Q. Questions are always coming up in mind. Things are confusing. At the moment, for example, I’m trying to understand how one can know whether experience is valid or not e.g. if one saw an apparition of Christ, is one to interpret it as real/unreal, true/untrue etc. and how would you know one way or another….questions about truth and validness are always crossing my mind. Continue reading
Category Archives: Q and A
Nothing Dies (Q. 308)
Q. I’ve been thinking about death for a long while and last night something came to me that I wanted to share with you. It’s not so much a question, though. Rather, I’m just wondering whether my thinking is ‘on the right lines’.
Ok, imagine a dead body lying in a coffin. Let’s say that this person lying there is called John Doe. Many people would believe that now John Doe is dead, something would have left the body, that this ‘John Doe’ identity is no longer there. My thinking from what I’ve learned about Vedanta so far, is that this ‘John Doe’ was probably never there as was perceived in the first place. Continue reading
Where the mind cannot reach (Q. 307)
Q: I am allowing life to teach me as I go through it, but I’m not finding it easy. Most of the time I feel I don’t want to even speak because I feel nothing I say is ‘correct’. At the same time, however, I feel that even if I do speak, whatever I say would not be ‘wrong’ because ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ do not exist. Words and concepts are a massive hindrance to my understanding, yet I cannot overcome them.
I want to say that I know that everything is Brahman, but then something says, ‘you can’t ‘know’ that everything is Brahman because that cannot be known with the mind’, so I’m always hitting a wall. Continue reading
Meaning of ‘Advaita’ (Q. 306)
Q: In Sanskrit, a word’s meaning is determined by the meaning of the dhatu at the heart of the word, modified by the meanings of prefixes and suffixes. So according to Monier-Williams:
- a is a prefix having a negative or privative or contrary sense. This gives us NOT-<whatever follows>, but also indicates the absence of it, or the opposite of it.
- dva means two or both. Continue reading
Spiritual Progress (Q. 305)
Q: What are some indicators of progress on the spiritual journey? Is witnessing consciousness an indicator of progress? (Oct. 2010)
A: Most people actually don’t go along with the idea of ‘gradual’ progress. The enlightenment ‘event’ if you like (akhaNDAkAra vRRitti) is rather a catastrophic reorientation of the mind (in the mathematical sense of course, rather than the emotive!)
The progress indicators are rather in terms of mental preparation, as in sAdhana chatuShTaya sampatti. We notice that we are less prone to emotional disturbance, avoid emotional reactions, see issues more clearly and make right decisions without selfish motive and so on. And maybe we have increasingly frequent glimpses of the unity and increasing conviction of the truth of the teaching. If, by ‘witnessing consciousness’ you mean seeing what is going on around you with a dispassionate eye, yes – that, too.
How did ‘I’ come to deceive itself? (Q. 304)
Q: How did ‘I’, the all knowing, all loving, all powerful, the absolute & infinite blissful ONE, without a second, come to deceive itself, and place itself in this illusion of illusions? How or why did the Ultimate Reality have this come to pass? (Sept 2010)
A: The spirit of your question is unanswerable – it is effectively asking why there is Self-ignorance and this is said to be anirvachanIya – inexplicable. From the standpoint of absolute reality, of course, there is no deception because there is no creation; and there is no illusion because there are no persons to be deluded. There is only brahman – satyam j~nAnam anantam as the taittirIya upaniShad says, limitless consciousness. It is only from the perspective of this apparently limited entity, the mind of the person, that there seems to be a problem. Once the truth is realized, it is also seen that there is no problem because everything is brahman – sarvaM khalvidam brahma.