From Lower Truth to Higher Truth: Vedanta in Practice | Prof. Jeffery Long

[SPEAKER_03]: Good morning everybody and welcome.
[SPEAKER_03]: We're so happy to welcome back, as I'll speak, her, a dear and very respected friend of our society, Dr. Jeffrey DeLong.
[SPEAKER_03]: He is the Carl W. Ziegler Professor of Religion, Philosophy, and Asian Studies at Elizabeth Town College.
[SPEAKER_03]: Where he has taught since receiving his doctoral degree
[SPEAKER_03]: He's written many books and articles, including Hinduism in America, a Conversion of Worlds, which won the Reginder and Joty Gandhi Award for Theology, Philosophy, and Critical Engagement in 2022.
[SPEAKER_03]: His latest book is discovering Indian philosophy and introduction to Hindu, Jain and Buddhist thought.
[SPEAKER_03]: This year, he's published through Oxford University Press, a volume of Hindu primary sources with his colleague, Dr. Ravi Gupta.
[SPEAKER_03]: He has spoken at a wide variety of venues both national and international, including three presentations at the United Nations.
[SPEAKER_03]: He has also been interviewed for a PBS documentary on the life and teachings of Swami Vivekananda and for the history channel series Holy Marbles.
[SPEAKER_03]: Dr. Long took initiation into the Vedanta tradition in the year 2005 and is a popular and frequent speaker at Vedanta societies across the United States.
[SPEAKER_03]: The subject of his talk today is from
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you very much Diane for that lovely introduction and to all of you for being here today The weather is not great in New York today, but you still came, so thank you very very much And to quotes while maybe we've accounted to thank you for your kind and cordial welcome So I'd like to begin today with the short prayer
[SPEAKER_00]: O, Jalanim, Saradam, Devim, Ramakrishna, Jagad, Gurum, Pada Padme, Thayos, Ritva, Panamami, Mahormu.
[SPEAKER_01]: Having taken refuge in the lotus feet of the Holy Mother, Saradadevi, and the world teacher, Ramakrishna, I bow to them again and again.
[SPEAKER_01]: Namaskar, Namaste, good morning, and a belated Shubha Bijoya to you all.
[SPEAKER_01]: We just had our Durga Puja celebrations in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, a couple of weeks ago, and still the joy of that is still reverberating in our community.
[SPEAKER_01]: As always, it's a great honor to be invited to speak at the Vedantic Society of New York, founded by Swami Vivekananda himself.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm grateful to Swami Subha Priyana Daji and to Diane for inviting me to share some thoughts with you today.
[SPEAKER_01]: I gave a very similar presentation to this at the Vedantic Society in DC, back in August.
[SPEAKER_01]: And made a few modifications, including to the title.
[SPEAKER_01]: And this was at the suggestion of my wife.
[SPEAKER_01]: And also very good friend, who I told him, I promised I would mention him today.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm a very good friend, Darren, who I've known since the third grade.
[SPEAKER_01]: He follows my work to this present day for some reason, and so he also suggested this title from Lower Truth to Higher Truth, which comes from a talk by Swami Vivekananda toward the realization of a universal religion.
[SPEAKER_01]: So this talk was inspired by my recent rereading of one of my favorite books, and in fact I highly recommend going back years later to some of those books that inspired you many years before you see new things in the next time around.
[SPEAKER_01]: The book in question is Aldis Huxley's the perennial philosophy.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is one of the books that most deeply shaped my thinking at a very early point in my personal journey.
[SPEAKER_01]: I first read it when I was 14 years old.
[SPEAKER_01]: Around the same time, I was also in the midst of reading the Bhagavad-gita, Paramahansa Yogananda's autobiography of a yogi, Swami Rama's living with the Himalayan masters, and Swami Prabhavananda's the sermon on the Mount according to Vedanta.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, yeah, this was my reading, and I would take these books with me to school and everyone thought I was very strange, but I didn't care.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, Huxley was an initiative of the Dante, and a disciple of Swami Prabhavananda, of the Vedanta Society of Southern California.
[SPEAKER_01]: Alongside, along with the renowned Gerald Herd, Christopher Isherwood, and my friend, N. E. E. E. E. E. E. E. E. E. E. E. E. E. E. E. E. E. E. E. E. E. E. E. E. E. E. E. E. E. E. E. E. E. E. E. E. E. E. E. E. E. E. E. E. E. E. E. E. E. E. E. E. E. E. E. E. E. E. E. E. E. E. E. E. E
[SPEAKER_01]: A central theme of the perennial philosophy is the idea that spiritual life is finally all about giving up the ego in order to experience the deeper ground of being that underlies our personal existence and indeed all of existence.
[SPEAKER_01]: it is about attaining a knowledge beyond knowledge, not the ordinary kind of knowledge that consists of being aware of facts and their interconnections, but the direct awareness of who and what we truly are.
[SPEAKER_01]: At the same time though, it is not about attaining anything at all because we already are that which we are.
[SPEAKER_01]: We are not attaining something so much as we are renouncing and giving up and losing our ignorance and our self-created self-imposed limitations.
[SPEAKER_01]: As the singer Donovan, who is also a spiritual aspirant on the path of transcendental meditation, has written beautifully in his Zen inspired song, There is a mountain, some of you might know this song, and if you don't go listen to it, the caterpillars shed his skin to find a butterfly within.
[SPEAKER_01]: We are caterpillars who are really butterflies, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: We're potential butterflies, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: The Vedantus has had to speak to the potential divinity within all of us.
[SPEAKER_01]: We're not seeking our butterflies, which is already our true nature.
[SPEAKER_01]: We are seeking, rather, to shed our temporary caterpillar self, the ego.
[SPEAKER_01]: As soon as we become serious about spiritual life, we start to realize that it's full of paradoxes such as these, we're on a journey that is not really a journey to a place that is not really a place, in order to find something that was never really lost.
[SPEAKER_01]: So why is spirituality so paradoxical?
[SPEAKER_01]: The answer is itself something of a paradox because spiritual life as such is really not paradoxical at all.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's, you could put it very simply as self-knowledge.
[SPEAKER_01]: It appears paradoxical because of the ways in which we try to speak about it.
[SPEAKER_01]: These give rise to paradox.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is because the experience at which spiritual life is aimed, the experience of the ground of being to use Hexley's words, or brahman to use the term from the Upanishads, is utterly beyond the capability of language to describe.
[SPEAKER_01]: To some extent, this is true of all experience.
[SPEAKER_01]: How would we describe the color blue to someone who had never seen a color?
[SPEAKER_01]: How do we put the experience of love in towards songwriters and poets have been trying that for centuries?
[SPEAKER_01]: And we'll probably still be doing so for centuries more.
[SPEAKER_01]: How do we even describe something as mundane as the experience of enjoying a good meal with friends?
[SPEAKER_01]: Each experience is so distinctive and each person's way of relating to their experiences so unique that the goal of conveying these experiences in words in any final or perfect way in language seems to elude us.
[SPEAKER_01]: The paradox of language, however, is that even as it arguably fails in its intended task, the attempt to express ourselves in this way, itself gives rise to new and even richer experiences, listening to an inspiring or informative talk, reading a good book.
[SPEAKER_01]: Hearing the words of a beautiful song, these can transport us to realms that we might not have realized in any other way.
[SPEAKER_01]: So words in some sense fail us, but they also open doors that would maybe perhaps never have otherwise been opened.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's itself a paradox.
[SPEAKER_01]: Part of inhabiting the human form it seems is being filled with the desire to express ourselves and to do so in language.
[SPEAKER_01]: This can be language in the conventional sense through words put together as sentences or the languages of artistic and musical expression.
[SPEAKER_01]: Whether one writes a sentence or paints a picture, one is using symbol and metaphor.
[SPEAKER_01]: Just as a picture is not the thing it depicts.
[SPEAKER_01]: a word is also not the thing it denotes.
[SPEAKER_01]: They all point beyond themselves to something else.
[SPEAKER_01]: If all words are symbols and all statements are metaphors, even when expressing something about our mundane experience, how much more true must this be when we speak of spiritual life.
[SPEAKER_01]: Our words have been formed to express our experiences of the realm of time, space, and causation in which we normally exist, and which is where we use language to function.
[SPEAKER_01]: The ground of being, though, is beyond time, space, and causation.
[SPEAKER_01]: The disjuncture between our language and what we seek to express with it, thus becomes even wider.
[SPEAKER_01]: Indeed, a vast gulf, when we try to speak of that, that with a capital T.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is why Adi Shankaracharya speaks to the divine reality as, quote, thou before whom all words recoil.
[SPEAKER_01]: And why the Briha Ananya Kopanishad says that this reality is nitty nitty.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not this.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not that.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not anything that a word can denote.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's why the Dow Dijing says that the Dow, the ultimate way or reality that can be put into words is not the eternal Dow.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's also why the Buddha is said to have sometimes responded with silence when asked about the ultimate nature of reality.
[SPEAKER_01]: Silence it seems is the best way to express the truth of the ground of being.
[SPEAKER_01]: And in fact, St. Omakrishna, there's a beautiful portrait of him and the title of it is the face of silence.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's so something that goes utterly beyond the capacity of words to explain.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is why the doubt is also says, the one who knows does not speak.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the one who speaks does not know.
[SPEAKER_01]: As someone who speaks for a living, and who's been invited to speak here today, I find this particular verse to be quite jarring.
[SPEAKER_01]: But it's a wake-up call not to be overly attached towards and to seek for wisdom in silence.
[SPEAKER_01]: Whenever we have an experience of realization, even a small glimmer of the depths of that infinite reality at the core of our being, we do indeed lapse into silence.
[SPEAKER_01]: Silence, we might say, is the language of God.
[SPEAKER_01]: In preparation for that experience, in meditation, we also seek to silence the mind, so that the deeper silence which is beyond the mind can be heard by the mind.
[SPEAKER_01]: And yes, that's also a paradox.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm speaking about hearing a silence, and not with ears, but with the mind, so it's a paradox and a metaphor.
[SPEAKER_01]: But there is a problem.
[SPEAKER_01]: with silence.
[SPEAKER_01]: There are different kinds of silence, and it can be difficult to differentiate them.
[SPEAKER_01]: One of my favorite professors in college had an expression that is always stuck with me.
[SPEAKER_01]: Whenever he would ask your question to our class and no one raised a hand to respond, he would say, is this the silence of profound wisdom or the silence of profound ignorance?
[SPEAKER_01]: This question never failed to listen to service laughter from the class.
[SPEAKER_01]: But it points to a vitally important distinction.
[SPEAKER_01]: There is the silence of the mind that knows nothing.
[SPEAKER_01]: And there is the silence of the mind that has realized the no-thing, the reality beyond time, space and causation, that is finally best expressed in silence.
[SPEAKER_01]: There is the silence of profound ignorance and the silence of profound wisdom.
[SPEAKER_01]: Most of us, however, are somewhere between these two states.
[SPEAKER_01]: If we're on the spiritual path, in fact, if you're here today or if you're listening to this talk, then you've already gone beyond the level of profound ignorance.
[SPEAKER_01]: Something has stirred within us the sense that something seems deeply awry with this life that we're living here and now.
[SPEAKER_01]: We found ourselves asking the question in the words of Peggy Lee.
[SPEAKER_01]: Is this all there is?
[SPEAKER_01]: Is there nothing more?
[SPEAKER_01]: At the same time, we have not yet reached the state of highest realization because we're still asking the question and still trying to figure everything out.
[SPEAKER_01]: We might have had a glimpse of that realization and that is probably what is keeping us going on the journey.
[SPEAKER_01]: The longing to recover that glimpse and make it more than a glimpse to sustain it and make it our normal mode of being.
[SPEAKER_01]: To make it we could say, our second nature, except it's really our first original nature.
[SPEAKER_01]: The butterfly in the caterpillar, the potential divinity in each and every being.
[SPEAKER_01]: Huxley uses a lovely image to describe the way many of us exist between the states of ignorance and awareness.
[SPEAKER_01]: He says that we are amphibious, going back and forth between the spiritual and mundane realms.
[SPEAKER_01]: I really like that image.
[SPEAKER_01]: We are spiritually amphibious.
[SPEAKER_01]: In a one moment your deep in meditation, the next you're trying to find a parking spot.
[SPEAKER_01]: We go back and forth between these realms.
[SPEAKER_01]: In this amphibious state we need words.
[SPEAKER_01]: We need images, symbols, and metaphors, because we're accustomed to gaining and sharing knowledge in this way.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's true that there are teachers who've had the ability of instructing their disciples through silence.
[SPEAKER_01]: In our era, it is said that both Sri Shiva Balayogi and Mahababa taught through silence.
[SPEAKER_01]: and according to the Degumbara Jain tradition, the enlightened being Mahavira also taught without words, emitting a divyadhani or divine sound which his 11 closest disciples had the ability to interpret.
[SPEAKER_01]: Some have referred to this divine sound as the sound of silence to again continue our musical theme, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Simon and Garfunkel, the sound of silence.
[SPEAKER_01]: However, the followers of Shri Shivabalayogi and Mahavira did translate the silences of their masters into words for the benefit of the rest of the world, and these teachers taught through siliments, but big thick books have been written that seek to explain that silence.
[SPEAKER_01]: And Mayher Baba, while keeping silent for much of his life, wrote numerous books, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: God speaks, and so on there are these massive books that he wrote.
[SPEAKER_01]: So even while silent, he did use words.
[SPEAKER_01]: Most of us need words, we and Fibians of the spiritual life, if we are to climb onto the solid land of realization and continue our evolution to the silent realm beyond.
[SPEAKER_01]: In this process, though, it's essential that we understand that words and symbols, just as in our mundane life, are not the things to which they point.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Zen tradition has a wonderful image that underscores this truth.
[SPEAKER_01]: Whenever we see the full moon rising, we're captivated by its beauty, and we want to share it with those around us.
[SPEAKER_01]: I've seen this over and over again.
[SPEAKER_01]: You see the big orange moon rising up above her head, and instinctively everyone wants everyone else to see it.
[SPEAKER_01]: So what do we do?
[SPEAKER_01]: We point to the moon until our friends have seen it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Once they've seen it for themselves, we can lower our hand.
[SPEAKER_01]: They no longer need to have it pointed out to them because they're experiencing it directly.
[SPEAKER_01]: Words, symbols, and belief systems are the finger pointing at the moon, which is the realization of the ground of being in this metaphor.
[SPEAKER_01]: If we mistake the finger for the moon, we run the risk of becoming fanatical and indeed regressing spiritually.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is what so often happens.
[SPEAKER_01]: We mistake the finger for the moon.
[SPEAKER_01]: Swami Vivekananda tells us that we are, quote, not traveling from error to truth, but from truth to truth, from lower truth to higher truth.
[SPEAKER_01]: Even when we are steeped in ignorance, we have at least that much knowledge as is needed to navigate the conventional world.
[SPEAKER_01]: We have whatever knowledge we've been taught by our families, any religious community, or association we might be part of, the educational system, the wider society, and I think today we can probably add the internet, there's a place where people go for knowledge.
[SPEAKER_01]: We also bear unconscious knowledge in the form of instincts that we inherit genetically, as well as from our past lives, in the form of the sunscaras and vassanas, the tendencies that we've cultivated in our previous states of embodiment.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think whenever I hear or read some discussion about nature versus nurture, I always think there's a third element.
[SPEAKER_01]: There is our genetic inheritance, there is our environment and our upbringing, but then you might have two identical twins growing up in the same home who may end up having very different experiences because there's what we each bring into this life from the prior existence.
[SPEAKER_01]: At a certain point, though, that sense of unease will afflict some of us, in which we come to feel there must be more to life than the physical world and the pursuit of material goods.
[SPEAKER_01]: This may be the result of a trauma, some great disruption in our lives, that shakes the foundations that we've taken for granted.
[SPEAKER_01]: Or it may be more of an inward crisis that develops gradually, perhaps in midlife, when we've achieved the goals that society has set for us, and yet find that we're still unsatisfied.
[SPEAKER_01]: The point of our existence that is our rebirth in this material world is to realize and to manifest that inherent divinity that is present in all of us, and that is our true nature.
[SPEAKER_01]: As described by the Phosphor Plato in the 10th book of his Republic, before we were born, we selected the life that we would lead next as the life best suited for helping us learn the lessons we need to learn in order to reach our goal.
[SPEAKER_01]: Or we could say the life best suited for doing the work that we need to do to reach that goal, work being an excellent synonym for karma, which as Vedanta and the other traditions of India teach, is what drives us to be reborn lifetime after lifetime.
[SPEAKER_01]: We've got work to do, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: You might find when you awaken from sleep.
[SPEAKER_01]: You think, okay, it would be nice to rest some more and then you remember, I have work to do.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so in the same way, we come back into the material world again and again.
[SPEAKER_01]: We have work to do.
[SPEAKER_01]: We have karma to work through.
[SPEAKER_01]: Plato's account is based on that of a man named Error, who had what we would today call a near-death experience.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's just a side note, but there is a scholar, an oncology doctor, who studies near-death experiences.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I love his work, but it's also funny because he's also named Jeffrey Long.
[SPEAKER_01]: And people sometimes confuse the two of us.
[SPEAKER_01]: And we've gotten each other's emails before and so on.
[SPEAKER_01]: But different people, but shared interest.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, these near-death experience, and some of you might have had these or known someone who had one or at least you've read or heard about it, where some of these people have a quite vivid and very detailed recollection, and these are similar across cultures and religious beliefs.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, air had a near-death experience, according to, according to Socrates as depicted by Plato.
[SPEAKER_01]: And Plato's understanding was that the events of our lives are not all predetermined, not in their every detail, but from the perspective of that between lives state, it's possible to foresee the likelyest trends that are going to occur in a particular lifetime,
[SPEAKER_01]: So this happens in what the Hindu tradition calls the boga boomi, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: That's the realm between lives, and then you have the physical lifetimes in the karma boomi, the realm where we do our work.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so a choice occurs, and this life we are in is one that we have chosen, not in its every detail, but in its broad outline.
[SPEAKER_01]: Once we're in this lifetime and events begin to unfold, we might start to get a sense of the path we need to take.
[SPEAKER_01]: Sometimes we have that, just some intuitive sense that we need to make a change here.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is a person who's important for us to speak with.
[SPEAKER_01]: some intuition that is really a resonance, it's a memory of that choice that we made.
[SPEAKER_01]: We'll seek the knowledge we need in order to advance toward our goal and be transformed into the being that we are meant to be.
[SPEAKER_01]: That we chose this life in order to become.
[SPEAKER_01]: And this transformation will in turn advance our knowledge.
[SPEAKER_01]: One could almost compare the spiritual path to the tuning of a radio or a television set.
[SPEAKER_01]: We're trying to align our minds with that higher reality toward which we are evolving.
[SPEAKER_01]: The manifestation of our true self, that's self with the capital S, the Atman.
[SPEAKER_01]: As we begin the process, there may be a good deal of interference.
[SPEAKER_01]: We might sometimes even despair of getting a clear signal.
[SPEAKER_01]: But then events unfold, and if we persist in our path, a signal begins to emerge, and the path before us becomes clearer.
[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe we meet the teacher who is going to be our main guide through the process in this life.
[SPEAKER_01]: At the start of our path in a given lifetime, again, we inherit knowledge from our society, our genetics, our past lives, much of this knowledge, especially what comes from society is second-hand.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is, we could say, not the true or deep knowledge that comes from our own direct experience.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's based on trusting the sources that have given that knowledge to us.
[SPEAKER_01]: Most of us, for example, are not physicists.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, the last time I gave this talk, there actually were some physicists in the audience, and there may be today too, but most of us are not physicists, but we accept the account of the physical world given to us by those who have dedicated their time, effort, and intelligence to understanding this field.
[SPEAKER_01]: We might have read many books on physics, but it's probably more true to say that we believe in subatomic particles and forces than that we know about them, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Unless we've done the experiments, done the work ourselves.
[SPEAKER_01]: We accept the accounts of those who do know about these things on the faith that they're telling us the truth about what they've observed and deduced in their scientific work.
[SPEAKER_01]: I know what it's like to give a talk at a Vedanta society or to teach a college course on Indian philosophy.
[SPEAKER_01]: I've done these things.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's direct knowledge for me, but I can only imagine what it's like to be a famous musician based on what I've read and heard about the lives of famous musicians.
[SPEAKER_01]: I will not know what being a famous musician is.
[SPEAKER_01]: What that is like until I become one myself, probably in a future lifetime.
[SPEAKER_01]: Certainly not this one.
[SPEAKER_01]: According to Vedanta and as Huxley explains all the great spiritual traditions, we are inherently divine.
[SPEAKER_01]: We are the ground of all beings.
[SPEAKER_01]: You are that, as the Chandogu Panashad famously states, it would seem therefore that we should know what it's like to be the ground of being, just like I know what it's like to be a college professor.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yet we seem only dimly aware of this reality, this deep truth of our existence, Provedsica Vajraprana in her simple introduction to Vedantas as we are shockingly ignorant of our own true nature.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is the thing that is closest to us and yet seems to be the thing we know the least.
[SPEAKER_01]: As Vedanta teaches us, we are ignorant of our true nature, precisely because we're busy knowing what it's like to be something else.
[SPEAKER_01]: College professors, famous musicians, and so on, we have in a sense unlearned our true nature and have assumed a limited nature that is not our true self.
[SPEAKER_01]: Or is only a shadowy manifestation of some infinitesimal portion of it?
[SPEAKER_01]: Our task is to unlearn this limited identification with the ego-self, and relearn our true nature as the ground of all being, the infinite brahman that is our true self or Atman.
[SPEAKER_01]: This relearning requires, again, knowledge, and not simply the theoretical indirect knowledge that is really belief that characterizes most of what we feel that we know.
[SPEAKER_01]: It requires a direct realization.
[SPEAKER_01]: The problem we have as amphibious creatures, who are partly in the realm of ignorance, but with a glimmering of the realm of knowledge, is it getting the knowledge we need to progress fully to the further shore of realization, the knowledge that will transform us into what we really were all along, to take us from the unreal, to the real, from the caterpillar, to the butterfly.
[SPEAKER_01]: When we start out on this path, our knowledge, again, consists largely not of knowledge, but belief.
[SPEAKER_01]: We begin, we could say, with what Huxley calls a working theory of reality.
[SPEAKER_01]: I love this way of speaking.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I was having a conversation with the friend once.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he said, I'm interested in your religious beliefs.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so we started talking about it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I said, I call it my working theory of reality.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he says, that doesn't sound very religious.
[SPEAKER_01]: This I think is a good way of thinking of it.
[SPEAKER_01]: If we don't want to be fanatical, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: We have a road map.
[SPEAKER_01]: We have a working theory.
[SPEAKER_01]: Again, this working theory is often one that we inherit from the family and to set the society in which we've been born.
[SPEAKER_01]: Indeed, it's possible that we've chosen to be born in the family and the society we have precisely so we could learn something from this particular world view.
[SPEAKER_01]: This learning can take the form of accepting what we've been taught, internalizing it, and practicing it such that it transforms us, and takes us beyond the limited ways of thinking and being with which we begin.
[SPEAKER_01]: It can also take the form of wrestling with those teachings, maybe even rejecting them for something else that is more true to our experience.
[SPEAKER_01]: But in either case, whether one remains committed to the beliefs with which one was raised, or whether one replaces them with something else, the beliefs themselves are not the ultimate truth, which can only be realized directly.
[SPEAKER_01]: They are fingers pointing at the moon.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is therefore essential to spiritual life, and this is yet another one of the paradoxes of spirituality, not to be overly attached.
[SPEAKER_01]: to the beliefs, practices, institutions, or texts of whatever tradition we inhabit.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is why Swami Vivekananda said, quote, It is very good to be born in a church, but it is very bad to die in a church.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is very good to be born within certain limits of certain forms that help the little plant of spirituality.
[SPEAKER_01]: But if a man dies within the bounds of these forms, it shows that he has not grown, that there has been no development of the soul.
[SPEAKER_01]: we need to move from belief to knowledge.
[SPEAKER_01]: Fundamentalist clinging to the beliefs to which we reborn is not only destructive to our own spiritual path.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's also quite clearly destructive if one is observant of history and contemporary events to humanity as a whole.
[SPEAKER_01]: To again, siteswamiji, quote, sectarianism, bigotry, and its horrible descendant fanaticism have long possessed this beautiful earth.
[SPEAKER_01]: They've filled the earth with violence, drenched it often and often with human blood, destroyed civilization and sent home nations to despair.
[SPEAKER_01]: One antidote to such attachment is the awareness that there are many paths to the ultimate realization.
[SPEAKER_01]: Each of us, indeed, has our own path unique to us.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is why Mahatma Gandhi once said, quote, in reality, there are as many religions as there are individuals.
[SPEAKER_01]: And as Lord Krishna proclaims in the Gita, as cited by Swamiji, who, so ever comes to me through whatsoever form, I reach him.
[SPEAKER_01]: All men are struggling through paths which in the end
[SPEAKER_01]: There are, in the end, many fingers pointing to the moon.
[SPEAKER_01]: To, again, side Gandhi, quote, religions are different roads, converging upon the same point.
[SPEAKER_01]: What is it matter that we take different roads so long as we reach the goal?
[SPEAKER_01]: Vedanta, especially as it's been taught by Shudamakrishna, the Holy Mother, Shuttered Adedi, and Swami Vivekananda, encourages us to view our beliefs and the practices that go with them, not as the only path to realization for all people,
[SPEAKER_01]: but as a beginner's guide to the spiritual life.
[SPEAKER_01]: Once we have settled upon the path that is truest to our own experience, we need to practice it diligently, or else we run the risk of being like the man described in a parable Sri Ramakrishna who kept digging holes in search of water, but who kept getting discouraged when he did not reach his goal right away.
[SPEAKER_01]: He ended up with a bunch of shallow holes.
[SPEAKER_01]: If he had only kept digging in one spot, he would have reached his goal and would have had a abundant water for himself and his family.
[SPEAKER_01]: To be diligent in one's path does not mean scorning the paths of others, rather we should wish them well and encourage them and also learn from them as we go about pursuing our own wholeheartedly.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think this is a little like walking the proverbial razor's edge that's mentioned in the Upanishads.
[SPEAKER_01]: that if we emphasize the aspect of following our own tradition on our own path diligently and well and wholeheartedly, and we disregard the fact that everyone else has their own path too and that that's fine, we risk becoming fanatical.
[SPEAKER_01]: if we emphasize well everybody's got their own path and it really doesn't matter maybe we don't then practice so diligently because we kind of see this in a very casual way so it's that simultaneous holding fast to one's truth right set the aggraha if we can quote Gandhi again right holding fast to that truth but respecting everyone else is at the same time this is this is something i think is as a species we're still struggling with
[SPEAKER_01]: We should also not allow ourselves to become overly frustrated.
[SPEAKER_01]: It could be that we're on a path that turns out to be a dead end.
[SPEAKER_01]: How will we know this?
[SPEAKER_01]: We will know this if we find that it is not in fact true to our deepest understandings and aspirations, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: If we feel like we're deceiving ourselves in some sense,
[SPEAKER_01]: But if it's consistent with these, and we're just not getting the results we want right away, then we need to be patient.
[SPEAKER_01]: There is much that we do not yet know, but it will come in time, and our belief will transform into knowledge.
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, I shouldn't tell the story about my late uncle, but I will, because it's apt, uh, he was curious about meditation, and so I taught him some basics of it, and uh, several weeks later, um, we were speaking on the phone and he said, oh, by the way, I tried that meditation that you taught me about, it didn't work.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I said, well, how long did you practice it?
[SPEAKER_01]: It had just been a few weeks since I told him about it.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I said, how many days, how many weeks?
[SPEAKER_01]: He said, 10 minutes?
[SPEAKER_01]: I said, so yeah, but 10 minutes for how many days?
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, 10 minutes?
[SPEAKER_01]: One time, 10 minutes, that was it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, there are people who could meditate for 10 minutes the first time and get in light.
[SPEAKER_01]: But they're very, very, very evolved.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's pretty rare.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's pretty rare to do that.
[SPEAKER_01]: So you have to stick with it.
[SPEAKER_01]: I was going to a beautiful image by a wise teacher early in my journey when I was frustrated by what I perceived to be my own lack of spiritual progress.
[SPEAKER_01]: I was, I laughed at this not as I was 16, how much spiritual progress have most of us made when we were 16.
[SPEAKER_01]: But this is stuck with me, this person that I knew who was very evolved said, quote, a rose bud is not an imperfect rose.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is perfect just as it is.
[SPEAKER_01]: In time, it will blossom into a rose.
[SPEAKER_01]: But now it is a perfect rose bud.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I've told you that we're in Fibians and that we're caterpillars, we're also rose buds.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so we need to be diligent and persistent with our practice, but we also need to be patient with ourselves.
[SPEAKER_01]: We're trying to reverse the effects of what thousands may be millions and billions of lifetimes.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is a long-term effort, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: This is not something to take lightly, but not to think that if we're not getting instant results that there's something wrong with us.
[SPEAKER_01]: And we are right where we need to be, to quote John Lennon, there's nowhere you can be that isn't where you're meant to be.
[SPEAKER_01]: We have something to learn from each phase of spiritual life, even those that might seem frustrating at the time.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is why in the Vedanta tradition, our teachers encourages us to persist in our daily meditation, even when we might feel that nothing is happening, or that we did not have a good meditation on a given day.
[SPEAKER_01]: Something is happening on the subconscious level, and as the Gita says, on this path no effort goes to waste, and no loss is incurred.
[SPEAKER_01]: Belief becomes knowledge when we begin to be transformed by our practice.
[SPEAKER_01]: When this practice leads to the experiences of the truth to which it points,
[SPEAKER_01]: One might believe, for example, in rebirth, but if in persisting in this belief and incorporating into one's practice, one's understanding of daily life, a past life memory arises, then this belief becomes knowledge.
[SPEAKER_01]: One does not now believe that one has prior existences, one knows it, like knowing what it's like to be a college professor or a famous musician.
[SPEAKER_01]: Because one is now someone who knows what has only previously been believed.
[SPEAKER_01]: One can see that one has been transformed.
[SPEAKER_01]: A belief that might previously have been held tentatively, or only theoretically, part of one's working theory of reality, becomes something on which one can rely, that can continue to build upon in one's lived practice.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a famous story about Infect Carl Jung in this regard.
[SPEAKER_01]: He was asked when he was pretty advanced in his years.
[SPEAKER_01]: an interviewer asked him, do you believe in God, and he said, no, and then there's a hesitation and then the interviewer thought, okay, he's an atheist, and then young said, I know God exists and that rather shocked the interviewer, it's not the kind of thing we normally hear, belief transforms into knowledge through practice.
[SPEAKER_01]: We move from lower knowledge to higher knowledge.
[SPEAKER_01]: Again, Swami Vivekananda tells us we're not traveling from error to truth, but from truth to truth, from lower truth to higher truth.
[SPEAKER_01]: Even those beliefs which coalesce internalized through experience remain mere fingers pointing at the moon.
[SPEAKER_01]: Even if we now know something to be the case, fanaticism and excessive attachment to this knowledge is to be avoided.
[SPEAKER_01]: In fact, if we're still clinging to what we claim to know fanatically, it's a sure sign that we do not yet truly know it.
[SPEAKER_01]: To be fanatica was a state that arises from fear, it's a form of attachment, Varaga.
[SPEAKER_01]: We become attached to something or someone because we fear to lose that thing or person.
[SPEAKER_01]: But if we truly know something, it can never be taken away from us.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is part of us, part of our experience.
[SPEAKER_01]: No one can take away my experience of speaking in a Vedanta society or teaching college classes.
[SPEAKER_01]: Except perhaps by inflicting a series brain injury upon me, but then Vedanta we understand that we are not our physical brain, so that that experience would still be there.
[SPEAKER_01]: Even then, I'll still be a person who has done these things.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't need to fear them being taken away.
[SPEAKER_01]: The sense carters will remain.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't have to fanatically insist.
[SPEAKER_01]: No, I am a college professor.
[SPEAKER_01]: I know it, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: So in the same way, we don't have to fanatically insist on our beliefs that have become knowledge.
[SPEAKER_01]: Once our belief is coalesced in an knowledge, it's still lower knowledge in as much as it's capable of being expressed in words.
[SPEAKER_01]: So we're not yet at the level of nativity, the level of the divine silence.
[SPEAKER_01]: At this stage, just as one had previously persisted in one's belief, until one had been transformed by it, and that belief had become knowledge.
[SPEAKER_01]: We must continue now to persist until we reach that state from which words recoil, the knowledge beyond knowledge, the higher knowledge of our true self.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is another one of the paradoxes of spiritual life.
[SPEAKER_01]: We seek knowledge in order to be transformed, but there is a higher knowledge which requires us to be transformed in order to perceive it in the first place.
[SPEAKER_01]: Our lower knowledge creates the conditions in our mind that enable us to make the leap to the further shore of higher knowledge, to receive the grace that brings this knowledge about.
[SPEAKER_01]: To be sure this does not happen all at once, it can take lifetimes, and the spiritual path is full of twists and turns that cannot be summarized in just one lecture.
[SPEAKER_01]: We will remain even after having multiple encounters with the divinity within amphibious beings moving back and forth from the mundane conventional realm to the realm of spirituality.
[SPEAKER_01]: And we will also find another paradox that even as we transform to a more fully spiritual
[SPEAKER_01]: that the mundane realm does not disappear, at least not for long, rather it becomes spiritualized.
[SPEAKER_01]: We're still the same people, yet we are transformed inwardly.
[SPEAKER_01]: According to Shankara the Nor of the Ottman quote, Where's No Outward Mark?
[SPEAKER_01]: Such a being is quote, not attached to external things, rests on this body without identification, and experiences all sorts of sense objects as they come through others wish like a child.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think this sounds a lot like Sri Ramakrishna and how he experienced the world, based on the accounts we have of him.
[SPEAKER_01]: To become such a being, a Jeevan Muktha, or one liberated in this very lifetime, is our goal.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is not correct to think of realization and liberation as an afterlife state, right, that you have to wait till after you die, somehow to get this.
[SPEAKER_01]: Achieving this state is the purpose of our rebirth here and now.
[SPEAKER_01]: In the words of George Harrison, they'll come a time when most of us return here, brought back by our desire to be a perfect entity.
[SPEAKER_01]: And of course, even thinking of this state as an attainment as something achieved as something that happens at a point in time, that's all lower truth.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a lower knowledge conditioned by the relative realm of time, space, and causation.
[SPEAKER_01]: We could say, when was the Buddha enlightened?
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, when he was 36 years old, but then we can ask the question again, when was the Buddha enlightened?
[SPEAKER_01]: He was always enlightened.
[SPEAKER_01]: He was always enlightened and then he became aware of his already enlightened state.
[SPEAKER_01]: We are already that.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Zen Master say we're already enlightened.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is our awareness that is in need of transformation.
[SPEAKER_01]: Reality remains the same.
[SPEAKER_01]: In the words of one master of the Zen T ceremony, before you studies in, a bowl is a bowl and T is T. While you're studying in Zen, when you're moving into that higher knowledge, a bowl is no longer a bowl.
[SPEAKER_01]: And T is no longer T. But then when you become enlightened, a bowl is again a bowl and T is T.
[SPEAKER_01]: So in conclusion, the paths to realization from belief to the lower knowledge that can be articulated to the higher knowledge that expresses itself in the deepest silence are again the paths to this are as many as there are beings.
[SPEAKER_01]: For some, Nyanayoga, the path of knowledge which consists largely in reminding oneself constantly that I am not this body, I am not this mind, I am this self.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is not for everyone, and it's described in the Bhagavad-gita as very difficult.
[SPEAKER_01]: A better path for many is to cultivate a loving devotion to the self as the supreme being of whom one is a servant, a child, a friend, or a beloved.
[SPEAKER_01]: The path of bhakti yoga.
[SPEAKER_01]: Both according to the gita lead to the same goal, both involve a process of de-identifying with the ego, the caterpillar self, either using the intellect in the case of Nyanayoga
[SPEAKER_01]: In our contemporary era where the concept of a personal God has become problematic from any, another path is through sava, or selfless service, the path of karma yoga, in which the ego is subordinated to the needs of the suffering beings all around us.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then of course there is the royal path, Rajyoga, of silencing the mind, and letting the deeper silence of the self speak within us directly.
[SPEAKER_01]: Whatever path we take, whatever combinations of these yoga's, we utilize whatever works best for us.
[SPEAKER_01]: The key is to be diligent, though not phonetical, and to in the words of Swamiji, quote, stop, not until the goal is reached.
[SPEAKER_01]: Then we can move from our amphibious existence to the solid ground of spiritual life, and we'll be able to say truthfully, not as a mere theory or belief.
[SPEAKER_01]: Aham Bramasmi, I am Brammi.
[SPEAKER_01]: Sri Ramakrishna, penamastu.
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you all very much.
[UNKNOWN]: Hi.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_04]: My name is Ravi, at least the name given to this jadhis Ravi.
[SPEAKER_04]: Thank you very much and enjoyed your talk.
[SPEAKER_04]: And I like the catapulteniness and the butterflyness.
[SPEAKER_04]: And resonates with me when you're talking about this, Lower Truth and Higher Truth is being discussed many times.
[SPEAKER_04]: And you talked about the bhakti yoga part,
[SPEAKER_04]: Lord Krishna, in the Dhyanayoga, in Chapter 6, Yoga of Meditation, the thing I somehow recite sometimes in my evening prayers is the Bhandur at Manastasya, Venatma Ivaatmanacita, Anatmanasthu, Satturutva Ivar, Taitatmaidva, Satturva.
[SPEAKER_04]: There he talks about controlling the lower mind with upper mind.
[SPEAKER_04]: The one who doesn't control the lower self with the upper self the lower self becomes enemy, the one who controls the lower self with the upper self the lower self acts as a friend.
[SPEAKER_04]: So that paradigm is slightly different from moving from the lower self to the upper self and then to in the samadhi stage.
[SPEAKER_04]: That Krishna says always it's going to be the lower self when you have to conquer the lower self with the upper self.
[SPEAKER_04]: Well, it resonates with me when he talking about a catapult lesson on the butterfly nurse with that, with that resonance comes in my own mind, a little bit of a dissonance into that.
[SPEAKER_04]: Can you clear up my dissonance in the true paradigms, true, true, different paradigms?
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, so yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: Since it's probably between what sounds like a tri-part-type model and a two-fold model, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: So, I think they are the same model, but the way I formulated it in terms of three, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Lower, higher, and then highest.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it's just a, it's maybe a little closer analysis of what's described in the two, which is because you
[SPEAKER_01]: If we talk, if we're using English, we say lower self-higher self.
[SPEAKER_01]: Higher self can be a very broad category.
[SPEAKER_01]: It can include the Supreme Self, Paramahatman.
[SPEAKER_01]: But it can also include those aspects of the Jeevatman, the Jeevat, the soul that are wise, that still retain their knowledge from all the previous existences.
[SPEAKER_01]: and that are sort of guiding us silently through our conscience and through various intuitions to the highest.
[SPEAKER_01]: But that intermediate higher self, you could say, is not identical ultimately with the highest.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's still part of the realm of time and space and causation.
[SPEAKER_01]: Or you could say another maybe a better way of saying it is that that higher but not quite highest so is like a limb of the highest that extends into this manifest world and that so we experience it as our inner guide and our inner guru and our inner teacher.
[SPEAKER_01]: So the two are ultimately the same, but I have this sense of the highest self as something it is not speaking that is silent, that is utterly beyond.
[SPEAKER_01]: So it has to do with the relationship with time.
[SPEAKER_01]: So when we experience that highest self through the lens of time and space, it becomes that higher self.
[SPEAKER_01]: But when we break the bonds of space and time, then we're completely out of that.
[SPEAKER_01]: because we are that, we finally realize, that even the lower self was ultimately that, because that is all the eras.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know if that quite gets to the issue or not, but, yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: You're not thinking?
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: Why did one of you later on that said, it's good to be born in the church and not to die in the church?
[SPEAKER_04]: Right, but I understand why he said that in the world.
[SPEAKER_04]: But then we came from it and then we go in.
[SPEAKER_04]: That's what it is.
[SPEAKER_04]: That's what we are looking at.
[SPEAKER_04]: Come in from there.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I think that's a nice way to think of it actually, and I get, I'm very into these, you know, threefold developmental models.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know why, but I wrote a piece for Pupur, the Bajotta, a few years ago, called The Need for a Meaningful Narrative.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I talked about a kind of evolutionary developmental model where we begin with, and I use a term from the French philosopher Paul Recur, who was quite brilliant in talking about these things.
[SPEAKER_01]: We begin at a naive stage where we basically believe what we've been taught.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then we learn a little bit more.
[SPEAKER_01]: We have a few more life experiences of our own, maybe in our adolescent ears, or as we develop on into adulthood, that causes to doubt that.
[SPEAKER_01]: And we become skeptical.
[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe about all of it.
[SPEAKER_01]: We have our phase where we just don't believe in anything.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then we have certain life crises, certain tragedies, things happen to us, for which this new and improved skeptical worldview we've developed is not adequate.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then we return back to the teachings of our childhood, but with all of the life experience that we've had since then to refine it,
[SPEAKER_01]: And say, okay, well, maybe we're not talking about, you know, seven literal days of creation or Noah's Ark really having all of that many animals.
[SPEAKER_01]: And maybe we're talking about something much deeper that is expressed through those metaphors.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm just using examples from Christianity, but you could draw those from any tradition.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that record calls that the second naivete, and he sees that as a kind of a mature state of religiosity, and of course we don't have to think of this in itself in an overly literal way, but he tends to think of the naivestages, a childhood stage, the skeptical stage as an adolescent stage, and the second naivete as an adult stage.
[SPEAKER_01]: But it might map differently on to different people's life journeys.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I know people who are quite a bit older than me who are still in their naive stage.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's not a judgment about them.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's just where they are.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like the way they see these things is, well, you just don't question it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I have a lot of friends have a lot of students, in fact, who are in that questioning and skeptical phase, and then you meet people who have come to peace with all of it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's like, I take this from my tradition, I understand this to be wise and helpful to me in my life.
[SPEAKER_01]: It helps me understand everything and be a better person.
[SPEAKER_01]: Do I believe all of it literally and like in my childhood?
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, no, right.
[SPEAKER_01]: So you go from naivete to skepticism to the second naivete.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I think what we've accounted that if we translate, what we've accounted to said into Paul Recurs language, you don't want to stay naiv all your life, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: And in fact, he even, he's even, so I'll maybe have to kind of assess some harsh truth sometimes.
[SPEAKER_01]: He says it's better to be an honest atheist than a religious hypocrite, he's very hard-hitting.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he's trying to push people beyond naive faith, but he didn't want people to stop at skepticism either, because there are other places where he's equally biting about skepticism.
[SPEAKER_01]: We say the world is dark, but we have not opened our eyes, you know, he'll say things like that.
[SPEAKER_01]: So he's urging us to move on to that deeper understanding.
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you so much for that wonderful overview since this was regard to teachers who teach through silence.
[SPEAKER_02]: I just wanted to mention Ramana Maharshi because he did speak and his talks are recorded but he was very much known and renowned for his teaching through silence as well.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_01]: And, and of course, our very own synonym Krishna too, talked, but spend a lot of his time in some of the or in silence.
[SPEAKER_01]: Silence is a good spiritual discipline.
[SPEAKER_01]: Again, especially with people like me who talk for a living, to just be quiet sometimes.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's just that there's such a great piece that comes with that.
[SPEAKER_01]: And you can sense that there's something there behind all the sound.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like to use another, to more visual metaphor, there's the screen on which the film is being projected.
[SPEAKER_01]: If you turn off the projector, there's that screen is there.
[SPEAKER_01]: You don't see it when the film is on.
[SPEAKER_01]: But without it, you couldn't see the film.
[SPEAKER_01]: The film goes off, then there's the screen.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's that layer that ground beneath everything.
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you all very, very much.