TAKING A HUMAN LIFE

Can taking a human life ever be justified?  Swami Prabhavananda said that it all depends.  There are people who feel they must protect other persons, who must protect their homes and their country.  If they didn’t, human society would collapse, they feel.  For them, killing another human can be justified.

It is different for a spiritual aspirant, however.  If the aspirant has reached a stage of unfoldment in which he is continuously absorbed in the thought of God, then it becomes impossible for him to take another person’s life. He sees no enemy.

Then, such a person is also unlikely to take the life of any other living thing.  Vedanta teaches the principle of ahimsa: “nonviolence, abstention from harming any living being in thought, word, or deed.”  He is disinclined to harm even insentient beings, objects, the environment, as well.

It is an extreme example, but an aspirant would never dream of flying a B-52 airplane on a “carpet bombing” mission, as in WWII and the Vietnam War.  Such bombing, also known as obliteration bombing, destroyed every insentient and sentient being in its path, leaving behind only a wasteland.

An aspirant will abstain from such things not necessarily for moral reasons, although that may be part of it, but because he knows that all insentient and sentient beings, indeed everything in existence, the entire universe, is Brahman, God.  Why would he attack God?  It is union with God that he seeks not the death of God.

FINAL GOAL IN VEDANTA

The ultimate goal of a follower of Vedanta is the same as it is for a follower of any religion.  It is the attainment of perfection in the Godhead.
Whether you are a Vedantist, a Christian, a Buddhist, a Jew, a Muslim, or a Zoroastrian, the ideal is what your faith chooses to call it, the beatific vision, illumination, samadhi, or nirvana.

It was Christ who said, “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father in Heaven is perfect.”  Note that he did not say that you must die a physical death in order to attain that perfection.  But your ego must die, and you must be reborn in spirit.  Realizing this goal is to be here and now, in this very life.

What does it mean that your ego must die?  Your ego is your conditioned consciousness, the I-consciousness, the person who your name refers to.

In Vedanta, the death of the ego can be achieved by one, or a combination of, the four main yogas, or paths to union with God.  These are bhakti yoga, the path of devotion, jnana yoga, the path of knowledge, karma yoga, the path of selfless work, and raja yoga, the path of formal meditation.

These four yogas shift your attention away from yourself and put it directly on God.  Everything you do becomes for God.

THINKING ABOUT GOD VERSUS MEDITATING ON GOD

Thinking about God gradually leads a person to meditation, even as they are two different mind functions. Thinking involves the analytical, discriminating mind, whereas the meditating mind is the intuitive mind. 

For the thinking mind, God is an object, a thing.  For the meditating mind, God is a feeling, an impression.  For the thinking mind, God is a location.  For the meditating mind, God has no location.

Meditation is the state where the mind flows continuously toward God.   There is a consciousness, an awareness of the presence of God in meditation.  In Vedanta, meditation is next to Samadhi, the superconscious state where Brahman, the ultimate Reality, is experienced.  Brahman is God.

In the words of the Bhagavad-Gita, “The light of a lamp does not flicker in a windless place,” meaning that when through meditation the mind ceases its restless movements and becomes still, Brahman, God, is realized.

PROGRESS IN SPIRITUAL LIFE

Progress at anything does not happen in a straight line.  There are many ups and downs. So it is in spiritual life.

Swami Brahmananda gave the example of a calf.  The calf tries to get up on its feet soon after its birth, but quickly falls down again.  For fifteen minutes, half and hour, one hour, the calf attempts to get up, but again it topples over.  But it does not give up the struggle.  Later it not only stands but begins to run.

It is more than sheer will that accounts for the calf’s determination, however.  It is the calf’s nature to get to its feet.  It is built in.

In the same way, it is the nature of humans to know God.  It is built in, as well.  Then, it is the nature of everything to know God, sooner or later, contingent upon being born human.

Vedanta stresses the significance, importance of being born human, for we are the only species with a level of consciousness high enough to connect with God.   And connect we will, and run.

MOMENTS OF MOMENTS

We are an approximation of ourselves for our lifetimes.  We have one name, Joe Blow, but there is no one Joe Blow.  Rather is there a series of Joe Blows, in a state of what is called “becoming.”  Joe Blow is forever becoming the next Joe Blow. 

Accordingly, who we are at the end of our lives is not who we were at the beginning.  Philosopher Alan Watts used the example of a burning branch, which, when swirled in the air, gives the appearance of a circle.  But the circle is an illusion, just like each of us is an illusion, a series of moments, moments of moments.

For more on this subject see the 4/9/14 posting “Becoming” here in this blog.

ATMAN AS 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.

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.”

In Vedanta the Chosen ideal is most often associated with bhakti yoga, the path of devotion, which is one of the four main yogas, or paths to union with God.

The other paths are jnana yoga, the path of knowledge, karma yoga, the path of selfless work, and raja yoga, the path of formal meditation.  Bhakti yoga is the most natural path to God-realization and is the one that the majority of believers in all the great religions of the world follow.

BRAHMANANDA

Swami Brahmananda (1863-1922) was born Rakhal Chandra Ghosh in a village near Calcutta called Sikra.  His father was a wealthy landowner, and his mother a devotee of Sri Krishna.  She was the one who chose the name Rakhal, (Cowherd of Vrindavan) in honor of the cowherds who were the companions of the young Krishna.

At the age of twelve Rakhal was sent by his family to Calcutta to study at an English secondary school. The boys at this school used to exercise at a gymnasium, where it so happened Rakhal met Narendranath “Naren” Datta. The affectionate, gentle Rakhal was drawn at once to Naren’s aggressive boldness, and Naren felt equally drawn to Rakhal.  Thus it happened that the two, who were destined to become the leaders of the future Ramakrishna Order, Rakhal as Swami Brahmananda, and Naren as Swami Vivekananda, were already close friends before either of them met Ramakrishna.

The young Naren joined the Brahmo Samaj, a religious and social reform movement, and persuaded Rakhal to do the same.  Both of them signed the Brahmo pledge to worship and meditate upon God without form, i.e. God without attributes.  Rakhal was by nature contemplative, becoming, as a result, so preoccupied with the mystery of life and death that he neglected his schoolwork, along with all other worldly interests.

Rakhal’s father was concerned about this and settled upon a common remedy, marriage, which Rakhal accepted with his usual submissiveness. Thus at the age of sixteen he was married to a young girl named Visweswari.  Rakhal’s father doubtless figured he’d thus protected his son from metaphysical influences, when in fact he had done the opposite. It turned out that Visweswari’s brother, Manomohan Mitra, took Rakhal to visit Ramakrishna, early in 1880, and the rest was history.

MORE ON SARADA DEVI

Sarada Devi (1853-1920) was the wife and spiritual counterpart of Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, the nineteenth century mystic of Bengal. She was reverentially addressed as the Holy Mother (Sri Maa) by the followers of the Ramakrishna monastic order. She played an important role in the growth of the Ramakrishna Movement.

Sarada was born Saradamani Mukhopadhyaya in Jayrambati, a village in West Bengal. At the age of five she was betrothed to Ramakrishna.  Ramakrishna was twenty-three at the time, the age difference not unusual in nineteenth century rural Bengal.  She joined him at Dakshineswar, at the Kali temple, when she was eighteen years old.

Sarada's days began at 3:00 a.m. After finishing her ablutions in the Ganges, she would practice japa and meditation until daybreak. Ramakrishna taught her the sacred mantras, and instructed her how to initiate people and guide them in spiritual life.  Sarada is considered to be Ramakrishna's first disciple.  Except for her hours of meditation, she spent most of her time cooking for Ramakrishna and the growing number of his devotees.

It is interesting how Ramakrishna, a mystic and holy man, came to take a wife in the first place.  Rumors had spread that he had become unstable as a result of his spiritual exercises at Dakshineswar. His mother and his elder brother, Rameswar, decided to get him married, thinking that marriage would be a good steadying influence upon him.  It would force him to accept responsibility and to keep his attention on normal affairs rather than his spiritual practices and visions. 

According to Sarada Devi's traditional biographers, both lived lives of unbroken continence, the ideal of the monastic way of life. After Ramakrishna's death, Sarada Devi stayed most of the time either at Jayrambati or at the Udbodhan office, Calcutta. The disciples of Ramakrishna regarded her as their own mother, and after their guru's passing looked to her for advice and encouragement. She outlived Ramakrishna by thirty-four years.

HAVEN’T I SEEN YOU BEFORE?

One day, by seeming chance, Abanindra, destined  to become Swami Prabhavananda, met Sarada Devi. She was Sri Ramakrishna's wife who, following his death, was regarded by his disciples as their spiritual mother--"Holy Mother," they called her.

One of her attendants told Abanindra who she was; otherwise, he would have taken her for an ordinary countrywoman, sitting barefooted, without the slightest air of self-importance, outside a village inn. When he approached and bowed down to touch her feet in reverence, she said, "Son, haven't I seen you before?"

When Abanindra was eighteen and a student in Calcutta, he visited the Belur Math, the chief monastery of the Ramakrishna Order, which is beside the Ganges, on the outskirts of the city. He wanted to see the room in which Vivekananda, Ramakrishna’s chief apostle, used to stay.  Since Vivekananda’s death in 1902, it had been maintained as a public shrine.

When Abanindra left the Vivekananda Room, he found himself for the first time face to face with Brahmananda, another principal apostle of Ramakrishna whom Ramakrishna regarded as his spiritual son. And Brahmananda said to him, "Haven't I seen you before?"

Could it be that everybody has known everybody else over countless past lifetimes, the memory of which we lose when we pass from one incarnation to another, the exception being illumined souls who carry memories of everyone they’ve ever met for all time?

Subsequent to his meeting Brahmananda, Abanindra became a monk, and Brahmananda, or Maharaj as he was known at Belur Math, accepted him as his disciple.

All of us have encountered everybody else in the world many times over, when all of us were other people. However, not all of us went on to meet an illumined soul, which altered the course of our lives forever.

Incidentally, all beings insentient and sentient chance upon all other insentient and sentient beings over the millennia in their journey to spiritual awakening.  It is the  way in which the universe itself is awakening.

WHAT YOU ACTUALLY ARE

You have no past, no remembering, no regretting, no thought to who you used to be or to what your circumstances once were, even five minutes ago.  You have no future, no anticipation, expectation, planning--worrying--no thought to who you are yet to be or to what your circumstances will be at some point in the future, even five minutes from now.  You have only what you actually are, one breath, one heartbeat at a time.

VEDANTA SOCIETIES

By providing access to ways that suit individual temperaments, the Vedanta Societies endeavor to stimulate each person’s innate spirituality.  The occult, the bizarre, or the sensational have no place in Vedanta.

Naturally, the Societies do not promise instant illumination. God-realization can take a lifetime, if not many lifetimes. But without doubt illumination will occur in the end, for even if we are deeply asleep, which most of us are over many incarnations, we will awake eventually.

Vedanta Societies are worldwide.  Here in the U.S., they are located in Berkeley, California, Boston, Massachusetts, Chicago, Illinois, Ganges Township, Michigan, Hollywood, California, Houston, Texas, Kansas City, Kansas, New York, New York, Phoenix, Arizona, Portland, Oregon, Providence, Rhode Island, Sacramento, California, San Francisco, California, Santa Barbara, California, St. Louis, Missouri, St. Petersburg, Florida, Stone Ridge, New York. Washington, D.C.

The Vedanta Society of New York was the first Vedanta Society in the U.S.  It was founded by Swami Vivekananda in November 1894. The Societies are guided by monks who serve as ministers.  Their websites are a great resource for books, articles, devotional music, prayer chanting, and recorded lectures.

GOD SHOULD NOT BE HARD TO CONTACT

God should not be hard to contact.  But He is.  The reason He is, is because He is not a person.

RICHARD HITTLEMAN REVISITED

Richard Hittleman (1927-1991) wrote numerous books on Hatha (physical) Yoga, and several on the Yoga philosophy of Advaita Vedanta.  He had a Masters Degree in Oriental Mysticism from Columbia University, and was a friend of Alan Watts.  His "Yoga For Health" TV programs ran for many years.  Indeed, in New York "Yoga for Health" ran for more than four-and-a-half years without a break.

Hittleman was a student of Ramana Maharshi in the late 1940s and regarded Maharshi as his guru. He also had an interest in Zen Buddhism, and Buddhism generally. He and his daughter were said to be working on a re-interpretation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead at the time of his death from prostate cancer.

Hittleman's chief teaching was that ultimately all is only the divine Self, Atman/Brahman.  "'Self'' is another word for 'God,'" he wrote.  "This is the God who is the Absolute, who is immutable, without qualities, pure awareness, without beginning or end. . . . It is dependent upon nothing and is not affected by, nor does it react to, any occurrence in the phenomenal world.  It is further characterized as having the qualities of bliss and knowledge."

WHERE GOD IS

God is just below silence.

GOD IS AWARE

God cannot be accessed by way of the thinking mind, which is to say the thinking mind can only give us ideas about God, not God Himself.

God, on the other hand, has access to us, in that He is us.  For instance, He knows, or more correctly, is aware of our thoughts before we think them and what we are going to say before we say it.

He is aware of when, to the second, we were born, and when, to the second, we will die.  He is aware of every object and every living being we have ever been, at the same time that He is aware, ultimately, of what will become of us.

All of this that God is aware of we also are aware of, only we are not aware of it yet.

ACKNOWLEDGING GOD IN VEDANTA

Acknowledging God is important in Vedanta, not because God needs and wants us to do it, but because we need and want us to do it.  Communing with God is communing with our true selves, Atman/Brahman.

It is not as though God is unaware of our acknowledging Him.  As the Eternal Witness He is aware of everything that happens in the world of form.  And it is not that nothing comes of the acknowledgement. Something comes of any contact we have with Him, even if a mere nod.

Acknowledging God is a celebration. It is the Joy part of Vedanta’s definition of God, which is Sat-Chit-Ananda: Absolute Existence, Absolute Consciousness, Absolute Joy.  We exist absolutely, are conscious absolutely, and, when we acknowledge God, are joyful absolutely.

GOD DEFINED

Sat-Chit-Ananda is the traditional definition of God in Vedanta.  It stands for Absolute Existence, Absolute Consciousness, Absolute Bliss or Joy, which is the subjective experience of the ultimate, unchanging reality of God.

Absolute Existence means that God is vast, infinite, limitless, i.e. not limited in time, eternal. There is no second to God, the way in which He is nondual. There is nothing that is not God, nothing that is apart from God.  He is everywhere and everything.

Chit is Absolute Consciousness.  God is pure consciousness, a consciousness that is neither created nor destroyed, and is content-less, without content.  This is unlike ordinary consciousness which has an object as its content.

The pure consciousness that is God illuminates our conditioned consciousness.  The pure consciousness that is God is in all of existence.  The pure consciousness that is Go is all of existence.  All of existence emanates from the pure consciousness that is God like sparks from a fire.

Ananda means Pure Bliss, Absolute Joy, the highest state of being.  When we unite with God we feel  how infinite He is, prompting Ananda.  If we are not experiencing Ananda, it is because our minds and senses are too attached to sense objects.  When we are no longer bound to sense objects  the result is Ananda.