FREE WILL

Free will is the ability of persons to make choices unconstrained by certain factors. These factors include metaphysical constraints such as logical, nomological, or theological determinism, physical constraints such as chains or imprisonment, social constraints such as threat of punishment or censure, or structural constraints, and mental constraints such as compulsions or phobias, neurological disorders, or genetic predispositions.

In the religious realm, free will implies that individual will and choices can coexist with an omnipotent divinity.  This would be the case with Christianity, for example, but is not so with Vedanta.  Brahman is an omnipotent divinity, in a manner of speaking, but it does not participate in existence.  It only watches existence, witnesses it.

This leaves the constraint of karma.  When a person is born he carries good and bad karma which express themselves as tendencies.  The choices he makes reflect these tendencies, which limit his free will.

PURIFICATION

In Vedanta, awakening into Brahman, i.e. realizing God, is the goal of life.  But how exactly does one accomplished this?

It begins with purification.  This means that a person must become desireless, since the biggest obstacle to awakening is, as it is termed, craving and clinging.  It is an individual's craving, clinging, grasping, desiring of the whole cornucopia of things and experiences that life has to offer.  It is, in short, the longing for everything other than God.

There are two courses of action.  The first is that one can indulge himself, as anyone can do quite completely and successfully over his lifetime, until he is satisfied that he has done everything that he ever wanted to do, has everything that he ever wanted to have, to the point that he can say "been there, done that."  This is the long way around, but it is still purification.

His other option is to desire Brahman, God, more than he desires anything else.  This has the advantage of immediacy, no need to wait a lifetime, and endure all the misery that indulging oneself to the maximum invariably brings.  If there is a difficulty with this it is that not everyone is capable of this intensity of desiring God.

These options, however, are not mutually exclusive, allowing for a mix of the two.

With, then, the mind purified, cleared of "ignorance" and "impurities," as they are called, awakening will occur.

THREE KINDS OF DUKKHA

Dukkha is a term in Buddhism commonly translated as "suffering," "anxiety," "stress," or "dissatisfaction."  It is the first of the Four Noble Truths.

There are three different patterns or categories of dukkha.  The first category includes the obvious physical suffering or pain associated with birth, aging, illness, and dying, the term for which is dukkha-dukkha, or the dukkha of ordinary suffering.

The next category includes the anxiety or stress of trying to hold onto things that are constantly changing, which is termed viparinama-dukkha, or the dukkha produced by change.

The third pattern or category is the general feeling of unsatisfactoriness.  This pervades all forms of life because all forms of life are, again, impermanent and ever changing. Here, the dukkha is a sense that things never measure up to our expectations or standards, and is called sankhara-dukkha, or the dukkha of conditioned states.

Both Buddhism and Vedanta emphasize that one overcomes dukkha through the development of a transcendent understanding.

WHO YOU REALLY ARE

You are not your body or your mind, but that which perceives them.

MORE THAN MEETS THE EYE

Something is going on below the surface that we are not privy to.

Actually, this is not quite correct.  There are many things going on below the surface that we are not privy to, and not just below the surface but all around us.  Our mind and senses capture only a fraction of what is happening here.

TANHA

Tanha (craving) and upadana (clinging) are considered the two primary causes of dukkha (suffering, anxiety, dissatisfaction) in Buddhism.

Tanha literally means "thirst," and is commonly translated as craving or desire.  This is the craving or desire to hold onto pleasurable experiences, to not have painful or unpleasant experiences, and to not have neutral experiences or feelings diminish. The Buddha identified three types of tanha:

Sense-craving is the craving for sense objects which provide pleasant feelings, and for sensory pleasures, generally.
Craving to be is the craving to unite with an experience for the purpose of becoming something.
Craving not to be is the craving to not experience the world for the purpose of being nothing.  More generally, it is the craving for destruction, and, otherwise, as the Dalai Lama states, "a wish to be separated from painful feelings."

The cessation of craving leads to Nirvana.

UPADANA

Upadana (clinging) and tanha (craving) are considered the two primary causes of dukkha (suffering, anxiety, dissatisfaction) in Buddhism.

Upadana means "clinging," "attachment," or "grasping," although the literal meaning is "fuel."  The Buddha identified four types of upadana:

Self-doctrine clinging.
Wrong-view clinging.
Rites-and-rituals clinging.
Sense-pleasure clinging.

They are causally interconnected as follows:

Self-doctrine clinging: first, a person assumes that he has a permanent "self."
Wrong-view clinging: then, the person assumes that he is either somehow eternal or that he will be annihilated after this life.
Rites-and-rituals clinging: if person assumes that he is eternal, then he clings to rituals to achieve self-purification.
Sense-pleasure clinging: if a person assumes that he will completely disappear after this life, then he disregards the next world and clings to sense desires.

The cessation of clinging leads to Nirvana.

KARMIC PROCESS

Behavior that leads a person to the realization of Brahman, to awakening into Brahman, produces good karma. Behavior that leads a person away from the realization of Brahman, away from awakening into Brahman, produces bad karma. The amount of good and bad karma a person carries determines how his life will go. The process is impersonal.

Good and bad karmas that carry over into a new life express themselves as tendencies.  A person who possesses more good karma than bad, will have a strong inclination to awakening, having already been on this path in his past life, or lives, needing now only to conclude it.

Conversely, a person who possesses more bad karma than good, will have a strong inclination to not awaken, having already been on a path, or paths, of non-awakening in his past life, or lives, and therefore  will continue in non-awakening, needing now only to conclude it.

SPIRITUAL FAMILIARITY

Spiritual familiarity is the feeling that you have been spiritual in the past, specifically in a past life.  You don't know in what way exactly you were spiritual in a past life, but the feeling is unmistakable.

In what way?  Maybe you were an aspirant, a devotee, a monk, or a priest.  For the feeling to be strong enough to carry over into your current life, it likely means that you were more than merely an aspirant, or even a devotee.

Supposing then that you were a monk or a priest.  As a monk or a priest you would have accumulated an ample amount of good karma, prompting the question, why have you been forced into yet another life?  Didn't you get the job done the last time?

But what job?  Could it be that the work you were doing, as noble as it might have been, was not the final work that you needed to get done.  The purpose of life, according to Ramakrishna, is to find God.  You still may not have found God. 

ATMAN SPEAKS

Swami Vivekananda said that he reached a point where everything he said felt like the Atman speaking; it wasn't himself who was speaking at all.

Fighting him, though, was his objective mind, where even his interest in the subject he was talking about, say, rebirth, left him bewildered.  "How could I possibly want to talk about that?" he asked himself.  

In the end, though, he chose to stay with the flow of thoughts and words on rebirth, precisely because it didn't feel like it was from him.

NOTHING EXCLUDED

Physicists tell us that everything in existence is comprised of molecules and atoms in constant motion, and in this way nothing is dead.  The Atman is present in all living things, and if by this is meant everything that is in constant motion, then everything, including rocks, water, and other planets, contains the Atman.

ANATTA CLARIFIED

In Buddhism, the term anatta (Pali) or anatman (Sanskrit) refers to the idea of "not-self" or the illusion of "self."  On the one hand, it means that what is considered the self, "I," "me," "mine," does not exist ultimately, that it is merely the result of a collection of aggregates, called skandhas, that upon death vanishes.  Hence the self's unreality beyond a person's experience of it in the relative world.

The Sanskrit term anatman, on the other hand, has been interpreted as meaning "no-soul," which can be misleading.  If the word "soul" refers to a non-bodily component in a person that can continue in some way after death, then Buddhism does not deny the existence of a soul.  In fact, persons are believed to possess an ever-evolving consciousness, a stream of consciousness, or a mind-continuity, which, upon death, i.e. the dissolution of the skandhas, becomes one of the contributing causes for the arising of a new group of skandhas.

However, here is the important distinction.  Buddhism denies the existence of a permanent or static entity that remains constant behind the changing bodily and non-bodily (consciousness) components of a living being.  This is contrary to Vedanta that holds that there is a static entity that remains constant throughout, that is eternal, and that is Atman/Brahman.

CONTEMPLATIVE LIFE

The contemplative life, the life of a monk, for instance, is actually a misnomer.  A monk lives his life not pondering God but being with God.  This is to say, a monk is already a believer.  He doesn't need to figure out God any longer, and be convinced of Him.

Alan Watts, by contrast, said that he preferred the word contemplation over, say, meditation, not surprising considering that he was a philosopher and an intellectual.  For Watts, God was a topic to be thought about, analyzed, and discussed as opposed to a presence to simply be amidst.

GLIMPSES OF THE TRUTH

Awakening does not happen all at once but in stages.  A person has glimpses of the truth, that the Atman in him is in fact the Brahman, over a lifetime, until at last comes the final glimpse.  These glimpses are experiential not intellectual.

SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE

In his discussion of the Mundaka Upanishad, Swami Prabhavananda makes the point that we are born into this world to gain spiritual experience.

Our lives are the the working out of our accumulated good and bad karmas, he says, not something that we are consciously doing but something that our lives are doing, and in the process we gain spiritual experience.

Good karma comes when we do something that moves us closer to awakening, the ultimate goal and purpose of life.  Bad karma comes when we do something that moves us away from that goal.

With awakening, all new karmas are erased, but all past karmas must still play themselves out, which is why even saints can suffer misfortune.

DIFFICULT TO FATHOM

The reason we have difficulty grasping what exactly the Brahman is, is because of the time, space, and causation nature of our world, its relativity.  Due to this relativity, we can only understand things in relation to other things.

The Brahman, however, is everything.  How can everything be in relation to anything else?  It is anything else.

At the same time, the Brahman cannot be one thing, as our giving it a name suggests, making it even more illusive to our minds.  This is why it is said that the Brahman is something that is experienced, as opposed to something that is known intellectually.

GRAVITATION

In the physical sense, gravitation is a natural phenomenon by which all physical bodies attract each other.  It is most commonly experienced as the agent that gives weight to objects with mass, and causes them to fall to the ground when dropped.

But there is also spiritual gravitation.  This is likewise a natural phenomenon and is how we are attracted to God and God to us.

Vedanta speaks of this in terms of the Atman and its source the Brahman.  The Atman and the Brahman are drawn to each other naturally, and when, through spiritual disciplines, the Atman awakens into Brahman, there is a completion, and a return of equilibrium, like after a rock falls to the ground.

ATMAN SIDETRACKED

The destiny of the Atman is to awaken into its source the Brahman.  This, though, can take many lifetimes to achieve, due to the distraction of what is called in Vedanta "the sheaths" or "the coverings," which is the body, mind, and emotions.

The demands of these coverings cause the Atman to identify itself with them, even while it is drawn, by its nature, to the Brahman.

The analogy is given of the needle of a compass attracted to a magnet.  But the needle cannot find the magnet exactly because of the dust piled on top of it.  The dust is the body, mind, and emotions.

Yet, by way of spiritual practices, such as meditation, the dust can be swept aside, freeing the Atman to realize its destiny.

BACKGROUND, FOREGROUND

It has been stated here in the past that our background consciousness is the Atman, but some clarification of this is now in order.

Our background consciousness is more correctly stated as the Brahman, which is transcendental consciousness.  Our foreground consciousness, as it were, is the Atman.  This is the consciousness in which we conduct our everyday activities.

Philosopher Alan Watts referred to what he called floodlight consciousness versus spotlight consciousness.  This is a similar idea.  Floodlight consciousness is the big picture, the whole ball of wax.  Everything is included in floodlight consciousness.  There is nothing that is not in floodlight consciousness.

Spotlight consciousness is the same as floodlight consciousness only it is focused, concentrated on the doings of the individual in the relative world.  It does not see the big picture, the whole show, but only what the person is involved in at the moment in the relative world.

Note again that spotlight consciousness is the same as floodlight consciousness only more focused, in the same way that the Atman is the same as the Brahman, only more focused.

SPIRITUAL ASPIRANT

There is this looking.  What the looking is looking for we do not know until the looking finds it.

ONE EYE, TWO EYES

We see life through only one eye.  What we see with that one eye is the relative world, the manifested world, the world of form.

When we see life with two eyes, with both eyes, we see not only the relative world but, as well, the ultimate world, where matter and spirit are woven together in a vast multidimensional fabric that Vedantists call Brahman.  Spiritual awakening is seeing with both eyes.

WE DON'T NOTICE

Like the motor of a refrigerator turning on and off throughout the day, or the ticking of the clock in the den, or the static in the background on the radio, there are things that are constant in our environment that we do not notice.  So, too, the presence of God.

God's presence is like the water that a fish swims in.  "Water?  What water?" the fish says.

TRYING TO FEEL BETTER

Our entire lives are spent trying to feel better.

So why do we feel miserable most of the time?  It is because we are seeking something.  But then either because we cannot attain what we seek, or because we attain it but find that it isn't what we thought it would be, or find that it is what we thought it would be but it doesn't last long, we are frustrated.

The solution, as obvious as it is but which we never seem to see, is to stop seeking, stop trying to do this, trying to have that, trying to be that.

Yet how realistic is it to stop?  The point to remember is that seeking, as such, is something we all do quite naturally; it's normal.  However, when the seeking causes us suffering, makes us unhappy, this is when we need to change, and when it is most realistic to do so.

BRAHMAN IS INDIVISIBLE

The Atman in each of us is not a piece of Brahman, but is the entirety of Brahman.  In each of us is contained the complete Godhead.

KNOWLEDGE OF GOD

Knowledge of God is not intellectual knowledge but experiential knowledge.