GOD IS IT

Swami Sarvapriyananda stated that when, over many lifetimes, a person has had enough of this manifested world, he is drawn to spirituality.  His having “had enough” means that despite his doing everything, being everything, having everything, he is not happy.  Doing, being, having everything is not it.

ECKHART TOLLE ON CONSCIOUSNESS

You cannot say what it is because it is everything. 

Consciousness emanates from a source that does not exist in space and time, what the Buddha called the unmanifested, the unborn, the uncreated.  If the word “God” has any meaning, it is that. 

You cannot conceive of it; you cannot talk about it; you cannot name it.  It is that which precedes the “Big Bang.” 

WHO OR WHAT REINCARNATES? REVISITED

According to Vedanta, the jiva reincarnates.  The jiva is the Atman identified with its coverings--the body, mind, senses, etc.  Ignorant of its divinity, the jiva, or jivatman, experiences birth, death, pleasure and pain.

Meanwhile, Vedanta adopted the concept of a “subtle body” which is attached to the jiva for as long as the jiva’s bondage to samsara lasts.  Samsara is the perpetual cycle of birth, death, and rebirth.  The subtle body is what carries karmic debts, although it cannot preserve one’s personal attributes.

The facts recorded by the subtle body are a sum of hidden tendencies or impressions imprinted by karma as seeds that will generate future behavior and personal character.  These tendencies will materialize unconsciously in the reborn individual, denying the person, at the same time, any hint of what his or her karmic condition actually is.
 
There is no transmitting of conscious memory from one life to another, as memory belongs to the world of illusion, to the world of name and form, and dissolves at death.

As long as it remains unaware of its identity with Brahman, the jiva is reborn as a new individual with a new subtle body.  When at last it realizes its true identity it awakens, freeing itself from the trap of samsara. 

SWAMI VIJNANANANDA

Hari Prasanna Chattopadhyaya, 1868-1938, was a monastic disciple of Sri Ramakrishna.  Hari Prasanna went to Dakshineswar in 1883.  He was a district engineer in the Indian government before he joined the brotherhood at Alambazar in 1896.

The Swami supervised the construction of buildings of the Ramakrishna Math and Mission at Belur and Varanasi, and he established a Mission center at Allahabad.  In 1934, he became vice president of the Order, and in 1937, president.

UNSEEN SEER

You are the unseen seer.   In a series of lectures on the ancient text Drg Drsya Viveka:  An Inquiry into the Nature of the Seer and the Seen, Swami Sarvapriyananda explains how this is so.

The seer and the seen are separate, subject and object.  Your eyes see the outside world.  The eyes are singular, while the outside world is many, i.e. many colors, shapes, sizes, etc., and is ever changing.
 
The eyes cannot see themselves.  It is the mind that sees the eyes.  Here, the eyes are many, i.e. good vision, poor vision, open, closed, sleepy, scratchy, etc., and are ever changing.
 
But the mind does not see itself.  It can reflect upon itself, called introspection, but it does not see itself, as from a distance.  Here, the mind is the many, i.e. many thoughts, emotions, moods, etc., and is ever changing.

Pure consciousness, also termed the witnessing consciousness, is what sees the mind.  Again, the seer and the seen are separate, subject and object.  Here, the witnessing consciousness is one thing, the mind many things.
 
However, unlike the outside world, the eyes, and the mind, the witnessing consciousness is constant, unchanging.  You are this witnessing consciousness; it is your true identity.  You are the unseen seer. 

SAGE ADVICE

Rather than dwell on how your life might have gotten better had you, instead, done this or that, you should think of the ways in which it might well have gotten worse.

ICONOGRAPHY

Even Zen Buddhists can be found with elaborate temples and bowing to statues of the Buddha, but this, Alan Watts explained, is merely what Buddhism comes in, the packaging.

ONE WITHOUT A SECOND

“Vedanta  teaches that Brahman (the ultimate reality behind the phenomenal universe) is ‘one without a second.’  Brahman is beyond all attributes.  Brahman is not conscious; Brahman is consciousness.  Brahman does not exist; Brahman is existence.  Brahman is the Atman (the eternal nature) of every human being, creature, and object.

“Vedanta teaches us that life has no other purpose than this: that we shall learn to know ourselves for what we really are, that we shall reject the superficial ego-personality which claims that ‘I am Mr. Smith; I am other than Mr. Brown,’ and know, instead, that ‘I am the Atman; Mr. Brown is the Atman; the Atman is Brahman; there is nothing anywhere but Brahman; all else is appearance, transience, and unreality.’”--Christopher Isherwood in Vedanta for Modern Man. 

BECOMING THE ATMAN

Appearing as many different lifeforms over millennia, the Atman journeys toward its awakening.  Currently, humans are the only beings on this planet that the Atman is able to awaken in.  The brain capacity of humans accounts for this.

Awakening is unlike anything a person has ever known.  It is a major shift in his consciousness, to where his perception of himself as only an ego is invalidated.

 

What he does not anticipated, however, is that the Atman continues to awaken in him, until, at last, it becomes him. 

Vivekananda said that he had become the Atman, so that when he spoke, it was as the Atman.  Always remember, he said, that the bringing forth of the divinity within us is what this life is for.

Being born human is a rarity, he also said, given the millions of other lifeforms here, and, equally, given the brief amount of time we have been here, or will remain here.
  
After we disappear, how many more millions of years will it be until another species evolves to the point that the Atman can awaken in them.

SO SIMPLE: A SHORT STORY

It was so simple.  There was only God now.   His life in its entirety, not just part of it, was for God now.

God had been waiting for him to say this.  But then he had been waiting for him to say it, too.

MEANT TO BE

A rose bush sprouts flowers all of a sudden, much to its surprise.  It is now what it was meant to be, it realizes, the only thing it could ever be.  No less so humans, spiritually.

RIGHT DIRECTION

You are facing in the right direction, mythologist Joseph Campbell said.  All you have to do is keep walking.

RELAX

Your will has nothing to do with it.  You are happening of yourself. There is nothing for you to figure out.

ISHERWOOD ON BRAHMAN

In his introduction to the book of essays Vedanta for the Western World, Christopher Isherwood summed up the Brahman.  He said that Vedanta teaches that this universe is an effect or power of Brahman.  The relationship is that of heat to fire.  They are inseparable. 

However, Brahman does not intervene in the world’s affairs, which raises the question, why does God permit evil?  This, to a Vedantist, is as meaningless as why does God permit good?  The fire burns one man and warms another, hence is neither kind nor cruel.

Vedanta sounds like an inhuman philosophy this way.  Certainly it is, Isherwood says, for the obvious reason that Brahman is not human.  We must avoid the temptation to think of Brahman in relative terms.  Brahman is not simply a giant person, and has nothing to do with our shifting standards of good and evil, pleasure, unhappiness, right and wrong. 

Brahman is sat-chit-ananda.  It is existence itself.  It is consciousness itself.  It is, as in the Christian Bible, the peace which passeth all understanding, termed “bliss” in Vedanta.

WATTS ON THE TAO

The Tao that can be named is not the Tao.  He who says he knows the Tao does not.  It cannot be said what the Tao is, only what it is like.  The Tao is like gravity.  

Wu wei in Taoism means non-interference, which is to say you should flow with your life, not get in the way of it. 

As Alan Watts put it, “You are going along with the Tao whether you want to or not.  You can swim against it but you’ll still be moved along by it.  If you swim against it, all you will do is wear yourself out.  But if you swim with it, the whole strength of it is yours.  Yet the difficulty is determining which way it is going.”