#advaita vedānta

[sspacegodd]

Light is both a wave and a particle.

Right. Sounds like cognitive dissonance, non-dualistic Hinduism ("Atman is Brahman"), or Shimmer ("it's a floor wax AND a dessert topping.")

Albert Einstein suggested that light is not only a wave but is also a stream of particles.

But the damn duo would never pose for photos. Until now.

Now, using electrons to image light, scientists at EPFL have succeeded in capturing the first-ever photo of this dual behavior of light behaving both as a wave and as a particle.

[lux-paraclitus]

Qual a visão do Vedānta sobre o budismo?

"Esse conhecimento acerca da Última Realidade, não dual e caracterizada pela ausência da diferenciação do conhecimento, objeto de conhecimento e conhecedor, não é o mesmo tal como foi declarado pelo Buddha. A visão do Buddha da qual rejeita a existência dos objetos externos e asserta a existência da consciência, somente, é similar ou bem próximo da verdade do Ātmā não dual. Mas esse conhecimento não dual que é a máxima Realidade pode ser somente obtida pelo Vedānta."

~ Comentário ao Māṇḍūkyopaniṣad, Śrī Śaṅkarācārya.

Aqui, Bhagavatpāda Śaṅkara afirma que a doutrina do Buddha é distinta do Vedānta Advaita. Apesar de ser um estabelecimento próximo, ainda não chega na absoluta verdade não-dual da doutrina pura do Veda.

Śrī Mātre Namaḥ.

[yoga-studies]

Notes from a lecture by TKV Desikachar - 'Is Veda a Religion?'

The Brahma Sūtra is the source of Hinduism or Hindu Philosophy or Vedānta. It acknowledges the Veda as the source of its teachings, hence the term Vedānta, within which there are three main streams: 1. People who believe in One (Advaita or school of non-dualism advocated by Śaṅkara) 2. People who believe in One with certain characteristics (Viśiṣṭādvaita or school of qualified non-dualism…

[liberatingallselves]

August Meditations MMXXI

It’s been nine years since I started August Mediations. Its beginning coincidentally marked the start of monumental changes in my outer life that continue today. Health matters and deaths in my birth family, some sudden, some protracted, are the mainstay of these changes. The passing of my mother finally led to my becoming the executor of her estate. A matter that will soon end and, perhaps, mark the end of this cycle in my life.

I would be remiss if I didn’t include in these changes the Covid-19 pandemic that continues in the world today. The ensuing social isolation that it brought led me to the internet where I found much material on non-duality. Non-duality, or Advaita Vedānta, is a school of Hindu philosophy that refers to the idea that Consciousness alone is real and the self an illusion.

A central point of non-duality is that there is nothing that the self can do to cause enlightenment. An idea that I was not unfamiliar with but which I never explored in depth. The material I found on the internet was irrefutable. Sage after sage confirmed that nothing they ever did, no meditation, no chanting, no selfless service caused their enlightenment. Many, in fact, even denied there was such a thing as enlightenment, citing only that there had been a ‘change in perspective’ that accompanied the realization that there is no self.

Being unable to deny what the non-dualists said brought about a low-level depression in me that lasted for most of the summer and early fall of 2020. An understandable result of realizing that there was absolutely nothing I could do to fulfill what I always saw as my life’s purpose. With this, however, came the growing realization that there was also no need to fix anything. The grace that leads to your true nature comes regardless of one’s mental or physical state. In fact, it comes in woe as easily as in joy.

I came out of my depression realizing that despite what the non-dualist were saying, there is a place for spiritual practice. Those who realized no self without any former spiritual practice or knowledge often found themselves unable to comprehend what had happened. It took years to integrate their sudden enlightenment into their lives. It’s true that none would say that had they had a spiritual practice it would have been easier. But that positioned seemed to rise mostly from an unwillingness to speculate about what may or may not have been. Non-dualists, you see, are big on ‘what is,’ not on what may have been in the past or may be in the future.

Once I got past the idea that my spiritual practice was a wasted effort, I began to see that much of what I had been doing could fall under the category of integrating my shadow into conscious awareness. In analytical psychology, the shadow is either an unconscious aspect of the personality that the conscious ego does not identify as itself, or the entirety of the unconscious, i.e., everything of which a person is not fully conscious. In short, the shadow is the unknown side.

Non-dualists generally agree that integration of the shadow follows the realization that there is no self. What integration means, however, is not clear. At least not from what I’ve come across. For me it’s involved facing fear. A fear of inadequacy that, if seen, would result in various catastrophic outcomes. The worst of which being loss of control and physical death. All of which are core fears of an ego that ultimately knows it is an illusion but desperately seeks to keep its identity intact.

It is not surprising that the last nine years have brought many opportunities to see through my feelings of inadequacy. Taking care of my mother in the last five years of her life and now wrapping up the estate during a pandemic has provided me ample proof that I can handle life as it’s presented to me. The health problems that brought me close to death did likewise, although I must admit I’ve still a ways to go.

Despite what the non-dualists say, I do believe that there is a place for spiritual practice. And I’m not entirely convinced that there is no self. Certainly, the ego as a complex web of thought and emotion is ultimately unreal. Much in not all of it does dissolve when the ‘shift in perspective’ gracefully comes about. But is it not possible that a non-conceptual, non-localized Self continues? Whatever that means?

So, to wrap up this post, another year of August Meditations begins with this page. As this past year found me less motivated to continue the site it may be that this coming year will find that I stop posting altogether. Who knows? Maybe stopping, as Gangaji said, is the only way to realize one’s true nature?  

[zerogate]

For Jīva, the Brahman aspect is non-personal consciousness—the ātman/puruṣa goal of some of the Upaniṣads, the Yoga Sūtras, and most other ātman-seeking traditions, including advaita Vedānta. In the sun metaphor, it can be analogized with the formless, quality-less, all-pervading light: “You are also that Brahman, the supreme light, spread out like the ether” (Bhāgavata IV.24.60). 

But the point in this analogy is that light emanates from a higher source, the sun. Nonetheless, within this impersonal effulgence, there are myriad individualized ātmans that, like the sun-ray particles, can partake of and “merge into” the greater body of the all-pervading light. Thus, this experience is one of eternality and infinity, devoid of all objects other than blissful consciousness itself. As the light of numerous small autonomous flames can radiate out and coextensively “merge” into one greater generic body of light, while yet remaining the light of multiple individual flames, so the consciousness of myriad ātmans can all “merge” into Brahman, sharing in one infinite, blissful, eternal experience of pure contentless awareness itself, while yet remaining distinct ātmans, according to Vaiṣṇava thought (and, for that matter, the philosophies of Sāṅkhya and Yoga).

[...]

The Absolute is thus not monolithic, standardized, or, so to speak, one-size-fits-all. The aspect of the Absolute that appears coherent and appealing to any particular individual is a reflection of that person’s presuppositions (which, in yoga categories, are nothing other than previously cultivated saṁskāras, mental imprints, embedded in the citta, quite likely from previous lives). In actuality, one generally simply accepts the theological and metaphysical specifics of the tradition to which one connects, either because of inherited cultural or family reasons or because of being inspired by a charismatic guru figure whose lineage one simply adopts out of faith, as noted previously.

In any event, the aspect of the Absolute one perceives is a reflection of the perceiver: “Although Bhagavān is one, he is approached through different mind-sets and perspectives [of the perceivers] and so perceived variously as the person Īśvara, as Paramātman or as Brahman, pure consciousness” (III.32.26).

-- Edwin Bryant, Bhakti Yoga

[onancientpaths]

“I hinted above, for instance, at my belief that the very thing that the great theologians of Nicene tradition recognized as the pervasive if mysterious rationality of the whole of Christian tradition—the miraculous exchange of natures between God and creatures, God becoming human that humans might become God—is still the aspect of Christian doctrine and theology that needs to be thought through to its radical, if inevitable, conclusions. And it seems to me also that, obedient to the call of that antecedent finality and cosmic destiny, Christian thinkers might find it worthwhile fruitfully to draw on resources outside the historical, cultural, and even religious continuum of the tradition as currently understood. The example I suggested (and one perhaps peculiarly close to my heart) was that of Vedānta (whether Advaita or Viśiṣṭādvaita); other possible examples, however, are legion. Just as Christian thought in late antiquity naturally drew upon Platonic tradition not only to enunciate, but better to understand, its doctrinal content, there is no reason why these other remarkable traditions should not also come to inform Christian self-understanding. I am convinced, at the very least, that there are certain dimensions of the great Christian narrative of divine and human communion in Christ—both necessary logical premises and necessary logical conclusions—that have rarely been fully articulated in the tradition, except in rare instances, often at the boundaries, and in a largely mystical vein; and I am no less convinced that, say, the thought of Āḍi Śaṅkara might cast new light on, for instance, the thought of Maximus, and that this in turn might cast new light on the tradition as a whole. I would even argue that the whole rationality of the Christian tradition—creatio ex nihilo, divine incarnation, human deification, the vivifying Spirit of God breathed into humanity, and so forth—entails and requires a kind of metaphysical monism that has only sporadically manifested itself within the tradition, but that certain schools of Vedānta (not to mention certain schools of Sufism) have explored with unparalleled brilliance. But it would be wrong, I hasten to add, to see this process merely as the appropriation of foreign sources for purposes that would be alien to them." - David Bentley Hart

[edwordsmyth]

Dedicating the remainder of my life to the ātma-vichāra practice of Advaita Vedānta.

[journalofanobody]

Haqq al-Yaqin

Advaitic song. Ātman (IAST: ātman, Sanskrit: आत्मन्) is a central idea in Hindu philosophy and a foundational premise of Advaita Vedānta. It is a Sanskrit word that means "real self" of the individual, "essence", and soul. 

[moriras-lejos]

Hoy me presentaron a unos Yogis. Empezamos hablar de Advaita Vedānta, todo iba bien hasta que les dije que era nivel 27. Ya no creyeron que había trascendido, medio aprensivos los hippies.

Como siempre, haciendo amigos...

[uncle1milty]

a = not, dvaita = two, means no-two or non-dual

Advaita Vedanta - Wikipediaen.wikipedia.org › wiki › Advaita_VedantaAdvaita Vedanta (/ədˈvaɪtə vɛˈdɑːntə/; Sanskrit: अद्वैत वेदान्त, IAST: Advaita Vedānta, literally, "not-duality") is a school of Hindu philosophy, and originally known as Puruṣavāda, is a classic system of spiritual realization in Hindu tradition. Vedanta

Swans are an important figure in Advaita and represent an enlightened soul untouched by

Maya

(illusion).

Advaita Vedanta is a school in Hinduism. People who believe in Advaita believe that their soul is not different from Brahman. The most famous Hindu philosopher who taught about Advaita Vedanta was Adi Shankarawho lived in India more than a thousand years ago. Adi Sankara learned the sacred texts of Hinduism, like Vedas and Upanishads under his teacher Govinda Bhagavadpada and later wrote extensive commentaries of Hindu sacred texts called Upanishads. In these commentaries, he proposed the theory of Advaita, saying that the Upanishad actually teach that the individual soul (called Atman) is not different from Ultimate Reality (called Brahman). He also taught that there is only one essential principle called Brahman and everything else is a kind of expression of that one Brahman. Because of this theory of one being, his teachings became popular as the "Advaita" (a = not, dvaita = two, means no-two or non-dual). The way he said this to people was "Atman is Brahman."

Adi Shankara was smart and knew that people would wonder how he could say such an odd thing. He realized that many people would ask him, "If a person's soul is really one with Ultimate all along, then what makes a person feel so separate from Ultimate?" His answer to this was that we are ignorant of our real self being Ultimate because we see through a kind of filter—like looking through a dirty piece of glass—and he called this filter we look through, maya, which means "illusion" in Sanskrit. Shankara said that our ignorance makes us feel very separate from Ultimate, and even from everything around us. Shankara suggested that the best way people can find the truth is for them to try to clear their thinking of all ignorant thoughts, be very good, and think very hard about who they really are. He said that if a person did all these things he would realize that Brahaman was himself all along.

This is a very similar idea to other religions at their esoteric core.[1] For instance within Islam there is an idea of annihilation within the divine,  (Unity of Existence)

[tomasorban]

ALCHEMY AS NONDUAL PROCESS (from essay: Circumambulating the Alchemical Mysterium)

A child of metallurgy and the traditional crafts, alchemy cannot be easily separated from the concrete aspect of existence any more than it can be separated from the transcendent. Indeed, both become interfusible, interdependent and interchangeable. If alchemy appears elusive, it is precisely because it cuts across categories ordinarily seen as mutually exclusive. For this reason, alchemy may be better approached not so much as a fixed domain of activity, but as a nondualprocess. Indeed, its sphere of operation is better comprehended as existing betweendomains, or better yet, as the medium in which more ‘fixed’ domains proceed. Like the fusible nature of metals, this medium may be regarded as the ‘substance’ from which fixed forms ‘solidify’, and into which they ‘dissolve’. As such, it is the conditio sine qua non for transmutation and dissolution, for converting one form into another, and for dissolving and abrogating the familiar boundaries or borders between apparently fixed states.

One explicit example of this is the fact that the key object of the western alchemical quest itself—the philosopher’s stone or ‘universal medicine’ (the perfecting agent par excellence)— is also, literally, a universal poison. In the Greek alchemical manuscripts, the expression is given as katholikon pharmakon. The word katholikonmeans ‘universal, whole’, while pharmakon, a very ambiguous word, means not only ‘medicine’, but also ‘poison’, and ‘magical philtre’. According to the mercurial Jacques Derrida (who perhaps understood ambivalence better than anyone):

this ‘medicine’, this philter, which acts as both remedy and poison, already introduces itself into the body of the discourse with all its ambivalence. This charm, this spellbinding virtue, this power of fascination, can be—alternately or simultaneously—beneficent or maleficent’.

‘If the pharmakon is ambivalent’ continues Derrida, ‘it is because it constitutes the medium in which opposites are opposed, the movement and the play that links them among themselves, reverses them or makes one side cross over into the other (soul/body, good/evil, inside/outside, memory/forgetfulness, speech/writing, etc.)’ Thus, in conjunction with its ability for transformation, the (universal) pharmakon is also a medium for cosmic enantiodromia.

This capacity for fluid interweaving between different states of existence is perhaps most eloquently expressed within alchemical tradition proper by the seventeenth century Sufi, Muhzin Fayz Kāshānī, who described a process in which ‘spirits are corporealised and bodies spiritualised’, a process that, according to Henry Corbin, takes place in an ontologically real, yet liminal, zone—the mundus imaginalis—which Corbin defined precisely as a juncture between the eternal and the transient, the intelligible and the sensible: the intermonde or intermediary realm par excellence. Importantly, Corbin’s phraseology is not only drawn from Persian and Arabic mystical texts (which deeply tinctured the alchemy of the time), it is also consonant with other, earlier Islamicate alchemical sources, such as the Kitab Sirr al-Asrar(Latin: Secretum Secretorum), whose Tabula Smaragdina (Emerald Tablet) famously states: ‘that which is above is like that which is below, and that which is below is like that which is above, to perform the miracles of the one thing’. This formula, which is further ascribed to [pseudo] Apollonius of Tyana’s Book of the Secret of Creation, orBook of Causes (Kitāb Sirr al-ḫalīqa, or Kitāb al-῾ilal), bears a still deeper identity to the hieratic art as practiced by the Neoplatonic theurgists. According to Proclus,

the theurguists established their sacred knowledge after observing that all things were in all things from the sympathy that exists between all phenomena and between them and their invisible causes, and being amazed by that they saw the lowest things in the highest and the highest in the lowest.

In the alchemical purview, the ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ aspects of existence are ultimately reciprocal and interdependent expressions of a deeper, more inclusive reality. Thus, to separate alchemy into a purely material and a purely spiritual aspect in a mutually exclusive fashion, without recognising their fundamental complementarity, is to miss the greater flux between the volatile and the fixed with which alchemy is almost invariably concerned. As a hieratic art, the alchemical vision of reality encompasses all levels of existence within the holarchical monad, and as such engages the world—including the world of duality, which is subsumed in the greater whole—as a nondual reality: a simultaneously abstract and concrete integrum.

In speaking of alchemy as a nondual process it is important to understand just what is meant when the term ‘nondual’ is used. The word itself is a formal translation of the Sanskrit word advaita (a- + dvaita, ‘not dual’), and is used to indicate an epistemology in which both ‘seer’ and ‘seen’ are experienced not as separate entities but as a unity, a single act of being in which both the subject and object of experience become agent and patient of one divine act. While nondualism forms the basis of three of the broadest currents in eastern metaphysics (Buddhism, Taoism and Vedānta), it is also expressed explicitly or implicitly in the western philosophical canon by figures such as Plotinus, Eckhart, Böhme, Blake, Spinoza, Schelling, Hegel, Nietzsche, Bergson, Whitehead and Bohm, to name but a few. Despite this, the idea of nondualism has not been readily understood or accepted in the west, and this is because western constructions of reality, especially after Decartes and Kant, are based precisely upon a strict affirmation of mind-matter or subject-object dualism. At the root of the matter lie two fundamentally different ways of experiencing the world. One is the ‘everyday’ experience available to everyone; the other proceeds from a metaphysical experience theoretically available to, but not necessarily attained by, everyone. Although dualism and nondualism describe two different experiences of the world, it is not simply a recapitulation of the materialist-idealist divide (which is simply another dualism). As David Loy remarks:

none of these three [Buddhism, Taoism, Vedānta] denies the dualistic ‘relative’ world that we are familiar with and presuppose as ‘common sense’: the world as a collection of discrete objects, interacting causally in space and time. Their claim is rather than there is another, nondual way of experiencing the world, and that this other mode of experience is actually more veridical and superior to the dualistic mode we usually take for granted. The difference between such nondualistic approaches and the contemporary Western one (which, given its global influence, can hardly be labelled Western any more) is that the latter has constructed its metaphysics on the basis of dualistic experience only, whereas the former acknowledges the deep significance of nondual experience by constructing its metaphysical categories according to what it reveals.

What is proposed, therefore, is to begin to understand certain forms of alchemy as an expression of a nondual experience of (and engagement with) the world, not only with regard to the dualities of spirit and matter, but also their corollaries: subjective experience and objective experiment. As Prussian poet and Kulturphilosoph Jean Gebser observes with regard to the structures of consciousness that underpin entire modalities of civilisation, nondualistic or aperspectival epistemologies do not exclude but integrate more perspectivally-bound epistemologies within a diaphanous whole. [ What this means is that apparent dualities are not ultimate; rather, they are relative expressions of a deeper reality that is ultimately free from the limitations of dualism and opposition. It means that one can see all things in the ‘ultimate’ reality, and reciprocally, the ‘ultimate’ reality in all things. It is to see, with Blake, ‘a World in a Grain of Sand’ and ‘Eternity in an hour’.  According to this view, one eventually fails to distinguish between the ultimate and the relative in a rigidly dualistic way, abandoning the attribution of any inherent ontological primacy to one or the other. Because there is no longer any essential contradiction or opposition perceived to exist between them, so-called ‘material’ and ‘spiritual’ realities become co-present, interdependent expressions of a deeper, ‘existentiating’ field of being. What is more, according to the ancient epistemology ‘like knows like’, the nondual, aperspectival or integral nature of reality, in both its relative and ultimate expressions, can only be known by the nondual, aperspectival or integralconsciousness. It is in this sense that alchemy, in its more profound sense, necessitates a metaphysics of perception.

Illustration by Rubaphilos Salfluěre

[sspacegodd]

When quantum physics and Advaita Vedānta collide.

Quark, strangeness, and Om.

[lux-paraclitus]

Refutação de Śrī Madhūsudāna sobre um possível dualismo entre Māyā e Brahman no Advaita Vedānta:

"Mesmo a realidade da negação não implica no abandono da perspectiva Advaita. Já que a negação não é diferente de Brahman, o qual é o substrato da negação do mundo fenomênico. Nem o fato do mundo ser objeto de uma real absoluta negação implica que o mundo em si seja absolutamente real. Pois não achamos nenhuma realidade que pertence à concha que parece prata, que ainda é objeto de uma negação.

De outro modo, podemos dizer que a negação não tem nenhuma realidade. Mas até neste caso, a realidade da negação não é meramente aparente, mas relativa."

- Advaitasiddhi, Madhūsudāna Sarasvatī.

[yoga-studies]

Notes from a lecture by TKV Desikachar - 'Is Veda a Religion?'

The Brahma Sūtra is the source of Hinduism or Hindu Philosophy or Vedānta. It acknowledges the Veda as the source of its teachings, hence the term Vedānta, within which there are three main streams: 1. People who believe in One (Advaita or school of non-dualism advocated by Śaṅkara) 2. People who believe in One with certain characteristics (Viśiṣṭādvaita or school of qualified non-dualism…

[nicolae]

Adi Shankara

(Ādi Saṅkara) Adi Shankara (sanscrită: Ādi Śaṅkara, numit uneori Ādi Śaṅkarācārya; din Śaṅkara sau Śaṃkara, „cel care aduce binecuvântarea”, unul dintre epitetele lui Shiva), este, în secolul al VIII-lea, unul dintre cei mai cunoscuți maeștri spirituali ai hinduismului, filozof al școlii ortodoxe Advaita Vedānta și comentator al Upanishadelor vedice, al lui Brahma Sūtra și Bhagavad-Gita. Stăpânul…

[www-tantra-press]

Sobre el Tantra y nuestro poderoso propósito

Sobre el Tantra y nuestro poderoso propósito

Nuestro esfuerzo “Nuestro esfuerzo está enfocado en ofrecer contenidos de calidad basados en las sagradas escrituras sobre el Hatha Yoga tradicional, el tantra oral de la tradición Shakta del Shivaismo de Cachemira, y de los aspectos más relevantes de la espiritualidad hinduista y el Advaita Vedānta. En nuestra sociedad occidental, ignorante y complaciente, tanto el Yoga como…