Sri Ramakrishna: The Synthesis of Vedanta | Prof. Jeffery Long

[SPEAKER_00]: Good morning, everybody, and thank you so much for joining us on this really messy day in New York City.
[SPEAKER_00]: You're to be admired for challenging it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Anyway, we are so happy to welcome as our guest speaker today, a dear and respected friend of our society, Dr. Jeffrey D. Long.
[SPEAKER_00]: Here's the Carl W. Ziegler professor of religion, philosophy, and Asian studies at Elizabeth Town College, where he's taught since receiving his doctoral degree at the University of Chicago Divinity School in the year 2000.
[SPEAKER_00]: He has written many books and articles, including Hinduism in America, a Conversion of Worlds, which won the Reginder and Jodi Gandhi Award for Theology, Philosophy, and Critical Engagement in 2022.
[SPEAKER_00]: His latest book, Discovering Indian Philosophy, an Introduction to Hindu, Jane, and Buddhist thought was published just last year.
[SPEAKER_00]: He has spoken at a wide variety of venues both internationally and nationally, including three presentations at the United Nations.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's also been interviewed for a PBS documentary on the life and teachings of Swami Vivekananda.
[SPEAKER_00]: And for the history channel series, Holy Marbles.
[SPEAKER_00]: Dr. Long took initiation into the Vedanta tradition in the year 2005, and is the popular and frequent speaker at Vedanta societies across the United States.
[SPEAKER_00]: The subject of his talk today is Sri Ramakrishna, the synthesis of Vedanta.
[SPEAKER_00]: Jeff, welcome.
[SPEAKER_04]: Thank you for that wonderful introduction, Diane.
[SPEAKER_04]: Sometimes you hear nice things set about yourself and you think, oh, who's that person?
[SPEAKER_04]: I would like to meet that person.
[SPEAKER_04]: Let's begin with an invocation to start with.
[SPEAKER_04]: Om Jananim Saradandevim Ramakrishnaam Jagad Gurum Parapadme Thayos Ritva Pranamami Mohur Mohur Having taken refuge in the lotus feet of the Holy Mother, Shadada Devi, and the world teacher Ramakrishna, I bow to them again and again.
[SPEAKER_04]: and I bow to all of you.
[SPEAKER_04]: Namaste.
[SPEAKER_04]: Namaskar.
[SPEAKER_04]: Good morning.
[SPEAKER_04]: And yes, it is, as Diane just said, a messy day in New York.
[SPEAKER_04]: It's raining now and then it's supposed to get extremely hot.
[SPEAKER_04]: Maybe the Divine Mother wants to us to think of Kalkata today.
[SPEAKER_04]: And so I'm wearing a quartet today because this is nice and cool and I met with a few of you yesterday and Diane was there as well and my wife and I and I had about two quartets for this week because I knew the weather was going to be hot and I said should I wear the red one or the blue one and they all said the blue one.
[SPEAKER_04]: Because apparently, Swami Vivekananda said, blue is the color of infinity.
[SPEAKER_04]: So there you have it.
[SPEAKER_04]: And that's something I'm going to be talking about today, as well, infinity.
[SPEAKER_04]: As always, it's a pleasant and profound honor to speak here at the Vedanta Society of New York.
[SPEAKER_04]: And I'm grateful as always for your kindness and hospitality.
[SPEAKER_04]: And I've been looking forward to that.
[SPEAKER_04]: I'm always excited to come here.
[SPEAKER_04]: So thank you for having me.
[SPEAKER_04]: Once Swami Subhar Pryanadaji and Diane invited me to give today's lecture, it occurred to me that while my talks have always been anchored in the life and teachings of Sri Ramakrishna, Swami Vivekananda and the Holy Mother, I've never given a talk at this center that was focused specifically on Sri Ramakrishna.
[SPEAKER_04]: I've spoken about Star Wars, George Harrison, the four yogas, Jane Philosophy, nonviolence, the harmony of religions, and even extraterrestrial life, but not treat Ramakrishna as my main subject matter.
[SPEAKER_04]: So I think I need to correct that today.
[SPEAKER_04]: I think I've always assumed whatever I've been invited to speak at Vedanta centers that everyone in the audience is already very familiar with Sri Ramakrishna and his life and his teachings, and what have no need for a lecture from me on this topic.
[SPEAKER_04]: Many of you have even had the benefit of growing up in this tradition and hearing about Sri Ramakrishna from infancy.
[SPEAKER_04]: But the assumption that everyone in the Vedanta center must necessarily know all this material well,
[SPEAKER_04]: might not always be correct.
[SPEAKER_04]: Some of you might be visiting the center for the first time today.
[SPEAKER_04]: Hi, if you are.
[SPEAKER_04]: Namaste.
[SPEAKER_04]: And because this center also posts the Sunday lectures online, many people who are viewing and listening, hello to you, in that format, you might also be accessing this material for the first time and may not be familiar with Ramakrishna and his teachings.
[SPEAKER_04]: Finally, even the devotees who know the material well can never hear enough about Sri Ramakrishna.
[SPEAKER_04]: On hearing or reading the same stories again and again, we find we learn something new each time.
[SPEAKER_04]: Each retelling provides some revelation.
[SPEAKER_04]: One of my teachers from graduate school, Professor Paul J. Griffiths, has written a book about what he calls religious reading, by which he refers to the act of devotionally approaching a text, the same text again and again as a source of spiritual edification.
[SPEAKER_04]: So hopefully there'll be something for you today if you are a brand new, or if you know a little bit and want to know more, or if you already know a lot, but you're just enjoying hearing about Sri Ramakrishna.
[SPEAKER_04]: The stories of the great masters and their teachings have the ability not only to inspire us intellectually, but to awaken something in the heart.
[SPEAKER_04]: They give us a kind of spiritual recharge.
[SPEAKER_04]: This can happen even if we're reading or hearing about them for the millionth time.
[SPEAKER_04]: That such is the inherent power, the Guto Shakti that is latent in their teachings.
[SPEAKER_04]: In the title of today's talk, I'm calling Sri Ramakrishna the synthesis of Vedanta.
[SPEAKER_04]: This was inspired by an event in which I participated a few months ago.
[SPEAKER_04]: Our local Vedanta community in the Harrisburg Pennsylvania region, as we do every year, celebrated a Pujal in commemoration of Sri Ramakrishna's birth.
[SPEAKER_04]: On Western calendars, his birth date is given as the 18th of February 1836.
[SPEAKER_04]: though his birthdate on the Bengali calendar floats around a bit in terms of where it falls in the Western reckoning.
[SPEAKER_04]: So some of you will see different dates given for that.
[SPEAKER_04]: That's the reason for that.
[SPEAKER_04]: In the text of the Pujah, dedicated to him, one of the titles given to Sri Ramakrishna is Savadhama Swarupa, which can be translated as the essence of all religions.
[SPEAKER_04]: He's called this because we see Sri Ramakrishna in the tradition based on his life and teachings as having embodied the ideals of all the great spiritual paths.
[SPEAKER_04]: I believe we can also call Shudamakrishna a Vedanta Swarupa, a realized master who's life and teachings in body Vedanta.
[SPEAKER_04]: I see this as being true in two different senses, which I'll elaborate on a little later.
[SPEAKER_04]: First, the sense in which his life embodies the ideal of Vedanta as a universal and perennial philosophy.
[SPEAKER_04]: which is really the sense captured in the term Sabadhama, Svarupa, that he is embodied at a universal truth.
[SPEAKER_04]: And secondly, the sense in which his teachings bring together and synthesize aspects of the various schools of thought that make up the historical tradition of Vedanta.
[SPEAKER_04]: And express these in powerful and compelling ways.
[SPEAKER_04]: To be sure, the Phosphi taught and upheld by the Ramakrishna order, the Ramakrishna mission, and the Vedanta societies, is well-described by Swami Sabha Priyana, who I quote here.
[SPEAKER_04]: He's not here with you today, but I'll bring his words in.
[SPEAKER_04]: He says, our core philosophy is the Advaita Vedanta, meaning non-dual Vedanta, studied and understood in the light of Sri Ramakrishna's life and teachings.
[SPEAKER_04]: The light that Sri Ramakrishna's life and teachings shine upon Advaita Vedanta shows that other systems of Vedanta also convey important truths that can be appreciated from within the broad, inclusive understanding of Advaita Vedanta.
[SPEAKER_04]: That Sri Ramakrishna, his most famous student, Swami Vivekananda, and all the subsequent generations of revered teachers in the Ramakrishna order have shared with the world right up to the present day.
[SPEAKER_04]: Before diving into the life and teachings of Sri Ramakrishna, I want to address some possible concerns on the part of those who might be new to this teacher in this tradition.
[SPEAKER_04]: Before an audience of devotees, to refer to Sri Ramakrishna as the essence of all religions or the synthesis of Adata is uncontroversial.
[SPEAKER_04]: But a newcomer might think, boy, this sounds kind of heavy, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: Maybe this is just another religious group trying to sell me on their teacher and how great he is, that our teachers the best, that our way is the only way, and so on, and so on, blah, blah, blah, blah, right, we hear these.
[SPEAKER_04]: things all the time.
[SPEAKER_04]: People always say ours is the best.
[SPEAKER_04]: As Ramakrishna himself once said, everyone thinks their watch tells the correct time.
[SPEAKER_04]: So, if anyone's thinking this, I want a hasten to point out that Sri Ramakrishna himself never said to my knowledge.
[SPEAKER_04]: It's not in any of the books.
[SPEAKER_04]: He never said, I am the way.
[SPEAKER_04]: I alone know the deep truth of life, you must follow me.
[SPEAKER_04]: This never do you see that.
[SPEAKER_04]: In fact, his teaching is precisely the opposite of this.
[SPEAKER_04]: That there are as many paths as there are living beings seeking realization.
[SPEAKER_04]: We each have our own path.
[SPEAKER_04]: And it's up to us to find that path, and if that intersects with Sri Ramakrishna, if he can help us, that's wonderful, if it intersects with the Buddha, that's wonderful, however we do it, it's really up to us.
[SPEAKER_04]: So nothing is being imposed here.
[SPEAKER_04]: In fact, it's his teaching of
[SPEAKER_04]: this very idea, this sort of independent-minded spiritual path, that's a large part of his appeal for many of us who've come to this tradition.
[SPEAKER_04]: I'm one of those people who's not crazy about things being too organized or rigid, and yet I had a sense that I needed something, otherwise your spiritual life becomes very unmoored and chaotic.
[SPEAKER_04]: So it's like, okay, what is the least organized
[SPEAKER_04]: And that was part of the appeal right it's it's it's there is a system there's a way of thinking there's practices, but it's up to you to do it You do it yourself
[SPEAKER_04]: This is why, in the tradition, based on Ramakrishna's life and teachings, we do not proselytize.
[SPEAKER_04]: So it's not my intention today to persuade anyone that they should follow Sri Ramakrishna or join the Vedanta society.
[SPEAKER_04]: And at the end, I'm not going to ask for money.
[SPEAKER_04]: This is not how it works, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: As I say to my students at the start of every semester, it's against my religion to try to convert you to my religion.
[SPEAKER_04]: So I'm going to say a lot of nice things about Sri Ramakrishna today, but that's my perspective.
[SPEAKER_04]: And the perspective, I think, of many of us gathered here.
[SPEAKER_04]: But the intent is not to impose that.
[SPEAKER_04]: It's to share it.
[SPEAKER_04]: The spirit of this tradition is sharing and celebration.
[SPEAKER_04]: All people, I believe, have a duty to speak the truth as we see it, to share our understandings of reality with anyone who's interested, to listen to the understandings of others, so we can continue to learn and grow.
[SPEAKER_04]: And importantly, to leave those who are not interested, undisturbed.
[SPEAKER_04]: Freedom of religion means being able to practice our path without harassment, but it also means freedom from religion for those who are not drawn to it, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: So we're not here to impose anything on anyone.
[SPEAKER_04]: In fact, this was the very spirit in which she'd Omikrishna himself taught.
[SPEAKER_04]: Often devotees would travel to speak with him in person at the Khalid Temple of Dukshinesh, where he served as a priest for most of his life.
[SPEAKER_04]: But these devotees often had friends and relatives with them who were not interested in any of that at all.
[SPEAKER_04]: And Ramakrishna did not impose himself on them.
[SPEAKER_04]: He would invite them to walk around the temple grounds and go and enjoy the view of the river, while he spoke to their friends who were really interested in spiritual life.
[SPEAKER_04]: And there was no judgment involved in that, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: Everyone, you know, we all ultimately receive what we're looking for.
[SPEAKER_04]: And if you're looking for a nice view of the river, you've got that.
[SPEAKER_04]: If you're looking for Moksha.
[SPEAKER_04]: You've got that, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: So our goal is to share Shri Ramakrishna's teachings with anyone who's interested and celebrate his teaching in life, which is one of the most remarkable lives ever lived.
[SPEAKER_04]: So divided my talk into three parts.
[SPEAKER_04]: So part one, that was the introduction.
[SPEAKER_04]: Part one is Shri Ramakrishna's Samadhi's.
[SPEAKER_04]: Shri Ramakrishna was born, as I mentioned earlier, in 1836, and a rural Bengali village known as Kamakrakwater.
[SPEAKER_04]: My wife and I had the great privilege of this thing come up record in 2014.
[SPEAKER_04]: I can't believe it's already been over 10 years.
[SPEAKER_04]: There, one can see the house where she Ramakrishna grew up.
[SPEAKER_04]: The small school, which he attended during his childhood, he wasn't crazy about school, but he went to school.
[SPEAKER_04]: and the stage where he once played the role of Lord Shiva in a children's drama, during which he famously fell into a state of samadhi, or we might say ascended into a state of samadhi, a deep meditative trance, much to the arm of those who were in attendance, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: You can imagine, the first they were thinking he's forgotten his lines, and then they're like, okay, no, he's completely gone.
[SPEAKER_04]: What's happening?
[SPEAKER_04]: There's even a distant relative of Sri Ramakrishna in Kamarpakur who bears a striking resemblance to the master and who, for a small fee, will allow you to take a selfie with him.
[SPEAKER_04]: And I have to confess, yeah, I got myself a. I couldn't resist that.
[SPEAKER_04]: Ramakrishna was not in fact Shudamakrishna's original name.
[SPEAKER_04]: He was born as Gadadhar Chattopadhyay, his parents Kudidam and Chandramani Devi were devout Hindus, and the child Gadadhar or Gaday as he came to be known, was raised in a loving family surrounded by religious devotion.
[SPEAKER_04]: One thing I've learned from my wife, who's Bengali, is everyone has a name and then a name that they actually use.
[SPEAKER_04]: So Gadadhar, but your mom doesn't say Gadadhar, she's a Gaday,
[SPEAKER_04]: Little Gaddae had a highly sensitive character.
[SPEAKER_04]: He was deeply moved by the beauty of the natural world.
[SPEAKER_04]: According to the accounts we have of his life, his first experience of Samadhi was prompted when he saw a flock of white cranes flying against a background of dark storm clouds, while he was walking through a rice field.
[SPEAKER_04]: Imagine the beautiful vivid contrast of the white feathers of the birds and the dark clouds, the beauty of the sight overwhelmed him and he collapsed to the ground.
[SPEAKER_04]: He had a similar experience, as mentioned earlier, while acting out the role of Lord Shiva in a school play.
[SPEAKER_04]: Most of the accounts of his life suggest that the rice field event happened first than the event on the stage.
[SPEAKER_04]: But they were not far apart in time.
[SPEAKER_04]: He would have been anywhere from about 9 to 11 years old during this period.
[SPEAKER_04]: Shunam Krishna had experiences of this kind throughout his life, spontaneously going into a trans-state, often prompted by some deep emotional feeling, usually religious in nature, such as when hearing a sacred song, or while engaging in a conversation on a spiritual topic he could be in the midst of discussion, and he would go into one of these states.
[SPEAKER_04]: Skeptics have suggested, and his friends and relatives worried, even during his lifetime, that these some other states were, in fact, epileptic seizures.
[SPEAKER_04]: He typically came out of these transges in a state of great bliss and displaying signs that he had attained a highly elevated level of meditative awareness.
[SPEAKER_04]: The signs included deep insight into complex spiritual and philosophical topics discussed in Hindu sacred literature, despite the fact that he had not studied that literature.
[SPEAKER_04]: As well as a transformation of his already sweet and playful character, such that he held great wisdom, even on practical matters with which he was unfamiliar.
[SPEAKER_04]: It said that when he married the Holy Mother shot at a Davy, and she was still a young woman, he sort of explained to her how to be a housewife, and he knew all of these things about you know, cooking and cleaning and so on, and this was not something he had done, I mean he had no doubt observed it, but he knew it well enough to teach her.
[SPEAKER_04]: and he had an intuitive grasp of what exactly a person who came to him with a problem needed to hear in order to deal with that problem.
[SPEAKER_04]: He just seemed to know what would work for that individual.
[SPEAKER_04]: His follow-up
[SPEAKER_04]: is therefore argued that his experiences were not epileptic seizures, but a genuine attainment of a state of consciousness characterized by complete absorption of subjective awareness into its object.
[SPEAKER_04]: A state described in the yoga sutras of Patangeli as Samanti.
[SPEAKER_04]: Now, I'm going to share my personal interpretation.
[SPEAKER_04]: I'd like to suggest that these two interpretations are not mutually exclusive.
[SPEAKER_04]: I do not claim any special expertise in this regard.
[SPEAKER_04]: I'm not a brain surgeon.
[SPEAKER_04]: There might be some brain surgeons here for all, I know.
[SPEAKER_04]: So correct me if I'm wrong.
[SPEAKER_04]: But I've often wondered,
[SPEAKER_04]: If certain states that have been characterized in our modern society as mental illnesses, might not in fact reflect the awakening of parts of the brain to levels of reality typically inaccessible to a so-called normal brain.
[SPEAKER_04]: You know, we talk about neurodivergence now.
[SPEAKER_04]: This has come to be understood that people's brains are different.
[SPEAKER_04]: If our brains allow us to take in sensory phenomena and create an experience of the material world, what we experience as colors and sounds and sensations, that's not the material world, it's being manufactured by the brain.
[SPEAKER_04]: So if we can do that, might the brain not also enable us to perceive other kinds of phenomena, extra sensory phenomena, that are not typical of our conventional experience, but are nevertheless real.
[SPEAKER_04]: And I think one piece of evidence, if you wanted to argue for this, is that many people from via wildly divergent cultural backgrounds who've had extraordinary experiences describe the same things.
[SPEAKER_04]: So maybe it's because the brain structure to certain way, but maybe
[SPEAKER_04]: If we assume there's a material world, which may be a big assumption, but might we also be able to say, well, there's something being perceived by these people who have these experiences.
[SPEAKER_04]: Perhaps Sri Ramakrishna's brain was configured in a way that gave him access to states only available to most people either through years of meditative practice or in a less controlled and reliable fashion that I'm not endorsing through psychedelic drugs.
[SPEAKER_04]: In any case, the characterization of particular mental states as a sign of illness is not just a matter of objective fact.
[SPEAKER_04]: Indeed, modern psychology has moved away from that idea, and has come to address the question of mental illness by asking whether the experiences a person may be having are inhibiting their ability to live a happy and productive life, number one, and whether that person is a danger to themselves or others.
[SPEAKER_04]: If you're happy, if you're going to work, if you're functioning, and you're not harming anyone, then let God talk to you all you like.
[SPEAKER_04]: What's the harm?
[SPEAKER_04]: What's the harm?
[SPEAKER_04]: In fact, seeing things or hearing voices aren't necessarily signs of illness.
[SPEAKER_04]: Many devotees across the world's religions have had the experience of being addressed by a divine being, a great saint, or a deceased loved one,
[SPEAKER_04]: And not only have these experiences not interfered with their ability to function in the world, but in some cases these experiences have been a positive boon to their lives.
[SPEAKER_04]: Some of them have gone on to accomplish great things precisely because they were inspired to do so by these kinds of experiences.
[SPEAKER_04]: Of course there have been many others who have been tormented by such experiences, but then we would say they're ill, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: They want to make this stop and so the medications and treatments for that.
[SPEAKER_04]: They've caused themselves and their loved ones great anguish sometimes, and of course in the worst cases there are people who've done terrible things and sometimes even inspired others to do terrible things based on their alleged visions and inspirations.
[SPEAKER_04]: How can we discern the difference between a delusion and a genuine inspiration?
[SPEAKER_04]: The Biblical adage that you shall know them by their fruits would seem to be a good guide in this regard.
[SPEAKER_04]: Are these leading to harmful phenomena, are they leading to something helpful?
[SPEAKER_04]: This is consistent with the thinking of the great Americans, psychologists, and philosophers, William James, who argue that an important criterion for accepting the truth of a claim is the kind of outcome that follows from accepting it, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: Traditionally, philosophers look at correspondence, you know, can we check with other things we know to see if climax is true or is climax internally consistent?
[SPEAKER_04]: James added to this, what will happen if we believe climax, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: This is his famous philosophy of pragmatism, in his essay The Will to Believe, James argues that if a belief in proves our lives and the lives of those around us, and if there's no compelling reason to reject it, then we have every right to accept it.
[SPEAKER_04]: The belief in question might not be scientifically proven, or even provable.
[SPEAKER_04]: I think of an example.
[SPEAKER_04]: There's the very famous story, which I'm sure many of you have heard, where Carl Sagan asked the Dalai Hama, what if we could prove that there was no such thing as rebirth?
[SPEAKER_04]: And of course, the Dalai Hama's whole title and identity is based on the concept of rebirth.
[SPEAKER_04]: And the Dalai Hama said, well, if it was proved wrong, then we'd have to reject it.
[SPEAKER_04]: But then he asked Carl Sagan, how would you do that?
[SPEAKER_04]: And that's a difficult question.
[SPEAKER_04]: It might not be possible to prove or disprove that one.
[SPEAKER_04]: But so long as it does not contradict other established knowledge, and does no harm, it can be accepted.
[SPEAKER_04]: James incidentally was one of many professors who met and were impressed by Swami Vivekananda during his time in the United States in the late 19th century.
[SPEAKER_04]: Certainly, in the case of Sri Ramakrishna, not only did no harm come from his transdates, but from them emerged a powerful message that would transform the world, a transformation that many of us would argue has only barely begun, and will return to that in the conclusion.
[SPEAKER_04]: Part two, Sri Ramakrishna's sadhanas, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: We spoke about his samadhis, now his sadhanas.
[SPEAKER_04]: Once Sri Ramakrishna was 16 years old, he accompanied his beloved elder brother, Ram Kumar, to Kalkata, where Ram Kumar was running a Sanskrit school.
[SPEAKER_04]: A couple of years into Ram Krishna's stay, Ram Kumar took up the position of being a priest at the temple of the mother goddess, Kali, located in Daksheneswar on the outskirts of Kolkata.
[SPEAKER_04]: Kolkata has since expanded to encompass Daksheneswar, but it was out in the country in those days.
[SPEAKER_04]: The temple would have been built by a highly successful businessman named Ronnie Rushmoni.
[SPEAKER_04]: Ramkumar intended that his younger brother should become his apprentice, continuing his Sanskrit studies and becoming a priest under his tutelage.
[SPEAKER_04]: He had great love and concern for his Ramakrishna, who was not especially fond of school and was seen by many in the family as having an impractical bent of mind.
[SPEAKER_04]: So basically, his mother said, you know, Ramkumar, take care of, take care of him, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: tragically, though, when Ramakrishna was only 19 years old, his brother suddenly died, and in fact I've looked in a variety of books and sources and no one is sure exactly what his cause of death was.
[SPEAKER_04]: He just died.
[SPEAKER_04]: He was quite a bit older than Ramakrishna, about 31 years older, so he would have been 50.
[SPEAKER_04]: Well, I consider that young, but in those days it was not necessarily uncommon for someone to just pass away.
[SPEAKER_04]: So, with the rest of his family, often Kamakrakur, some distance away, Ram Krishna was alone in the world.
[SPEAKER_04]: Right?
[SPEAKER_04]: He was left alone.
[SPEAKER_04]: His mentor, his friend, his brother was no longer there.
[SPEAKER_04]: As for many of us, the experience of the loss of the loved one proved to the occasion for a deepening of spirituality and the heart of Suryodhana Krishna.
[SPEAKER_04]: This, I find, is one of the most relatable moments of his life.
[SPEAKER_04]: For all of us have had the experience of facing loss, or we will eventually.
[SPEAKER_04]: Out of the tragedy of the loss of his brother and mentor was born a profound sense of devotion, and a determination to see the mother goddess whom he served.
[SPEAKER_04]: Not simply in the form of her morti in the temple, but as a living reality.
[SPEAKER_04]: This longing was so great that those who knew him feared for his mental health as he spent day after day in prayer, weeping and crying out for a vision of mockade.
[SPEAKER_04]: During this period, as each day would end, he would cry out to the goddess and say, I've wasted another day, another day has gone by without my seeing you.
[SPEAKER_04]: And this really tortured him.
[SPEAKER_04]: Why did the loss of his brother, aroused such intense devotion in Ramakrishna?
[SPEAKER_04]: One might expect the opposite, that on losing a beloved relative and friend, he might blame God, or lose faith in there being any meaning in life, given the cruelty of a world that takes our loved ones away.
[SPEAKER_04]: I may be projecting my own feelings here, but my sense is that this is exactly why Shude Omakrishna wanted to see the goddess.
[SPEAKER_04]: If she was real, then life would make sense again.
[SPEAKER_04]: The loss of his brother might then have some higher purpose.
[SPEAKER_04]: But if not, then what would be the point of carrying on?
[SPEAKER_04]: And in support of this interpretation, I'd like to point out the fact that Ramakrishna finally became so desperate to see the goddess that he took a sword that was hanging on the wall of her temple and threatened to take his own life if she would not reveal herself to him.
[SPEAKER_04]: What happened next is best said in his own words, translated into English.
[SPEAKER_04]: It was as if the houses, doors, temples, and all other things vanished altogether.
[SPEAKER_04]: As if there was nothing anywhere.
[SPEAKER_04]: And what I saw was a boundless, infinite, conscious sea of light.
[SPEAKER_04]: However far in whatever direction I looked, I found a continuous succession of effulgent waves coming forward.
[SPEAKER_04]: Shunamakrishna realized that these continuous waves of light were, in fact, the goddess, that this was the form in which she had chosen to reveal herself to him.
[SPEAKER_04]: It would prove to be the first of many such visions.
[SPEAKER_04]: In the days that followed Shunamakrishna's song, Kali everywhere, in everything and every living being that he met.
[SPEAKER_04]: And this is one of my favorite stories.
[SPEAKER_04]: He even caused some inadvertent offence when he gave the food that had been brought by a group of devotees to offer to the goddess to a cat.
[SPEAKER_04]: He said he saw the divine mother, even in the hungry cat.
[SPEAKER_04]: And he asked, she has come and asked me, give me some food.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, how can I say no, to her?
[SPEAKER_04]: So there's a little cat coming up in meowing.
[SPEAKER_04]: And he offered the food to the cat.
[SPEAKER_04]: And people were horrified, but when he explained to the temple authorities why he did it, they said to the offended devotees, he's a little different, let him be, you know, they accepted this of Ramakrishna.
[SPEAKER_04]: They understood, running much money, and her close relative, Mather biswas, who helped administer the temple.
[SPEAKER_04]: They understood what Ramakrishna was about, and they sort of protected him from people who were offended by his unconventionality.
[SPEAKER_04]: After his powerful and transformative vision of Makali, Sri Ramakrishna felt drawn to the practice of various traditions in succession.
[SPEAKER_04]: He never practiced a bunch of things at once, but he would practice something wholeheartedly and he would do this in the hope of having the experience of the divine reality in all the varied ways that these traditions might make available to their sincere practitioners.
[SPEAKER_04]: It was as if he was hungry for every possible kind of experience
[SPEAKER_04]: His diverse sathanas or spiritual disciplines led to visionary experiences of the kind he had with the goddess Kali, a experience of Samadhi, of complete absorption in the object of his meditated practice.
[SPEAKER_04]: He followed various Hindu observances, practicing Vaishnava, Shiva, and Shaktipathas, as well as the practice of Advaita Vedanta under the guidance of the monk Totapuri.
[SPEAKER_04]: He also practiced Islamic and Christian devotion.
[SPEAKER_04]: He had visionary experiences of Ram, Krishna, Shiva, Allah, Jesus, and for six months, he was absorbed in the non-dual reality of Nirguna Brahman, beyond all limiting qualities in the state of Navi Kapa Samathi, in which all sense of subject and object disappears.
[SPEAKER_04]: Six months, he had to be fed and cleaned and taken care of, he was like a corpse, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: He was completely absorbed in Brahman.
[SPEAKER_04]: Based on these experiences, he affirmed that all religions are passed to the same goal or ways of experiencing the same infinite reality in myriad ways.
[SPEAKER_04]: He would describe the different visions of God in terms of the different words that people might use for water, English people call it water, in one part of India they say, Joel and one part they say, Pani, but it's the same water, this was his understanding.
[SPEAKER_04]: These experiences also gave him insight into the nature of reality as described in the sacred literature of various Hindu traditions.
[SPEAKER_04]: The depth of his knowledge amazed many learned scholars and devotees, growing numbers of whom came to Dr. Neswar to speak with him, as word of his wisdom spread and his fame increased.
[SPEAKER_04]: The Brahmini Bhairavi who had served as Ramakrishna's guide when he undertook Tantric Sadhanas was especially impressed with him so much so that she proclaimed him to be an avatar, a divine incarnation.
[SPEAKER_04]: She was the first of many to do so.
[SPEAKER_04]: I said this is maybe one of the more controversial claims that we make in our tradition.
[SPEAKER_04]: There are some people who skeptical of the very concept of an avatar, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: Why would the divine reality become human
[SPEAKER_04]: And even among those who accept the idea of avatar, they say, how do we know this person is an avatar?
[SPEAKER_04]: For those who accept the idea, if you're familiar with the concept of avatar, avatar always comes to Earth for a specific mission.
[SPEAKER_04]: And non-Christianism mission, it said, was to promulgate the harmony of religions, to bring it out about an end to religious conflict.
[SPEAKER_04]: Again, a process that many of us believe has only just begun because if you check out the news, we have not yet overcome it.
[SPEAKER_04]: But if you look in places that are less likely to make the news, you'll see people cooperating and working together.
[SPEAKER_04]: And this is a movement that is gained much strength in the time since Sri Ramakrishna.
[SPEAKER_04]: What was especially impressive about Ram Krsna was the fact that his knowledge seemed to be derived not from book learning, from scholarship in the conventional sense, but from his some other experiences.
[SPEAKER_04]: He taught not like one who had learned about the things of which he had spoke, but like one who had seen those things directly, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: So he would be talking with scholars, and you know as a professional scholar myself, you know, we say, well, you know, in this chapter of the book about the Purana, it says this, and he said, yes, but in this verse of the Taitiri upon a shot, it says this, and then she and on Christian and say, well, when I was talking to Madhya the other day, she told me this, and it was very simple and direct and based on his experience, but it engaged with what the scholars were saying in a way that was quite stunning to them.
[SPEAKER_04]: To be sure, shoot Ramakrishna certainly possessed some knowledge in the conventional sense.
[SPEAKER_04]: You sometimes see the claim made that he was illiterate.
[SPEAKER_04]: This drives me crazy.
[SPEAKER_04]: If you go to the museum at Bill or month, you can see his signature on a document.
[SPEAKER_04]: He could sign his name.
[SPEAKER_04]: He was not very literate.
[SPEAKER_04]: He could not sit and read war and peace either in Bangalore or English.
[SPEAKER_04]: But, but,
[SPEAKER_04]: He, a people often, I think, overplay the concept of literacy, a lot of knowledge in many societies in India has been one, is passed on by memorization.
[SPEAKER_04]: And he had a fantastic memory, and he possessed several books, and he wouldn't read, but he would have people read to him.
[SPEAKER_04]: And he went off and cite from those books, chapter and verse.
[SPEAKER_04]: So it's not that he was utterly devoid of book learning.
[SPEAKER_04]: His favorite book, apparently, was the Adhat Madramayana.
[SPEAKER_04]: It explains the esoteric meaning of the Ramayana, revealing the spiritual symbolism behind this celebrated and ancient story from the Hindu tradition.
[SPEAKER_04]: He was not, though, a learned scholar in the traditional sense.
[SPEAKER_04]: He spoke simply and the rural Bengali of Commarper Corps, but the depth of his knowledge was far greater than can be expected purely from his limited educational background.
[SPEAKER_04]: Thus giving credence to the idea that yogic experience has genuine epistemic value and is not simply delusional, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: It's not only sensory experience from which we can draw information that Ramakrishna had access to information through his experiences and that he demonstrated this.
[SPEAKER_04]: Part three, Shudanamakrishna's philosophy.
[SPEAKER_04]: In a wonderful book that I highly recommend, I said, I'm not going to ask for money, but I'm going to plug a book, not mine, a wonderful book called Infinite Paths to Infinite Reality, Shudanamakrishna, and cross cultural philosophy of religion, Swami may
[SPEAKER_04]: Contrary to many scholars who have not taken Ramakrishna seriously as an intellect, that a rich, internally consistent philosophy can be discerned, ensured Ramakrishna's teachings.
[SPEAKER_04]: And he's done this through a very, very careful reading of the Bengali texts of the original sources.
[SPEAKER_04]: Shiramakrishna clearly drew through his practical engagement with them from the ideas of many varied traditions, diverse Hindu philosophies, as well as Islam and Christianity.
[SPEAKER_04]: He was aware of, though had a more limited engagement with the Sikh Buddhist and Jain traditions.
[SPEAKER_04]: Finally, though, his teachings were not based, again, on his studies, but on his experiences, aspects of which he saw reflected in a variety of philosophical viewpoints.
[SPEAKER_04]: He did not agree with all these philosophies equally.
[SPEAKER_04]: Nor did he claim they were all equally true or true in the same senses, in fact, that would be logical impossibility.
[SPEAKER_04]: But he did affirm that there was some truth to be found in all of them.
[SPEAKER_04]: And even more and fathically, he affirmed that the lived practices, which accompany these belief systems were effective in leading one to the goal of realization.
[SPEAKER_04]: He famously said in Mangra Jato Matatopat, the each philosophy each mat is a path.
[SPEAKER_04]: Advaita Vedanta was, of course, one of the paths that Sri Ramakrishna practiced.
[SPEAKER_04]: We went already mentioned his six-month New Vikapa Samadhi.
[SPEAKER_04]: This provided the philosophical framework that his immediate followers, such as Swami Vivekananda, found to best approximate his teachings.
[SPEAKER_04]: And it continues to define the basic worldview that one finds presented in the teaching of the institutions that were established in his name.
[SPEAKER_04]: Their core philosophy, as Swami Subha Priyana de His said.
[SPEAKER_04]: But again, not wanting to assume that everybody knows everything already.
[SPEAKER_04]: I'm going to raise a very basic question.
[SPEAKER_04]: What is Vedanta?
[SPEAKER_04]: And what does it mean to call Sri Ramakrishna its synthesis?
[SPEAKER_04]: So we're going to really kind of come to the thesis today of this presentation.
[SPEAKER_04]: So I'm going to add a little academic here.
[SPEAKER_04]: So please bear with me.
[SPEAKER_04]: But hopefully it will be of interest.
[SPEAKER_04]: Vedanta is derived as its name indicates from the Vedas, the sacred revelation affirmed by all Hindu schools of thought as the most authoritative texts.
[SPEAKER_04]: The word Vedanta has several layers of meaning.
[SPEAKER_04]: It's a compound word, and a Sanskrit we call Samasa.
[SPEAKER_04]: It's made up of the words Vedanta and Anda.
[SPEAKER_04]: You combine them, you get Vedanta.
[SPEAKER_04]: So on one level of meaning, Veda means the Vedas, the authoritative writings.
[SPEAKER_04]: Anta has a similar semantic range to the English word end.
[SPEAKER_04]: So you have the end, like the end of a movie, right, or the end of this talk.
[SPEAKER_04]: But you also have the aim or the goal of something.
[SPEAKER_04]: Two what end you're doing something.
[SPEAKER_04]: And both these meanings apply to Vedanta.
[SPEAKER_04]: So Vedanta can mean the literal end, the conclusion of the Vedas.
[SPEAKER_04]: But can also refer to the goal or purpose toward which the Vedas point.
[SPEAKER_04]: So in terms of the first meeting, Vedanta as the end of the Vedas in a literal sense refers to the sacred text known as the Upanishads, the secret or esoteric portion of the Vedas, typically taught last in the traditional Vedic curriculum, because they are the end of the Vedas, the Upanishads came to be known as the Vedanta.
[SPEAKER_04]: But because the philosophy of the Upanishads teach is held by those who follow it to be the point of the Vedas, the final goal toward which the Vedas are pointing, this philosophy has also come to be known as Vedanta in the sense of the aim or purpose of the Vedas.
[SPEAKER_04]: This is the meaning of a Dante that most people have in mind when they use this term.
[SPEAKER_04]: The philosophy of the Vedas and more specifically of the Upanishads, their final portion, what we could call the last word in both the literal and metaphorical sense of the Vedas.
[SPEAKER_04]: There is, however, another meaning of Vedanta that is at least as important as this one.
[SPEAKER_04]: The root meaning of the word Veda is wisdom.
[SPEAKER_04]: If Veda refers not only to the most authoritative Hindu texts, but to the wisdom that they express, we can see Vedanta is referring to the goal a more purpose of all wisdom, all knowledge.
[SPEAKER_04]: Indeed, Swami Vivekananda says quite explicitly that this is the case.
[SPEAKER_04]: He describes the Vedas in the following way.
[SPEAKER_04]: By the Vedas, he says, no book segment.
[SPEAKER_04]: They are the accumulated treasury of spiritual laws discovered by different persons in different times.
[SPEAKER_04]: By talking about spiritual laws, he's wanting to evoke the concept of physical laws that this is akin to a science.
[SPEAKER_04]: He also says, quote, the whole body of supersensuous truths, having no beginning or end, and called by the name of the Vedas, is ever-existent.
[SPEAKER_04]: This one could argue, and this always confused me, when I was first studying Hindu philosophy.
[SPEAKER_04]: This is why Hindu teachers have affirmed that the Vedas are Aparushaya, that is not man-made.
[SPEAKER_04]: It's a claim that sounds strange if we're talking just about a set of writings.
[SPEAKER_04]: And of course, Buddhists relentlessly made fun of Vedic philosophers about this.
[SPEAKER_04]: You're saying a book is eternal.
[SPEAKER_04]: It's a book, someone wrote it.
[SPEAKER_04]: And they said, no, it's not man-made.
[SPEAKER_04]: Because the wisdom it teaches is not man-made.
[SPEAKER_04]: So this sounds strange when we're talking about writings.
[SPEAKER_04]: But if we define the Vedas as the sum total of metaphysical truth, makes perfect sense.
[SPEAKER_04]: There's the necessary truths that ground all of existence.
[SPEAKER_04]: As the metaphysical truths underlying everything, the Vedas can in principle be discovered by anyone of any cultural religious or philosophical background, so long as their mind has been transformed by spiritual practice to perceive them.
[SPEAKER_04]: Just as the laws of physics are available to be discovered by anyone who has the training to discern and understand them, according to Swami Vivekananda, such people have existed throughout the world and throughout history.
[SPEAKER_04]: If the Vedas refer to the whole body of supersensuous truths, then Vedanta can be seen as in the words of Subhapitri Radhakrishnan, not a religion, but religion itself in its most universal and deepest significance.
[SPEAKER_04]: Vedanta in this sense can be identified with what Alda's Huxley calls the perennial philosophy in which he traces through the teachings of great mystics from many different traditions.
[SPEAKER_04]: So, when its deepest broadest and most universal sense, Vedanta refers to the knowledge that can be seen to underlie all religions, all philosophies, so I may be able to even modern science in this.
[SPEAKER_04]: What's the connection between Vedanta in the more conventional sense, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: The Hindu philosophy, and this universal sense of Vedanta.
[SPEAKER_04]: This can be explained in the following way.
[SPEAKER_04]: But just as the physical sciences, historically, have not developed everywhere at the same time and to the same degree.
[SPEAKER_04]: Inquiry into the spiritual realm has similarly developed in an uneven fashion, having been pursued in greater depth in sometimes in places than others.
[SPEAKER_04]: This is not to say that sometimes the places are necessarily better than others, sometimes people have been busy doing other things like trying to survive natural disasters or surviving being attacked or something of that sort.
[SPEAKER_04]: So when there has been the time, the ability people have developed spiritual culture, the findings of the spiritual scientists of the past have also been better preserved in some societies, some societies than others.
[SPEAKER_04]: It could be that there are cultures that have held great spiritual wisdom, but we just don't know about them anymore, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: The maybe they have vanished without a trace.
[SPEAKER_04]: This is why Swami Vivekananda teaches that spiritual values, although universal, can nevertheless be discerned preeminently in the Vedic scriptures.
[SPEAKER_04]: Now this, of course, is going to be a controversial claim.
[SPEAKER_04]: Everyone from every tradition is going to say that this universal wisdom is preserved best in our text.
[SPEAKER_04]: So I'm just happy to accept that, say, yes, everyone's going to think that.
[SPEAKER_04]: We're speaking from the perspective of this tradition.
[SPEAKER_04]: All right, so Swami Vivekananda says that, quote, although the super sensuous visions of truth is to be met within some measure in our Putanas and it the houses, that is Hindu sacred literature that's not part of the Vedha, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: Smriti is supposed to shruti.
[SPEAKER_04]: And in the religious scriptures of other races,
[SPEAKER_04]: Still, the fourfold scripture known as the Vedas being the first, the foremost, and most complete, and most undistorted collection of spiritual truths, deserve to occupy the highest place among all scriptures, command the respective all nations of the earth, and furnish the rational of their respective scriptures.
[SPEAKER_04]: I want to just add one last piece about this, that, again, someone who is inherent in another tradition might try that disrespectful.
[SPEAKER_04]: Oh, you saying your Vedas are the best,
[SPEAKER_04]: say, well, you're free to say the same thing in reverse it, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: And, you know, let these things be discussed.
[SPEAKER_04]: But I think there's a benefit to this way of thinking, which is that we do not want the idea of universal truth to become what scholars sometimes call relativism, where we have no criteria for determining certain things, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: Some of the great traditions affirm the concept of rebirth, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: Reincarnation is a real thing.
[SPEAKER_04]: Others say, no, there is no such thing, it doesn't happen.
[SPEAKER_04]: How do we decide about something like that?
[SPEAKER_04]: So you have to take your stand somewhere, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: And Swamiji takes his in the Vedic tradition, and that's where I'm presuming most of us do as well.
[SPEAKER_04]: Vedanta in the conventional sense, like we've already mentioned, is based on the teachings of the Upanishads, and two additional texts that help explain them.
[SPEAKER_04]: The Brahma Sutras, this is a highly technical collection of verses that's very difficult to read without the help of a scholarly commentary.
[SPEAKER_04]: And that's not just me saying that people much more brilliant than myself have been utterly baffled by the Brahma Sutras, but you need a commentary.
[SPEAKER_04]: So Shankar Ramanoja, one of these great thinkers,
[SPEAKER_04]: And the Bhagavad-gita, a popular work, part of the epic Mahabharata, that makes the Vedanta available and accessible to ordinary people.
[SPEAKER_04]: It was really quite brilliant of the author or authors of the Mahabharata to place the Bhagavad-gita in the Mahabharata, because if you think of ancient times in India, this is before the internet, before film, before even most people had writing, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: And he writing existed, but it was usually the preserve of a small number of people.
[SPEAKER_04]: culture and people told each other stories.
[SPEAKER_04]: So imagine if you put your most sacred teaching that you wanted to communicate to the world in the middle of a dialogue between a couple characters in Star Wars, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: So you're gonna you're gonna share that information with a lot of people and that's essentially what the Bhagavad-gita does.
[SPEAKER_04]: These three combined the Upanishads, the Brahmasutras and the Bhagavad-gita form the Prasthanatri, the triple foundation of Vedanta
[SPEAKER_04]: And I've written a lot here, so in the interest of time, I'm going to just skip a little what I've written without losing the essence.
[SPEAKER_04]: But basically what I have described in the part that I am going to skip a little bit of is that over time various commentators gave their interpretations of these three core texts.
[SPEAKER_04]: And then result, you get diverse systems of Vedanta, Advaita Vedanta, which is the tradition that we inherit in the Ramakrishna tradition.
[SPEAKER_04]: There's also Vishish the Dvita, Dvita, Adhintyabhita, there's lots of lots of different systems of Vedanta.
[SPEAKER_04]: And they disagree on a lot of issues, but they also share, I think they share more than they differ on, because they're all rooted in these same three texts.
[SPEAKER_04]: And they even share things with other traditions, like the James and Buddhist, because they affirm karma and rebirth and the idea of Moksha.
[SPEAKER_04]: There are three topics that I want to draw attention to and where there's some disagreement among these traditions and see what Ramakrishna does with these disagreements.
[SPEAKER_04]: There's the question of whether Brahman, the infinite, is a personal being, Ishrura or in English God who loves, cares about, and sustains all beings or something utterly beyond such concepts and often described in non-personal terms.
[SPEAKER_04]: Second, and connected to this first issue, is the question of how do we reach Moksha?
[SPEAKER_04]: Is this through Pakti, through a loving devotional relationship to the Supreme Person, or is it through Nyanah, through the cultivation of knowledge of our true nature?
[SPEAKER_04]: Finally, are the individual jiva's, the souls, all of us?
[SPEAKER_04]: Are we distinct from yeta kin to Brahman?
[SPEAKER_04]: Which makes sense if Brahman is the personal God?
[SPEAKER_04]: Or are we identical with Brahman, the self, the Atman, understood again in a more impersonal sense?
[SPEAKER_04]: Now, I've just oversimplified three massive issues, on which much much ink has been spilled through the centuries.
[SPEAKER_04]: And each one could provide its own topic of discussion.
[SPEAKER_04]: But I just want to gesture toward how pseudomic Krishna is a kind of synthesis of it onto when we talk about issues like this.
[SPEAKER_04]: Shuramakrishna's contribution is profound.
[SPEAKER_04]: It's drawn again not from study in the conventional sense, but from his direct experience of the realities described in the Hindu scriptures.
[SPEAKER_04]: In keeping with Advaita Vedanta, Shuramakrishna affirms that Brahman, being infinite is utterly beyond our ability to comprehend.
[SPEAKER_04]: This, of course, is what the punishments of firm as well.
[SPEAKER_04]: The famous Nadine, Nadine, Brahman is not this.
[SPEAKER_04]: It's not that.
[SPEAKER_04]: This means, though, that while Brahman cannot be limited to a concept like personhood, it also means we cannot disallow the possibility that Brahman can assume personhood fully and completely to enable beings to attain liberation.
[SPEAKER_04]: Student Omicrucina basically says, who are we to say?
[SPEAKER_04]: Brahmin can do or not do whatever it she wants to do.
[SPEAKER_04]: Who are we to say?
[SPEAKER_04]: So we have to accept the possibility, even if we can't logically reconcile it.
[SPEAKER_04]: In one of the many vivid images that he uses in his teaching, Shradam Krishna compares Brahman to water, which is cooled by the devotion of living beings, and freezes into shapes that enable us to interact with Brahman devotionally.
[SPEAKER_04]: These are the devitas of the various traditions.
[SPEAKER_04]: And to be sure, Brahman is described in both personal and in personal terms in the Upanishads.
[SPEAKER_04]: Now, what the various systems of Vedanta have tended to do is if they affirm one, then they see portions of the text that affirm the other, as well those are illustrative, those are metaphorical.
[SPEAKER_04]: That's how they make sense of it.
[SPEAKER_04]: And then we're left to kind of deal with that.
[SPEAKER_04]: How is it both?
[SPEAKER_04]: Brahman is both the Supreme person and the impersonal ground of being.
[SPEAKER_04]: And Brahman being infinite is also neither of these, being finally beyond the comprehension of the intellect.
[SPEAKER_04]: The most accurate answer to the question, what is Brahman would probably be silence?
[SPEAKER_04]: Similarly, while Sri Ramakrishna affirms that it is through knowledge of Brahman that we become liberated, he was as deeply devotional as you can imagine a person to be, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: He was going to cut his throat if Kali didn't show herself to him, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: He was that devotional.
[SPEAKER_04]: Rather than seeing the path of the cultivation of knowledge and the path of devotion as mutually exclusive alternatives, he affirms that true knowledge leads to devotion.
[SPEAKER_04]: and true devotion leads to knowledge, they're different paths to the same goal.
[SPEAKER_04]: And in fact, in the Bhagavad-gita, when Arjuna says to Krishna, I know which of these is better, Krishna says that Yana yoga is more difficult, but both reach me, both reach me in the end.
[SPEAKER_04]: And of course, the different commentators have given interpretations of that.
[SPEAKER_04]: My sense is that Ramakrishna's interpretation is consistent with just kind of a simple, straight reading of the text.
[SPEAKER_04]: They both work.
[SPEAKER_04]: Regarding whether we are ultimately one with Brahmin or eternally distinct, while Sri Ramakrishna affirms the non-dualist understanding of an ultimate unity underlying all existence, he does not simply dismiss this diverse world, the divine play of Maya, is not a mere delusion.
[SPEAKER_04]: He reaffirms the teaching of Shankara, in fact, that Maya is, and this often blows people's minds, but it is both real and unreal.
[SPEAKER_04]: The appearance, which I think is a good translation of Maya, does not encompass the full reality of Brahman, in fact, it veils it, but it also partially reveals it.
[SPEAKER_04]: And the highest state of awareness, according to Sri Ramakrishna, and I think this is probably his unique contribution to Indian philosophy.
[SPEAKER_04]: is the state of the Ghyana, in which one perceives that it is Brahmin that has become all things.
[SPEAKER_04]: The mode of becoming may be appearance, Maya.
[SPEAKER_04]: That is, we can understand that Brahmin does not in its ultimate essence change or become finally being beyond time, space, and causation.
[SPEAKER_04]: But what appears to become, and to be the world which we experience, including ourselves, is only Brahmin.
[SPEAKER_04]: for Brahmin alone is real, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: That is all there is.
[SPEAKER_04]: So what else couldn't be?
[SPEAKER_04]: So in conclusion, Shiram Krishna's teachings are arguably not new, indeed one can find many of them in the Hindu scriptures.
[SPEAKER_04]: There are many attempts to sort of reconcile some of these disagreements.
[SPEAKER_04]: And you see this across the various schools of Vedanta.
[SPEAKER_04]: But in an era in which India had been colonized, remember the 19th century, right, when Ramakrishna lived, and was being brutally exploited by a foreign power.
[SPEAKER_04]: And in which many of the schools of thought, many not all, but many had retreated into mere repetition of their traditional claims in order to survive from one generation to the next.
[SPEAKER_04]: Shradamakrishna, with his bold spirit of inquiry and his pursuit of direct experience,
[SPEAKER_04]: And particularly through the work of disciples, his disciples, such as Swami Vivekananda, to reconceive this ancient philosophy as universal and bearing relevance to the whole world.
[SPEAKER_04]: And I think there's something very beautiful about this.
[SPEAKER_04]: Many things that are very beautiful, but one is that I don't think Sri Ramakrishna meant to do any of this.
[SPEAKER_04]: He just wanted to see God, and yet so much came from that.
[SPEAKER_04]: Through Sri Ramakrishna's synthesis of Vedanta and its global propagation, people all over the world have been inspired.
[SPEAKER_04]: and from popular culture to consciousness studies, from Star Wars and the Beatles to Transpersonal Psychology, a way of living and thinking has emerged that can give hope to human beings who are desperately in need of it.
[SPEAKER_04]: Divinity is around us and within us.
[SPEAKER_04]: We only need to open ourselves to that reality, whether we conceive of it as a personal God or an in-personal ground of being or as going beyond both.
[SPEAKER_04]: It, it, it really, ultimately matters less than that we be open to that reality.
[SPEAKER_04]: She'd Ramakrishnaapanamastu.
[SPEAKER_04]: Thank you all very much.
[SPEAKER_04]: I'm open to questions.
[SPEAKER_04]: I've talked an awfully long time, but if you're willing to sit and, and, uh, listen to me answer questions.
[SPEAKER_04]: I can.
[SPEAKER_04]: I saw two people, uh, I'm not sure who's first.
[SPEAKER_04]: Great.
[SPEAKER_04]: Gentlemen and back.
[SPEAKER_03]: As you rightly mentioned, there is no difference between the non Krishna being or inclusive of religions and the Hinduness, but the humanity as such is different of many benefits, because my quality is too as a reason.
[SPEAKER_03]: If you call Christianity or Islam as a religion, then there is no way you can call Hindu as a religion.
[SPEAKER_03]: It is more of a, you can monetize, monetize, monetize whatever it is, but by equating it with these two religions for historical reasons of being able to buy numbers, demand, gas, gas, gas,
[SPEAKER_03]: what can be done to renew this misunderstanding, because it is not in misunderstanding of the non Hindu bond people, even for those born Hindu and India, they will say do not believe that Hinduism is not a religion, I don't like to call it Islam because of sort of negative connotation to Islam.
[SPEAKER_03]: English is something which is good for humanity, it is not against any religion, it can absorb all religions and it has survived despite being ruled by these two religious religions dominated powers that ruled the nation.
[SPEAKER_03]: Otherwise it would have been destroyed by many other
[SPEAKER_03]: Not only among the Indians, but among others.
[SPEAKER_04]: Wonderful question.
[SPEAKER_04]: And the first I'll say, I agree with you, 100%.
[SPEAKER_04]: And then it's left to me to explain why I use the term religion.
[SPEAKER_04]: And so I'll address this.
[SPEAKER_04]: Your question was how can we kind of disconnect the concept of religion from the concept of Hinduism?
[SPEAKER_04]: Or even Hinduism?
[SPEAKER_04]: I'm not even crazy about that term.
[SPEAKER_04]: Hindu, the harmonious, you're not an environment, something like that, or Vedanta, we could say.
[SPEAKER_04]: So, first I'll just mention something else that it's not only the Hindu tradition that has suffered from this, another civilization, another country that I've had the great privilege to become very close to and experience a lot in my life is Japan.
[SPEAKER_04]: My wife is, some of you know her, Indian teaching Japanese in the United States, and so we go to Japan a lot, we take groups of students to Japan.
[SPEAKER_04]: Japanese people will insist to you.
[SPEAKER_04]: We are not religious.
[SPEAKER_04]: We are not religious, we don't believe in religion, and you will go, and you'll see every Buddhist temple and every Shinto shrine packed with people.
[SPEAKER_04]: And they're not alturists, they're very devout people practicing.
[SPEAKER_04]: So okay, they say they're not religious, but look what they're doing.
[SPEAKER_04]: So they have the same sense that you have, that this concept of religion is very specific to the Western world, and it's narrow and limiting in ways that these traditions aren't.
[SPEAKER_04]: That's just not part of those traditions self-consciousness.
[SPEAKER_04]: So your question is what do we do?
[SPEAKER_04]: Well, there are multiple layers, I think, and answers to this.
[SPEAKER_04]: Now one thing that many of us do as scholars is sort of bend over backwards to redefine and specify what we mean by the term religion, and that's usually like the least interesting part of our books.
[SPEAKER_04]: But we're sort of explaining that, okay, we don't mean that, you know, we don't mean believing in God, we don't mean adhering exclusively to one thing, you know, it's a
[SPEAKER_04]: But we use this term because it's the common term, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: It's kind of like, I gave a talk and then the last talk I gave it was like the use of the word God, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: And so because English is predominant, we're kind of stuck with it.
[SPEAKER_04]: So then that leaves you with
[SPEAKER_04]: a couple of other options.
[SPEAKER_04]: One is to do essentially what I did today, and also because my source materials, like even the books in English, by the Ramakrishna Order, also used the word religion, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: So I may be happy to be able to use the word religion because it was what was available.
[SPEAKER_04]: So that's why I used it today, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: It was consistent with my sources.
[SPEAKER_04]: But yes.
[SPEAKER_04]: I think that, in fact, often the term that's used to translate religion is Dharma, but as you pointed out, Dharma is much more encompassing.
[SPEAKER_04]: Now, I've, a lot of people I've said this to don't like what I'm about to say, but I think the closest word to religion is actually yoga.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yoga in its original sense, not in the sense of what people do in the gym, which is perfectly fine and good luck to them, but yoga as a path that is meant to connect us with the higher reality.
[SPEAKER_04]: And there are many yoga and I think that is close in some way to the idea of religion.
[SPEAKER_04]: So I think another thing we need to do is to gradually that wean people off of the word religion.
[SPEAKER_04]: And my own tiny contribution to this has been the course that I teach on the Hindu Jain Buddhist and Sikh traditions is called Dharma Traditions.
[SPEAKER_04]: And the first thing I do in the class is talk about the harma and sort of get the students to reflect on how this is both similar to but also in many ways very different from religion and they're really struck by the differences I mean they really they come away saying oh these aren't religions very often
[SPEAKER_04]: In fact, they leap to that more quickly than I probably would because I'm older and I have these habits.
[SPEAKER_04]: So I think we want to promote more of this sort of indigenous terminology.
[SPEAKER_04]: At the same time, we need to do it in a careful way because if you just jump into speaking Sanskrit without any kind of intermediary, then the large portion of your audience just doesn't understand what you're saying.
[SPEAKER_04]: And they change the channel.
[SPEAKER_04]: Okay, here's what I'm talking about, religion, I understand that, but I think this is a very important thing that we need to do is think in terms of these other concepts also because as you say Christianity has changed a great deal, the Western world has changed a great deal.
[SPEAKER_04]: I've seen in the course of my 25 year teaching career, the attitude of my students toward religion,
[SPEAKER_04]: And again, they're always exceptions, but in terms of the dominant attitude, has gone from very devout Christian adherence to very strong hostility toward all forms of whatever they call religion, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: And so then that means if you want people to listen to what you're saying, you have to use some other term, because sometimes people hear the word religion they just immediately shut down.
[SPEAKER_04]: And this is a recent development, I mean this is independent of what you were saying about colonization and so that's also all true.
[SPEAKER_04]: But there's also the way that what we might broadly call spiritual life and maybe that's a good, maybe that works pretty well for Dharma in some respects.
[SPEAKER_04]: That the most negative sort of insidious and rigid aspects of that have come to be denoted by the term religion.
[SPEAKER_04]: And so if you call all of it religion, then people who have absorbed that understandings, I don't want to know about this.
[SPEAKER_04]: This is religion, that's all nonsense and so on.
[SPEAKER_04]: So I agree with you, I think it's a conundrum, and so I think we need to change the way we use the terminology and change the terminology.
[SPEAKER_04]: But this has to be gradual, because if it's very sudden, then people just won't know what you're talking about.
[SPEAKER_04]: So someone says, you know, what do you practice?
[SPEAKER_04]: I practice synothinathinatharma, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: Then that's okay.
[SPEAKER_04]: What's that?
[SPEAKER_04]: Is that like Santana, the guitar player?
[SPEAKER_04]: What is that?
[SPEAKER_04]: And then, you know, and then you have to get into a long conversation, and you're an evidently going to use the word Hindu, because, you know, or Hinduism, because you can't help it, right, because you're trying to explain what it is.
[SPEAKER_04]: So that's, I think, where we are, I think the recognition of the problem that you've identified is now quite widespread, even among scholars.
[SPEAKER_04]: In fact, I read a very good book a few years ago arguing that religious studies should not be called religious studies, as you could be called cultural studies.
[SPEAKER_04]: And I think there's a point to be made for that.
[SPEAKER_04]: But then you went into institutional issues as well.
[SPEAKER_04]: So there are grants for religious studies, but maybe not for cultural studies.
[SPEAKER_04]: What do you do, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: So I agree with you, but it's very complicated.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: OK. Oh, there is.
[UNKNOWN]: What do you say in the comments?
[SPEAKER_04]: And you were in the first, first two people that raised the hand, yeah?
[SPEAKER_09]: Thank you for your talk.
[SPEAKER_09]: You said in your talk that Sri Ramakrishna, his intention was not, or he didn't think of developing all these organizations under his name or whatever.
[SPEAKER_04]: At least my interpretation.
[SPEAKER_04]: I expect he would have been amused by the idea.
[SPEAKER_09]: But that all he intended was to see God, but he went to the terrace one day and he cried to hold him to Mother Kali.
[SPEAKER_09]: Why are you not sending me disciples?
[SPEAKER_04]: That is correct.
[SPEAKER_09]: And then he also taught Swamiji and he gave Swamiji Vivekananda all his powers.
[SPEAKER_09]: to be able to spread his message.
[SPEAKER_09]: So I do think he wanted to teach it, whether he wanted to do it this way or the other way.
[SPEAKER_04]: That's true.
[SPEAKER_04]: I think I should correct what I said.
[SPEAKER_04]: I don't think he sought any personal self-aggrandizement through this process.
[SPEAKER_04]: He was very sincere in wanting to see God and wanting to share that with the world.
[SPEAKER_04]: And so, I mean, it's interesting, we have this photographs of him in centers, you know.
[SPEAKER_04]: And I think I would rephrase what I was saying in the following way.
[SPEAKER_04]: I don't think he did what he did so that we would all be looking at his picture and saying prayers to him.
[SPEAKER_04]: But,
[SPEAKER_04]: When that picture was taken, he said, ah, many people will come to Vedanta through this picture.
[SPEAKER_04]: So he did, he had that perception, he had that foresight.
[SPEAKER_04]: And he started the order, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: He distributed the Okarobes to his disciples.
[SPEAKER_04]: And we know he got his Vedanta initiation from Totapurri, and so it passed through him.
[SPEAKER_04]: And so,
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, I mean, I don't think I was exaggerating a bit because I wanted to be clear that he was not in this for himself or any greater glory, and it was that follow me, you know, that was absent, I think.
[SPEAKER_04]: Ego was absent, but yes, he did do specific things which became the foundation.
[SPEAKER_04]: But I think the real institution builder was Swami Vivekananda and I would give at least some honorable mention to Swami Brahman as well as the first president of the order that they said about building institutions.
[SPEAKER_04]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_04]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_05]: My name is Prashant and this question relates to the mother Kali as envisioned and vision.
[SPEAKER_05]: So for me it's very hard, I try a lot, I get, I get a quiz, but then I don't get people that kind of.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_05]: And I've been prona, if you all these mothers and shut here.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yes, sure, sure, absolutely.
[SPEAKER_04]: Well, first of all, you have a close kindred in Swami Vivekananda, who until a very specific incident.
[SPEAKER_04]: when his, he and his family were suffering a lot from poverty.
[SPEAKER_04]: And Ron Christian encouraged him to go and ask the mother for help.
[SPEAKER_04]: Till then, he was quite hesitant about the whole concept of mother colleague.
[SPEAKER_04]: And then it said that he, he did go and then he felt so moved that he couldn't even ask for a material thing from her.
[SPEAKER_04]: He's like, grant me a milkshake, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: That's all he wanted.
[SPEAKER_04]: So I would say that
[SPEAKER_04]: This is why there are many paths because everyone is different.
[SPEAKER_04]: And so there are those who are more inclined toward Advaita Vedanta.
[SPEAKER_04]: I'm very inclined toward Advaita Vedanta.
[SPEAKER_04]: Like Shudarmukrishna, I had a great loss in my own family when I was quite young.
[SPEAKER_04]: And so the idea that this place that's so full of death and suffering, yeah, that's not really real, that's not the full reality.
[SPEAKER_04]: There's something much more beautiful and profound hiding behind that veil.
[SPEAKER_04]: that holds great appeal for me.
[SPEAKER_04]: So I feel very drawn to Advaita Vedanta.
[SPEAKER_04]: It makes intellectual sense to me.
[SPEAKER_04]: I have to say, I love the mother goddess, I love Makali, I've had some of my own experiences we don't talk about these experiences, but I grew up in a culture, and this is embarrassing to say, but I think you all know it.
[SPEAKER_04]: I grew up in a culture where my first exposure to Makali was Indiana Jones in the Temple of Doom.
[SPEAKER_04]: So that was not an auspicious beginning to say the least, but that
[SPEAKER_04]: That made Makali sort of my special challenge.
[SPEAKER_04]: I thought, I will have really, I mean, to the extent that it's possible for someone not born in the tradition to try to find its heart.
[SPEAKER_04]: I said, if I can feel comfortable with Makali, I'll have gotten as close maybe as I can to that.
[SPEAKER_04]: And yeah, I, again, I, we're told we shouldn't talk about these especially in the internet, you know, but I, I've had dreams about Moncali that I, I'll all say is that they persuaded me that this was, this is also a way to to higher realization.
[SPEAKER_04]: But everyone's different, and not everyone has to accept Makati.
[SPEAKER_04]: It's just not for everyone.
[SPEAKER_04]: And so there's this wonderful story I heard from Sukali and St. Gupta.
[SPEAKER_04]: I don't know how many of you know him.
[SPEAKER_04]: He's another scholar.
[SPEAKER_04]: And he sold this great story about Swamiji, who had...
[SPEAKER_04]: He had given a talk in, I think, Boston.
[SPEAKER_04]: And then he left and traveled and then he returned later to Boston.
[SPEAKER_04]: And the people who gathered had been there for his previous lecture.
[SPEAKER_04]: And one person raised their hand, and they said, Swami, there was something you said in your previous lecture, and then he paraphrased it, and he said, I don't agree with that.
[SPEAKER_04]: I can't accept that.
[SPEAKER_04]: And Swami, maybe it was not for you.
[SPEAKER_04]: And then someone else in the audience raised their hand and said, I thought that was the best part of the lecture.
[SPEAKER_04]: That's what I took away from the lecture.
[SPEAKER_04]: And then Swami Ji said, it was for you.
[SPEAKER_04]: And so I would say, I'd write that Vedanta is for you, and maybe Makali is for, you know.
[SPEAKER_04]: who ever, yeah, my colleagues for you, yes, exactly, exactly.
[SPEAKER_04]: And that this is why, because we're talking about something that's infinite.
[SPEAKER_04]: So to try to say it could be grasped in any one of these concepts fully is, as you guessed, the first thing that we could say, Ramakrishna is arguing against, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: He's arguing against anything.
[SPEAKER_04]: It's that limitation of the ideal.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, let's see.
[SPEAKER_04]: My good friend, Kusamita is back there.
[SPEAKER_07]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_07]: That was great.
[SPEAKER_07]: Jeff, I'm responding to comment about religion.
[SPEAKER_07]: This is totally bracketed apart from the isom, the isom question.
[SPEAKER_07]: So very ironically, in various religions, there are leading thinkers that say what we have is not a religion.
[SPEAKER_07]: It's those other things that people have that are the religions called bark to great Protestant.
[SPEAKER_07]: Theologian said Christianity is not a religion, right?
[SPEAKER_07]: D.T.
[SPEAKER_07]: Suzuki, the great exponent of Zen Buddhism, said Zen Buddhism is not a religion.
[SPEAKER_07]: Those other things are the religions, and of course the next part of it is what we have is the truth of those other things that does cultural formations or, you know, for that.
[SPEAKER_07]: The same thing is said by a parent of Islam, Islam is not a religion.
[SPEAKER_07]: The other things are the religions.
[SPEAKER_07]: And people have been engaging in what is religion for over 100 years, 150 years.
[SPEAKER_07]: And they're allowed to consider this about what religion is, for instance, human phenomena.
[SPEAKER_07]: And it's whether they think it's true or false.
[SPEAKER_07]: And so I'm trying to teach you not to go out much longer.
[SPEAKER_07]: I'm a veteran and a promoter of the theory of the right
[SPEAKER_07]: And he said, religion, and this is not said, and then he can take religion to your thoughts.
[SPEAKER_07]: Religion is a world view of way of working.
[SPEAKER_07]: It's also a set of ethical values.
[SPEAKER_07]: So, I published an essay on Hinduism and Universality of Religion, where I unpack all of this and I closed, as a functional, you know, as a sense of neutral, you lock the neutral definition of religion well, so it has, and it's a way of relating to the sacred, so there's
[SPEAKER_07]: But one more thing, Clifford Gears, there's another great scholar, religion, minion, smart.
[SPEAKER_07]: And he had to be a great scholar of Indian philosophy.
[SPEAKER_07]: And he also was a two-loader of the idea of the world.
[SPEAKER_07]: And minion smart proposed that we talked about worldview studies.
[SPEAKER_08]: And part of the world, you know, I can live with that.
[SPEAKER_04]: Right.
[SPEAKER_04]: I love what you're saying because I'm really appreciate you for saying that.
[SPEAKER_04]: This is a move I've been making in my own work too.
[SPEAKER_04]: I didn't do it so much in this presentation, but to use the world world view, specifically because apart from what have been called religious traditions that say, well, we're not a religion.
[SPEAKER_04]: You do have an atheist in secular humanists who have worldviews, and they say, well, we're not religious, and they'll be quite upset if they get called religious.
[SPEAKER_04]: So world views are a little more neutral.
[SPEAKER_07]: They are now demanding to be part of the interface process.
[SPEAKER_07]: You're an atheist, you're a humanist, and there's an interface.
[SPEAKER_04]: Well, and this reminds me of, again, the other part of the equation, how we might want to make these changes, but it's difficult because of existing structures.
[SPEAKER_04]: And I wish I thought of this when this gentleman had asked his question.
[SPEAKER_04]: I heard a talk many years ago by one of the swamis from Hinduism today.
[SPEAKER_04]: You might all be familiar with that journal.
[SPEAKER_04]: And they've come up with all kinds of really good materials for teaching about Hindu traditions.
[SPEAKER_04]: And it was a meeting with a group of people who were like school teachers and activists and a big mix as well as some professional scholars.
[SPEAKER_04]: And so this question came up and someone said to the Swami, you know, why do we use the term religion?
[SPEAKER_04]: Shouldn't we talk about tarma?
[SPEAKER_04]: Why do you use the word religion in your materials?
[SPEAKER_04]: And he gave a very pragmatic answer.
[SPEAKER_04]: He said the first amendment to the US Constitution guarantees freedom of religion.
[SPEAKER_04]: Doesn't get any freedom of tarma or world view or darsana or some pradaya.
[SPEAKER_04]: And if you want to fight for your rights and you want to do it in that system, you have to use that terminology.
[SPEAKER_04]: So to some extent we're stuck with it, we can redefine it, I think.
[SPEAKER_04]: I like world view and in fact world view fits is a good fit for darsana.
[SPEAKER_04]: If you write about philosophy or study Indian philosophy, the different systems are called darsanas, which are world views, which is what they are.
[SPEAKER_04]: It includes systems of ethics, ontology, cosmology, all of those things.
[SPEAKER_04]: all the things that we study.
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you for your beautiful lecture.
[SPEAKER_02]: My question is in these days of AI and robotics, what does this modern man, modern human being?
[SPEAKER_02]: The finder way.
[SPEAKER_02]: Is it just a blind faith?
[SPEAKER_02]: or it's a realisation into himself or himself, what is God, what is religion, what is something beyond a material thing that we usually don't see, but we pass it to something beyond.
[SPEAKER_02]: Bye.
[SPEAKER_02]: cannot answer that, but this question is coming to mind, mind, because of the, especially at least this platform gives us the opportunity to expand on that, or go through, it's a dynamic way, that's the static thing, thank you.
[SPEAKER_04]: That's right.
[SPEAKER_04]: You know, in AI, I think,
[SPEAKER_04]: And like many tools, it's a very powerful one.
[SPEAKER_04]: It's probably going to get more powerful.
[SPEAKER_04]: And we need to figure out how to use it constructively.
[SPEAKER_04]: And that's challenging.
[SPEAKER_04]: And I say it as a professor, is I struggle with giving my students writing assignments.
[SPEAKER_04]: Because so many of them are inclined to just have the AI write it for them.
[SPEAKER_04]: And it's like, well, when do they learn to write?
[SPEAKER_04]: And then no one's ever done this, but I'm dreading the day that some clever student says, I'm not going to need to know how to write.
[SPEAKER_04]: Because AI will always be there.
[SPEAKER_04]: And it will do the problem one of that I found, the assignment that I gave students last, one of my courses last semester, was to have them generate an AI article about some topic we studied, and I said, using what you've learned in class, critique it for me.
[SPEAKER_04]: What mistakes did it make?
[SPEAKER_04]: And if you don't find any mistakes, what did it leave out?
[SPEAKER_04]: And you can always say more about any of these things.
[SPEAKER_04]: And they wrote really some excellent papers.
[SPEAKER_04]: And I know that they wrote them.
[SPEAKER_04]: And yeah, they found some glaring errors made by AI.
[SPEAKER_04]: They also found
[SPEAKER_04]: biased information, where something was given that was not necessarily inaccurate, but if you didn't have another point of view, you would get the wrong idea, and then there were things just emitted completely.
[SPEAKER_04]: And it was an illuminating exercise.
[SPEAKER_04]: And I think that's just one example of how we need to make it work for us.
[SPEAKER_04]: We don't want it to become dominant.
[SPEAKER_04]: We don't want it to replace our own thought process.
[SPEAKER_04]: It's very good at synthesizing information quickly, and that's a valuable tool to have, but it's a tool.
[SPEAKER_04]: It's not a substitute for our own creative thought, and then when you're thinking of spiritual life, I've never checked this, but there's apparently an AI Jesus that there are Christians who go to, and they've put all the, you know, the Gospels that are into the AI, and then you ask a question and it figures out what it thinks that he would say.
[SPEAKER_04]: And it's just like, okay, I don't think that's what Christianity has in mind when there's a lot of relations, if we had an AI, shoot on a Christiana, I mean, I think it might be useful for scholarly purposes.
[SPEAKER_04]: What would Sri Ramakrishna likely have said about topic X and we shouldn't take that as simply the truth, but it would give us something to like, okay, this says this, now, is that correct?
[SPEAKER_04]: Now, what do we think about it?
[SPEAKER_04]: But in spiritual, I mean,
[SPEAKER_04]: She got my question and didn't claim to encounter a virtual Macauley.
[SPEAKER_04]: He encountered Macauley, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: You want to really be able to, as you said, set aside the material world and truly focus inwardly.
[SPEAKER_04]: And at its worst, AI is one more fancy thing to tempt us away from going inward.
[SPEAKER_04]: And the world is full of those distractions.
[SPEAKER_04]: But at its best, it can enable that process.
[SPEAKER_04]: And we have to be very skillful about how we use it.
[SPEAKER_06]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_06]: I have a practical and maybe also philosophical question about this idea of pragmatism that we can know the validity or truth of great teachers like Sri Ramakrishna by the effects they have in the world.
[SPEAKER_06]: And I find that idea to be very appealing to me, but I also have doubts about it.
[SPEAKER_06]: So two specifically that I'll say is one, I don't feel like I can see the full effect of someone.
[SPEAKER_06]: And you've said that we haven't seen the full effect of Sri Ramakrishna's teaching so far.
[SPEAKER_06]: And it's even worse when he's more than 100 years back if someone's in our own life today right now before us.
[SPEAKER_06]: We really don't see the effect that they have on the world.
[SPEAKER_06]: I don't know the effect that I have on the world.
[SPEAKER_06]: And as a second point, if one of the major points of Dharma or religion, as we can debate, is that people like Sri Ramakrishna see something fundamental about reality itself, that I don't.
[SPEAKER_06]: Then how can I be the judge of the effect that they have?
[SPEAKER_06]: If the whole point is that they're trying to tell me something I haven't heard yet, or haven't realized yet.
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, that's right.
[SPEAKER_04]: Well, the second question I can take first, because the great masters often respond to this.
[SPEAKER_04]: This is an invitation to have that realization, by undertaking a spiritual discipline, being very serious about it, being devoted to it, not giving up, being patient and persistent.
[SPEAKER_04]: And then once I heard of Provejica from our tradition speaking, and someone asked a question, why did Brahman become the world or something like that, and she said,
[SPEAKER_04]: get realization and you'll know why you became the world, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: And that's what that was a wonderful answer.
[SPEAKER_04]: And this is where the word religion I think still has maybe some use.
[SPEAKER_04]: These things are a matter of faith until they become a matter of knowledge.
[SPEAKER_04]: And they become a matter of knowledge only through practice.
[SPEAKER_04]: So, I tend to think, and I talk to friends of mine to think, oh, that's kind of a wieny understanding of religion.
[SPEAKER_04]: But I think of a religion almost as something like a working hypothesis.
[SPEAKER_04]: And I'm going to live this way and follow this practice and see what happens.
[SPEAKER_04]: What Gandhi called experiments with truth.
[SPEAKER_04]: And what you will find depending on what you're practicing is it's either transforming your life in positive ways.
[SPEAKER_04]: Or it's not.
[SPEAKER_04]: Now as you say, we get to quote Gandalf, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: Even the very wise cannot see all things.
[SPEAKER_04]: We don't know the effects of our actions in the future.
[SPEAKER_04]: And I think the effects of Sri Ramakrishna's life are still unfolding and will be for centuries to come.
[SPEAKER_04]: But in terms of that first question, I think that the pragmatic criterion is one criterion.
[SPEAKER_04]: I don't think we can rely fully on it.
[SPEAKER_04]: And in fact, James himself said it was good on the whole and he coined this term on the wholeisms, which he was very fond of and he was basically saying, okay, take what I'm saying to be true, most of the time in most cases, but there will be exceptions.
[SPEAKER_04]: So pragmatism in a drive some phosphorus crazy because it's not super precise, like analytic philosophy.
[SPEAKER_04]: This is kind of what happens most of the time, and we know that.
[SPEAKER_04]: So there are still the criteria of logic.
[SPEAKER_04]: There's still the scientific method.
[SPEAKER_04]: I mean, that all remains, I think.
[SPEAKER_04]: In fact, from James's point of view, you should do all of that work first.
[SPEAKER_04]: And it's only when you're left with some proposition that is just escapes logical proof or disproved, that you then say, well,
[SPEAKER_04]: am I drawn to believe this, if I believe this, how will it affect my life, for me I believe in karma and rebirth affects how I interact with other people because I assume that everybody I meet I've probably met before and so I want to be on my best behavior and this might be my mother I'm talking to and that understanding that we're all interconnected very deeply.
[SPEAKER_04]: So whatever we do to others we do to ourselves.
[SPEAKER_04]: So for me, it's very powerful and it works.
[SPEAKER_04]: Sometimes that belief, also I think you need to look at, I think a revision maybe I would, if I can presume to revise James, would be to look at the whole context of the belief system too.
[SPEAKER_04]: Because you also have people who believe in Carmen Rebirth and use it to justify the fact that they're rich and other people are poor.
[SPEAKER_04]: Well, I was really good.
[SPEAKER_04]: And so, that seems to me to be not adequate to the larger spiritual vision that it worked there.
[SPEAKER_04]: So I guess that's my attempt to answer the first question, but yeah, that's a very good question.
[SPEAKER_01]: Firstly, thank you so much for your presentation.
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_01]: I do have a bunch of questions, but I'll keep it to two.
[SPEAKER_01]: Firstly, I've seen that integration is a broad theme, or at least the meta theme.
[SPEAKER_01]: Why do you think that is integration?
[SPEAKER_01]: Integration.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_01]: Could you say a little more of what your integration to
[SPEAKER_01]: the divine integration to some aspect or RBD system.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
[SPEAKER_04]: Okay, no, I'll give you a very traditional answer to that.
[SPEAKER_04]: This is because of our sunscars.
[SPEAKER_04]: This is because of everything we're carrying with us throughout this life and all the previous existences we've had.
[SPEAKER_04]: They've created certain tendencies and habits of mind that
[SPEAKER_04]: make certain aspects of reality very readily available to us and others more obscure.
[SPEAKER_04]: And very often the divine reality is very obscure to us because we've been conditioned or conditioned ourselves to orient toward the material reality.
[SPEAKER_04]: So, hey, to do it, but to quote Yoda,
[SPEAKER_04]: You must unlearn what you have learned right and so we have to and that's actually originally from the doubt ising and So it's difficult because changing habits is difficult and these are not simply habits of maybe the last few years or this lady They go back lifetimes, so they're
[SPEAKER_04]: They're human species since God are some of them and so we have to we have to work with that And that's why so many various spiritual disciplines are given and if you have the good fortune to have a guru or someone very close to you that can Sort of look into your consciousness They can tell you Maybe this type of spiritual practice You know, maybe invite of it on to works for you, but not mock on you or maybe mock on you works for you and not that way though it on the end
[SPEAKER_04]: And that will then help you make that change.
[SPEAKER_04]: You need to make that integration more seamless and happen more readily.
[SPEAKER_04]: And when it comes, it comes like a thunderbolt, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: It's like, this is why, and then they talk about sudden awakening.
[SPEAKER_04]: Because you're meditating, you're meditating, you're meditating.
[SPEAKER_04]: You've been meditating now for decades, and nothing has happened, and then suddenly, there it is.
[SPEAKER_04]: But all that work is happening on the unconscious level.
[SPEAKER_01]: understood.
[SPEAKER_01]: The second question I had was, the second question I had was, in the practice of it, Sathana or meditation, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: There is always, almost always this ask for something right and for an example Shree Ramakrishna had the site or had the was seeking the site of Makali right.
[SPEAKER_01]: In that state of a desperation or meditation right,
[SPEAKER_01]: it being a delusion.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think this is what you also mentioned in your presentation as well.
[SPEAKER_01]: How do we actually know if it is
[SPEAKER_01]: delusion, or it is the avikintut.
[SPEAKER_04]: Right.
[SPEAKER_04]: How do we know if it's delusional?
[SPEAKER_04]: And of course, one criteria in the one I mentioned was the William James criterion, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: Is if I accept this as real, what is it going to do to my life?
[SPEAKER_04]: And in fact, Swami Vivekananda, when He was still in the renderer and not thought that when He first encountered Sri Ramakrishna, and Sri Ramakrishna touched His chest and He started to have a spiritual awakening.
[SPEAKER_04]: And he said, what are you doing?
[SPEAKER_04]: I have, you know, he sounded like one of my students.
[SPEAKER_04]: I have exams, I have family, I have, and he had responsibilities.
[SPEAKER_04]: And she didn't record just like, he, it doesn't all have to happen now.
[SPEAKER_04]: And he, you know, relented.
[SPEAKER_04]: But, yeah, I think,
[SPEAKER_04]: Swami Vivekananda, Narendra Nathata, intuitively understood that at that stage of his life, he was not ready for that realization.
[SPEAKER_04]: But that it would come in time, and that what it required then was to get on the path with meant, which meant coming back to Sri Ramakrishna, asking questions, being part of that community, and doing some kind of practice, which he eventually learned.
[SPEAKER_04]: And so there are some things that we can't accept right away.
[SPEAKER_04]: Also, and I think we can't underestimate this our own capacity for self-dollusion, that you might have some vision or something that gives you some very grandiose idea about yourself.
[SPEAKER_04]: And there's a great story about this again from the Zen tradition.
[SPEAKER_04]: There was a novice monk, and he was meditating, and he suddenly had one of these visionary experiences.
[SPEAKER_04]: He saw a celestial city, and he saw dragons flying around, and dragons are very positive image in Japan.
[SPEAKER_04]: There's symbols of wisdom.
[SPEAKER_04]: And he thought, oh, I'm on the verge of enlightenment.
[SPEAKER_04]: So he rushed to his, his rochi, his, his guru, his master, and he said, master, I just had this vision, and he described it to him in great detail.
[SPEAKER_04]: And said, just keep meditating, and it'll go away.
[SPEAKER_04]: So I think it's good to have discernment within ourselves, and also some kind of guide.
[SPEAKER_04]: I think some kind of guru or teacher who knows these things well and that you can trust.
[SPEAKER_04]: Now, of course, that becomes a question, who can you trust?
[SPEAKER_04]: Because if you go online and say, I need a guru, you'll get five million emails, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: But I think too that we have to trust our intuitions.
[SPEAKER_04]: I could give you an answer, well, if you do this and this and it's correct, if you don't and then this is wrong.
[SPEAKER_04]: But there's a Christian philosopher, Blaze Pascal, he had this wonderful expression.
[SPEAKER_04]: He said, the heart has reasons that reason does not know.
[SPEAKER_04]: Um, I think that finding a teacher, getting on the right path, this is a little bit like falling in love, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: It's like finding your partner in life.
[SPEAKER_04]: It's like, you know, you just feel comfortable with this and that this is right and it's, and it's
[SPEAKER_04]: And if you look at it as objectively as possible, which is hard to do, but you see, okay, this is actually having beneficial effects on my life.
[SPEAKER_04]: My relationships are improving.
[SPEAKER_04]: Or I'm getting further away from the people who were harmful in my life.
[SPEAKER_04]: And I'm meeting new associates and having a better experience.
[SPEAKER_04]: Like all of these little signs are things that I think we need to be attentive to.
[SPEAKER_04]: Because, yeah, we can, that there's no, there's no Satan in the Dante understanding or treasure.
[SPEAKER_04]: But the ego plays that role very happily.
[SPEAKER_04]: And, you know, so we have to always be wary of that.
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_00]: Unfortunately, we have to come to the end, and this was absolutely wonderful, thank you, Jeff, and now the reason why we're going to be asking you back again and again, so everybody, please join me in giving a round of applause.
[SPEAKER_04]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_04]: Thank you.