Author Archives: Peter

About Peter

I am a student of traditional Vedanta, in London, an interest that started in 1970s. Current Influences: In 2007 I attended a talk by Swamini Atmaprakasananda on Ganapati Atharvashirsha – and knew I had found my teacher. I am current Secretary of Arsha Vidya Centre UK, an organisation established to make available in the UK the teaching of traditional advaita as unfolded by Swaminiji and her own teacher, the illustrious HH Swami Dayananda Saraswatiji, the most respected teacher of traditional advaita. www.arshavidya.org.uk

Who do you think ‘I’ is?

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PART I/3: THE IDENTITY CRISIS

According to the teaching of Advaita Vedanta even the most well balanced people have an identity crisis (even if they don’t know it). If we meet a person who claimed to be Napoleon we’d most likely quietly cross to the other side of the room. The ancient sages of India, despite knowing that most of insist we are characters very different from who we are in truth, are slightly more accommodative of our self-delusion and try to help us rise above it. Everyone is born ignorant of the world and also of the truth of one’s identity: that is part and parcel of the human condition. Worldly ignorance is relatively easy to overcome, but self-ignorance requires subtle work and takes longer.

It is a rare person, says the Upanishad, who turns back from worldly involvements and wants to know who the observer is. Most, however, remain firmly fixated in their partial views of who they are, and end their lives deluded. The view is partial because they know ‘I am’, but do not know what ‘I’ is: and never even think that it is worth the enquiry. It’s not just the Eastern tradition that finds this a waste of a human embodiment, the same sentiment is also evident in the Western tradition in the words of Socrates: ‘An unexamined life is not worth living.’ Continue reading →

Knowledge and consciousness

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My teacher, Swamini Atmaprakasananda, raised a question: If, as in the Gita, Krishna says, ‘I am consciousness’, who is speaking?  Consciousness does not speak, nor does the mithyA body-mind-sense complex, all of which are inert matter.

Then, by way of answering her own question, spoke of the levels of knowledge:

Knowledge is of two types: pure knowledge and manifest knowledge. Pure knowledge, śuddha jñānam, is knowledge that is not manifest and vyakta jñānam is knowledge that is manifest. Vedanta says that Reality, the Absolute Truth of this entire cosmos, the one substance of this substantive universe is pure knowledge. (Pure knowledge, pure consciousness, pure awareness are all synonyms.) Continue reading →

New start for an old site

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It’s always wonderful when a dormant giant wakes. And it’s nice to be able to play a role in  keeping it going. So welcome to Advaita Vision

I must confess to having had a sheltered journey so far: I found a school that was being guided by a teacher who they said was the ShankarAchArya of Jyotir Math, they practiced meditation, they studied Gita and Upanishads, they taught Sanskrit. So I was pretty comfortable in the belief that, not only was I following a traditional path, but there was no other path. Little did I appreciate that all these ingredients don’t necessarily add up to a traditional path. And only after coming into contact with this site a couple of years ago did I realise that there were several approaches that purport to teach advaita, the ‘philosophy’ of non-duality: direct path, neo, Western satsang, etc.

It is only since coming in touch with traditional advaita, as taught by Swami Dayananda Saraswati that I realised how different each approach really was: what once seemed like nuance, now loomed like a chasm. Needless to say that adherents of each of the different streams all claim that their way, their teacher, their group, is the real deal. And that it leads’ all the way’. And so do the traditionalists.

I’ve therefore decided not necessarily to take on any of these ideas head on (and that includes the plethora of other ideas that claim to be spiritual from channeling, to past life stuff, to crystals, angels and more like these). All this blog will do is present a viewpoint: I will simply attempt to present the way I have come to understand things.

I claim to be no different from any reader and thus invite a robust challenge to the things I write. I’ll leave this opening salvo with a thought from Swami Dayananda which cuts across most people’s ideas and blew my socks off:

Neither experience nor knowledge can destroy the perception of duality.