Within Reason - #143 Hinduism, Consciousness and Advaita Vedanta - Swami Sarvapriyananda

Episode Date: February 16, 2026

Get Huel today with this exclusive offer for New Customers of 15% OFF with code alexoconnor at https://huel.com/alexoconnor (Minimum $50 purchase).Come to my UK tour: https://www.livenation.co.uk/alex-o-connor-tickets-adp1641612.For early, ad-free access to videos, and to support the channel, subscribe to my Substack: https://www.alexoconnor.com.-Swami Sarvapriyananda is a Hindu monk belonging to the Ramakrishna Order. He is the current resident Swami and Minister in Charge, of the Vedanta Society of New York.-TIMESTAMPS:00:00 – Tour00:32 – An Intro to Hinduism and Advaita Vedanta14:31 – What Are the Upanishads22:08 – Where Do the Vedas (Scripture) Come From?29:02 – What Does “Upanishad” Mean?34:36 – What Do the Upanishads Teach Us?47:07 – What Is Brahman, or Ultimate Existence?1:02:52 – What Is the True Nature of Consciousness?1:08:15 – Non-Dualism in Advaita Vedanta1:18:34 – Why Isn’t There Just One Big Consciousness?1:29:06 – What Is the Self?1:36:30 – Are Brahman and Atman the Same Thing?1:45:25 – What Does ‘God’ Mean in Hinduism?1:49:07 – Does Hinduism Believe Other Religions Are Incorrect?

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Swami Sava Priya Ananda, welcome to the show. Yes, thank you. I've just had to try about 10 different times to get your name right. I hope that's not just me. No, that's always a problem, from podcasters to the Uber drivers. Technically, though, the Sanskrit would be Sarva Priya Ananda. And if you say it fast, it will become Sarva Priyana. I see.

I see. And this is a title. A Swami is not your first name. It's a title which is something equivalent to something like maybe... Master, Lord, master, like that. So it's a title for a spiritual teacher, a monk, basically. Swami would, in India or Hinduism, would always, almost all... In fact, always would be a monk.

Yeah. Well, thank you ever so much for joining me today. My audience will know that I've been obsessed with talking about consciousness and philosophy of mind, and I'm also deeply interested in the philosophy of religion. And there's basically a massive blind spot in my thinking and on my channel when it comes to the exclusion of Indian philosophy, which, as I've been exploring it, I have found, has just preempted and answered all of the questions which I've been thinking about and which Western philosophy has been battling over in the past few hundred years. So a term that I've been

throwing around a lot is the term Advaita of Adanta, and it's a sort of philosophical tradition. Some people might consider it a religion or a philosophical school, and it's connected with Hinduism, which itself is something of an umbrella term. So I was hoping, as an Advaita Vedantist, if you might be able to begin here by telling us what is Advaita Vedanta and how does it connect to what people call Hinduism? That's actually a very good place to start. Hinduism is a religion, and Adwita Vedanta is is one of the many philosophical schools within Hinduism. So a good place to start would be the name, Vedanta.

Vedanta comes from the Vedas and Anta. The Vedas are the Sanskrit name for the root texts, the fundamental texts of Hinduism, somewhat like the Bible for Christians or the Quran for Muslims, but very, very ancient, and they are basically a collection of texts, a really large collection of texts, texts going all the way back as far as we can tell four to five thousand years.

So long before Buddhism, for example. Buddhism was 2,500 years ago. And in those texts, you find a lot of ritual. In fact, the bulk of it is concerned with ritualistic performances, which was the religion of the ancient Hindus, the Vedic Hindus. But also, you find texts which talk about philosophy. what's the nature of ultimate reality what's our nature what are we truly what's the purpose or goal of life

what can we hope for so those texts form the basis of Vedanta Vedanta means anta literally means the end so the end of the Vedas end not in the sense of the physical end of the text though sometimes these teachings

are found at the end of these books the Vedas but sometimes scattered in between also but end the end of the Vedas in the sense of the final or the highest philosophical teachings of the Vedas. So these texts are called Upanishads and they are part of the Vedas. And these Upanishads specifically form the root texts or the foundation of what is called Vedantar. So throughout the history of Hinduism for centuries and millennia,

different generations of masters and commentators have come and taken up these Upanishads and written commentaries on that, setting forth different worldviews and the different schools of philosophy built around these worldviews. So, for example, if you look at philosophically speaking, if you look at the different schools of philosophy within the fold of Hinduism, you will find schools which are outright realistic, that there is a world independent existing externally beyond our human consciousness. There are philosophies like Advaita Vedanta, which are close to what today we might call idealism,

that reality is basically consciousness and appearances in consciousness. There are dualistic schools which talk about consciousness and material reality as two different orders of reality and interacting with each other. There are monistic schools which say that there's ultimately one fundamental reality. So there's a huge, huge spectrum of philosophical, perspectives within Hinduism. One of them is Adwaitavidana

and a pretty prominent one for certain reasons. So Advaita Vedant is an interpretation of the Upanishads, most notably by a great philosopher's saint Adi Shankaracharya who lived about 1300 years ago. And he wrote these

authoritative commentaries on the Upanishads and other texts such as the Gita, which is the most well-known text of Hinduism. And also on this text called the Brahma Sutras, which is a set of sutras, aphoristic sayings, which systematized this philosophy of Vedanta. And his commentaries became the basis for the school of Adwaita Vedantanth.

Now, technically, Adwaita Vedanta is older than Shankaracharya, because you can trace it all the way back to the Upanishads. So, Shankaracharya is sort of central because he's regarded as the main, commentator for Adwaita Vedanta. Now, to be fair, that's not the only school of Vedant. These Upanishads have had multiple interpretations. There are non-dualistic interpretations like Adwaita Vedanta. There are dualistic interpretations, multiple schools.

But one reason why, as we shall see, Advaita Vedantah has a peculiar claim to being special is it is what might be called philosophical as against what might today we might call theological. most of the other schools of Vedanth, if you look at what they're teaching, immediately you sense religion there. There's God and there is satirology,

there is some kind of heaven and afterlife to be attained and all of that. Whereas what Advaita Vedanta Vedanta seems to be saying is not only extraordinarily different from all of that, its methodology is also different because it relies heavily on experience and reason. So that is the source of Adwaita Vedan. Now, many, to put it in context also, many of the debates we find in modern philosophy, modern

Western philosophy, were already sort of anticipated. You look at the ancient Indian texts, different schools of philosophy within Hinduism and other schools of Indian philosophy like Buddhism and Jainism, all of which are also very complex because Buddhism has multiple, multiple schools of philosophy within it. And the debates between them. One amazing feature of Indian philosophy for centuries, in fact, millennia was what is called in Sanskrit Wada, philosophical debate. So they were like philosophical gladiatorial combats without the swords. But you would challenge an opposing point of view and then you would meet your opponents in a public debate. and there would be winners and losers.

And what happened was its philosophy which gained. For example, one of the most noted debates and long-running debates was the debate between Hinduism and Buddhism. So there you find, you immediately recognize the debate between realism and idealism there, between theism and atheism there. Modern debates, you know, you can see many of the same issues being raised and argued out more than a thousand years before our contemporary debates. And this debate on various issues, issues of metaphysics,

issues of epistemology, issues of what spirituality actually means, all of these issues and language. So all of these issues were debated thoroughly. Many, many texts were written. They were major philosophers on each side. And this debate lasted from about 800 to 1,000 years. among the issues where is there a self, permanent eternal self, which the Hindus seem to be advocating,

or is there no self, the no-self views of the Buddhists? Is there a god? It's an extension of the self-no-self debate. So the Hindus would argue for the existence of a god, very similar to theistic god of different theistic religions of the world. And the Buddhists would vehemently argue taking up agnostic or atheistic positions. So these issues were debated, a thousand years before their Western counterparts took up the same issues, including very interestingly questions of language.

After centuries of debate, the Indian philosophers came to the realization that one source of philosophical problems was language. The ambiguity of language, for example. And this solved it in an incredible way, long before Sir Bertrand Russell's theory of descriptions, his attempt to, you know, the linguistic philosophy of the 20th century, Cambridge, Oxford and so on, long before that, they developed in ancient India around 900 or 1,080 a form of Sanskrit called Naviayay, the new school of logic. It is Sanskrit. That was the language of debate philosophy in ancient India. But it's a new kind of extremely precise philosophical Sanskrit, which if you read it, it sounds very different from the usual sanscrit of preceding philosophical debates

and it made language extremely precise. So much so that today there is a whole sub-school of people trying to translate those ancient Navia-Naya texts into modern symbolic logic. It translates very easily. It's so precise. So it's probably the most sophisticated form of logic and logical language developed before our modern symbolic logic or mathematical logic. So this is the background of Indian philosophy,

and Adwaita Vedanta is one interpretation of one school. The Vedanta school and the school within that is Adwaita Vedantanth. Yeah, so... Yeah, quite extraordinary. I mean, I think that the... One of the reasons why people, I think, are attracted to ancient philosophy is that they recognize when we think we're being objective or trying to be purely sort of rational and reasonable,

we're often actually biased by various things, by the culture we live in, by the practicalities of our society, by our desires that are quite specific to the current time we're in. And so if you find that there are people writing in the 1800s or the Middle Ages or even a thousand years ago in ancient Greece about similar problems that we're thinking about today, then it feels like we can engage with it free of that sort of temporal bias.

finding out that these ideas don't just stretch back in time, but also across cultures, and picking up, you know, these ancient ideas from Indian philosophy and realizing that if you translate the words in a helpful way, oftentimes these different philosophical schools are all driving at the same kinds of questions. I think it's quite satisfying to people because it sort of offers a different approach to the same questions. It's not like you've got Indian philosophy over here with its own set of questions, and Western philosophy over here with its own set of questions. I think it's fair to say that the problems of philosophy most foundationally are the same

for every person who's ever walked the planet, right? Right. There's something called the perennial philosophy. Aldous actually famously wrote this book where he drew from spiritual texts across traditions and talk about common issues of human nature, the divine, human destiny, spiritual practice. and it's a small book but full of packed with wisdom and you see how easily you relate to Indian philosophers, Greek philosophers, Chinese philosophers

across traditions and across time and space. And you immediately get enriched. One unique feature of these Indian philosophies is that, and by that I mean philosophies within the Hindu fold and outside the Hindu fold. So Buddhist philosophers, for example, or giant philosophers, is that these are taken seriously. as philosophies of life, by which thousands and indeed millions of people, even now they swear by and live by it, they try to live by it.

So that's where it, that is the bridge between philosophy and religion in India. So these are philosophies of life. There will be people who are actually practicing it and trying to live by Adwaita Vedanta, but by other schools of Vedanta also, by other schools of these philosophies. Some of them are purely academic or purely historical, but something like Advaita Vedanta is first and foremost practical in the sense that millions of people today will say that it's part of their lived philosophy of life. Of course, there's an academic side to it and a historical side to it.

So you mentioned that a lot of Advaita Vedanta Vedanta is based on these texts known as the Upanishads, which people may have heard of. They know it's a sort of a kind of scripture, the Hindu tradition. They've also heard of the Vedas, and you said that the Upanishads are kind of in the Vedas, right? So people might sort of try to go and buy a big copy of all of the Vedas and be like, okay, so which chapter is, where are the Apanishads? Where do you find them? But I think it's a bit more complicated than that, right? So what do you mean that the Upanishads are in the Vedas or from the Vedas and how do you find them in the Vedas? Yes. I would advise against trying to find them in the

Vedas. Luckily, the Upanishads are translated in multiple excellent translations today, and they're available across the world in different languages, especially in English. There are multiple translations available today. So these Upanishads are studied independently. For example, a vast, for example, personally myself, I study the Upanishads. I rarely study the non-upanishadic portions of the Vedas. Some of them I do study, but only those which are which are supplemental to the Upanishads, for example, which help me to understand the Upanishans. So a large portion of the Vedas has become, in a sense, obsolete

as far as modern Hindus are concerned. The old forms of worship have been supplanted by what you would see in England or in America as the modern Hindu temples with deities and elaborate ritualistic worship. So that's what the modern Hindus would generally do as part of the daily worship or their regular worship, not the Vedic forms of fire rituals and other. But what has survived and has formed the basis of Hinduism,

philosophical basis of Hinduism, are these Upanishads. So if you go on Amazon and Google Upanishads, you will find multiple fine translations of the Upanishads already extracted from their Vedic heritage. So what is the, obviously, don't recommend going and doing this yourself, but obviously they have been,

extracted from the Vedas. And as far as I understand it, you know, that the Vedas are filled with like ritualistic ideas, like instructions on how to perform rituals, how to pray, how to do all of this kind of stuff, whereas the Apanishads are sort of later on in the development of the Vedas and they focus a lot more on essentially knowledge, that is not so much what to do, but how best to think. And so I guess what I'm asking is like these Apanishads, which have been extracted from the Vedas. Are they like sort of all near the end of the Vedas? Are they dotted all throughout the Vedas? Are they there at the beginning? Are they, is it sort of clear to a scholar as they're reading through the Vedas? Look, there's Napanashad or is it a bit more complicated? Like,

literally what does it mean to say that they are in the Vedas, you know? When you see the collection of Vedic texts, they are literally in the Vedas and it's easy to identify them because they themselves declare themselves to be Upanishads. Now, starts the Upanishan. And you are right to use terms like ritual and knowledge because that's how the Vedas are broadly classified. There is the ritual portion in Sanskrit known as the Karma khanda or karma means action. So the ritualistic action portion and then the knowledge portion, the Ghanakanda. And the knowledge portion is the Upanishads. And they are easily identifiable in the Vedas because they declare themselves to be Upanishads. Also by the tradition. So multiple schools of

Vedantah, they use the Upanishads and they know what they mean by the Upanishads. So across the centuries, there's a common agreement, more or less. And nothing, you know, I always say about Hinduism. It's so vast and wildly diverse within itself that for any question you ask Hinduism, the answer is always yes and no. So do Hindus believe in God? Yes and no. There are Hindus.

There are actually ultra-dox schools of Hinduism, which if not, not atheistic, or agnostic. Is God with form? Yes, obviously, you can see all the diverse forms of the deities. But no, God is also ultimately without form. Is God, you know, a male? The answer would be yes and no. Yes, God is male, but also very ancient traditions of worship of God as the divine feminine

and beyond gender also. And so, therefore, Going back to the question of the Upanishads, there's a general agreement on what the Upanishas are supposed to be which texts we are talking about. And that agreement comes through centuries of tradition from diverse schools, often opposing schools. So it's good that when, you know, people who are philosophically opponents, but they agree on that these are the texts we are debating. So, for example, the Upanishads we are talking about would be the Katow Upanishads, the Kano Upanishad, just to take the names, Esho Upanishad, the Mandukki Upanishad, the Brihadarnaa khanogya, they differ in size from the Manduqqq Upanishad which is so short you can write it in one piece of paper, just 12 lines, 12 mantras,

to the Briadhanik Upanishad, which is a massive text with three large books included within it. 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 Vedantha. Primarily the commentaries of Shankarachari and his disciples form the basis of what we call Adwaita Vedantah, which we are talking about today. 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 Huell to solve the problem.

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The Black Edition also has five extra grams of protein this way, and you can control how, like, thick or thin you want the Huell to be. I drink Hule almost every day, sometimes even while I'm recording podcast episodes, so I'm really glad that they're sponsoring the show. Go to Hule.com forward slash Alex O'Connor, and if you enter the code Alex O'Connor at checkout, as a new customer, you'll also get 15% off. person, or even if you're not, actually, Huell is a real game changer. 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? Like, 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, you know, 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, you know? Yes. 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 across the, um, for example. So, the Vedas and the Upanishads, 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 text, but they would root themselves in texts which are rooted or which are harked back to the Vedic past. So directly or indirectly, all of them would be, would accept the Vedas as fundamental or as sources. 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, the Buddhist schools do not accept the Vedas as a revealed truth or as a sent. They do not. And therefore, they are not considered Hindus traditionally, nor would the Jains be considered Hindus. 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 use. 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 Pentateuchuk. 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? So the Vedas are the sources are what are called the Rishis. Rishis literally means sages.

And they are not one. So many of them. In many cases, we just have the names which are found in the text 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. A very orthodox scholar or 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 set it out aloud. Others might say that they saw the principle and then they composed the they put it in the texts which we find them now. But the ideas is common.

The source is the rishis. And then there are the avataras 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. 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 Adjuna.

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 Upanishadik doctrine in a later age. So these sages who 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 just agree that that's true. And they just sort of hit on it and it stuck for that reason. Or is it more like a religious prophet where 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 happen to hit on the right kind of. kind of thing and therefore they got this classification of sage? The second one actually. So if you look at the understanding of a Rishi in Hinduism, even today, it's people who meditated, who thought deeply about it. In fact, one of them 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. These truths were existing. They didn't invent them. 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, 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

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 Adwaita Vedant, which I belong to, he said that the rishis, there can be other rishies too, and these Vedas are the common property of all humanity and you find the spiritual truths in every religion. That's how our religion starts with the discovery

of some spiritual truths and they will want to come in future. 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. This word Upanishat

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 tell them 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. Yes. So the Upanishads are primarily a knowledge tradition. There's

something to be learned here. Yes, there's something to be believed, something to be practice, 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 meaning is 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. The upa literally means to sit near. And knee, the prefix knee, means, means to ascertaining with clarity.

So you reason, argue, trash it out till it's very clear to you what you're talking about. And sat, 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 we put it together, you go near a teacher of the tradition whichever school of the Upanishads you are following whichever school of Vedanth, 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.

So the word Upanishad covers all of it. If you actually go into the Upanishads, you begin to see what's happening. There's 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. We are not created with our birth, we do not die with our death. We have existed, lived many times earlier, and we'll 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 tree. 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

of the other, the ancient Hindu would recognize, yes, this is a tradition I recognize. 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 this question, 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 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 the neuroscientist Christoph Koch calls the feeling of life itself, consciousness, the feeling of life itself. And here is an ancient Upanishadik 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 Kano Upanishad, by whom or by what. Kena means by whom or by what. And the answer is consciousness and the rest of the Upanishad is an exploration of consciousness, what consciousness really is. And you might find another. question where what happens after death? So the big, big one, you know, so these questions, and the answer is more or less the same answer all the time. That there is, and that's Vedanta, basically. So if I might go into that, at this point, take and look at actually what Vedant is, in spite of all. Yeah, because that's, that's the thing. We've got this, this groundwork of what

these texts are. Yes. 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? Right. And for the purpose of this discussion, I'll limit myself to the Adwaita Vedanta interpretation of these texts, but that's my tradition, and that's the one we are really interested in this,

for certain reasons, in this kind of a conversation. Yes. That is more philosophy than religion, to put it bluntly. Now, though there is a vast range of texts, a vast range of teachings, teachers and across a vast range of time, centuries and millennia, the beauty and elegance of Adwaita Vedant 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 Adwaita Vedantha.

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 the 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. 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 Vedant 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,

where are we in this? And it says, you are none other than Brahman. The Sanskrit being Brahma satyam, Jagat Mithyha, Jeeva, Brahmhai Vanafarra. 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 Tatwamasi, you are that, Tatwamasi, you are that ultimate reality. Brahman is equal to Atman. So, and even the famous monosyllable, Oam, one of the Upanishads, the shortest of the Upanishads, the Mandu Kupanishad,

is actually an explanation of Ome and there is a whole thing about it where it's shown that Ome teaches you this very thing, that you are that ultimate reality. So this is briefly put the most incredible claim of the Upanishads, at least on the Adwaita Vedant 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 Vedantha, on the authority of the Upanishals,

claims that we are deeply mistaken. And we are mistaken because we do not know what we truly are. are. So first comes an ignorance about our real nature, which is Brahman, will 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 very

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. 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. 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. But if you are not this, then what are we? And the answer that the Upanishads gave

is pretty deep there. 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 um you know 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 um of ornaments or jewelry in the that shop. Rather, 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 70-750s, would have said, it's just a, is just quibbling. It's just a ghost generated by language. There's no such thing as existence. In a certain sense, there are right, there is no such thing as existence. But it is the reality of all things

and it's not an abstraction. Adwaiata Vedantah 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 which 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 Christoph Gauke's name this recent book, The Feeling of Life itself. So the feeling of life itself is consciousness, basically. Bernard de Castro 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 itself, which appears as conscious experiences, which constitute our lived experience of life. Also, it is the source of all values, Ananda, bliss.

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 Vedant is sat being, existence.

How is knowledge possible? How is experience possible? The answer from Adwaita Vedant is chit, consciousness, bare consciousness. And is there a point to at all, or is it all constructed by us? Is there value or point? Yes, Adweta Vedansi says, certainly there is. And the answer to that is bliss, anandha, anna, joy, bliss, fulfillment, you can put it that way.

And then Adweta 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 Adwaita Vedanta rounds it up with an even more stunning claim that this Brahman, this metaphysical epistemological and axiological ultimate, is you. You are that. You are that. You are that, Tatwamasi.

or aham Brahmsmi, 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.

Vedantab would say that's the, in fact, the point of all of this, point of life and existence here. So that's the big theory in a nutshell. When the weather cools down, Golden Nugget Online Casino turns up the heat. This winner, make any moment golden and play thousands of games like her new slot Wolf It Up and all the fan-favored huff and puff-and-puff games. Whether you're curled up on the couch or ticking five between snow shovels, play winner's hottest collection of slots. From brand new games to the classics you know and love.

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Eligibility restrictions apply. See Golden Nuggettcasino.com for details. Please play responsibly. Yeah, I mean, and 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. 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 quare being. They prefer Latin to Sanskrit, you know, and they'll say, being, they'll say 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,

what, you know, what can you even possibly mean by that? You have to sit with it. You have to sort of 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 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. And, you know, like 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. And the way that I'm thinking about that and tell me, tell me sort of what you, what you think is like, you know, I've got like two, two objects here, right? I've got a, 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. And that is what we're associating with Brahman here, right? Yes. 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 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, a startling example would be the dream example. So if I say the SD card and the other thing that you showed. Yeah, a magnet. A magnet. 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? 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 are they exist apart from each other. They look different. They do different things. They are 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 in reality, now upon waking up, I see that it was not a magnet, it was not an SD card.

The 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. 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 a great. I've never heard that before, you know. That's quite a helpful analogy.

Yes, so the dream example is used again. An analogy is used again and again in Vedan. Oh, I talk about dreaming all the time when I'm talking about consciousness because it helps so many things become clear, but 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 SD card and the magnet. As far as I understand, this is just an analogy, right,

to say that when we say that everything is just Brahman and everything just sort of exists 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 what I call myself and stuff relate to ultimate reality, Brahman. Yes, you're right. When these analogies are used 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 is 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 dreamed of stuff in my dream, I am dreaming of this world in my mind. 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 adwaitic teaching.

Just as everything existed in the... Nothing was other than the dreamer's mind, and everything existed or appeared in the dreamer's mind. 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. 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 Vedant is saying. It's something close to what Berkeley might have been saying, but not Advaita Vedantanth. What Advaeranth 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 Adwaita Vedant, a very wonderful approach would be Meister Eckart, the German Catholic theologian who lived about 800 years ago, I think just after Thomas Akinus probably. And the stuff he says there is uncannily like, you know, you just feel like reading for an adwaitan.

It feels like I'm reading an adwaitic text. For example, let me give you one example. He 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. Yes. But if I might, I might, let me take it in another direction. Adwaita Vedantah, I find, one of the unique advantage of Adwaita Vedanta, it addresses the concern which you raised earlier.

When you straight away talk about limitless existence consciousness this 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 Adwaitavirantah what Adweta Vedantah also does there's this methodological

and it goes all the way back to the Upanishads. It starts with how we experience ourselves and the world, and it takes a 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 Vedantham. And we go back to the Upanishads, which help us to see for ourselves right now what they are talking about. 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, 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-dualists, Adwaitans, had with the yogis. That's another school of philosophy. By yoga, I don't mean the yoga pants and the stretchy kind of yoga. That's part of yoga. That's the physical side of yoga. But yoga is a

philosophy. I heard you say once that you were speaking to some American school kids in like Los Angeles and you started talking about yoga and one of the kids from L.A. goes like, oh, you have yoga in India as well, do you? Absolutely. They think that, oh, it's yoga. It's so popular in the United States. In New York, every other block has a yoga studio. So, yes, 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 Vera Anta, arrival 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. 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.

Adwaita Vedantah 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. 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

and that's the whole mystical special experience type of approach which is so common in spirituality and this is all very good in itself and I think it's a genuine approach but here is where Abhita Vedantha differs Adwata 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. 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 that's 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

you draw then you go deeper you draw your attention to the mind 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 experience the rock, I see it, I can touch it, but I'll 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. 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, series of phenomenological arguments to show and convince you, more like a philosophical, a 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 intellectiva, which is doing all this analysis. You can't even be a combination of all of these things. And then it asks the question, then what are you? At every steps it asks you. You clearly do exist. They're very decartian that way, cogitorogism. 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 the most undeniable feature of my experience of life, and I must be that. And so I am compressing it a lot, but we do it slowly and carefully. And 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.

Yes, I experience it as such. And it is an uncovering of our already existing experience, not new mystical experiences. Yes, yes, 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 university. And that does philosophically solve our problems. Yeah. Okay. So, I mean, this sounds, I mean, this is great. Like you're not discovering through this reflection on your conscious experience. 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 cut my hand, I might go, oh, I've cut myself, you know. but if I cut my hand off and I probably wouldn't say that I'd cut myself when that hand starts bleeding because I recognize my hand is not myself and whenever I'm hungry, you know, I feel it in my stomach

and if I start paying attention, I can really begin to detach myself from the hunger. I'm like, there's this hunger that's happening to me, you know, and it's down there and I can sort of, 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? And say, of course I would be. But I've removed one of the conscious experiences that you have. But I haven't removed consciousness. So what if you, what if I removed your hearing as well? You're still conscious, right? 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's really there at the center. Yes. And when we do that, what do you think we find at the center? 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?

We will find that we are being awareness, existence awareness. There's a new term being floated in new ad vitre 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 there one has to be careful there that the fine 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. There's a very beautiful Upanishadik 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. Jhati Shama Pita Jod. 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, if the sun is not there, it's dark, so the moon is a light to the world, and your electric lights are lights are lights. Our senses are lights. Our senses are lights. Eyes are lights. Ears are lights for sound. So what 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 in that way. But what's the light of all of these? It's consciousness. Without consciousness, none of these lights. 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, what is undeniable. One of the commentators says, in the very act of denying, it, you affirm it, that you are this being awareness. 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 Sanctia School, who are dualists, much like a modern dualist in like 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 ad vitre, right? So Vedanta is the study of the sort of the end, as you put it, of the Vedas and the Apanishads in particular. Adviter Vedanta, as far as I'm aware, ad vitre means non-dualistic. So when you say Advita Vedanta, what you're describing is a non-dualistic interpretation of like the end of the Vedas or the

Apanishads. 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? 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. There are 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 of about the subjects and objects. 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. Now, what Advaita Vedant says, or what Sankya says, Sankya says, don't do that. There are two kinds of stuff, subjects and objects,

or like Descartes, much later, minds and, bodies and objects, 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, not did the Sanctions long ago. They could not explain it satisfactory, if utterly different kinds of stuff, how would they interact? What Adwaita Vedantah 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. 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.

Sauts 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, Adwatha Vedanta would claim that's an object too. The absence of all objects is also experienced. Therefore, consciousness is there always.

it's not an object. Now, if you stop there, you get a dualism. And Adweta says you cannot stop there. And hence, non-dualism. Why can you not stop there? Because you cannot explain then how does this bear awareness interact with object? 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, this standing scandal of idealism, that you cannot easily refute idealism. How does this world it 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 Vedantah 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.

So, yes. So therefore, you have a non-dualism, a non-tualism. Yeah, 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 realize 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.

Exactly. It appears in consciousness. Yeah. 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 is right out of consciousness, but it's not conscious. Yes, what an ad-dwaiting would say is that very good. You make progress that way,

look at the dream example, and you say that it's made out of consciousness. The technical term in Adwaita Vedanta would be, and there's a term which they use is super-imposition. 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. 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 Adwaita Vedantah 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. 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 bundle of experiences is what I'm calling a rock. 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 Veronter 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? The consciousness is the table or the table which is experienced by the consciousness. A materialist would say the table. An idealist would say the consciousness. And Adwaita 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, you know, 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. 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.

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 also his dualism is of a kind of different flavor, a more sort of scientific, materialistic flavor than the Sankia School, because, like, the Sankia School have,

in the sort of, there's sort of the self and 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. Yeah.

You know, things like happiness or sadness or anger don't belong in the sort of mind category. They belong in the category. degree 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, okay, 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? Why does it appear that there is an object over there and an object over there? If we're just sort of all Brahman, why do we not just experience reality as this one great big, smooth, unified, like ultimate experience? Why is that not how we move through the world? You know what I mean? like 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?

Yes. You can put it this way. What would it look like if the Adwaitic worldview were true or if the Adviatic Brahman view, consciousness view, were true, non-dualism were true? And the answer from the Adviens is exactly like this. In fact, whatever it looks like is compatible with the Adwetic worldview. I am reminded of this anecdote about Wittgenstein. So he comes out of class one day and this philosopher was with him.

He 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? It would look exactly like this. 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 up 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 be, 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 in our virtual, when we construct a virtual reality, we get, we enter into the virtual reality in a particular point of view. That's a great point. And it's like, because I think that the thought is,

wow, yeah, the thought is like, okay, 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 there's 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. But you wouldn't be able to do anything. You wouldn't really be experiencing anything in order to actually, you know,

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 know, but you can understand that like, especially when so many. religious traditions seek unity with the divine, right? Like the mystical traditions of, of religious traditions, kind of seem as though they're striving towards forgetting this world and becoming unified with ultimate reality. And I guess on the Advait of Edanta,

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 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. You know, 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. The question is like, well, why? Why are there U's and me's and thems and over theirs? I understand that it's a bit, 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, I don't know why, I don't know why it's doing that. So this is a question. Why is this, there's 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 manifest? But why manifestation at all? Brahman could well enough just be Brahman. In fact, the author, Somerset mom, who wrote that book, The Razors Edge, which interested a lot of people in Vedantah. He goes to India and he meets this great Vedant teacher, Ramanah Mharshi. And he was well-read in Vedantanth. And he says sort of it's dry British humor, you know, English humor. He says that one feels that Brahman could have left well enough alone.

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. Teasic 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. 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. In deep sleep, in coma, in general anesthesia, there is no appearance at all. In the cosmic, on the cosmic level, there is this whole universe. which is appearing and stuff is happening, but then there will be an end to this, the Hindu idea of the cycles of existence

and then dissolution. So there will be times when there's nothing that is appearing. 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 are, there's 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 it would be a very dull consciousness with this consciousness but nothing to be conscious of So according to Wadh Vedhhātavh 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... 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 this phenomenon. and technological 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 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 also possible. Yeah, and again, it's quite difficult to, 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 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 it'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. 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, 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. They appear separate to me. but it's easy enough for me to recognize that they're 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 world.

direction. 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, you know, pure consciousness? 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 that? this self. According to Advaita Vedhhhhhhah Vedanth, 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 functions of the body, senses, mind in one individual. So here

is the body and the senses here and the mental activity is going on there. And these are all diverse but they're all inwardly phenomenologically subjectively integrated into one unit and that the function of that integration is performed by the ego and the ego is a function of the mind it's 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, 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. 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 abdwitabhwai, there are multiple models. There's a reflection model self-explanatory. There is the pseudo-reflection model.

There is a limitation model. 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 Vedantah 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. Similarly, 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 Vedant. It's the underlying reality of everything. now it becomes what's called a sentient being. 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 Vedantah is the presence of this mind

and especially the ego which reflects and channels consciousness. So the ego does two things. It integrates the body mind into an individual and it channels consciousness into our daily conscious experience. also a big problem of modern consciousness studies. Panpsychism, for example, modern panpsychism runs into the individuation problem. How are there parts of consciousness? There's nothing to suggest that if there's one consciousness, why does it even become parts?

There's 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. In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna actually says, to Arjuna. Though I am one, though I am one, I appear to be many.