SUSPENSION OF DISBELIEF

“Suspension of disbelief” or “willing suspension of disbelief” is a term coined in 1817 by the poet, literary critic, and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge.  He held that if a writer added “a human interest, and a semblance of truth” to a fantastic tale, the reader would suspend judgement regarding the implausibility of the narrative.
  
Novels of the action, comedy, fantasy, and horror genres are typically where this technique is employed.  It has always been an aspect of stage plays, and nowadays is central to television and film.  Circus sideshow acts and magic acts also rely on it; an audience is not expected to believe that a woman is actually being cut in half before their eyes or that a cat has been transformed into an ape.

We suspend our disbelief, in the same way, concerning what we are and what this place is.  All we know is that we are living beings among countless other living and nonliving beings on a planet revolving around a star among innumerable other planets revolving around stars in a universe too vast for our limited human minds to grasp, all of which is time bound.  If we did not suspend our disbelief that we are what we are, and are where we are, we would go mad. 

OBJECTS ARE CONSCIOUS

Even insentient beings, objects, are conscious, Swami Sarvapriyananda points out.  The difference is that objects do not have a mind to experience it.  The reason objects are conscious is because everything in existence is Brahman, and Brahman is pure consciousness.

EVERYTHING IS ONE THING

Swami Sarvapriyananda explains the oneness of Brahman this way:  Five metal chairs.  From the standpoint of chair, there are five.  From the standpoint of metal, there is one.  All the chairs are one thing, metal.  Take away the metal and there are no chairs.

GOD IS NOT A BEING

God is not a being but being itself.

INVISIBILITY

Have nothing, want nothing, be nothing.
Blessed are the invisible for they shall see God.

MORE THAN MEETS THE EYE

Much is going on backstage, behind the scenes, just out of sight, in the spiritual mind.  The mutual interpenetration of all things and events is going on there, likened to a spider’s web at dawn where every dew drop on the web reflects every other dew drop on it.  Meaningful coincidences, as Carl Jung calls them, the uncanny, arise from there.

SPIRITUAL DIMENSION

The spiritual dimension is oblique, in that it is off to the side, in the periphery of the vision, in the corner of the eye.  Approaching it can only be done indirectly.

VIDYARANYA

Swami Vidyaranya was the author of the 14^th century Panchadashi, a book of instruction on Advaita Vedanta.  Vidyaranya was not his family name.  One tradition has him as Sayana Acharya, a well-known commentator on the Vedas, but it is more generally accepted that he was Sayana’s brother, Madhava Acharya.

It seems likely that Madhava was born about 1314 A. D.  From a Brahmin family, he received the best education available, acquiring proficiency in grammar, medicine, astronomy, mathematics, and rhetoric.

Madhava went on to become a chief advisor of the early Vijayanagara kings.  Over time, however, he became increasingly aware that despite his worldly power and position, he still lacked the spiritual peace one should achieve in life.  At the age of about fifty-four, then, he renounced his office, honors, and wealth and became a monk under the name Vidyaranya.

Vidyaranya’s most famous works, among his many, are the Sarvadarsanasangraha, a compendium of all sixteen philosophical schools of Hindu philosophy, and again Panchadashi.

PANCHADASHI

Not all the best classics in Vedic literature are known in the West.  One such classic is Swami Vidyaranya’s Panchadashi written in the 14^th century.  

The fifteen chapters of Panchadashi--the word panchadashi means fifteen in Sanskrit-- fall naturally into three sections of five chapters each.  The three sections correspond to sat-chit-ananda, an epithet of Brahman.  Sat means absolute existence; chit means absolute consciousness; and ananda mean absolute bliss.

Some scholars hold that only the first ten chapters are from Swami Vidyaranya, the remainder written posthumously by a former pupil of his, using Vidyaranya's notes.  The book is an instruction on the metaphysics of non-dualistic Advaita Vedanta and a guide on Advaita meditation.

Since the subject of Panchadashi is Advaita Vedanta, it is often mentioned in conjunction with Shankara’s Crest Jewel of Discrimination written six centuries earlier.  The topic of Crest Jewel is also Advaita but it differs from Panchadashi in form.  Crest Jewel is a dialogue between a master and a disciple, where the master teaches the disciple the nature of the Atman and how to access it.

NEVER FIND FAULT

Swami Ishtananda states that we must never find fault with anyone or anything, for everyone and everything is the Atman working toward awakening, a process we must not second guess.

POINT OF NO RETURN

Awakening is final.  You can’t put a bird back in its egg.

TRANSCENDENTALISM

Transcendentalism was a religious, philosophical, and literary movement centered in New England during the 19th century.  It was a reaction against the state of intellectualism at Harvard University, and against the Unitarianism taught at Harvard Divinity School.

The major figures in the movement were Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Aldo Leopold, Margaret Fuller, and Amos Bronson Alcott.  They held that intuition was the only way to comprehend reality in a world where all natural phenomena possessed a spiritual truth. 

They believed that everything in our world is a microcosm of the universe, and therefore that there is an essential unity in all things.  And these things were ordered by a Supreme Mind or Over-Soul with which man’s soul is identical.  This belief in the divinity of man allowed the Transcendentalists to disregard external authority and tradition, relying instead on direct experience.

Transcendentalism was significantly influenced by Vedanta, as Thoreau in his book Walden directly evidences:

“In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal [sic] philosophy of the Bhagavad Gita, since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial; and I doubt if that philosophy is not to be referred to a previous state of existence, so remote is its sublimity from our conceptions.

“I lay down the book and go to my well for water, and lo! there I meet the servant of the Brahmin, priest of Brahma, and Vishnu and Indra, who still sits in his temple on the Ganges reading the Vedas, or dwells at the root of a tree with his crust and water-jug.  I meet his servant come to draw water for his master, and our buckets, as it were, grate together in the same well.  The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges.”

ONGOING

There is no finish line, for there is no starting line.