In this blog I would like to highlight the Vedantic perspective and provide a summary of the key Vedantic philosophies. Some of the material is from Deepak Chopra's video on God and Buddha.
Vedanta is the great wisdom tradition of India that goes back to at least 1500 BC. Authors are the great rishis who spent several eras of time thinking about various questions and developed sophisticated philosophies to explain the meaning of life.
During the 1st millennium of common era the people in the Indian subcontinent began to discard the simple teachings and stories of Gods and miraculous mythologies and the first level of God. Survival became easy and relatively more organized. Decided that the human being need not fear reality but was at a point where he was able to understand and question reality.
Veda means knowledge and Vedanta literally means the end of knowledge. Vedanta says that there are 5 reasons why human beings suffer, these are called Kleshas in Sanskrit.
- Not knowing the true nature of reality.
- Clinging to or grasping or holding to that which is ephemeral transitory or not real.
- Aversion to, revulsion to, running away from, fear of that which is insubstantial transitory, ephemeral or not real.
- Identification with a false and constricted and habitual self i.e. ego
Fear of death.
All other causes of suffering can be somehow related to these five.
And all of these 5 causes of suffering are contained in the first one i.e. not knowing the true nature of reality.
The only cause of suffering is not knowing the true nature of reality.
Essence of Buddhism is the alleviation of suffering and not the abstractions of reincarnation. Buddhism is a practical religion and doesn’t delve into abstractions. Buddhism answers the question "What is the cause of human suffering and what is the way out of it ?"
The true nature of reality: The true nature of reality is Brahman. If you ask someone to describe it, he/she can’t. He/She would refer to it as “that”, or in Sanskrit “Thath”. Vedanta says I am that you are that and that is ... That is infinite, eternal, dynamic, ineffable, silent, infinite intelligence, infinite dynamism.
And this Brahman projects itself as the physical universe (including you and me) through the power of Maya. Maya technically means measurement, although translated sometimes referred to as illusion. Because you are trying to measure is the infinite. Through the measurement of infinite you give birth to the concept of time. Maya, meter, time, measurement, music, matter refer to the womb of creation.
The unbounded womb of creation which projects itself through the concept of Maya to the realm of space time and causation. It does so through the web of karma. Karma is the result of our past actions on an individual level, a collective level and also on a deeper more mythical level. The remnants of Karma, our past actions are like seeds in our consciousness. And these remnants of Karma constantly actualize into our consciousness into our subjective experience. They are just the seeds of the past experience. They are not memories themselves but they are virtual memories, just like you have virtual protons and virtual particles. They are not part of our brain, but are part of the software of our soul.
A person who wrote Reagan’s biography stated one incident, apparently Mr. Reagan came from a therapy session. Someone had left a toy white house. Mr. Reagan tried to clutch onto a toy white house. When asked he said “I don’t know what it is but I think it is something to do with me”.
In Sanskrit it is called Samskara, or potential memory or the remnant of Karma. We all have spiritual alzheimers. We have this faint memory that somewhere there is a soul here, we know it has something to do with me but we don’t know what it is. Bible states “ what good does it do a man to find the whole world but to lose one’s soul”.
Losing the soul we begin to have the experience of suffering.
The karmic software which is actualizing into our consciousness it appears as our thoughts, our own memories, desires, feelings and emotions. During the daytime, rational mind, it weaves stories around the Karmic software, it does so quite logically at least to the rational mind and we live out these stories we call them “everyday reality”. Same thing happens at night but the rational mind is asleep, so there is not a consistent logic to these stories at night and we call them dreams. Vedanta says the mechanics of the dream and the waking state of consciousness is the same.
One is being given a rationalization and other is not. It is just the karmic software that is appearing in your consciousness and is making stories out of them and you are living these stories out and you get so caught up in the melodrama and the hysteria of the stories that you forget who you are.
It is like going to a good movie and getting lost in the movie. The only way to come out of the tangled hierarchy, the seer loses itself in the scenery, the lover loses himself/herself in the beloved, the knower in knowledge and so forth. Never remembering that there is a timeless factor in the midst of the experience. All experience is time bound, a beginning a middle and an ending. In the midst of all this there is a timeless factor it is the experiencer. The Experiencer is the eye inside. Not the personal eye but the collective eye and the universal eye.
There are six stages of Awareness or consciousness. All of reality is a projection of which state of consciousness you are in. Depending on which state of consciousness you are in you project a certain state of reality. If I peel beneath the layers of my soul I will go beyond my constricted fabrication, the constricted self identity that I have and will realize who I really am. And this is the essence of Vedanta.
Vedanta says there are 4 ways to do it
1) Karma yoga: Be always reminding yourself that no matter what you are doing you are not doing it. It is God, God does everything and this is the machinery through which the divine intelligence is working. The essence of Karma yoga is to be established in being and perform action. Yogasth Gurukarma Karmaniyasth as Lord Krishna says in the Bhagavad Gita.
2) Through love or the experience of love. This is bhakti yoga or devotion. It is the simplest and the most enjoyable but it gets you to the same place. Love is the ultimate reality and the ultimate truth in the heart of creation. We are all the same being but in different disguises. Once we realize that it becomes impossible to hurt or be hurt. What the Buddha refers to as compassion is really the experiential knowledge of love as the ultimate truth at the heart of creation.
3) Raja Yoga i.e. meditation and its allied disciplines. Different types of ways to dive between the gaps of our thoughts, or go beyond the secret passages and the dark alleys of our minds and find the part of ourselves that does not die.
4) Nyaana Yoga: Intellectual approach, razor’s edge i.e. to use the intellect to go beyond the intellect. That itself is a paradox but it is possible. To go beyond the rational mind.
That is the summary of Vedanta and all the 112 Upanishads talk about these few principles.
If one has gotten close to the event horizon which is called enlightenment then that experiential knowledge of immortality solves all suffering. Because you find out who you really are. As the Sufi poet Rumi said in one of his poems “By God when you see beauty you will be idol of yourself”.
3 comments:
Great!! Excellent!!
Thank you so much!! for sharing this knowledge.
Really enjoyed your unfolding of reality. Hope someone smells the perfume!
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Once chris
One side note on the Vedanta.
Deepak states that Vedanta means the end of knowledge. This needs to be clarified.
Vedanta came after the Vedas were completed. These are essentially foot notes to the Vedas and are interpretations by scholars and philosophers on the meaning of the Vedas.
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