ALONE IS NOT ALONE

"Ah, alone at last," you might say, or "Oh, no, I'm all alone," or you might even say, "Leave me alone."  But alas, you are never alone, not truly.  You can be alone relatively, but not finally.  As Swami Prabhavananda stated many times, "there is never one moment in your life when God is not with you."  In the same way, Jesus said, "the kingdom of God is within you," so you are never alone.

There are Christian monastics who choose to be alone, even if only somewhat so, and they are called anchorites.  An anchorite is one who lives alone, usually in a cell, for purposes of spiritual discipline, silence, and prayer.  He is a type of religious hermit.  Thomas Merton, the well-known Trappist monk, lived alone as a hermit in a tiny cottage a half-mile or so from his monastery, the Abbey of Gethsemani.

But what about Buddhists?  They do not believe in God and therefore would not believe that He is with them always.  When they are alone, they must surely feel that they are completely alone.

But feeling alone is the point for them, for when you are alone you are only aware of your breathing, of the steady beating of your heart, and of the constant parade of thoughts through your mind, until they settle, and then of the background consciousness that in Vedanta is called the Atman.  There is no Atman in Buddhism, but there is pure consciousness, the meditation on which leads a Buddhist ultimately to Nirvana.

But Nirvana is not nothing, so alone is still not alone.  You are never alone.

FEMALE SWAMIS

Many will know that there are nuns in Vedanta, but not many will know that there are women swamis.  The term for a women swami is pravrajika, meaning "woman ascetic."

To become a swami, a woman follows the same path as a man, which entails first spending four to five years in brahmacharya, the initiation period in which the aspirant takes the first monastic vows. The woman is known as a brahmacharini, corresponding to the male brahmachari.

Brahmacharya is an active period of education and discipline at the literal foot of a guru, either at a guru's own home or at an ashram, that is at a retreat, hermitage, or monastery. The brahmacharini treats the guru as a father and as a god, in absolute obedience and practicing complete chastity.

Following this educational period, the brahmacharini is eligible to take final vows called sannyas.  This is formal entrance into monastic life, dedicated to the practice of complete renunciation of self and the attainment of knowledge of the supreme Reality, Brahman.  A brahmacharini who has taken the final vows is called a sannyasini, corresponding to the male sannyasin.

In the Ramakrishna Order, or, in India, with the Sarada Math, the sannyasini takes on the title of pravrajika, the same as the title of Swami. 

The Sarada Math, incidentally, is an order of nuns organized in India in 1954 in the name of Sri Sarada Devi, the wife of Sri Ramakrishna.  Sri Sarada Devi is also known as Holy Mother.

On September 22, 1959, Christopher Isherwood recorded in his diary that Swami Prabhavananda had departed for a visit to India.  He said that the swami had with him five nuns who had just taken their final vows, thus becoming the swami's first pravrajikas.  These would have been nuns from the Vedanta Temple in Santa Barbara which was a convent.

OUR LIVES LIVE THEMSELVES

There is this distinct feeling in us that no matter what we do, our lives are on automatic pilot, as if they were living themselves.  Why is this?  It is because our lives are living themselves.  Karma is steering the ship.

Karma is defined variously as a mental or physical act; the consequence of a mental of physical act; the sum of the consequences of an individual's actions in this and previous lives; the chain of cause and effect operating in the moral world.

The types of karma are agami karma, which is the mental and physical acts that a person performs in the present life, the fruits of which are to be reaped in the future; prarabdha karma, which is that portion of stored-up karma from past lives which has begun to bear fruit in the present life, in which it must be exhausted; and sanchita karma, which is karma that an indivdual has created in prior lives and which is waiting to fructify in a future life.

Each individual's karma is made up of what is called samskaras.  A samskara is an impression, tendency, or potentiality, created in a person's mind as a result of an action or thought.  The sum total of an individual's samskaras represents his character.

The samskaras guide his motives and conduct in both his present and his future thoughts and actions.  In this way, every karma becomes a seed of another karma.  The fruits of karma are reaped as happiness or misery, in accordance with the nature of each thought or act.

While each person's character imposes certain limitations upon him, he has two options.  He can either choose to follow the tendency he has already formed, or decide to make a change. 

Devotion to God, enhancing good karmas and mitigating evil ones, begins to loosen the bonds of karma.  When a person "awakens," becomes illumined, all karma is then wiped away.  The ability to choose, to exercise true free will, comes with awakening.  No longer will one feel his life is living itself.

GOD CAN'T BE BOUGHT

In his book My Guru and His Disciple, Christopher Isherwood records how Swami Prabhavananda was talking to him about grace.  He said that Maharaj (Swami Brahmananda, a direct disciple of Sri Ramakrishna) had told him that there are some people who just get it. 

"God can't be bought," Maharaj went on to say.  Even if you do all the japam, that is the repeating of one's personal mantra, and spiritual disciplines, you still can't command enlightenment.  It's always given by grace.

FREE, ILLUMINED SOUL

The word yoga means "union," as in union with God, and while in English translations they are typically called aphorisms, a more descriptive term is the Sanskrit "sutras."  Sutra literally meaning "thread."  The first four yoga sutras read: 

This is the beginning instruction in yoga. 
Yoga is the control of thought waves in the mind.
A person who controls his thought waves abides in his real nature.
At other times, he remains identified with the thought waves.

Remaining identified with the thought waves means remaining identified with the "personality," or egoic self.  In his book How to know God: The Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali, Swami Prabhavananda states that when the lake of the mind becomes clear and still, a person knows himself as he really is, always was and always will be.  He knows that he is the Atman.  His "personality," his mistaken belief in himself as a separate, unique individual, disappears.  The "personality" is only an outer covering, like a coat or a mask, which he can assume or lay aside as he chooses.  He who sees this is known as a free, illumined soul.

BUDDHIST VIEW OF YEARNING

Buddhists do not yearn.  No grasping, clinging, clutching, trying to be this or to do that.  Buddhists avoid all attachment, because to be attached to something is to want something of a person or a thing, and when this want is not fulfilled, or happens in a way that is insufficient or not what one expected it to be, the result is frustration, suffering.  Buddhism is about eliminating suffering in one's life.

Yearning is suffering.  Yearning for God, what Vedantists do, is suffering on a grand scale, Buddhists say.  This is because God is elusive, now you see Him, now you don't, and elusiveness is a source of frustration, suffering.  This very elusiveness of God is, in fact, why Buddhists doubt, if  not deny completely, that God even exists.  Better to remain unattached, to steer clear of that whole issue.

But are Buddhists truly without attachment?  It could be argued that they are attached to Buddhism itself.  A case could be made that they are attached to avoiding suffering.  When their Buddhism is not what they anticipated, or when their efforts to nip suffering in the bud are thwarted, they end up suffering all the same. 

However, this they are willing to live with, it would seem.  They always have the option of switching to a different school of Buddhism if the one they're in is not to their liking, and if their attempts to eliminate suffering are not successful, they can always choose a different strategy within Buddhism.

CHOSEN IDEAL

The Chosen Ideal, or "ishta" in Sanskrit, is the aspect of the Godhead chosen by a spiritual aspirant, or by his guru for him.  Through meditation on his Chosen Ideal, the aspirant attains, over time, concentration of mind, love of God, and ultimately illumination. The Chosen Ideal can be Ramakrishna in Vedanta, or any of the Vedic gods, Vishnu, Kali, Krishna, etc., or be figures from other religions, such as Christ, the Buddha, Muhammad, and so forth.

Related to the Chosen Ideal is the mantra.  A mantra, or mantram, is the particular name of God, corresponding to the Chosen Ideal, with which the aspirant is initiated into spiritual life by his guru.  The mantra, considered as one with God, represents the essence of the guru's instructions to the aspirant.  The aspirant is instructed to keep the mantra sacred and secret, and to meditate on the aspect of God which it symbolizes for the remainder of his life.  Repetition of the mantra called japa, performed regularly and reverently, results in purification of the mind, and ultimately in the realization of God.

In his book Religion in Practice, Swami Prabhavananda suggests that one's Atman, the personal aspect of Brahman, be one's Chosen Ideal.  "Let your Atman become your Lord, your Chosen Ideal, and keep your mind and heart concentrated on him.  The simplest method given us is to chant the name of God, such as Om, Srim, Aim, Hrim, etc., in a mantra.  The Name and his Being are identical.  When you repeat your mantra, the Presence is there immediately.  That is because Brahman is everywhere.  If you can't do anything else, chant the name of the Lord.  Make it a habit.  You will receive great benefit from it."

DIVINE GRACE?

In the posting here entitled "On Being Who You Are Not," this writer stated:  "The Atman is a witnessing consciousness...  It watches, observes. Observing, though, is all that it does. It does not participate in our lives, has nothing to do with this world of form beyond looking at it only. It is not responsible for events in the world."

But what about when something miraculous happens to us, our lives are saved in a car crash, for example, when the odds of it are astronomical, might it not be Divine grace?  Might not the Atman, which is Brahman, have stepped in?  The spiritual teacher Ram Dass said that it was Divine grace that kept the stroke that he suffered from killing him.

To argue that Divine grace does not exists, which Buddhists would do, is not easy.  We all have feelings about it based on our personal experience.  But there is always the other explanation.  Buddhists, as well as Vedantists for the matter, would offer that it is our karma, good and bad, that is responsible for our fortune, or responsible for much of it. 

In this way, when something exceptional happens to us, we can be grateful that we had some positive karma in the bank to help us, and then when something tragic befalls us, we can lament that somewhere in our past we made a poor decision.  The beauty of this is that with God out of the picture, we have no one to blame.  We have only ourselves to blame, this is to say.

Why not both Divine grace and karma?  This seems more realistic. 

PURPOSE OF HUMANITY

Your inner purpose is to awaken. It is as simple as that. You share that purpose with every other person on the planet - because it is the purpose of humanity.--Eckhart Tolle

SOURCE OF YEARNING

Always when Sri Ramakrishna was asked, "What is the way to find God?" he answered, "Yearn for Him with a longing heart."  Or he would say, "People shed streams of tears because sons are not born to them. Others eat away their hearts in sorrow because they cannot get rich.  But how many weep for not having seen God?  Very few indeed!  Verily, he who seeks the Lord, who weeps for Him, attains Him."

In order to find God, in Vedanta's view, the following three conditions must be met:  human birth, longing for God, and the society of the holy, i.e. a guru. When the first two conditions are met, the third fulfils itself.  It is the desire for God, though, that is lacking in us and which we must develop. The question is, however, where is this desire supposed to come from?  Who is supposed to do the desiring?  Not the egoic self, surely, for it could never sustain it for long.

No, the yearning for God, at the end of the day, comes from within us, deep down, comes from the Atman, in its inevitable attraction to Brahman.  It's simply a matter of not letting our egos get in the way of it.

A further view comes from Shankara in his Crest Jewel of Discrimination.  He states that it is Divine grace that affords us the chance at liberation, but that some of us foolishly waste the opportunity. 

In his words:  "Only through God's grace may we obtain those three rarest advantages--human birth, the longing for liberation, and discipleship to an illumined teacher. 

"Nevertheless, there are those who somehow manage to obtain this rare human birth, together with bodily and mental strength, and an understanding of the scriptures, and yet are so deluded that they do not struggle for liberation.  Such men are suicides.  They clutch at the unreal and destroy themselves. 

"For what greater fool can there be than the man who has obtained this rare human birth together with bodily and mental strength and yet fails, through delusion, to realize his own highest good?"

COSMIC DRAMA

In his play As You Like It, William Shakespeare writes,  All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts.

This is a feeling we all share, the sense that we are living in a play, or in a movie, where it is all make-believe, and we are all just playing parts.  We are just acting out roles and, furthermore, are forced to act them out, in the same way that everyone around us is acting them out, and must act them out whether they want to or not.

But why do we feel this way?  The fact is, we can only know about the world by what our senses tell us.  Our senses, however, are limited.  They can only give us lower knowledge, so-called.  They cannot give us the big picture.

The big picture, in the view of Vedanta, is that the world is a manifestation of the One Reality that is Brahman. This manifestation is a drama, or a sport, so described, in which the Brahman plays all the parts.  We feel that we are merely performing roles in this life because this indeed is what we are doing, as the Brahman.

EXPECTATIONS

ASPIRANT:  It has been said that for us to see God we must "go within". If I decide to meditate twice a day, for say three years, what can I expect to happen? Will I get definite results?

SWAMI PRABHAVANANDA: You don't have to wait three years. Do a half-hour of meditation a day, but true meditation is like the pouring of water from one vessel to another, with the current of your mind flowing toward God. If you can do that for half an hour, then you will attain samadhi. But to reach that state it might take three years or three lives, depending upon how much effort you put into it: Usually our minds run away somewhere else.

We don't work hard enough to stop our mind in its wandering. It all depends on how much effort we employ. It's the quality that counts, not the quantity. If you think of God for even five seconds, those are five blessed moments in your life. 

The other moments are in vain, wasted moments. So make your life blessed every moment by thinking of the Lord every moment. We must have purity of heart. What is the sign of this purity? It is when the natural tendency of your mind is to flow toward God. When you attain this state, you will see God.

REMEMER TO REMEMBER

"Recollection" is a term in religious literature for meditation and concentration on God and prayer. 

The purpose of recollection is so a person does not lose touch with God, and is why spiritual disciplines, "sadhana" in Vedanta, are so important. 

Recollection can be as basic as momentarily turning one's attention to God throughout the day, simply thinking about God, or can be as elaborate as formal prayer and meditation. 

The importance of recollection cannot be overstated.  To not recall God on a regular basis is to allow the mind to lapse into avidya-maya, the illusory trance of everyday life, where a person is led farther and farther away from the realization of God.

Twenty minutes of meditation in the morning and twenty minutes in the afternoon, or even one thirty-minute session of meditation per day, as one's time permits, will suffice.  More is better, obviously.  But it must be consistent. 

God must never be far from mind, otherwise the mind will drop into avidya-maya as surely as an iron ball drops down a set of stairs, and the farther down the stairs it drops, the harder it is to retrieve.

WHAT SHALL WE DO?

ASPIRANT:  I am discouraged about my spiritual life. I don't seem to be making any progress. What shall I do?

SWAMI PRABHAVANANDA:  Keep up the struggle! You see, there is no such thing as progress in a straight line. In spiritual life, too, there are ups and downs. But there is no failure as long as you make an effort.

Swami Brahmananda, my master, used to give the following illustration. The calf tries to get up on its feet within a very short time of its birth, but it falls down. For fifteen minutes, half an hour, or one hour the calf tries to get up, but it keeps falling down. Still it doesn't relinquish the struggle. Later, it not only stands but begins to run.

It is the same in spiritual life. You make a resolution that you will do so much meditation. Then laziness gets hold of you, "Oh, I'll skip it for today." Or restlessness and passion distract you, and all your good intentions are forgotten for the time being. But if you have fallen, get up again. Struggle! Promise yourself, "I will try to do better." You will fail many times, but don't give up. That's how we grow.

SAHAJA YOGA

As Swami Prabhavananda explains, "Sahaja yoga means 'easy yoga,' the easy way to union with God. It is the way of constant recollectedness. While you are sitting, or lying down, or walking, or working, think of the presence of God. Let a current toward God flow in your heart at all times. You don't have to close your eyes or ears to do this. Remember him always, while you are busy and while you are idle and you will see him."

EVERYTHING IS EXACTLY RIGHT

There is the true story of a Vedantist who moved in alongside the swimming pool at his apartment community.  He was so happy.  There were a dozen other apartments all around the pool and he could only imagine that those tenants were just as happy as he was.  How lucky they all were. 

This was due to the view.  When the pool lights were on at night, for example, the pool glowed an ethereal blue.  Then there were the palm trees, elegant and towering, and the shrubs covered in pink blossoms bright as pearls, and then the long beds of crimson, amber, and azure hibiscuses everywhere, so that, well, it looked like paradise on earth.

What the Vedantist did not anticipate, though, was how many residents would be using the pool, now that it was summertime, and it wasn't just the residents.  It was also all their family members and all their friends, and so many little kids, they couldn't all be from the residences, surely. 

The adults, drinking their beer, laughed loudly, shouted, and jumped wildly with huge splashes into the pool, while the little kids shrieked their heads off, running around here there and everywhere, playing their games. Was this what was in store for him now for the next five months of summer?  Was he so naive as to think that it would be other than this way?

As he thought about it, however, he had a different view.  His initial reaction of, "how dare these people ruin my paradise," changed to the question of what exactly it was that they all, including himself, wanted. 

Life was suffering, the Buddha taught, and so what everyone wanted was a respite from it, however elusive and brief it might be.  This was the fact of it.

Yet, there was more to it than this.  What everyone really wanted, as only he, a Vedantist, could appreciate, was moksha.  It was with moksha, final liberation so-called, that suffering ended completely, permanently.

And, as it happened, this moksha was what everyone, including all of these people down there at the pool, little kids as well, would achieve one day.

He and all these folks were, after all, all one life, were Brahman.  Everything was exactly right.

The pool looked wonderful to him again.

OBSERVING THE OBSERVER

The philosopher Alan Watts described his lecture series “Reflecting the Mirror” as follows: "A discussion of the many aspects of the problem of ‘observing the observer’ and ‘knowing the knower,’ an enterprise that seems always to come to a dead end or to impenetrable mystery. But perhaps the very difficulty of the problem provides a clue to its answer. This is, of course, the central problem of self-realization as approached through the spiritual disciplines of Yoga, Zen, and Taoism."

From the standpoint of Vedanta the answer is simple.  There is no observing the observer, no knowing the knower.  Background consciousness, just plain consciousness, the observing Atman/Brahman consciousness, does not observe itself.  The analogy is that of our eyes.  Our eyes do not see themselves.  When we try to see our eyes, we see nothing.  Were pure consciousness to try to see itself, it would see nothing.

There's another aspect to this, however, and it often appears in the work of Watts.  It must be remembered that Watts was a philosopher, and a philosopher inquires into things by way of his intellect.  The trouble is, Atman/Brahman consciousness, pure consciousness, is beyond the reach of the intellect.  The intellect can only look at consciousness from afar, and what it sees is not what it is.

ON BEING WHO YOU ARE NOT

It begins at birth.  We are given a name.  Then we learn that the persons looking down at us warmly are our parents.  We then learn that certain of our behaviors are acceptable and certain of them are not.  And on and on.  Soon we find that we have identified with what is an emerging sense of self, reinforced by others around us who also appear to be identifying with the selves, the egoic selves, that they are experiencing.

The egoic self is the character we will play throughout our lives.  No one can convince us that we are other than this egoic self.  Indeed, anyone who attempts to alter the perception, we shun right away.  For to suggest that we are other than our egoic self is to suggest that we have a split personality somehow, disconcerting indeed.  

The only way that we could accept that we are other than our egoic self is to be convinced that this self  is actually an illusion, part of a larger illusion that is the world of form itself.

By illusion is not meant that this world is unreal.  We experience the world by way of our senses, and to our senses the world is surely real.  But our senses are themselves of this world, so naturally they would perceive the world as real.  So our senses are relative in this way; they relate only to this world.  And they are time bound, are changing, ever changing, hence are non-eternal, as Vedantists put it, as opposed to eternal, the divine state. It is in this sense that the world, including the egoic self, is an illusion.

Sri Ramana Maharshi, the Hindu spiritual master, asks, "Who are you?"  Who is a person really?  His answer is that we are consciousness itself, pure consciousness, the screen upon which our lives are being played out.  This ground consciousness is, finally, the Atman, the personal aspect of Brahman.

The Atman is a witnessing consciousness, furthermore.  It watches, observes.  Observing, though, is all that it does.  It does not participate in our lives, has nothing to do with this world of form beyond looking at it only.  It is not responsible for events in the world.

This universal mind can be experienced in meditation, typically in turiya, the fourth level of consciousness.  The feeling of it is supreme bliss. This is who we truly are, as opposed to who we truly think you are.

A PERSONAL RELATIONSHIP WITH GOD

In Western religions, establishing a personal relationship with God is the ideal.  But is such a personal relationship possible in Vedanta?  How can you have a personal relationship with a God that is impersonal? 

Yet Vedantists who have had a mystical experience, for instance, would never say that it was an impersonal experience, mystical experience defined as union with God.  They might say that it was beyond description, but they would not say that it was impersonal.

In early Vedanta, allowance was made for the "individual personal experiential knowledge" of God.  This kind of knowledge they said was not mere epistemic knowledge (knowing about something) but was a direct, unambiguous knowing, leading to liberation.  This acquiring personal knowledge of God and its concomitant liberation is referred to now as "sramanic culture" and is significant in its influence on the development of mainstream Hinduism.  So there is precedent for a personal relationship with God.

One other point needs to be made here.  Tat tvam asi in Sanskrit means "that are thou," and refers to the relationship between the Atman, the subjective aspect of the Brahman, and the Brahman itself.  The Atman IS Brahman and therefore it does not make sense to speak of having a personal relationship with Brahman when a person IS Brahman.

And finally, is God, or Brahman, truly impersonal?  Different schools in Vedanta argue it differently.  For example, Dvaita argues for the personal, while Advaita supports the impersonal.  It is more realistic perhaps to say simply that God is both personal and impersonal, and neither personal nor impersonal.