Tag Archives: Knowledge

Depression – Q.330

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Depression – Q. 330

 Q: For years now I’ve been severely depressed and it doesn’t seem to be changing. What led me to Advaita, I think, was the intense desire to know what I guess I can only meaningly refer to as God.

I read a lot about how we are not our bodies and how if we can be aware of something, then that ‘something’ cannot be us. I understand all this. There is a formless awareness that appears to be prior to everything, prior to my body, my mind and the suffering of depression, I can see that.

One book I’ve read, not specifically about depression, advises that we remain with that awareness, as that awareness that is prior to both body and mind. However, I find this difficult. The body and mind come out of the Self and thus must be the Self. Beyond this the reasoning and experience of it gets quite subtle, but I’ll give it my best shot. Yes, there is an awareness that is before the mind and body, something that you might call the Ultimate subject, but It is only apparent because of the body and mind – without the body and mind, the Self wouldn’t know itself. Continue reading →

Non-dual Reality – Q. 328

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Q: Can one ever KNOW that reality is non-dual?

A (Ramesam):

(i)   YES, The moment you can grasp tight your reflection in the mirror!!! 
(ii)  No, you cannot know it like you know the salary you get.

(iii) Yes, you cannot ever NOT know it; what all IS, is your perception alone.
(iv)  No, if you place yourself aloof trying to know it as a distant object.

(v)  Yes, you know It in your deep sleep.
(vi)  No, if you want to measure and compare to duality. Continue reading →

Mandukya Upanishad – part 1

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Here is Part 1 of a new, short series (5 or 6 parts) on the Mandukya Upanishad, from James Swartz.

This first part talks about the means for obtaining knowledge and the meaning of the word ‘limitlessness’, using the snake and rope metaphor.

(In case you are wondering about the photo, the title of the Upanishad is sometimes claimed to be derived from the Sanskrit ‘maNDa’, meaning ‘a frog’.)

Annihilation of Thought

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Yogavaasishta is a remarkable Advaitic text in many ways. It is at once a theoretical text and a practical Manual. It combines the abstruse Vedantic concepts of Non-duality with simple doable tips and presents them in an engrossing manner.  Sage Vasishta often uses the technique of bringing home the most intricate philosophical point through a fictitious tale crafted on the spot with imaginary characters  representing with high fidelity the point to be illustrated in an unforgettable manner.  One such story is of Kadamba Daasura**. It tells us about the untenability of the perceived world. Daasura is shown to be living on the last tender leaf of the topmost branch of a Kadamba tree (Anthocephelus – Latin name: Adina cordifolia) where sustenance for any being, leave alone a human, is impossible. Sage Vasishta intends to impress on us that the sustenance of a world (which we take to be real and functioning) to be equally impossible.

Daasura teaches his son that the world is a creature of the ‘thought’  that thinks it. Intent on ending the world, the son who is hardly in his early teens enquires what is thought and how thought itself originates and what are the means of annihilating the thoughts. Daasura’s response to these questions is very profound and a summary is presented below. Continue reading →

upadesha sAhasrI part 5

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Part 5 of the serialization of the  presentation (compiled by R. B. Athreya from the lectures given by Swami Paramarthananda) of upadesha sAhasrI. This is the prakaraNa grantha which is agreed by most experts to have been written by Shankara himself and is an elaborate unfoldment of the essence of Advaita.

Subscribers to Advaita Vision are also offered special rates on the journal and on books published by Tattvaloka. See the full introduction and part 1 of the new series.

Can you accept that the world is mithyā? – 2/2

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Read Part 1

It is extremely difficult to accept that what we see, what we experience, what we take to be real is not quite real. Even Swami Dayananda wrote of his utter shock on realising that the solid universe is made up of nothing but words and meanings. I personally remember the first time I saw his demonstration of close-up magic when he held up a clay tea cup in the meeting hall, one hot afternoon in his Gurukulam in Anaikatti. “What am I holding?” he asked and then answered for us: “You say cup, I say clay. Tell me which bit of this is cup? My fingers touch clay, the weight of what you call cup is the weight of clay. The feel of the cup is the feel of clay. The colour of the cup is the colour of clay. Where is the cup? Is it on the clay? If it is I can remove it. Maybe it is in the clay?” In this way, as we watched, the thing called ‘cup’ vanished in front of our very eyes. ‘Cup’ is nothing but the name given to a particular form of clay for the sake of distinguishing it from other things made of clay and all other things as well.

Now extend this to all objects that can be traced back to a common cause: even science supports this view. Then at each stage we just have names: Shirt is the name of a form of material, material is the name of yarn, yarn of cotton, cotton of fibres, fibres of atoms, atoms of sub-atomic particles, etc till we arrive at a single cause. (Vedānta śāstram goes one step further than science in stepping from the perceptible to the non-perceptible world.) Continue reading →

Experience and Knowledge (Q. 321)

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Q: ‘Experiential’, seemingly, is becoming a stumbling block in current discussions within spirituality and non-duality. There are the ‘experiential’, usually ‘anti-intellectual’ types (who deprecate ‘merely intellectual’, or ‘conceptual’ approaches), and those who defend the proper use of mind and the intellect, without denying the validity of experience.

 Would it be possible, though, to dispense with either of the two concepts: ‘knowledge’ and ‘experience’?; they appear to overlap, practically being synonyms and, indeed, one can say “I know pain in the belly”, or, “I know such and such emotion”, “I know (I am acquainted with) life”, etc., without resorting to the word ‘experience’ – the word ‘acquaint’, conveniently, is derived from the Latin via old French: cognoscere, gnoscere. The other alternative would be to dispense with the word ‘knowledge’ and use instead ‘real’/’unreal’, ‘reality’, which is, precisely, sat/asat in sanskrit – and expressions using these terms are quite frequent, as everybody… realizes (‘is cognizant with’, then, would have to be ruled out). Just today I wrote in a comment that true understanding is an experience, but now I have my doubts. Ultimately, certainly, the only Experiencer/Knower is brahman/atman (though he remains ever unmoved). Continue reading →

saMskAra-s, svadharma and karma (Q. 320)

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Q: I read about the above topics in your book and struggled with them, not only because there are a number of things to remember, but also because how exactly they function is complex.

 I thought about what you said regarding svadharma and how not going with it, with the example of Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita, would have been bad for ones karma and thought about Hitler.

 You might say that it was Hitler’s svadharma to do as he did and that to go against that, in other words, to be an ordinary politician or something for example, would have given rise to bad karma for him, the same way as going against his duty would have caused Arjuna bad karma, as explained by Krishna: ‘slay thy foes’. But then that seems unfair to him (Hitler), since surely his ‘bad actions’ (genocide, etc.) that his svadharma would have had him following would have brought him bad karma any way, so either way, things, from that perspective, looked pretty bleak for him? Then one might say that what Hitler did was not really his svadharma, but this I personally would agree with, as a ‘person’ cannot act outside of Brahman, that is, everything we do, feel, think is Brahman, so even Hitler’s ‘evils’ were also Brahman? Continue reading →

Self ‘knowing’ the Self (Q. 317)

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Q: Nisargadatta Maharaj (especially in his later books) emphasises that the “I am” or Consciousness is not the final Reality which he calls Parabrahman or Awareness. He goes on to state that Awareness is “unaware of itself”. However, others such as Francis Lucille and Rupert Spira seem to disagree. Francis Lucille, for example, specifically states that Awareness (in the sense Nisargadatta means) is aware of itself as itself.

 I am not exactly clear what Nisargadatta was meaning. It could be interpreted as the Final Reality being essentially almost a nihilistic eternal stupor rather than the more appealing (at least to this body/mind) satchitananda. I rather suspect not, and that he was merely indicating the essential non duality of reality perhaps along the lines of Ramana Maharshi’s comment : “Although (the Self) is consciousness, since there is nothing for it to know or to make itself known to, it is said to be different from the sentient and the insentient.”

 Nevertheless, it perplexes me that if Awareness is not aware of itself as itself as Francis Lucille suggests then do we not have the situation whereby an enlightened sage such as Ramana Maharshi is before his “death” not only aware as the Self but conscious thereof and in a better position, so to speak, than Final Reality which is not so aware? Continue reading →