disciples,
and from whom many of these Neo-Advaita people sprang, were quite devotional. So was Nisargadatta.
I mean, they would get out the puja kit, the symbols. So a lot of times that aspect isn't
brought forth very much. I think that's true, but I think it's also not obvious how to understand
that. I mean, to be honest, you know, I've read many of Ramana Maharshi's teachings. I've read
Nisargadatta's "I Am That" and other texts. And they do seem to say, sometimes at least,
that the personal god is not the ultimate reality. And if so, then there's this question,
okay, yeah, they might be engaging in devotional practice, but one explanation would be they're
doing it to cater to the masses who are not ready for the highest teachings. Another is,
they have to spend their time in some way while they're still in the body, which is itself an
illusion. So they may as well worship an illusory god within the dream. Do a dream puja of a dream
personal god in this dream because there's no loss in doing that. It's better than smoking
tobacco. Or "Nisagadatta Amara" is both smoke tobacco and devotional practices. So just by noting that they're devotional,
that they were also devotional, that doesn't mean that they subscribe to "Vijnana Vedanta".
You see what I mean? That would be what I call lazy harmonizing. I think that's a really, really
great danger in traditions, especially that try to be ecumenical and syncretic. The danger is
they leap too quickly to the assumption that all paths just lead to the same goal
without being rigorous about the mechanics of it, which is the second part of your question.
Yes, we haven't gotten to that yet. We want to talk more about mechanics. I can understand how
something like meditation, which I've been doing for like 55 years, has neurophysiological effects
and so on and can restructure your whole makeup, gross and subtle, and things like yoga and so on.
But how about the dhanta itself? Maybe there's the analogy that you pull one leg of the table
and the whole table comes along. So, what is the table leg of studying Vedanta? How does it
drag along the rest of one's makeup and actually transform? It would even have to be neuro
physiological, transform one so that realization can become an abiding living reality.
>> We have to be careful about the term Vedanta. This is another thing I kind of
>> Oh yes, it's a multi-
>> My work, my lectures, and because Vedanta is too broad and it encompasses many different
traditions.
Let's say Vijnana Vedanta, we'll keep it at that.
So, with Vijnana Vedanta, here's the key premise.
We are already God. We are already God.
And we are already children of God.
And the problem is, the layers of impurity from many past lives
that are covering over that innate knowledge that we are divine.
So, the way that Swami Vivekananda puts it is,
yes, every yoga is a direct path to liberation.
And there are people who push back and question him.
For instance, Anantarand Rambachan. I don't know if you've had him on your podcast.
He's an interesting scholar, he's a Hindu scholar, who wrote a book criticizing Vivekananda's ideas.
And he has a whole chapter devoted to a kind of critical demolition of Swami Vivekananda's view,
the Vijnanavidhanta view, which is that all four yogas are direct paths to the same goal of moksha, liberation.
And he's criticizing Vivekananda from the standpoint of Shankara, interestingly.
He's a follower of Shankara.
And he says that Shankara gives a really logical, airtight argument for why the path of knowledge,
the mechanics of how the path of knowledge can afford liberation.
Vivekananda doesn't give an explanation of the precise mechanics by which Bhakti Yoga,
Raja Yoga, Karma Yoga can equally lead to liberation. That's the criticism. And in my book on Vivekananda,
Swami Vivekananda's Vedanta-Cause of Balkanism, in chapter 2 of the book, I respond to Rambachan's
criticisms and this is the way I do it. The key premise is we are already knowers of Brahman.
We are already knowers of Brahman. That knowledge of Brahman is already innate in us.
But we're not aware that we have that knowledge because of these layers of impurity covering over
that knowledge. Now, every single yoga, the aim of every yoga, whether it's jnana yoga or bhakti
yoga or jnana yoga or raja yoga, is to purify our hearts and minds. That's it. That's it. So that
through the successful practice of any of these yogas, what's the result? You've purified your
heart and mind and that innate knowledge of divinity, of your own divinity, shines forth,
manifests. That's the mechanics of it. You're just removing those layers of impurity covering over
that innate knowledge of Brahman. And if you want a scriptural precedent, actually the Bhagavad Gita
says exactly that. It says that we are already, we already have jnana, but that jnana is covered
over by worldly desires and attachments, that kind of impurity. Yeah, I think doesn't it mean
to say knowledge is the greatest purifier? And that knowledge, something like that?
Absolutely. But in this case, I'm saying something different. I'm saying that that
knowledge is already within us. And through any spiritual practice, whether it's a path of
knowledge or devotion or whatever, you remove those layers of impurity covering that innate knowledge,
Preventing from realizing that you're already an old man in that sense.
That you already have the skill and knowledge.
Yeah, study is, I think that's part of the danger of Neo-Advaita because it's...
I don't mean just a superficial, you know, dabbling. I mean, yeah.
...teachings of Ramana Maharishi is enough for liberation. Yeah, but a deep study. Absolutely,
absolutely. That by itself...
I guess the whole question of which is fastest and which is best, you know,
comes back to like who you are and what your makeup is.
Exactly. That's absolutely right. You can't say that for everybody, there's one path that's
objectively better than the others. And Sri Ramakrishna would use the example of a mother
cooking different fish preparations for different children. And I think it's a very intuitive
example because it makes no sense to say that pasta is objectively better than...
Different strokes for different folks.
It's a matter of taste.
Okie dokie. Here's another question that came in.
Mrinalini Singh in New Delhi, "Could you please speak more about Kalima and why she is always
shown as so fierce and deadly? Thakurji, in other words Sri Ramakrishna, in Dakshinwar
spoke so lovingly of her and described her as Shakti, which was omnipotent."
Yeah, thanks. It's a great question. I'm teaching Bhagavad Gita in the Light of Shri Ram Krishna.
That's a class, an ongoing class that I'm teaching and we're using Sri Aurobindo's
essays in the Gita as our main text. And we just discussed a chapter where he says
really beautifully, he says, "Hinduism is one of the few religions in the world that accepts
unflinchingly that God is not only the creator but God is also the destroyer.
God doesn't just manifest as a good but also manifests as evil." And we don't have to posit
some other entity like satan or ariman in the in the context of zoroastrianism as this kind of
counterpoint to god to explain everything that's bad or dark in the world no god is equally both
and you have to accept god in the forms of both good and evil. Sri Ramakrishna used to say that
Kalima has manifested as both avidya maya and vidya maya. avidya maya is the maya of ignorance
which includes all selfish qualities egoism lust and greed and all that stuff and vidya maya all
of the spiritual qualities, like devotion, like knowledge, like discrimination, like detachment,
which bring us to the highest knowledge of ultimate reality. And she's equally both.
She's equally both. And so, I think that it's just a very sobering and also realistic and
expansive understanding of God. - And about a month ago, I was
corresponding with a friend and I used Bing chat or something like that to bring up a list of
the various points in the Bible that discuss the omnipresence of God. And there are a number of
them that are very plain. God is omnipresent. So, if God is omnipresent, then God equally pervades
everything by definition, including Auschwitz and whatnot. And if God is missing from some of those
places, then there are holes in God and God is not omnipresent. But people bring that up as an
obvious example of how could there be a God which would allow something like that? If that's the way
God can behave, I'm not interested in the guy.
Absolutely. So this is exactly the question that came up in the Gospel of Shri Ramakrishna.
There's an incident when the author of the Gospel, M, he mentions to Shri Ramakrishna,
there's this great pandit at the time named Vidyasagar. Vidyasagar says, and he told this
to M, and M conveyed it to Shri Ramakrishna. Vidyasagar said, Genghis Khan was faced with
a difficult situation. He had about 100,000 prisoners. And to maintain those prisoners,
you have to feed them, doesn't have the resources. So somebody asked him, what do we do with
these prisoners. He said, "Oh, just kill them." Vidya Sagar says, "Didn't God see that? If
God is omnipotent, wouldn't he have prevented that? If God is perfectly loving, shouldn't
he have prevented that?" So if we accept the theistic God, the traditional God of theism,
which is that God is perfectly loving and omnipotent, then you have no way of explaining
the presence of this tremendous suffering and evil in the world. That's the problem
of evil in philosophy and philosophy, religion and theology.
Yes, I do.
I do. Yeah.
...work to kind of discussing our tradition's response to the problem of evil.
I'm now basing what I'm going to say on chapter seven and eight of my book on
Shuram Krishna called "Infinite Paths to Infinite Reality." So I would say that it's a three-part
theodicy. Remember the word that you had trouble pronouncing, theodicy. What does theodicy mean?
Theodicy was a term coined by Leibniz, and it means justifying God's ways to human beings,
explaining why God permits all this evil and suffering that we see around us.
Now, how does Shuram Gosha do it? I think it's a three-part response and they're all kind of
interrelated in interesting ways. First line response is what philosophers called skeptical
theism and that's his first line response to Vidya Sagar actually. He says, "How can we ever know why
God does the things she does? God creates, preserves, and destroys. How can we ever know
why and when she destroys?" This is what's called skeptical theism in technical language. What it
it means is, why in the world should we think that we are in any position to know why God
would do the things that he does or she does?
And an example that William Alston uses, which I like, is he uses the example of chess.
Imagine a chess grandmaster.
We can think of Magnus Carlsen, for instance, the greatest chess player in the world, playing
against another very high level player.
I'm watching in the audience.
I'm just an amateur chess player.
I know the rules, but I'm terrible at chess, which is true about me.
Okay, I'm watching Magnus make this move,
which seems like way out there.
Like it's a move I would never make.
Would I jump to the conclusion
that Magnus is making a huge mistake?
I don't think I have good evidence for that
because I'm just an amateur, right?
I mean, I don't have the mind that Magnus does.
He's thinking a hundred moves in advance,
whereas I can't even think two moves in advance.
If that's true of Magnus Carlsen,
who's still a finite human being,
how much more true would it be of God,
who's infinite, who is omniscient and omnipotent?
That's skeptical theism.
That's true Ramakrishna's first line response
to the problem of evil.
because we don't understand why God permitted Genghis Khan to slaughter all those people
or Hitler to allow for all those Jews or order all those Jews to be killed in the concentration
camp. It doesn't mean that God didn't have a good first line response, but that's not all.
There are two other dimensions which I want to elaborate. Second, the second dimension of
Shri Ramakrishna's theodicy is what I call his saint-making theodicy. Okay, saint-making theodicy,
and it has three main doctrines.
In the Gospel of Shri Ram Krishna,
Shri Ram Krishna raises the problem of evil himself,
and he asks,
"Why has God created all these evil worldly tendencies in us?"
All this selfishness, lust, and greed, and anger
that leads to so much suffering for so many people.
Untold suffering.
He gives a very succinct answer,
and you can write whole books on it,
as I tried to myself.
His answer is, "In order to create saints."
It's a very interesting answer.
And then he says,
You learn how to control the senses and how to overcome ego and how to overcome your selfish
qualities and egoistic tendencies through the encounter with evil and suffering both in yourself
and in this world and in other people. You learn from other people's mistakes for instance but you
also learn from your own mistakes from both good and bad and all the things that you do in the
course of your life. And it's through that that we grow morally and spiritually. If we weren't
tested, if we weren't challenged, if this world were just a kind of a kind of utopia or a heaven,
we wouldn't make ethical progress. That's why this world is so unique. That's why this world is what's
called the karma bhumi. That's why even more than any of these temporary heavens that people go to
because of their good karma, this world alone is the karma bhumi in the sense that in this world
alone can we work out our karma and actually make ethical and spiritual progress precisely because
it's not a perfect world and it's not all peaches and roses. In those higher realms where it's all
good, you're not going to grow because everything is great. It's a kind of hedonistic paradise.
Okay, now what are the three key doctrines here that help to kind of fill out the specifics of this picture?
Karma, rebirth, and universal liberation.
The doctrine of karma. This is one of the fundamental tenets of Hinduism.
We believe that there is this law of karma.
Every single one of our acts has a certain ethical quality.
It could be wholesome or good. It could be unwholesome or bad, unethical.
or it could be neutral.
And the ethical quality of our actions
has consequences for us.
Either later in this life
or in a subsequent life.
And so, Karma is linked
to the doctrine of rebirth,
which is that this is not our only embodiment.
We have had past embodiments
in other human beings,
but also possibly lower creatures,
even plants.
And until we attain liberation,
we'll have to come back again in another body
and assume human form again,
ultimately to get liberation.
Now, there's a big question about
how to interpret this law of karma. One traditional way that the Hindu doctrine of karma has been
understood, not just Hindu, I think many Buddhists understand it this way, is what's called the
retributive doctrine of karma. Karma is retribution. It's a kind of punishment.
You get what you deserve and so if you do something bad, you're punished for it. You're
going to be born as a, I don't know, as a whatever something really bad would be, like in really
unfortunate circumstances, or you're born as a cow who's ultimately going to be slaughtered and
served as grade A beef in some restaurant, whatever it is. And if you do something good, you're given
a lollipop and good for you and you're going to be born into a nice family and have a lot of wealth
and be happy in your life. Okay, that's one view. Now, there's another way of understanding the
doctrine of karma, which is I think Sriram Krishna's way, which doesn't deny the fundamental
principle of law of karma, which is we reap what we sow, but takes the sting out of the
retributive dimension of it. He says the primary aim of the law of karma is not retribution. It's
not reward and punishment. It's our spiritual growth. It's our ethical and spiritual growth,
our spiritual and moral evolution. And so by contrast with the retributive doctrine of karma,
I think Shri Ramakrishna, our tradition upholds an evolutionary doctrine of karma.
And which ties in with the previous point, which is the difficulties of life or learning
experiences. Absolutely, exactly. And I think this gives us a much richer, much saner,
much more humane way of thinking about the law of karma. It gives us a more humane way of thinking
about when other people are suffering. We don't say that person's getting what's coming to him. No,
we try to help that person because we know that we're also going to evolve spiritually and morally.
This is an opportunity for us to serve by helping others by trying to alleviate their suffering.
Now, the third doctrine, because we're not done yet with the saint making theodicy,
the third doctrine which is crucial is the doctrine of universal liberation. Shrampush
just says, he uses a metaphor, he says some people will be fed at six in the morning,
other people at 12 noon, other people at 6 pm, other people at midnight.
But everybody will be fed without exception. He says likewise,
everybody will eventually attain liberation, if not in this life, then in
the future. Now, why is that relevant to the problem
of evil? Because a massive problem in theological
discussions of the problem of evil in the context of Abrahamic religions
is the doctrine of an eternal hell. This is a huge problem.
Christian theologians themselves are starting to acknowledge the problem, like
John Hick for instance points out in a book, a beautiful book he wrote called "Evil and the God
of Love" he says, "Look, traditional Christians believe in an eternal hell for some souls. If God
were perfectly loving, he would not want a single soul to be condemned to eternal damnation."
Why? Well, because at worst, whatever evil that person has committed, it's a finite sin.
Why punish somebody for a finite sin with an eternal punishment? So that's the first part of
it. Secondly, God is also omnipotent, John Hick points out. If God is omnipotent, God is perfectly
powerful, which means that God is in a position to prevent any soul from being condemned to an
eternal hell. So if both these things are true, we have to jettison one of these two theistic
attributes. Either God is perfectly loving but not omnipotent, or God is omnipotent but not
perfectly loving. But it can't be both at the same time. So that's a challenge, right? Even within
Abrahamic religions, some liberal Christian thinkers, as a result, have
actually abandoned the doctrine of eternal health. So I think the drift, even
in some traditional theologies, is toward universal liberation. I have a friend at
University of Michigan-Dearborn named Imran Aijaz, who's working on... we're thinking
of editing a volume together on universal... it's called universalism,
that's the term, which means universal liberation, universal salvation, in Islam,
because he's an expert in Islam. And he's fascinated by these Islamic theologians
who actually believed in universal liberation. You might not even know that some Muslims
believed in that, but that is an unorthodox view within Islam as well. And so our tradition
fully accepts that every single soul without exception will eventually attain liberation,
and therefore God can be perfectly loving and perfectly omnipotent. He's not condemning
anybody to an eternal punishment. So the third dimension, after all this, you might say,
well, okay, I get it. I get karma, rebirth, universal liberation, but boy, God is putting
us through all sorts of ordeals and challenges just what for his own amusement? Why couldn't he have
just made us saints in the first place? Why put us through all this trouble? Why have to go through
millions of lives before we attain the goal? It's a legitimate question. Isn't that kind of cruel on
God's part to make us jump these hoops? That's a question. That's why there's a third crucial
dimension and it's a kind of mystical/spiritual dimension of his theodicy. Vigyana. I've been
talking about vigyana a lot. Actually we never even talked about what vigyana is in the context
is Ramakrishna. So let me just mention that first because I was talking about Vijnana Vedanta but
people might want to know what the heck Vijnana is. Okay, Ramakrishna often distinguishes Jnana
from Vijnana and he says it's like this, you want to climb to the roof of a house, you want to get
to the roof. How do you do it? By climbing a staircase. Climbing the staircase is like the
process of neti neti reasoning. Not this, not this. Brahman is not this world. Brahman is not this soul.
Brahman is not this, not that. The traditional path of Jnana Yoga, the path of knowledge until
you reach the roof which signifies what? Knowledge of your true nature is non-dual pure consciousness.
This is the ultimate goal for classical Advaita Vedantins like Ramana Maharshi, Shankara and all
the others. That's reaching the roof. Trangu Risha then said something really interesting. So that's
jnana for him. Jnana means just knowledge of non-dual Brahman. He says there are some people
who after reaching the roof will look back on the staircase and say wait a minute the staircase is
made of the same materials as the roof. Bricks, lime and brick dust. That's the bhikyani who after
realizing non-dual Brahman in the state of nivikapa samadhi can come back to this world
and realize that that Brahman as Shakti has become everything in this world and realizes
that Brahman and Shakti are inseparable.
Now coming back to the problem of evil.
There's an incident in Shram Krishna's life during his period of spiritual practice when
he sees a wounded butterfly and this poor butterfly has a splinter in one of its wings
and it can barely fly and it's probably going to die soon.
Ramakrishna feels tremendous anguish for this butterfly and he thinks what cruel boy must
have inflicted this pain on this butterfly just out of a sheer kind of sadism that some
children have.
And in the next moment he flies into the state of spiritual ecstasy and he starts laughing
uncontrollably and then he says, "I realize at that moment the butterfly is divine mother,
the splinter that the boy has put into the butterfly's wing is equally divine mother,
The cruel boy inflicting suffering on the butterfly, equally divine mother.
I am divine mother.
So who's to praise and who's to blame?
There's only divine mother.
This is the ultimate response to the problem of evil because I see this final level of
response as not solving the problem of evil, but as dissolving the problem of evil.
That's the way I put it.
In what sense?
Well, the problem of evil is grounded in a fundamental presupposition.
That presupposition is that God is there out there and we, his poor suffering creatures,
are on this side.
a duality presupposed between God on the one hand inflicting suffering on poor us, human
beings and other animals, right?
Vijnana denies that very presupposition at the root of the question, at the root of the
problem of evil.
Therefore, I call it dissolving the problem of evil because it just says you're not different
from God.
There's a very poignant moment in the gospel of Sri Ramakrishna when the future Swami Turiyananda,
okay, his name was Hari, he's hearing Sri Ramakrishna explain this whole saint making
Theodicy, Karma, Rebirth, it's all Mother's will.
And Thurinandji says something very poignant.
He says, "But Mother's play, Mother's Leela, is our death."
That's the statement.
And Sri Ramakrishna immediately responds,
"But who are you?
Divine Mother has become the 24 cosmic principles.
You are not different from God.
And when you realize that, the problem of evil,
it won't just be solved, it will dissolve away.
It won't be a problem."
Ludwig Wittgenstein, the great Austrian philosopher,
toward the end of the Tractatus, he said,
the solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem. That's what he does.
Pete: That's good. I like all those points and I look forward to reading the books in which you,
you know, describe them in much greater detail. I have another thought, what did Einstein used to
call them? Thought exercises or something? Another way that I look at it, I don't know
if this fits into any of the three, but I try to take a God's eye view of it. Firstly, the time
span of God's subjective experience, if you will, is eternal, if not at least 13.7 billion
years, but eternal really.
And so, we with our little time spans don't have that perspective and things might seem
very unfair from our myopic little vision.
Secondly, if there's going to be a creation, it seems to me by definition it has to be structured
in polarities and opposites and different qualities.
If there's going to be hot, there's got to be cold, fast, slow, good, bad, all the different
relative polarities.
You couldn't have it be all, like you said, peaches and roses or something, without their
counterparts.
I don't think such a creation could function.
And thirdly, you know, what might seem to be cruel and difficult is actually from the
big picture, if we could really zoom out, in service of our evolution.
So, our bodies, your body and mine, are made up of the remnants of stars which died and
exploded and dispersed their contents throughout the galaxy, and if there were inhabited planets
orbiting those stars, that wasn't a pretty experience for the people who lived on those
planets.
We might have been one of them, but now here we are with a body made of the heavier elements
that were forged in the death of those stars.
Could God have done it differently?
I don't know.
Perhaps there are certain laws of nature, as science understands them, that just have to be the way they are in order for the universe to function.
Yeah, I would add one more example, because we brought up Auschwitz or Holocaust a number of times in this interview, but Viktor Frankl, Frankl I think would be the German pronunciation, he wrote a whole book about how he grew morally and spiritually from his experience in concentration camp.
concentration camp. As did others. Elie Wiesel, there was a woman who actually, I forget her
name now, but she was having these beautiful celestial experiences in the concentration
camp, having these spiritual experiences. Okay, let's give our brains a rest for a second
and come up with another question here. This is from Patrick Brockman in Nirguna, Vancouver.
I didn't know there was a place in Vancouver named after Nirguna. Your contempt for Shankara
has always amused. Could you share your realizations about Gaudapada's doctrine of Ajatavada
and would your insight into Vijnana change if you regarded 'sat' as an appearance rather
than a manifestation?
I never gathered that you did. I've listened to you talk about Shankara a lot.
That's a strange word you use. I have absolutely no contempt for anybody. Yeah, it's an unspiritual
quality. I think it's people on the Shankara side who kind of call me names. But anyway,
so that I'm disavowing because I don't think that's fair.
Right, Mandukya Upanishad and all that.
What about Gaudapada?
Didn't he do a commentary on the Mandukya Upanishad?
Absolutely, the Mandukya Karika.
Exactly, yeah.
One of his famous karikas there is
[Sanskrit]
It's Ajatavada, which means that
there is no spiritual aspirant,
there is no liberation, there is no bondage, there is no universe.
Yeah, nothing ever happens, it's just non-dual pure consciousness.
I'm not entirely sure what the question is,
actually, because, yes, and I think Shankara
actually accepted Ajatavada fully.
it's not actually that Shankara differs from Gaudapada. You'll find if you study the Mandukakarika
carefully is that he's kind of almost equating the waking state with the dream state. He's putting
them on an equal ontological footing. He's saying the waking state is no more real than the dream
state and Shankara doesn't say that. If you look at his commentary on the Brahma Sutra,
he's pushing back against, he's criticizing Yogacara Buddhists who hold that view and it's
not a coincidence that Gaudapada himself was strongly influenced by Buddhist traditions like
like Yogachara Buddhism and Nagarjuna.
That's why some opponents of Shankara,
like the Bhakti schools of Vedanta,
call followers of Shankara,
Crypto Buddhists, Ratchanda Buddhists.
And I think there's some truths to that.
So in any case,
Shankara does not put the waking state
and the dream state on equal footing.
He says that the waking state is for certain reasons,
more real than the dream state.
And he gives a bunch of reasons.
One reason is that we wake up from dreaming
every single night
and that dream experience is sublated on a daily basis.
Whereas our waking experience is not sublated until we attain knowledge of Brahman.
But at the same time, the caveat is, when we attain knowledge of Brahman, we realize that
nothing in this world ever was.
We never even pass through a dream.
It's that radical.
So I think he's as radical in Ajatavadhan as Gaudapada, but that he placed greater emphasis
on honoring this empirical reality, this waking state, than did Gaudapada.
That's the difference.
And it's a kind of subtle difference, and it's not actually a fundamental metaphysical
They were both equally a jata bodhins
and then I think another part of the question was I
Think it's a confused question to be honest because he's asking whether if he takes up to be
Manifestation rather than appearance does that solve the problem?
Can you repeat that if you regarded sat as an appearance rather than a manifestation?
I guess he's saying that something's what the reality truth the reality
so I guess he's saying that if you regarded the reality of the creation as an appearance rather than
Having more substance to it as a manifestation of the divine
Question exactly like is that okay? Does he want me to believe that or what does he want me to do?
Would your insight change if you regarded the creation as a mere appearance as I suppose Goda Pada did
Of course it would rather than a substantial manifestation
Of course it would of course it would and that's exactly the difference between what's wrong Christian calls a Ghanian a big gun
The Jnani, he says, looks upon this world as a framework of illusion, as an illusory appearance,
as an illusory snake superimposed on the real rope.
And the Vigyani, by contrast, sees this world as a mart of joy.
Everything is divine bliss.
Of course, that's a fundamental difference in phenomenology.
Of course, it's a completely different outlook on the world.
Of course.
And that's why Vigyana Vedanta is so different in its outlook on the world than classical
Advaita is.
You know what I find interesting?
How influential one's philosophical understanding can be on one's life.
I mean it has ramifications in terms of the way it influences your behavior and your relationships and your motivations and everything else.
It makes a huge difference what you understand or believe philosophically.
Absolutely. That's why in the Buddhist Noble Eightfold Path, the first step is, the first factor, is right view.
Because depending on the view, your practice will follow.
Even if it's not explicitly articulated, right, even if it's just unconscious or implicit, it's still there.
Right. Yeah.
And it's going to take some undigging to make what's implicit explicit, but everybody's a philosopher, either an unconscious philosopher or a conscious philosopher. That's the way I put it.
Yeah, think of the people who just regard life as meaningless and everything is accidental and might as well take heroin or fentanyl or something because life sucks and then you die.
That's a controversial philosophical position among others and people differ to the degree
that they're able to articulate the underlying philosophical tenets that they subscribe to
and to what extent they're able to defend them, you know, in a coherent way, but in
a compelling way.
But yeah, but I think everybody is a philosopher and they have their own, however rudimentary
kind of worldview of how things are.
Yeah.
Here's another question.
This is from Nicholas in New Zealand.
Many spiritual teachers today are claiming that there is no more "I" to refer to anymore,
referring to themselves.
I've interviewed people who have argued that they've lost all sense of a personal self
and that there never was a personal self and so on.
Sri Ramakrishna said that even great saints such as Shankara came back from Nirvikalpa
Samadhi and still retain the ego of knowledge.
I've heard it said that since Sri Ramakrishna came to earth, it made it easier for regular
spiritual aspirants to reach the claim "I am He."
What do you think about that?
There are a few things.
Sri Ramakrishna used to say that "Vigyanis" - this is a small category of people who, after
attaining knowledge of non-dual Brahman in the state of nivakapu samadhi, can come back
to this world either holding onto the "I" of a devotee or holding onto the "I" of a
jnani - of a knower of Brahman.
One or the other.
He used to say that Shankara retained the "I" of knowledge.
Not ego.
Ego is not really the right word.
"Ami" in Bengali just means "I".
Identity as what?
As a knower.
He said that the Vijnani can take two forms, the kind of Jnani oriented Vijnani and the
Bhakti oriented Vijnani.
Vijnana according to Sri Ramakrishna takes one of two forms.
You can either retain the eye of knowledge and come back and serve people and teach people
the path of knowledge like Shankara did or a Vijnani can come back retaining the eye
of the Bhakta, of a devotee of the personal God and then see this whole world as a manifestation
of God and serve others in the spirit of worship.
Sri Ramakrishna used to say, "Shiva jnana jeeva seva."
Serve others in the spirit of worship by trying to see God in everyone.
That would be the Bhaktavidyani's attitude toward the world.
After Sri Ramakrishna came, it seems like he made available the state of "I am Brahman"
to many more people.
That's the idea.
Here I think there's a bit of a confusion because if you go back to the teachings, he
warned against saying to yourself, "I am Brahman, I am Brahman."
He said that only very, very few highly evolved spiritual aspirants are eligible to practice
that.
He said that bhakti is actually a far safer and better path for the vast majority of human
beings on this earth.
But did he make the state of Vijnana available to a greater number of people?
I think yes is the answer.
And that even though in the past Vijnana was a very, very rarefied spiritual state available
only to a very small minority of souls, I think he has broadened the accessibility of
state of Vijnana to a broader number of people. That doesn't mean everybody has to be a Vijnana.
He doesn't say that that's mandatory at all. He gives a very simple example. He says,
there's this beautiful river, the Ganga, the holy river Ganga in India, running throughout India,
right? Or most of India. He says, in order to touch the Ganga, do you have to run your figure
from the source of the Ganga and then run it all the way down to South India where it flows into
the Indian Ocean? No. If you touch the Ganga in one place, you can say, I've touched the Ganga.
exactly like that, people don't have to realize God as Krishna and Allah and as Christ and as
non-dual Brahman. No! You realize in whatever form you like and that's realization for you.
So, Vijnana is not mandatory, but I think he did make Vijnana, the state of Vijnana,
accessible to more people through his advent and his teachings in his life.
Pete So, we were talking about Neo-Advaita earlier,
and one of the points that they hammer away at is that there is no self, there is no personal self,
And some of them argue that they themselves live that way without any sense of personal self.
And I say, "Okay, can I whack your thumb with a hammer and see if you feel that it's happening
to somebody and not just happening to a rock over there?" Maybe some of them are experiencing
something that I haven't and just don't understand, but I've never been able to wrap my head around
the notion of being able to function as a human being without any sense of personal identity or
existence. Absolutely, I think that's great pushback. The funny thing is, Sriram Bhaja says
exactly that. Using just a slightly different analogy, he says, "Those people who say,
'I am Brahman, I am Brahman, I am not this body,' the real test, the ultimate test is,
stab them. And then they'll be bleeding profusely. Can they say in that moment,
'I'm not feeling pain?'" And there are some who can actually say that, because it completely lifted
their mind from body consciousness. And he says, "Only those people alone are eligible to practice
Advaita Vedanta." You can argue with and say that that's too restrictive, that's too extreme.
You can even argue in Shankara, even if you're a follower of Shankara in other ways, you can say,
"Wow, look, that fourfold qualification, that's way too high level stuff for ordinary people. I want
to study Advaita Vedanta, even though I don't have those fourfold qualifications. Why is that a
problem?" I'm on the side of Shankara and Shram Krishna on this point. I think that in order to
be eligible to practice Advaita Vedanta, you better be able to lift your mind completely away from the
body and literally say, "I'm not the body." So that if your body is in tremendous agony, you can still
So
opinion or even experience to some extent is a dimensional thing, a multi-dimensional thing,
where, you know, on the one hand you might be in physical pain, on the other hand there's a level
or dimension of your experience which is beyond that. And it's not that you don't feel the pain,
but there's also a dimension in which the pain doesn't reach. It's about where your consciousness
resides, that's the way I put it, and there are different states of consciousness. So, for instance,
with respect to Sri Ramakrishna and that earlier question about whether you retain some sense of
I or not.
He would not say I, he would refer to this place.
The teachings of this place.
That's when he's at a certain level of conscious when he's completely lost eye consciousness.
But there are many places where he says I.
He even says I'm in pain.
He broke his arm.
I'm in pain.
What does that mean?
How can both these things be true?
They're true at different levels of consciousness.
I think that's the key.
One of the nice things about the beginning of the paradigm, he uses beautiful example
of a flute and he says, I'm a flutist.
I can do one of two things.
I can play one note on the flute the whole time.
Boom.
And say, I am Brahman, I am Brahman.
And he says, but that's boring.
I'm a Vignani.
I want to play ragas and raginis on this flute.
Those are Indian classical terms,
but it means beautiful, melodious,
complex harmonies and songs.
I want to revel with God and relate to God
in many different ways.
As a servant, as his child, as his parents,
sometimes as his lover.
Sometimes I want to say I am he.
And he even says in one place in the gospel,
That is my final view.
Sometimes I think of myself as a servant of God.
Sometimes I think of myself as an amsha,
as a portion of God.
And at sometimes, I like to think of myself
as identical with God.
But there's no hierarchy there in the way that there is
in the traditional schools of Vedanta.
- Good.
All right, well, we've done just about two hours
and we could easily go another two or four or six.
But is there anything that after we hang up,
you're gonna feel like,
"Darn, I wish we'd talked about that."
Is there any other key thing,
like what you're working on now?
I'm writing a book now on karma and rebirth and Hinduism.
It'll be published by Cambridge University Press
sometime in 2025, I believe.
It'll be a small little book,
but I think it'll be good for people across the spectrum.
I mean, Hindus who have faith in these doctrines,
but who maybe aren't as confident
about defending those views
or articulating those views to themselves,
I think that'll be helpful.
And also for skeptics and agnostics
and people who are very, very critical
of the doctrines of karma and rebirth.
I'm gonna be writing several chapters on arguments
for and against karma and rebirth.
And so just to kind of encourage people
think for themselves. We're talking about critical thinking, but I think that's important.
And secondly, a book that's in the pipeline that'll be coming out with Oxford University
Press, it'll be the third installment in what I call my Integral Advaita Trilogy of
Books. The first book in that Integral Advaita Trilogy is Infinite Paths to Infinite Reality.
It's a philosophical study of Sri Ramakrishna, published in 2018. The second one was published
last year or two years ago, Swami Vivekananda's Vedanta Cosmopolitanism. And the third is
going to be on Sri Aurobindo. You had mentioned it in the beginning, an all-embracing oneness,
Sri Aurobindo's integral Advaita and the legacy of Sri Ramakrishna.
So what I'm claiming is, it's a very bold claim, I'm claiming that these three figures,
Sri Ramakrishna, Swami Vivekananda and Sri Aurobindo have developed a new school of integral
Advaita within Vedantic thought.
And it's new in the sense that it's non-sectarian and extremely expansive, and that it gives
us a way of harmonizing the traditional schools of Vedanta.
It's still Advaita, it's non-dual, but it's an integral Advaita in the sense that it's
all-encompassing.
It doesn't exclude anything or dismiss anything as unreal.
It says that everything is that same divine reality in different manifestations or forms.
So, stay tuned.
Dave Wonderful.
Oh, I will.
Like I said in the beginning, I really want to read all your books.
I convert them to audio and listen to them while I walk in the woods or ski in the woods
or whatever.
But I've learned a lot from you in the last couple of weeks and I feel like I really want
to stay focused on what you're doing and I'll learn a lot more.
I'll be in touch.
I'll probably be sending you emails, "What about this?"
Thank you so much for the thoughtful questions and conversation. It was a pleasure.
Thank you. And thanks to those who've been listening or watching. The next interview
after this one, I think will be number 700 or close to it. Maybe that's the one after
that. But it will be with Anna Breitenbach, whom I interviewed quite a few years ago,
who is an animal communicator, and Brad Laughlin, whose wife, Leslie Temple Thurston, I interviewed
about 12 years ago, and they're going to be offering a course called For the Love of Animals,
but it won't just be about animals, there's a whole spiritual dimension to it, and we'll
be talking about a number of things.
Leslie's interview was, I think, my fourth most popular of all, so she'll be coming back
for a recap.
There's an upcoming interviews page on badgap.com where you can see what we've got scheduled,
and if you go there, explore the menus, you'll find some interesting things.
And that's it for now.
So thank you Swamiji.
Thank you so much Rick.
It was a pleasure.
I hope to meet you in person someday.
Likewise, yeah.
And thanks for all the insightful questions from the online audience.
Okay, thanks.
Bye.
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