#143 Hinduism, Consciousness and Advaita Vedanta - Swami Sarvapriyananda

21:27Swami Sarvapriyananda:So you have a whole range of texts different in size and yes, and the commentators have commented on those texts and that is the basis of the different schools of Vedanta. Primarily, documentaries of Shankaracharya and his disciples form the basis of what we call Advaita Vedanta, which we are talking about today.

21:49Alex O'Connor:Okay. So lots of questions springing up. And I'm conscious here that people listening to this, this might be sort of their first real engagement with this material. So I want to be clear. We'll get back to the show in just a moment. But first, this year is just flying by and I've been really busy. And I'm the kind of person who will get like halfway through the day and then realize that I've forgotten to eat, but also that I'm so deep in my work that I don't want to stop and go and cook or buy something. In those moments, which have been happening quite frequently as of late, I've been using today's sponsor, Huel, to solve the problem.

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23:34Alex O'Connor:And with that said, back to the show. And the first question, I don't want to go too deep on this, but just as a clarification, the idea that within Hinduism, the answer to everything is yes and no. I know what you mean. But then some people might sort of ask, well, then how can we even use a term like Hinduism? What can Hinduism be if for basically any important philosophical or theological dispute, there are people who think one way or the other? Like to be a Christian, you believe in Jesus. To be a Muslim, you believe in Tarweed and you believe in the Prophet Muhammad. Is there anything unifying this tradition of Hinduism whereby you can say that this belief or this worldview is definitely not Hindu?

24:15Alex O'Connor:Yes.

24:16Swami Sarvapriyananda:So, for example, what we were just talking about, the Vedas and the Upanishads, they are commonly regarded as the central texts or the root texts of Hindus broadly across the traditions. Now, some traditions like Advaita Vedanta would firmly root themselves in the Upanishads and the Vedas thereby. And you can clearly see it's a Vedic tradition. Some other later developments would have drifted far away from the original texts, but they would root themselves in texts which are rooted or which are hark back to the Vedic past. So directly or indirectly, all of them would accept the Vedas as fundamental or as sources.

24:57Swami Sarvapriyananda:None of them would, for example, reject the Vedas. So, for example, if you rejected the Vedas, you would be considered outside Hinduism, as the Buddha did. So the Buddhist schools do not accept the Vedas as a revealed truth or as a sin. They do not. And therefore, they are not considered Hindus traditionally, nor would the Jains be considered Hindus.

25:20Alex O'Connor:And so since these texts are foundational to understanding what it means to be a Hindu, you just said the word, I think you said, I can't remember the exact word you used. You said these texts are not received or revealed or something. For Christians, the Holy Spirit guides the development of the Gospels, and maybe Moses wrote the Pentateuch. For Muslims, God dictates the Quran to Muhammad. For Hindu, where do the Vedas come from? Who writes them, and what is the origin of the message?

25:55Swami Sarvapriyananda:So the Vedas, the sources are what are called the rishis. Rishis literally means sages. And they're not one. Many of them. In many cases, we just have the names which are found in the texts themselves. And the idea is that these rishis, they perceived already existing spiritual truths. So these Vedas are supposed to be a collection of spiritual truths. They already exist, much like the discovery of scientific truths. But these are truths of the spiritual life. And these rishis, over time, they have discovered this and then put them into the form, the Sanskrit form in which we find them. Again, there is a wide variety of opinions.

26:36Swami Sarvapriyananda:A very orthodox scholar, orthodox Hindu might hold that, oh no, no, no, the rishis actually saw these truths in the Sanskrit, in the very form in which we find them in the books. So he just heard these or saw these and said it out aloud. Others might say that they saw the principle and then they put it in the texts which we find them now. But the idea is common. The source is the rishis. And then there are the avatars who are the incarnations of God. So like Rama and Krishna and others who come again and again in the history of Hinduism to revive religion as it were, to re-establish the truths of religion over the centuries.

27:25Swami Sarvapriyananda:So these are the sources, and numerous philosophers and saints who have drawn upon these sources. So the fundamental sources would be the Upanishads, which is revealed to the rishis or seen by the rishis, and then the Gita, which is the one book which is most well-known about Hinduism, but which is not actually part of the Vedas or the Upanishads. It's a teaching given by the incarnation of God Krishna to his disciple, the warrior prince Arjuna. But if you see the actual text of the Gita, it liberally draws from the Upanishads. So there the Upanishads are actually the source, and Krishna is more like a major teacher of the Upanishadic doctrine in a later age.

28:12Alex O'Connor:so these um these these sages who i i guess sort of discovered these spiritual truths are they thought to be a bit like say a scientist like einstein who is a genius who just worked out a truth and now everybody's like yeah we we just agree that that's true uh and they just sort of hit on it and it stuck for that reason or is it more like a religious prophet where these these guys had some kind of special ability or like special revelation or they were sort of communicating with God or something and that's where they got the message from or was it just that people were all trying to work stuff out some people happened to hit on the right kind of thing and therefore they got this this classification of sage the second one actually so if you look at the

28:59Swami Sarvapriyananda:understanding of a rishi in hinduism even today it's people who meditated who thought deeply about it. In fact, one of the names for these rishis is one name is Muni, which means to, Muni would literally mean to contemplate, to think deeply. And they came upon these truths. Now, these truths were existing. They didn't invent them. They didn't spin it out of their own minds. It's important to note that all of these schools hold that these are eternally existing truths. But they came upon them through spiritual practices like meditation and philosophical practices like deep thinking. They were already seekers, spiritual seekers, and they're supposed to be enlightened.

29:42Swami Sarvapriyananda:And they come across these truths and therefore leaving open the possibility that these rishis will keep coming through the ages. The Vedas themselves are a fixed body of texts. But if you see the Vedas as existing spiritual truths, there's always the possibility of finding newer and newer truths. In fact, one recent great teacher in Hinduism, Swami Vivekananda, who is central to our tradition, the particular tradition of Advaita Vedanta, which I belong to, he said that there can be other rishis too, and these Vedas are the common property of all humanity, and you find the spiritual truths in every religion.

30:23Swami Sarvapriyananda:That's how a religion starts, with the discovery of some spiritual truths, and there will be more to come in future. LinkedIn is pretty amazing at helping you grow your small business. We cannot make your email response time faster. We can help you sell, market, and hire in one place. We cannot help you find space for your three desk drinks. Why do you have three? And while we can't help you find the perfect volume for your presentation video, LinkedIn can help you find the perfect audience for your business. Grow your small business on LinkedIn. Learn more at linkedin.com slash smallbusiness.

30:59Alex O'Connor:Spring is here, and there's a whole new way to chai at Starbucks that's made perfect for you. Choose your sweetness, dial it up, or keep things light. Add a touch of pistachio, a hint of strawberry, or vanilla, or make it a spring classic with lavender. Because this season, there's endless ways to chai at Starbucks. I see. Okay, so hopefully some sort of necessary groundwork out of the way, just to give people a picture of where this is all coming from. uh this word upanishad um which is sort of known as the title of these texts but it literally means something like to sit down next to right which implies that these are teaching so somebody would kind of sit down next to some kind of sage or teacher and they would they would tell them these these these lessons and that's where we get this word from it's this idea of sort of a message being taught by somebody who knows, something important to somebody who doesn't.

32:00Swami Sarvapriyananda:Yes. So the Upanishads are primarily a knowledge tradition. It's something to be learned here. Yes, there's something to be believed, something to be practiced, but all of that comes later. So it's a knowledge tradition. Literally, the word Upanishads give you two derivations. One meaning would be the old meaning, which is the basic meanings of a secret knowledge which is transmitted from teacher to student. A more detailed etymology would mean the word Upanishad has been explained by one commentator as upa means to sit near a teacher. So upa literally means to sit near. And ni, the prefix ni means ascertaining with clarity.

32:42Swami Sarvapriyananda:So you reason, argue, thrash it out till it's very clear to you what you're talking about. And sat, the The root sat has these three meanings. That which destroys ignorance. That which takes you to the ultimate reality. And that which frees you from the travails of samsara, of worldly existence. So Upanishad, if you put it together, you go near a teacher of the tradition. Whichever school of the Upanishads you are following, whichever school of Vedanta, you go near the teacher. and the teacher transmits this knowledge, which one must then absorb through philosophical reasoning, meditation, and the result would be overcoming ignorance about our real nature, attainment of our true real nature, and then the result of it, the freedom from the suffering of samsara, attainment of fulfillment.

33:34Swami Sarvapriyananda:So the word Upanishad covers all of it. If you actually go into the Upanishads, you begin to see what's happening. There are certain common features. In fact, stepping back a little, I just said that the Vedas are common to the Hindus. Hindus would generally accept the Vedas as authoritative. But if you want philosophically, what's common to Hinduism philosophically? There are certain ideas. For example, karma, which is causality. Actions have consequences. And that's very important because what we see in our lives are consequences of past actions. And as an extension of that comes this idea of multiple existences, multiple lifetimes.

34:13Swami Sarvapriyananda:We are not created with our birth. We do not die with our death. We have existed, lived many times earlier, and will continue to do so until there is some kind of spiritual resolution of this. So these are something which are common to all the wildly diverse schools of Hinduism. Karma, rebirth, the Vedas. And that's why I would feel you belong to a common tradition across the geography of India, for example, or through time, through centuries and millennia, if an ancient Hindu would come, nothing really dies in Hinduism. So in some form or the other, the ancient Hindu would recognize, yes, this is a tradition I recognize.

34:55Swami Sarvapriyananda:Okay, so back to the Upanishads. You would see in the texts, in most cases, you would find a teacher and a student. And a student comes with a question. And these questions are deeply philosophical. So for example, there is a question, Sir, what is that by knowing which one can know everything? So that's a question you find in multiple Upanishads. And you can see it's a very scientific question that way, like asking for a grand unified theory or a theory of everything. What is that by which everything is known? And then the Upanishad starts, the teacher starts teaching. or one might ask how is it sir that i see i hear i smell i i taste i think i imagine i speak what is that one shining being which makes all these experiences possible you can clearly see here it's an ancient question about the nature of consciousness what am i exactly what's going on here basically what makes all this possible you know what uh the the neuroscientist christophe calls the feeling of life itself, consciousness, the feeling of life itself.

36:05Swami Sarvapriyananda:And here is an ancient Upanishadic student who starts the Upanishad by asking, by what is this life, this experience of life, by what is it made possible? What's that one thing which makes all of this possible? In fact, the Upanishad is called Kena Upanishad, by whom or by what. Kena means by whom or by what. And the answer is consciousness and the rest of the Upanishad an exploration of consciousness, what consciousness really is. And you might find another question where, what happens after death? So the big one, you know. So these questions, and the answer is more or less the same answer all the time.

36:46Swami Sarvapriyananda:That there is, and that's Vedanta basically. So if I might go into that at this point, take a look at actually what Vedanta says. Well yeah, because that's the thing.

36:57Alex O'Connor:we've got this groundwork of what these texts are and the reason I sort of tried to establish that was to be like, okay, that's all very interesting but what do they say? What do they tell us?

37:08Swami Sarvapriyananda:Right. And for the purpose of this discussion, I'll limit myself to the Advaita Vedanta interpretation of these texts. That's my tradition and that's the one we are really interested in for certain reasons in this kind of a conversation. That is more philosophy than religion to put it bluntly. Now, though there is a vast range of texts, a vast range of teachers, and across a vast range of time, centuries and millennia, the beauty and elegance of Advaita Vedanta is it can be stated very simply. It can be stated in half a verse, it can be stated in one short sentence or even one syllable, the whole of Advaita Vedanta.

37:53Swami Sarvapriyananda:So, one way of putting the entire teachings of the Upanishads is that Brahman is the reality, the world is an appearance, and you are Brahman. The word for ultimate reality in the Upanishads is Brahman. It's not different from Brahmin, which is a caste. But Brahman, etymologically and in the Upanishads also, philosophically too, Brahman just means the vast, the limitless. Often in Upanishads you will find, instead of the names of the Hindu deities which came much later, you will find words like tat, which is exactly what it sounds like in English, that. So the name for the ultimate reality is that.

38:40Swami Sarvapriyananda:Or the name for the ultimate reality is Brahman, the vast. It literally means the vast. Or sometimes it's called limitless, anantam. So one way of summarizing the entire teaching of Advaita Vedanta, of all the Upanishads is this Brahman is the only reality that there is. The world which we experience, what we take to be real is an appearance of that reality. So it is not real, it's an appearance and the reality which is not evident is Brahman. It reminds me of the idealist philosopher Bradley who said, what appears is not real and reality does not appear. And then what are we in this whole Brahman and world equation?

39:28Swami Sarvapriyananda:Where are we in this? And he says, you are none other than Brahman. The Sanskrit being Brahmasattyam Jagatmitya Jeeva Brahmaivanapara. Brahman is the reality. The world is an appearance. And the sentient being, you or I, each one of us, is Brahman in its entirety. You can make it even shorter. The famous Tattvamasi, you are that. Tattvamasi, you are that ultimate reality. Brahman is equal to Atman. And even the famous monosyllable Aum, one of the Upanishads, The shortest of the Upanishads, the Mandukya Upanishad, is actually an explanation of Aum. And there is a whole thing about it where it's shown that Aum teaches you this very thing, that you are that ultimate reality.

40:16Swami Sarvapriyananda:So this is, briefly put, this incredible claim of the Upanishads, at least on the Advaita Vedanta interpretation of it, that what this world appears to us and what we appear to ourselves is not the final truth about ourselves. It appears that there is an external material world which we are experiencing, and we are a tiny, tiny part of it, and we are these bodies, and quite possibly these minds and personalities which are embodied. And that's it. That's where we start. And Advaita Vedanta, on the authority of the Upanishads, claims that we are deeply mistaken. And we are mistaken because we do not know what we truly are.

41:02Swami Sarvapriyananda:So first comes an ignorance about our real nature, which is Brahman. We'll come to what Brahman is. And because of this ignorance of our true nature, we take what appears to us to be the final reality. What appears to us is this body with its mind and personality. And I think, I am this. We don't even question it. And the moment I think, I am this, this body and mind, the rest of it falls into place. Yes, as the body and this mind, this little person, I am little. This is a vast universe. It's huge. The more we have investigated from the time of the ancient Vedic sages till today, we just find it seems to be limitless physically.

41:41Swami Sarvapriyananda:It seems to be limitless even temporarily. We are born and we clearly as bodies, we are born and we will die very soon. We are not even a flicker in the history of the universe. whereas Vedanta claims that you are not this body, you are not this mind, rather you are this background, ultimate reality, Brahman. What is this ultimate reality? So the question arises then, as long as we are the body and the mind, we know what we are. We are this flesh and blood and bones and brain and the thoughts and feelings and life. But if you are not this, then what are we? and the answer that the Upanishads give is pretty deep there.

42:25Swami Sarvapriyananda:Brahman is described as existence, consciousness, bliss. Sat, chit, ananda. What is this existence? It's not an existing thing. Rather, it's the existence of all things. It's like going into a jewelry shop, the example which I like, you see bracelets and necklaces and rings, they're all made of gold. and somebody tells you the reality is gold it's not a necklace now that does not mean gold is a new kind of ornament you can't you won't find gold if you look at the catalog of of ornaments or jewelry in that shop rather now that does not again mean gold is theoretical rather gold is real so when we talk about existence as the reality and not existing things people might immediately think that you're just playing with words and there'll be any number of linguistic philosophers in Oxford or Cambridge, at least in the 60s or 70s, 750s, would have said, it's just quibbling.

43:25Swami Sarvapriyananda:It's just a ghost generated by language. There's no such thing as existence. In a certain sense, they're right. There is no such thing as existence. But it is the reality of all things, and it's not an abstraction. Advaita Vedanta would tell you, compared to existence, existing things are abstractions. In fact, what we would take as a very undeniable real world is actually ghostly abstract compared to the even more stunning reality, which is existence itself, even more undeniable reality with existence itself. So that is called sat. and then there is Chit. Chit means consciousness. Another way of looking at life is that all of life is conscious experience like Christophe Kochs who named his recent book The Feeling of Life Itself.

44:19Swami Sarvapriyananda:So the feeling of life itself is consciousness basically. Bernardo Kastrup says even matter and energy and other stuff we consider to be real, they are all presentations in consciousness. All that we have is a series of conscious experiences. If you take it that way, Brahman is consciousness itself. Not a particular conscious experience, but just like the gold in all golden ornaments, it is what is called pure consciousness or bare consciousness or consciousness itself, which appears as conscious experiences which constitute our lived experience of life. Also, it is the source of all values, ananda, bliss.

45:00Swami Sarvapriyananda:It's the point of everything. In fact, one way of understanding Brahman would be, and I think it's a tremendously inspiring way of understanding Brahman, the ultimate reality is, the three fundamental questions of philosophy. What is real? The answer to which is metaphysics. How do you know anything? The answer to which is epistemology. And what's the point of anything at all? What's the value in all of this? The answer to this is axiology, you know, ethics and aesthetics and all of that, morals and all of that. and if you don't in this context if you look at brahman you see it is answering these three questions what is reality the answer to the great metaphysical questions the answer from advaita vedanta is sat being existence how is knowledge possible how is experience possible the answer from advaita vedanta is chit consciousness bare consciousness and is there a point to this at all or is it all constructed by us?

45:59Swami Sarvapriyananda:Is there value or point? Advaita Vedanta says certainly there is and the answer to that is bliss, ananda, joy, bliss, fulfillment, you can put it that way. And then Advaita goes further and says these are not three different things, they are the same thing. There is one ultimate reality which is the basis of all real things. It is the basis of all conscious experience and it is that which is manifested as all purpose, value, all seeking, the point of it all. It is in itself, it is the answer to, it is metaphysics, epistemology and axiology all combined together. And Advaita Vedanta rounds it up with the even more stunning claim that this Brahman, this metaphysical, epistemological and axiological ultimate is you.

46:53Swami Sarvapriyananda:You are that. You are that. You are that. Tattva Masi. Or I am Brahmasmi. I am Brahman. And this is what has to be realized. We don't know that. Quite obviously, we don't know that at all. This is what has to be realized. And once we realize this, that actually, there's a very practical result to that. That leads to fulfillment and transcendence of suffering, Vedanta would say that's, in fact, the point of all of this, point of life and existence here. So that's the big story in a nutshell.

47:26Alex O'Connor:Kayak gets my flight, hotel, and rental car right, so I can tune out travel advice that's just plain wrong. Bro, Skycoin, way better than points. Never fly during a Scorpio full moon. Just tell the manager you'll sue. Instant room upgrade. Stop taking bad travel advice. Start comparing hundreds of sites with kayak and get your trip right. Bad advice? You talking to me? Kayak. Got that right. Yeah, I mean, it's a lot, right? And also, it's very difficult to discuss these ideas with precise language. And one thing that's very clear is that a lot of the time we sort of have to skirt around the edges, use analogies, sort of come at the same topic from different angles before an image begins to sort of form.

48:15Alex O'Connor:And I just wanted to add a footnote here that this is not unique to Advaita Vedanta or Indian philosophy or Hinduism, right? If you speak to a Thomist who is in love with the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, they will tell you that God is the same thing as being itself, being qua being. They prefer Latin to Sanskrit, you know, and they'll say, they'll say being qua being. is what God is and goodness is just being and evil is just non-being. And for somebody who hears that for the first time, they might sort of be like, well, you know, what can you even possibly mean by that? You have to sit with it.

48:53Alex O'Connor:You have to sort of, you have to really sort of maybe change the way you're thinking about things in order to even just to understand what a person is driving at. But I just want to clarify that this crops up all over the place. Even, you know, one of my my favorite hobbies at the moment is to look at basic concepts in physics and just go on the wikipedia page and a lot of people think that this like philosophy and certainly religion is this sort of like wishy-washy using words that don't have precise meanings and i'm like okay as opposed to something like science which is very specific and precise okay just go and read the wikipedia entry for energy or for mass or for charge.

49:38Alex O'Connor:And look at those sentences that come up. Imagine how they read to somebody who isn't well-versed in physics, and it begins to sound the same. Any discipline is going to be very, very difficult to start talking about unless you're already a bit steeped in that discipline, because it's all new. It's like a whole new language. And so Brahman, ultimate reality, Brahman is just what is. And as Thomas would say, God is just being itself. A Vedantist might say, you know, Brahman is just being, like it's just existence. And I also like how you clarified that existence is not the same thing as existing things.

50:20Alex O'Connor:And the way that I'm thinking about that and tell me sort of what you think is like, you know, I've got like two objects here, right? I've got an SD card in one hand and I've got a magnet in the other, right? These both exist. And insofar as they both exist, what is the thing they share in common? You know, they don't share any matter. They don't share a position in space. They don't share a creator. They're not created by the same thing in the same factory, but they've got something in common with each other and that they're both here. They both exist. Whatever that sort of mysterious thing is, the thing that the magnet and the SD card have in common is just what existence itself is.

50:58Alex O'Connor:And that is what we're associating with Brahman here, right? Yes.

51:04Swami Sarvapriyananda:One example that's often used in Vedanta is the dream example. That helps us to understand. So as you said, analogies, examples, it's very difficult to come to this straight away through first principle thinking but it that's also done i'll come to that shortly but first examples so i give you the gold and ornaments example a much more personal example startling example would be the dream example so um if i say the sd card and the other thing that you showed um yeah a magnet a magnet just got a magnet if i say No, they are basically the same underlying reality appearing in two different ways. It sounds nice, but whatever do you mean exactly?

51:47Swami Sarvapriyananda:What is that underlying reality? Now, let's just imagine you suddenly wake up and you realize you were dreaming. Now it makes sense that the SD card and the magnet, which are in two different places, and they're made of two different things, and they exist apart from each other. They look different. They do different things. They have different functions, names, positions in space, their own independent existence and value. All of that seems to be different. How are they one? Now we immediately see, aha, what you meant was that I dreamt it up. so the the in reality now upon waking up i see that it was not a magnet it was not an sd card sd card was nothing other than me the dreamer the magnet was nothing other than me the dreamer my dreaming mind projected the two in fact even the space in which they are separately located the space itself was dreamt up by me and the names and the forms and the functions and the space Everything was dreamt up by me.

52:50Swami Sarvapriyananda:In fact, all that there was, was the dreaming mind, which, however, was not part of the show. Like the screen on which a movie is shown, the screen is not part of the plot of a Harry Potter movie. It's nowhere there. But it's possible. It belongs to an entirely different order of reality, if you will. That's great. I've never heard that before, you know.

53:12Alex O'Connor:So that's quite a helpful analogy.

53:14Swami Sarvapriyananda:yes so the dream example is used again an analogy is used again and again in uh oh i i talk about

53:21Alex O'Connor:dreaming all the time when i'm talking about consciousness because it helps so many things become clear but that that idea of the screen not being a part of harry potter is amazing but just to be clear this is an analogy right you're not saying by this that right now i'm somehow sort of dreaming up the the sd card and the magnet i as far as i understand this is just an analogy right to say that like when we say that everything is just brahman and everything just sort of exists in in consciousness it functions in a similar way to how the objects in my dream relate to me that's how like objects in the real world and you know what i call myself and stuff relate to to ultimate reality brahman yes you're right when these analogies are used

54:08Swami Sarvapriyananda:or metaphors are used, they are used to point out something. And it's always warned in the teaching tradition that it depends on the skill of the teacher to deploy these analogies carefully. Because then otherwise, the teacher might know what they mean, what he's trying to convey by that. But it might not be clear to the student, if it's not used properly, it will lead to wildly inaccurate understanding. So for example, as you just said, if the dream analogy is not used properly, one might think, oh, are you saying something like Berkeley, subjective idealism? Just as I dreamt of stuff in my dream, I am dreaming of this world in my mind.

54:49Swami Sarvapriyananda:Only I, the mind, exist, and this body and the world are all parts of... No, it's not a subjective idealism. But then certain things are meant, are carried over from the dream analogy to the Advaitic teaching. Just as everything existed, nothing was other than the dreamer's mind, and everything existed or appeared in the dreamer's mind, so also, in place of the dreamer's mind, think of Brahman, a limitless existence consciousness. And the universe, and the individual beings, and their minds, they are all appearing in this underlying reality. And you are not that particular body mind which you identify yourself with, you are actually that limitless underlying reality.

55:36Swami Sarvapriyananda:So this is what is being pointed towards. If it was said that you, Alex, are dreaming of this universe and Swami is part of Alex's dream and the universe is part of Alex's dream. No, this is not what Advaita Vedanta is saying. It's something close to what Barclay might have been saying, but not Advaita Vedanta. But Advaita Vedanta is saying that there is one consciousness, one underlying being consciousness, which is appearing to itself as multiple subjects like Alex and Swami and a vast objective universe. So that's closer to what's being said. Going back to the non-dualism in, say, Catholic theology, One approach for a person who's trained in Catholic theology towards Advaita Vedanta, very wonderful approach, would be Meister Eckhart, the German Catholic theologian who lived about 800 years ago, I think just after Thomas Akinis probably.

56:39Swami Sarvapriyananda:And the stuff he says there is uncannily like, you know, you just feel like reading for an Advaitin, it feels like I'm reading an Advaitic text. For example, let me give you one example, which will immediately match what we are talking about. he says the ground of god and the ground of my soul are one and the same ground so i the individual being what i am in reality that ground and god the cosmic being the cosmic reality what that is in reality is the same ground so there is an underlying oneness which appears then as me the guy and the universe and the god of this universe but there is one underlying absolute.

57:21Swami Sarvapriyananda:Yes. But if I might, let me take it in another direction. Advaita Vedanta, I find, one of the unique advantages of Advaita Vedanta, it addresses the concern which you raised earlier. When you straight away talk about limitless existence consciousness, it seems so far away from what we think of ourselves and experience the world as. It sounds like some, you know, like some extraordinary philosophy, speculation, nice in itself, very academic, not really, and difficult to access. But there's the beauty of Advaita Vedanta. What Advaita Vedanta also does, there's this methodology of Advaita Vedanta.

58:05Swami Sarvapriyananda:And it goes all the way back to the Upanishads. It starts with how we experience ourselves and the world. And it takes us step by step, right here and now, to seeing for ourselves how this could be one limitless existence consciousness, please. And how I could be that Brahman. And this process in Sanskrit is called vichara. Vichara means inquiry. A philosophical inquiry which is based on our experience. What modern philosophy might call a phenomenological... In fact, one philosopher named it a logico-phenomenological procedure. So there are these multiple inquiries set up in Advaita Vedanta. And we go back to the Upanishads, which help us to see for ourselves right now what they are talking about.

58:55Swami Sarvapriyananda:And right now, it's not postponed to a future. It's not postponed, well, when God is gracious upon you, then you will see for yourself. Or when you go to heaven, a post-mortem enlightenment. Not that. Right now, in this life, and using nothing but reason and our already available experience, let me contrast this with an ancient debate which the non-dualist adwaitis had with the yogis that's another school of philosophy by yoga i don't mean the yoga pants and stuff this stretchy kind of yoga that's part of yoga that's the physical side of yoga but yoga is a philosophy and i've heard

59:32Alex O'Connor:you say once that um you were speaking to some american school kids in like los angeles and you started talking about yoga and one of the kids from la goes like oh you have yoga in india as world. Absolutely.

59:44Swami Sarvapriyananda:Yoga is so popular in the United States. In New York, every other block has a yoga studio. And it is not unrelated. It is, in fact, part of the larger yoga tradition in India. But there's a school of yoga, a philosophical school of yoga, which is a rival to Advaita Vedanta, a rival in multiple ways, primarily metaphysically. The yoga school is allied to another rival school called the Sankhya school, which is a metaphysical dualism and very ancient and actually very logically acceptable. It's pretty much like the modern pan-psychist approach. There is consciousness and there's material reality and they interact.

1:00:24Swami Sarvapriyananda:That's it. That's the universe. Where do they interact? Us. We are combinations of consciousness and material reality. They say you cannot reduce consciousness to material reality. They came up with this hard problem of consciousness thousands of years before David Chalmers. So you cannot reduce consciousness to the material reality, but neither can you reduce material reality to consciousness. And they interact and in us. Advaita Vedanta starts where this school stops. It says that how do they interact? Like any dualism, which Descartes discovered much later, the mind-body dualism, it's very difficult to reconcile.

1:00:58Swami Sarvapriyananda:If you say two utterly different realities and yet intimately interacting how. But that's the metaphysical side. Let me come to the practical side of the difference. The yogic school says you can attain enlightenment and realize yourself as pure consciousness by yogic practices. So like meditation, sit in this way, breathe in this way, visualize in this way, focus your mind and calm it down in this way. Then the separation between you and the body-mind will become clear to you. Great as far as it goes. But then it depends on a particular experience which you have to wait for or practice towards.

1:01:31Swami Sarvapriyananda:And that's the whole mystical, special experience type of approach which is so common in spirituality. And it's all very good in itself. And I think it's a genuine approach. But here is where Advaita Vedanta differs. Advaita Vedanta says you don't have to wait for special experiences. The experiences which we have right now can, if investigated, with the help of the Upanishads and reasoning, it can show you right now what you truly are. So for example, there are these different methods, which are inquiry methods, which take us from, the beauty of them is they take us from where we are right now, step by step to seeing what they are talking about.

1:02:11Swami Sarvapriyananda:How am I, this guy, Sarva Priyananda, this person sitting located in time and space with my own personal narrative, which my memory, my little story, how am I limitless existence consciousness placed the ground of this entire universe. And they say, you start where you are. You start with the body and then becoming present to the body. And it's a phenomenological investigation, a sort of inward journey. Then our attention is drawn to subtler and subtler aspects of our existence, which is already there. You draw your attention to the breath. Then you go deeper. You draw your attention to the mind.

1:02:45Swami Sarvapriyananda:And at each level of philosophical investigation is done to see that though you are experiencing the body you are not literally the body for example the very fact that you're experiencing the body they will say things like what's the difference between this rock and this body you don't say i experienced the rock i see it i can touch it but i never say i am the rock now this body i can experience it i can see it smell it taste it touch it every sense organ can objectify it. On what grounds are you saying, I am the body? And they will go through detailed philosophical investigation to show till you begin to see that, yeah, I don't mean I'm literally the body.

1:03:25Swami Sarvapriyananda:Then you say, then what are you literally? Go further inwards. Are you a mind which is embodied? And they will apply the same argument, the multiple, actually a series of phenomenological arguments to show and convince you. You're more like a philosophical lawyer, not like a mathematical proof, but more like a lawyer with a battery of arguments based on reason and evidence to show that you can't be the body, even if the body is being experienced. You can't be the vital forces, the breath, the prana, even though it's being experienced. You can't be the senses or the mind or the intellect even, which is doing all this analysis.

1:04:02Swami Sarvapriyananda:You can't even be a combination of all of these things. And then it asks the question, then what are you? Every step it asks you. You clearly do exist. They're very Descartesian that way, Cogito Ergosum. Even this very analysis shows that you do exist. Then what are you? Then what are you? And it finally forces us back to an actual phenomenological appreciation that I am awareness. I am this bare consciousness as a matter of fact right now, not as a fancy word or an abstract concept, not at all. It is it is the most undeniable feature of my experience of life and I must be that and so I'm compressing it a lot but we do it slowly and carefully and the the beauty of it is at no step should it be unreasonable it should be something that is clear to us rationally and even more amazing The claim is at every step, the student must come to this confession.

1:05:05Swami Sarvapriyananda:Yes, I experience it as such. It is an uncovering of our already existing experience, not new mystical experiences. Yes, that's right. That's what's so beautiful about it. It's a shared experience. And you come to the final truth that you are this consciousness. Then you go from there to actually what we are all left behind, the world, body, mind, that's also this consciousness. And then it's demonstrated to you that you are the underlying reality of this universe. And that does philosophically solve our problems.

1:05:42Alex O'Connor:Thought sweet green was just salads? Think again. There's a new way to do sweet green. Wrapped and ready. These handheld wraps pack bold flavor and 40 plus grams of protein into something hearty, satisfying, and built for life on the go. From craveable sauces to satisfying textures. They're designed to keep you going without slowing you down. So put that fork down. Try the new wraps today in app or at order.sweetgreen.com available at participating locations only. Yeah, okay. So, I mean, this sounds, I mean, this is great. You're not discovering through this reflection on your conscious experience.

1:06:24Alex O'Connor:You're not discovering some new state of enlightened thought where like you're getting all of this new kind of experience you're just distilling what's already there you're just being very careful to be precise about what you're talking about because like you say most people will will sort of if i if i cut my hand i might go oh i've cut myself you know but if i cut my hand off and i you know i probably wouldn't say that i've cut myself when that when that hand starts bleeding because i recognize my hand is not myself. And whenever I'm hungry, I feel it in my stomach. And if I start paying attention, I can really begin to detach myself from the hunger.

1:07:01Alex O'Connor:I'm like, there's this hunger that's happening to me, and it's down there. And I am aware of this thing that's separate from me, which instantly tells us something. And I've been asking people recently, in trying to get to what consciousness is, which is a similar kind of question, like what is consciousness itself a lot of the time people think that consciousness is the ability to feel pain or it is awareness or a sense of self or something and i just imagine if we took those things away so i love asking people if i took away your eyesight would you still be conscious oh i'd say of course i would be but i've removed one of the conscious experiences that you have but i haven't removed consciousness okay so what if you what if i removed your hearing as well You're still conscious, right?

1:07:48Alex O'Connor:And then I ask people, what if I removed your memory? And I don't mean like you suddenly forget everything. I mean, there's no such thing as memory. Like in every single instant that you're alive, no memory ever gets laid down. So there's no continuity. You don't know that these are your hands. You don't know where you are. You don't know how to use language. Anytime you try to have a thought, by the time you've got to the end of it, you've forgotten the beginning. And yet it seems like there would still be something I could call you. there would still be something that is conscious so we start stripping away all of this stuff you strip away and without memory you have no sense of self without you know if i take away your ability to feel pain i take away your memory i take away your eyesight what's the thing that you're left with and this process is not like you say some new kind of experience it's the removal of all of the rest to find out what what's really there at the center yes and when we do that What do you think we find at the center?

1:08:46Alex O'Connor:Do we find, would you say we find consciousness? Would you say we find Atman? Would you say we find the self? Would you say we find Brahman? Like, what is the nub at the center of the experience of the self?

1:08:57Swami Sarvapriyananda:We will find that we are being awareness, existence awareness. There's a new term being floated in new Advaita circles these days, presence. I like that. Presence has connotations of existence. And it's a conscious existence. It's a shining existence. We will find that. However, one has to be careful there that the find will be within quotes. The moment you find it, you are that. So it's not something that you have found in the way that we find the world or we find the body. Not in that sense. But it will be extraordinarily clear that I must be that. There's nothing else that I could be. And that being there, everything else is lit up by that.

1:09:42Swami Sarvapriyananda:There's a very beautiful Upanishadic verse which goes, that shining, everything else shines. By its light, everything here is lit up. So that shining, your mind is lit up. Thoughts and feelings and memories are lit up, if they are available at all. And the mind shining, then the senses get lit up. That means eyes and ears and all, they have sensory experiences. and the mind and the senses shining, the body and the world are revealed to us. So at the source, in fact, one of the terms used for consciousness in the Upanishads is light of lights. In the Gita, it's called a light of lights. Jyoti shama pitad jyoti.

1:10:21Swami Sarvapriyananda:It is the light of all lights. A light is defined as something that reveals. So something is in darkness. The world is in darkness and the sun rises. So the sun is a light. At night, the sun is not there. It's dark. So the moon is a light to the world. And your electric lights are lights. But so also are our own senses. Our senses are lights. Eyes are lights. Ears are lights for sound. So if something reveals something to us, gives knowledge of something that's a light. Language is a light that way. Our knowledge is a light that way. But what's the light of all of these? It's consciousness. Without consciousness, none of these lights.

1:10:58Swami Sarvapriyananda:They are all borrowed lights. Consciousness is the light of lights. and one has to be careful here and admit it freely that when we come to this sense of consciousness it's not the usual dictionary sense it's not the usual consciousness study sense we're coming to a very specialized use of the word consciousness here so being awareness that is the irreducible minimum but not as an object it's not something that you stumble across it's just what you literally must be, which is what is undeniable. One of the commentators says, in the very act of denying it, you affirm it, that you are this being awareness.

1:11:35Alex O'Connor:Yeah. Okay. So let's think about this for a moment. We've said that there are different interpretations of Vedanta. And you've mentioned, for example, the Sankhya school, who are dualists, much like a modern dualist in the Western tradition that people might be familiar with. they think there's kind of two types of stuff because yeah it seems a bit weird like i've got physical objects there's you know stuff that i can touch and it's all made out of atoms and then there's this consciousness and so some people believe that there are two types of stuff in the universe and so they're known as dualists right and one word we haven't yet defined is advaita right so vedanta is the study of the sort of the end as you put it of the of the vedas and the

1:12:25Alex O'Connor:as far as I'm aware, Advaita means non-dualistic. So when you say Advaita Vedanta, what you're describing is a non-dualistic interpretation of like the end of the Vedas or the Upanishads. And so the view is that there's kind of one type of stuff instead of two. And that one type of stuff, would you call consciousness?

1:12:49Swami Sarvapriyananda:Yes. That's a very good way of putting the whole debate. So when, as you said, when we look at our own experience, there seems to be two kinds of stuff. There is the stuff which we experience, the world, and us. So there are objects and there are subjects. And I am a subject and others, some of these objects look like subjects to me. So you can see all these objects around me. Even the computer is an object. But Alex doesn't seem to be just an object. Clearly an object to my senses, but also seems to be a subject like me. So there are subjects and objects. And Sankhya says, there must be a reality about these subjects and objects.

1:13:33Swami Sarvapriyananda:The monist would say that there's one kind of stuff and you have to reduce one to the other. The subject is reduced to the object, consciousness to matter by materialism. And most accepted physicalist schools today, those who are in consciousness studies, they will say that consciousness is basically brain or activity in the brain. That's reducing the subject to the object, consciousness to matter. The other way around would be someone like Berkeley or the ancient Buddhist mind-only school, which reduces the objects which appear to the mind which perceives those objects, which experiences those objects.

1:14:14Now, what Advaita Vedanta says, or what Sankhya says, Sankhya says, don't do that. There are two kinds of stuff, subjects and objects, or like Descartes, much later, minds

1:14:28Swami Sarvapriyananda:and bodies and objects, or minds and stuff which minds experience, and leave it at that. They are irreconcilable, they are irreducible, they just interact. The problem is again, how would they interact? It's a very, very serious problem. Descartes had no solution for it, nor did the Sankhians long ago. They could not explain it satisfactory. If utterly different kinds of stuff, how would they interact? What Advaita Vedanta does is, it says that there is one underlying reality which is appearing as these two kinds of stuff, as subject and object. So when we inquire, with the process of self-enquiry, we come to this irreducible consciousness awareness.

1:15:10Swami Sarvapriyananda:If you stop there, you have sankhya, a dualism, this bare consciousness awareness. And by the way, there, even what we thought of as consciousness as subjects, like the mind, in general discourse, the mind is the subject. But if you rigorously apply whatever appears to you, whatever can be experienced, or in Vedantic language, whatever can be termed this is an object, then the mind also becomes an object. Thoughts also become objects. Feelings also become objects. Ideas become objects. And the absence of all objects, like in deep sleep or in general anesthesia, that also, Advaita Vedanta would claim, that's an object too.

1:15:53Swami Sarvapriyananda:The absence of all objects is also experienced. Therefore, consciousness is there always and it's not an object. Now, if you stop there, you get a dualism. And Advaita says you cannot stop there. And hence non-dualism. Why can you not stop there? Because you cannot explain then how does this bare awareness interact with objects? How do you actually experience an object? I mean, that's also the hard problem of consciousness. It's the problem also in philosophy, what is called the standing scandal of idealism, that you cannot easily refute idealism. how does this world which exists externally at which point does it contact the conscious subject mind or consciousness and there's no clear answer to it in modern or ancient philosophy so what advaita vedanta does is it says that this underlying consciousness and what appears to it the subject and the object the subject and the object are appearances of this underlying consciousness even the objective universe is not a second reality apart from this underlying existence consciousness, much like the dreamer and the contents of the dream.

1:17:04Swami Sarvapriyananda:So, yes. So therefore you have a non-dualism, a non-dualism. Yeah.

1:17:10Alex O'Connor:And I've liked, I only thought about it in these terms just the other day, that when I talk about ideas like idealism or panpsychism or whatever, people get this idea in their head that, you know, am I supposed to believe that like a table is conscious then, or like a cup is conscious. And I realized that a good way of putting this maybe is to think about a dream again and realize that if I have a dream about a table, I might wake up the next day and say, even now, even thinking about the table in my dream, was that table conscious? No, no, it wasn't. But in a way, I kind of do want to say that it's like made out of consciousness.

1:17:50Alex O'Connor:That like it appears in consciousness. and when you say something like you know the microphone isn't conscious but it appears in consciousness people are like what can that even mean i think just consider it a bit like a dream right in a dream a table appears in consciousness and it's right out of consciousness but it's not

1:18:07Swami Sarvapriyananda:conscious yes what an adwaiting would say is that very good you make progress that we look at the dream example and you say that it's made out of consciousness the technical term adwaita vedanta would be, there's a term which they use is superimposition. Superimposition would be taking one thing to be another. The classic example of the rope as the snake. Now, it's mistaken to be the snake. It's actually a rope and always was a rope. But for a while, it looked like a snake. It wasn't a snake, even when it looked like a snake. Exactly like the dream too. It looked like people and places and stuff happening.

1:18:42Swami Sarvapriyananda:But there were no people, there are no places, there are no stuff happening. It was just a mind dreaming. But you don't deny the appearance. You actually did see an appearance of a dream. The dream contents themselves are not realities as they seem to be, but they were experienced. Now, the question is, yeah, all right, I get the dream example. Now what Advaita Vedanta does is, that's where the beauty of the method comes in, is that, all right, look at this stuff, Even the table here, notice that the table appears to you. Instead of saying it appears in consciousness, you can't leave yourself out of the experience.

1:19:23Swami Sarvapriyananda:If you say, describe what's going on here, you can start off by saying, this is a table. I can say that this is a rock. But a more precise definition would be, this is, I am seeing a rock. I am touching a rock. And this experience, bundle of experiences is what I'm calling a raw. In all, in and through all of this, I am present. So this is obvious. One would say, yeah, how else could it be? But Vedanta says, hey, hold on a minute. It's a very interesting feature that the only way you can experience a table is in and through yourself. You have to be there to experience it. Experience. So what comes first?

1:20:05Swami Sarvapriyananda:The consciousness experiences the table. or the table which is experienced by the consciousness. A materialist would say the table. An idealist would say the consciousness. And Advaita would say there's an underlying reality, the bare consciousness itself, which appears as the experiencing subject and the experienced table. Just like in the dream, there is the dreamer who appears not only as the dream world, but also as a dream subject. You are there in your own dreams, sitting at the table and experiencing the table. both you and the table in the dream are appearances to the real you, which is the underlying dreamer.

1:20:43Alex O'Connor:So I'm hoping this makes sense to people. And I think that anybody who's listened to me interview idealists and panpsychists and talk about my views on the nature of consciousness will recognize everything that they've heard in what you're saying. And it is astonishing. You know, I'd like to take the time to reflect on how we often think of these ideas as associated with particular thinkers, like the dualism of Descartes, for example, when he was far from the first person to realize this. and uh also his his dualism is of a kind of different flavor a more sort of scientific materialistic flavor than the sankya school because like the sankya school have in the in the sort of there's sort of the self and and and your your awareness and that's one thing and it's not that you've just got like mind and body it's that you've got awareness and then you've got this other stuff which includes the world but also includes things like your emotional states.

1:21:43Things like happiness or sadness or anger don't belong in the sort of mind category.

1:21:48Alex O'Connor:They belong in the category of the stuff that happens to you, which I think is a much more interesting kind of dualism. But I think it's astonishing. But then the same kinds of questions are going to come up. That is, as I've been talking about these views on consciousness, people are like, I get your view that maybe everything is kind of made out of consciousness or appears in consciousness. Maybe there's this great big consciousness that some people call God, But then, like, why is it that there is division? There is discrimination. Why is it that I have thoughts that you can't access? You have thoughts that I can't access.

1:22:26Alex O'Connor:Why does it appear that there is an object over there and an object over there? If we're just sort of all Brahmin, why do we not just experience reality as this one great big smooth unified ultimate experience? Why is that not how we move through the world? You know what I mean? It seems to be a bit of a mystery. Even if I accept that you and I are both sort of manifestations of the same ultimate consciousness, why is it manifesting in that way? Why are we not just both existing in one big, smooth consciousness?

1:23:00Swami Sarvapriyananda:Yes. You can put it this way. What would it look like if the Advaitic worldview were true? Or if the Advaitic Brahman view, consciousness view were true, non-dualism were true. And the answer from the Advaitins is exactly like this. In fact, whatever it looks like is compatible with the Advaitic worldview. I am reminded of this anecdote about Wittgenstein. So he comes out of class one day and this philosopher was with him and has written down the reminiscence. And he comes out, Wittgenstein looks at the setting sun and he says, I wonder why ancient people thought that the sun goes around the world instead of the other way around which it really is which is the case and this person said why professor that's what it looks like it looks like the sun is rising in the east and setting in the west and then Wittgenstein says ah but what would it look like if it were not the case if it were not the case which is not if it were actually that the sun doesn't rise in the east and set in the west and it's the earth which is rotating, then what would it look like?

1:24:08Swami Sarvapriyananda:It would look exactly like this.

1:24:12Swami Sarvapriyananda:What does the dreaming, you know, one could ask the same question in a dreaming world, that if we are all one being and I am dreaming of this entire world, why does it feel that you are separate from me and there's a huge world around me? This is here, that is there, and clearly there's a universe all around us. Why does it feel like that instead of I am everything? Yet when I wake up, I will say, yep, I was everything there. So maybe the way of experience would require a subject and an object. So I have to be a subject experiencing an object. Notice our virtual realities. We still have a point of view when we construct a virtual reality.

1:24:55Swami Sarvapriyananda:We enter into the virtual reality in a particular point of view. That's a great point.

1:25:01Alex O'Connor:And it's like, because I think that the thought is, wow, yeah. The thought is like, okay, well, but if it is just true that there is one great big Brahman consciousness, why would it manifest itself in this way? Why would I sort of be experiencing the world as a being who moves through the world and interacts with stuff and the stuff over there and over here? And that's a great point, actually, is that like, you know, any video game designer or developer on the metaverse kind of knows the answer to this question. Because they could create a system whereby you put on a headset and you're just sort of thrust into this computer where all the information is just there.

1:25:42Alex O'Connor:But you wouldn't be able to do anything. You wouldn't really be experiencing anything.

1:25:50Alex O'Connor:In order to be aware of the world that you're in, there needs to be this discrimination, even if it's sort of fake and sort of digitized. But you can understand that, especially when so many religious traditions seek unity with the divine, the mystical traditions of religious traditions kind of seem as though they're striving towards forgetting this world and becoming unified with ultimate reality. and i i guess on the advaita vedanta like worldview aren't we kind of already there and if we are yes if we are then like you know why does ultimate reality not look like this this this sort of big unified thing i mean i kind of just i'm finding it really difficult to put into words exactly what i mean but it's sort of as though you know sometimes people talk as though we're just like ripples in an ocean.

1:26:53Alex O'Connor:There's just one great big ocean, which is Brahman. And what you call yourself is just like a ripple in the ocean. It's not separate from the ocean. It's just like a localized ripple. And that makes sense. But then I kind of want to ask, but why are there ripples? Why isn't there just a perfectly still body of water? That seems simpler. It seems like there's less to explain. And there seems nothing contradictory about the idea that there would just be the perfectly still body of water. As soon as you start saying, Well, actually, it contains loads of motion and ripples and energy and whirlpools that are all cropping up.

1:27:26Alex O'Connor:The question is like, well, why? Why are there yous and me's and them's and over theirs? I understand that you said it's a bit like the dream where you wake up and you realize, oh, it was all one thing. But even with a dream, I know that that's the case. But I don't know why. I don't know why it's doing that.

1:27:44Swami Sarvapriyananda:So this is the question. Why is this manifestation at all? afterwards you get to the question of the details why this kind of manifestation why not that kind of manifestation what are the possibilities in different manifestations but why manifestation at all Brahman could well enough just be Brahman in fact the author Somerset Maugham who wrote that book The Razor's Edge which interested a lot of people in Vedanta he goes to India and he meets this great Vedanta teacher Ramana Maharshi and he was well read in Vedanta And he says sort of dry British humor, you know, English humor. He says that one feels that Brahman could have left well enough alone.

1:28:24Swami Sarvapriyananda:Just because Brahman manifested itself, now we are trapped in this so-called virtual manifestation of Brahman. And now we need to work our way out towards enlightenment. So why all this? There are multiple answers to this question. In fact, a whole range of answers. Some of them are theistic answers, but I will not bother with those. Theistic answers like, you know, this is the grace of God. God is helping us to evolve spiritually and attain enlightenment and oneness with God. Things like that. They all make, ultimately they do make sense, but they're couched in theological language. Let's come to the more philosophical answers.

1:29:03Swami Sarvapriyananda:One answer which I like is, what are the logical alternatives before Brahman? Either it could manifest or not manifest. It could just be or it could appear. And it is doing both. In our waking world, it's appearing. In our dream worlds, there is appearance. And in deep sleep, in coma, in general anesthesia, there is no appearance at all. On the cosmic level, there is this whole universe. Here is a universe which is appearing and stuff is happening. But then there will be an end to this Hindu idea of the cycles of existence and then dissolution. So there will be times when there is nothing that is appearing.

1:29:44Swami Sarvapriyananda:Bare existence alone remains. It doesn't appear as anything particularly. So logically, if you look at it, there can be zero or a one. And Brahman is providing both. There are periods of no appearance, maybe even no time. You can't even call it a period. And there is appearance too. Or if you look at it in terms of existence and consciousness, it would be a very dull kind of existence if there was only existence without existing things. The moment you have existence, you have the possibility of existing things. And so Brahman gives us a bounty of existing things, this entire universe, without losing its real nature as existence.

1:30:25Swami Sarvapriyananda:It would be a very dull consciousness, which is consciousness, but nothing to be conscious of. So according to Advaita Vedanta, consciousness appears to itself as the objects, the contents of consciousness. It would be a very dull movie screen which played no movies at all. So that's the very potential. In fact, one non-dualist put it this way. This universe is basically Brahman shining. It's what Brahman does. It shines forth. It's like, why do we not experience ourselves as one smooth consciousness? Actually, they do. Now, there are these phenomenological reports of non-dualist meditators. if you stay with this deeply enough the claim is over time we will experience this all of life as one radiance and one can see how what a stunning thing that would be to experience bodies mind sensory experiences other people the world all issues political social all as the radiance of one being and you are that being that's that's also possible

1:31:30Alex O'Connor:yeah and again it's quite difficult because we're talking about something which is by definition experiential we're talking about consciousness and so i think if you really want to understand what it means to to be aware of the unity of all things you need to speak to mystics people who have reached states of meditation where they've experienced it or people who've taken psychedelic drugs such that they report. I mean, people do report that their ego dies. They're like ego death. And that's not to say that they can suddenly hear the thoughts of someone around the world. It's almost like that desire or that question just becomes kind of meaningless all of a sudden because you realize that you're just the same as everything.

1:32:14Alex O'Connor:But I imagine for people who've really experienced these kinds of ego deaths, they'll tell you that there's just no way I can quite explain what it was like. You have to experience it to understand. but having said that um ego is an important concept here and i think that at least when it comes to consciousness one of the biggest mysteries for idealism or the view that we're all manifestations of one ultimate reality is what is the nature of the self there are something i call me and there's something i call you and i might say that the table and the chair both exist in consciousness. And the table and the chair are just, they are sort of separate.

1:32:54Alex O'Connor:They appear separate to me, but it's easy enough for me to recognize that they just matter, you know, and someone's arranged the matter into a table and this matter into a chair. And really they're all kind of made out of the same stuff. They're just shaped and formed in different ways. Right. But when it comes to minds and people, it seems like I have this center of consciousness as though the world, like you say, the world presents itself to me, like it's all sort of streaming in this direction. And yet, I imagine that you are having the same experience, that the whole world is moving in your direction.

1:33:26Alex O'Connor:That is like where the center of the universe is as far as you're concerned. So I've got a center and you've got a center. What is that thing? What is this thing which people call the self as opposed to just pure consciousness?

1:33:42Swami Sarvapriyananda:Yes. So the self, let's start with the self in the sense we talk about it generally, where we all agree. Just this person that I am, and I guess everybody else is also. What is this self? According to Advaita Vedanta, the ego, the sense of I, which is individual for every sentient being, that is a psychological function. It's a function of the mind. And it does two things. One, it integrates the function of the body, senses, mind in one individual. So here is the body and the senses here and the mental activities going on there. And these are all diverse, but they're all inwardly, phenomenologically, subjectively integrated into one unit.

1:34:33Swami Sarvapriyananda:And the function of that integration is performed by the ego. And the ego is a function of the mind. It's like the, according to Vedanta, the mind has an intellect which is the capacity to understand grasp comprehend it has a memory which retains traces of past experiences it has a mind which processes sensory inputs and emotions and it has an ego so the ego is very much part of this psychophysical system and it's one crucial one crucial two crucial functions one crucial function is that it integrates the whole thing into a unit. So I don't say, I am conscious of talking here. No, I am talking.

1:35:16Swami Sarvapriyananda:I am sitting here. I am walking. I am this guy, Sarva Priyananda. This is all being done by the ego. And its only function is, it's like a ghost in the machine. Its only function is to integrate the whole thing so that we can behave as an individual subject. That's one crucial function of the ego. Again, one can check and see that's what it's doing. And the other crucial function of the ego is, it's a reflector or a channeler of consciousness. In Advaita Veyranta, there are multiple models. There's a reflection model, self-explanatory. There is the pseudo-reflection model. There is a limitation model.

1:35:51Swami Sarvapriyananda:But all of them, they are trying to explain how consciousness manifests in this body-mind-ego system. So, ecosystem and ego system. It's an ego system. Good, I invented that one just now. So in the ego, basically, you can think of it. A beautiful example is given in Vedanta of the moon and sunlight. So at night, the world is lit up by moonlight. But we know the moonlight is basically sunlight. And yet, you need the moon. The sun by itself cannot light up the earth at night. So the moon basically collects sunlight and reflects it back in a limited way, in its own way to the earth and it performs some of the functions of sunlight.

1:36:37Swami Sarvapriyananda:Similarly, the ego has the capacity, in fact the mind itself, but especially the ego has the capacity to quote-unquote reflect consciousness and then sort of operationalize it so that now consciousness is able to flow through this mind and body and senses and have various sensory, emotional, intellectual, memory experiences, personality experiences. Now this bundle of ego, mind, senses, body and reflected consciousness, consciousness reflected through the ego, because consciousness is always available according to Vedanta, it's the underlying reality of everything. Now it becomes what's called a sentient being.

1:37:21Swami Sarvapriyananda:That's what distinguishes me from this rock. So the rock has a physical existence, but it does not have a psychic existence. There's no ego in it and therefore no reflection of consciousness. So it is consciousness, but it does not behave like a sentient being because it does not have an ego. Those entities in this world, which again, all appearances of consciousness, but just like in my dream world, there are people and there are animals which behave like sentient beings and there are tables and chairs which do not behave like sentient beings, all the time being projections of one mind. Similarly here, the difference between a sentient being and an insentient object like the rock, according to Vedanta, is the presence of this mind and especially the ego, which reflects and channels consciousness.

1:38:08Swami Sarvapriyananda:So the ego does two things. It integrates the body-mind into an individual and it channels consciousness into our daily conscious experiences. also a big problem of modern consciousness studies panpsychism for example modern panpsychism runs into the individuation problem how are there parts of consciousness nothing to suggest that if there is one consciousness why does it even become part there is this answer it becomes parts because some of the objects manifested in consciousness have the capacity to reflect consciousness and those objects are individuating egos therefore you feel in the Bhagavad Gita Krishna actually says to Arjuna, though I am one, I appear to be many.