EMERSON AND VEDANTA

Ralph Waldo Emerson, (1803-1882), was an American poet, essayist, and philosopher.  After a studious but undistinguished career at Harvard, and a brief period of teaching, he entered the ministry. 

He was appointed to the Unitarian, Old Second Church of Boston, his native city, but soon became an unwilling preacher.  Unable, in conscience, to administer the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, he resigned his pastorate.

In 1836, he published an essay entitled “Nature,” considered the moment at which transcendentalism became a major cultural movement.  

Emerson’s transcendentalist philosophy was characterized by its reliance on intuition as the only way to comprehend reality.  Like Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman, he was also attracted to mystical Indian literature and philosophy.

His interest in Indian thought came from his reading the French philosopher Victor Cousin.  Emerson went on to read the Bhagavad Gita and Henry Thomas Colebrooke’s Essays on the Vedas.  The nondualism of Vedanta colored much of his writing afterwards.

His 1841 essay “The Oversoul” reflected this:

“We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles.  Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related, the eternal ONE.  And this deep power in which we exist and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one.  We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are shining parts, is the soul.”

TURIYA REVISITED

Another way to think of the Atman is as Turiya, literally “the Fourth,” as it is the fourth state of consciousness after the ordinary states of consciousness:  waking, dreaming, and dreamless sleep.

Turiya is superconsciousness, the pure consciousness that illuminates the conditioned consciousness in which waking, dreaming, and dreamless sleep occur.

The Mandukya Upanishad, which analyzes all the states of consciousness, describes Turiya in terms of what it is not.  “It is neither subjective nor objective experience, neither consciousness nor unconsciousness, neither knowledge of the senses, nor relative knowledge, nor inferential knowledge.”

But then on the positive side, it says that Turiya is “pure unitary consciousness, ineffable peace, and the Atman.”

SWAMI TURIYANANDA

Harinath Chattopadhyaya, (1863-1922), later Swami Turiyananda, was a monastic disciple of Sri Ramakrishna.  In 1884, he went to the Dakshineswar temple, where Ramakrishna lived for many years, and became a devotee. 

In1887, he joined Ramakrishna’s monastery at Baranagore, after which he made a number of pilgrimages in northern India. 

Accompanying Swami Vivekananda to America in 1899, he worked first in New York, and after a short visit to Los Angeles, in San Francisco.  He was the founder of the Shanti Ashrama, a retreat in the San Antonio Valley of northern California.

He returned to India in 1902, dividing his time between the headquarters of the Ramakrishna Math and Mission in the village of Belur, and the holy sites of Kankhal, Almora, Puri, and Varanasi.

It was Harinath who recommended that Prabhavananda be sent to the United States, rather than to Singapore as originally planned, to establish a Vedanta center.  After stops in San Francisco and Portland, Prabhavananda founded the Vedanta Society of Southern California. 

DHARMA AND CASTE

The word “dharma” literally means “that which holds your true nature.”  The word may denote merit, morality, righteousness, truth, religious duty, or, more usually, the way of life which a person’s nature imposes upon him.

Vedanta, historically, stressed the importance of a person following his own dharma and not trying to follow the dharma of another.  The advantage of the caste system was that there was never any doubt concerning one’s dharma.

In the eighteenth chapter of the Bhagavad-Gita, the caste system is presented as a kind of natural order, the four castes described in relation to their duties and responsibilities.  Caste was determined by karma and later by heredity.  The typical member of each caste was a particular kind of human being with particular capacities which indicated his duties.

The four main castes were:  1. The brahmin caste consisting of priests, pandits, philosophers, and religious leaders; 2. The kshatriya caste which included politicians, military persons, and individuals of royal descent;  3. The vaishya caste was made up of providers, such as merchants, farmers, and artisans;  4. And the shudra caste was laborers and servants.  So called untouchables were considered outside the caste system.  Since the reforms of the 19^th century, India’s government has largely abolished the caste system.

Still, there is the matter of dharma, the way of life that a person’s nature imposes upon him.  In today’s world we may go our entire lives doing all sorts of things but never really our dharma.

Yet, “Be yourself,” the old saying goes, and “To thine own self be true.” To his students who often asked him what they should do with their lives, Joseph Campbell used to say, “Follow your bliss,” i.e. do what comes naturally to you.

When we do what comes naturally to us, we have a passion for it, and it makes us happy.  But we don’t follow our bliss.  We do what is expected of us, instead, whether it suits us or not.  Lucky is the person whose bliss is also what is expected of him.

BRAHMAN AND ISHWARA

Brahman has no attributes and therefore cannot be described.  Rather, it is the substratum of all attributes.   Brahman does not act, for it is the substratum of all action.  It simply is. 

Brahman is omnipresent.  When it is spoken of as residing within any particular object or creature, it is called the Atman.   This, however, is merely a matter of linguistic convenience, for the Atman and Brahman are one and the same.

Ishwara is the term used for what is generally thought of as “God.”  It is God with attributes, loving, merciful, and just, for instance, the Personal God.

It is Ishwara who creates a universe, sustains it, and eventually dissolves it again, in a process called evolution/involution. 

Ishwara’s three aspects, known as the Hindu Trinity, are personified as Brahma (the Creator,) Vishnu (the Preserver), and Shiva (the Dissolver).

Ishwara resembles, in a way, God the Father in Christianity.  He is the ruler of the universe which he has created.  The Christian says “God” and means, essentially, Ishwara.  A Vedantist says “God” and means Atman/Brahman.  To the Vedantist the statement “I am God” is self-evident, whereas to the Christian “I am God” is blasphemy.