Maya by Swami Sarvapriyananda - Inspired by Swami Vivekananda's Jnana Yoga

[Music] oh [Music] om lead us from the unreal to the real lead us from darkness unto light lead us from death to immortality home peace peace peace good morning this lecture today is second in a series of talks on swami vivekananda's gyana yoga so the first one was last month i think it was called our real nature and this one is maya i have never spoken on this subject earlier it's perhaps the most difficult subject that i have ever taken up so be ready to go away with a headache brahman is very simple maya is complicated swami vivekananda devoted three whole lectures on maya in his series of talks on gyani yoga in london in fact the house where he gave those stocks it's still there and if you go there they have a blue circle system in the united kingdom where it's a heritage place it says uh the hindu philosopher and monk gave uh talks here in this house it's there in london man matanat ganguly one of one of swami vivekananda's disciples approached him once swami vivekananda was very happy with him and said ask for something and i'll give it to you and ask me a question so manma sanat asked i have read your lectures on maya but i want to know about it more fully from you please tell me what is maya and swami vivekananda said ask something else but man mata persisted he said if i cannot know this from you from a guru like you then i will never understand it in my life i have got a guru like you and this is something that i want to know in my life then swami vivekananda started speaking and manmata has his reminiscences we learned about it from there he started speaking after some time man mata said it's as if literally not even as if literally the world started spinning around him and it dissolved he says he gives an example i don't think it's there in the english translation of his reminiscence in the original bengali it's there that when you look at a fire and just above a fire there is you know if you see the the because of the heat there's a shimmer the world seems to come in and out of focus so the room around him the place around him seem to vibrate come in and out of focus you know like it's as if it's disappearing after some time vivekananda himself disappears his own manmata's own body is disappeared he's just hearing the voice of vivekananda and then he bursts out he says he burst out in a high-pitched voice he's saying all this is maya even you what you are doing all this ramakrishna mission the monastery all your work this is all maya and vivekananda um so he says this and suddenly he realizes in in bengali in indian languages there are different ways of ways of saying you in old english also there was thou and uh you so you say apni to somebody who's senior so guru vivekananda is guru he should have said apni but he said to me to me means you when you say it's to somebody who is your inferior or to a child somebody in any way not certainly not your guru he realized he had said to me to vivekananda the moment you realize this you know the sense of difference comes in that the world snapped back into place and vivekand is there sitting at him and looking sitting and looking at him and smiling and vivekande said you are right all this is maya and if you do not like this play of maya then go into the himalayan fastness and meditate and and merge into brahman but if you cannot then come and help in this work unfortunately what vivekananda said manmath has not written that down so i don't think i can deliver that to you today to make the world disappear but i think i can reasonably promise you a fairly uh intense headache today but vivekananda's lectures are there the the talks on maya so today's talk is based on what vivekanda said about maya in three lectures i'll try my best to to summarize what he has said vivekananda spoke about maya in a in a refreshing new way you know in a very direct way those who have read those lectures you will always you'll never forget and this is maya and this is maya and this is maya to understand his approach the refreshing the new the novel in his approach to maya one must first take a look at the classical approach to maya now maya is an ancient word and it is accepted by all schools of just about every school of indian philosophy hindu and buddhist but the way the non-dualists advaitins talk about maya that's what we're going to talk about today that's unique that's different from the other schools um in general the schools of hinduism the tantra the the vaishnavas they all accept maya as the power of god shakti so the power of god to create and it's a real power and god's creation with maya is a real creation here is this universe god has created this universe this is the way it is understood in the other schools but the this maya takes on a unique approach in the approach to maya and advaita vedanta is unique in classical advaita vedanta what is maya let's quickly take a look at it and then we will go on to vivekananda's approach to maya the literature on maya is vast is is um in fact there's more written on maya than on brahman there's more written on falsity than on reality the the unique approach to maya in advaita vedante is encapsulated in the the central teaching of advaita vedanta brahma satyam jagat mithya jiva brahman brahman alone is the reality the absolute existence absolute knowledge absolute bliss absolute is the only reality then what is this world this uh pluralistic world this variegated world which we see spread out before us what is this so this is um jagat mithya it's an appearance this mithya is another name for maya that it's an appearance appearance of brahman it's not real in itself what are we then are we real or an appearance jeeva brahma even opera you are none other than that absolute you do not know yourself if you really knew yourself you would realize me i am the absolute of which the universe is an appearance so this is a unique formulation the non-dualists have this advaita vedanta and it got the non-dualists into no end of trouble because they were immediately fiercely attacked by the other schools the orthodox schools of uh hindu other schools of hinduism the dualists qualified modest and so and so forth in fact it led to a tremendous flowering of philosophy if you look back upon the history of indian philosophy you can see three periods of glorious development tremendous flowering and richness one is at the dawn of indian philosophy when from the vedas philosophy emerged darshana darshana means philosophy darshan literally means to see to see darshana emerged um that was the age of these sutra cars the those who wrote these sutras the aphorisms the nyaya sutras of of gotama the vaishika sutras of kanada the yoga sutras which are very famous even now they are studied you know the patanjali yoga sutras the sankhya sutras of kapila which are lost the purva memsa sutras of germany and the brahmasutras of vyasa bada rayana piazza so this the age of the sutras that was the beginning of the different schools of of philosophy the next great period of development in indian philosophy came a few centuries later with the emergence of buddhism so buddhism was such a strong challenge powerful challenge purva paksha powerful challenge to the orthodox schools of hinduism so that set off a thousand-year debate i kid you not one thousand years from about a couple of hundred years after the buddha till around the time of shankaracharya just after that nearly a thousand years in which the buddhists attacked the two most precious beliefs of the hindus the belief in an immortal soul atma and the buddhist said anatma no self and god that there is a god ishwara the buddhists are agnostic about it they may be who knows not interested doesn't matter so this huge debate which sparked off for a thousand years the hindu is trying to defend the theses of an immortal soul and uh of of an eternal god all-powerful creator and the buddhists attacking them relentlessly and both sides developed it was like a philosophical arms race both the logic developed the philosophy of language developed the methods of interpretation of the scriptures developed on the hindu side the niyah school and the purva muamsa school were the two primary schools which developed a lot a lot of philosophical literature at this time but that does not concern us the next burst of development of indian philosophy was after shankaracharya so when the dualists now it's within hinduism the dualists attacked the non-dualists so this continued for about 500 years after shankaracharya where they tried to attack the non the advaita non dual school and most of the attacks were concentrated on the non-dualist formulation of maya so maya they immediately saw this is the weak link and this is where the attacks have to be concentrated so what was the advaita formulation of maya what is maya when we started studying advaita vedanta our introductory textbook was vedanta sahara which is a rather boring dry little book of it's like a book of definitions it gets used but it gives you a solid foundation for studying classical non-dualism classical advaita vedanta in that there is a definition or a description of maya so you have to we have to be able to learn it memorize it remember in advaita point of view maya is at its at its core maya is nothing but ignorance means ignorance ignorance of what our true nature we do not know we are brahman and hence all the problems so you have to know your brahman ignorance is the problem maya and ghana knowledge is the solution so the definition of maya is the definition of ignorance in in vedanta and it goes like this ignorance is or maya is what does it mean this maya or ignorance you cannot say that it is seeing that once you become enlightened it is not one swami put it very beautifully this question about maya why all this how did the one become the many one swami said very beautifully he said on our side of enlightenment when we are not enlightened on our side we have the question there is no answer and on their side after enlightenment they have the answer there is no question so sad asad bihar manir it you cannot say maya is an ultimate reality because after enlightenment there is no maya for you for you the enlightened person but you cannot say that it does not exist either but seeing that we see all this our entire life is lived in maya so you cannot say it is you cannot say it is not sat as cannot be expressed as is or is not the second thing is this is this is maya what is it composed of can you say what is maya made of and the answer the non-dualistic from the sankhya cosmology three gunas sattva rajasthan sattva rajasthan i will not go into all this but we discuss it again and again but this is something that we have borrowed from sankhya cosmology satwara just thomas maya is opposed to knowledge opposed to knowledge you must understand carefully maya is that which is destroyed by knowledge it's a fancy way of saying that knowledge removes ignorance so what you are ignorant what i am ignorant about i need knowledge about that if i if i don't know chemistry and then i need i'm ignorant of chemistry so i need knowledge of chemistry yes if i i don't know french i'm ignorant of french i need knowledge of french and that will remove that particular ignorance if i do not know my real self as a dwight of elantra claims i'm ignorant of my real self then i need knowledge gyanam of my real self and that will remove ignorance so ignorance is gayana virodhi it is cancelled by knowledge negated by knowledge that's another characteristic of ignorance of maya then the next one is bhavarupam these are all very controversial bhava rupam it's not an absence ignorance is not just an absence of knowledge it's a positive something why a positive something because in advaita vedanta maya has two functions it does two things one it obscures the reality brahman it veils the reality it does not allow you to know yourself as you are one this is called avarana and the second one is vik shaper error it projects the reality as it is not it's not so difficult to understand i do not i see a snake by mistake it's a rope i did not know the rope as a rope veiled yeah and next what happened because i did not know the rope as a rope i mistook it for a snake beacon you can miss uh mistake it for something else also so you mistook it for a snake so that is projection error that is called wik shaper the two functions sri ramakrishna is beautiful example he says one of the functions of maya is avarana it hides the reality and he gives a beautiful story from ramayana where rama and sita and lakshmana are on their way to the forest in exile and rama walks ahead here rama is paramatma the supreme self and lakshmana is jivatma the individual self us and sita is the whale of maya so she is in between and rama is in front and us we be the individual beings lakshmana is at the back and lakshmana can see rama only if sita graciously steps aside and lets him see so that's sri ramakrishna's beautiful example in fact when i was preparing this talk i looked up what sri ramakrishna had said about maya and really that's a subject in itself we should have a separate lecture of on sri ramakrishna on maya very beautiful things we have discussed it from time to time he speaks about the serpent the cobra which has poison in its mouth a little bit of that poison is enough to knock out a mouse or a frog but all the poison is in the mouth of the cobra but it doesn't do anything to the cobra it's the power of the cobra so suramar krishna says maya is the power by which we are all deluded we are trapped in samsara but the entire power is wielded by god ishwara saguna brahman but ishwara is not trapped by maya so that's an example he gives another example he gives is when the water is muddy he says it does not form a good reflection of the sun or the moon the sun of the moon is not reflected properly in muddy water but it's clear then the reflection is good similarly he says in the mind deluded by maya atma the realization of the self it's not clear atman is right here but it's not clear covering this is our unavail another very simple village example he gives for this you have to see villages in bengal there are lots of these little ponds they're called pukur in fact suramar krishna's birth place kamar pukur it's a pond a village pond and you remem you must know that bengal is a very fertile place i mean it's it's always overgrown it's it's luxurious there so the ponds are often covered with a kind of creeper a water plant it covers the surface of the water panna he says hyacinth it's high synth and suramar krishna says you can't see the water when you go and push it aside then the sparkling water underneath you can see but the moment you let go it dances he says it dances back and covers everything similarly it says that when you are you know contemplating vedanta when you are in holy company when you are meditating and praying it seems to disappear samsara goes away but moment you let go it dances back into you again so these are the examples he gives the two functions of maya we shape and our unavailing and projection how can it have two functions if maya is nothing it must have some kind of positive entity remember i'm talking about the five characteristics of maya and vedanta so one characteristic is bhava it it has a positive dimension that it is a positive entity there is something called maya it's not just an absence of knowledge when you say ignorance you can say ignorance is an absence of knowledge but no the non-dualists hold that this maya is not just an absence of knowledge it's not that i don't know that's it no there is a positive force which has these two powers so it's called bhava rupam as if it exists and then finally the last one yat kinchit it's a mysterious something what do you mean it's a mysterious something um there that the description is that you cannot characterize maya as it is this in sanskrit it is like this you cannot say that about maya it is it can't it's hard to pin down and that's the very nature of maya srirama krishna talks about this he says that it's like a man possessed by a ghost he did not know he was possessed by a ghost until he thinks about it and it leaves him immediately we say it you know we had it's a figure of speech whatever it possessed to you we say so when you contemplate upon look upon it it suddenly disappears so maya is like that yet which does not bear the the the light of reason if you focus if you reflect upon it if you concentrate upon it it vanishes um in uttarakhand in the in the himalayas the sadhus have a saying the monks have a saying about maya about uh again they say in hindi first again cut down ignorance don't try to establish that ignorance is by these proofs you can never do that and that's not the point of non-dualism the point is there is something which we do not know let's try to know it that's the thing so these are the five characteristics and i will come i'll tell you why i'm saying all this we are getting up a taste of what the classical analysis of maya was what is the classical presentation of maya this is from vedanta sarah which was written about 700 years ago and this idea of the non-dualists came under heavy attack by the other schools um for nearly 500 years and the non-dualists responded so to get a get a taste of the kind of attack that came from the other schools ramanujacharya who lived about a thousand years ago who wrote the commentaries laid the foundation of vishishta qualified monism so he attacks non-dualism advaita vedanta he attacks non-dualism in his masterpiece shri bhashem so there the the style of debate in ancient india was that if we are going to have a debate if you say something before i reply i must restate to you what you said to your satisfaction is this what you said do you have to agree yes then i can reply you can see how many quarrels it would prevent most of the time when we are very arguing it goes into quarrel develops into or degenerates into quarrels because i'm not really listening to what you're saying i'm thinking of my reply you know like this reply is going to blow you away i'm not really not even listening to the other side i'm just listening nowadays it's it's like that they call it an echo chamber so we just listen to our point of view and then keep giving replies without listening to the other person look here you have to restate to that other person's satisfaction is this what you said and then i can i'm allowed to reply so ramanujacharya he is attacking advaita vedanta in the classical style he restates the position of advaita vedanta what is advaita saying nondualism saying they are saying this so in that in his book it's called mahapuru paksha the great opponent who is the great opponent the non-dualists and he does such a fair job of it and often when people argue you set up a straw man and knock it down and say i won the argument but here ramanuja gives a very fair statement one of our swamis was a great scholar of non-dualism and is a very staunch non-dualist he admits that ramanuja is a gentleman because he does a fair job of stating our position is this what you said let me say yes ah now listen and then he proceeds to shred non-duality and non-dualism to pieces over the next few pages so his main attack is on maya um maya gets a poor rep bad rep you know maya is not all bad sriram krishna says maya is avidyamaya and vidyamaya is that which traps us in samsara he says calm or crow the lust and anger and greed and jealousy and pride these are avidyamaya the maya of ignorance but there is vidyamaya there is the maya of knowledge also which is viveka and vairagya the conviction that there is an ultimate reality the dispassion for temporal things and trying to attain the eternal so vidyamaya and in fact the way out of maya is also through maya swami vivekananda says you cannot escape the machine you must learn how to work the machine then it will set you free so which is basically what we call spirituality and that then the machine sets you free so maya is not all bad but ramanuja um trains his guns on maya sevenfold objection if you listen to the objections your whole understanding your whole faith in non-dualism will be shaken the whole house of nondualism begins to tremble and and and crumble under these uh tremendous attacks what are these attacks seven seven great inconsistencies in maya he says what are they just as a taste i haven't started yet but if you if you know this it will give you a good insight on into what vivekananda was doing when you when he begins to say and this is maya and this is my what are the seven great inconsistencies in maya maya itself is inconsistency so what are the seven great inconsistencies in the theory of maya first he says um the word he uses is anupapathi anupapati means inconsistency or illogicality so the first one is called ashrayanu papati the locus of maya where is this precious ignorance of yours is it in brahman but how can ignorance be there in brahman brahman is the absolute reality it's like saying there's darkness in the sun can't be but it can't be there in in the jiva in the individual being there are only two places where ignorance can be in us or in the ultimate reality where is it but it can't be in us also because brahman according to you the non-dualists brahman alone is appearing as the jiva because of ignorance so ignorance must precede the existence of the jiva where is your ignorance dear sir this is ashrae anupapati the next swarupa nupapati and what is this ignorance is it real is it unreal um what is what is the nature of this ignorance swarupa and there's a very powerful attack there then the third one our answer was if you now remember it cannot be said to exist it cannot be said to not exist the third one is an attack directly on this what you are saying is a logical inconsistency a thing is either true or false in logic there is the law of the excluded middle you can't say it is both true and false you can't say it is neither true nor false no um so you cannot say anir vachanya that it cannot be expressed as is and is not anirbachchanyanupapati third fourth it says maya obscures brahman ignorance obscures brahman how can the absolute existence consciousness bliss how can it be obscured how can you think of anything hiding make tiradhana means disappears vanishes how can brahman vanish because of something like maya it's impossible you might as well shut your eyes and say the sun has vanished no so the impossibility of maya obscuring or veiling brahman tirodhana and and then it goes on to speak about um the um you said maya is a positive something because it remember it as a function of obscuring and projecting yes hour and a week shaper but that's not reasonable ignorance is simply the absence of knowledge you know or you do not know you do not know is this absence of knowledge you that's the absence of knowing is not knowing what is this positive not knowing then the sixth one what will remove this called ignorance according to you the knowledge of nirguna brahman i am brahman what kind of brahman brahman beyond all attributes all qualities all adjectives but according to ramanuja who is a theist the ultimate reality has many qualities you can't talk about an unqualified reality because there's a very logical point here anything that you know must have certain characteristics otherwise how will you know it how will you know it as it is like this so it means this list of characteristics so nir gooda brahman brahman without any characteristics is impossible there is no such thing only brahman brahman means god god has many characteristics omnipotence omniscience omnipresence all loving all benevolent and so and so forth he says in sanskrit brahman is a repository of infinite auspicious qualities so this because there is no such thing as nirguna brahman there is no knowledge of nerd abraham and possible and so overcoming agyana is not possible and finally he says there is no possibility of going beyond if there is such a maya which you are speaking about beginningless maya there is no possibility of going beyond this my if it is there you are finished you're forever trapped in it and there's there are reasons why seven fold a tremendous attack if you actually read the objections in detail you'll be convinced gone non-dualism he's gone i remember it's not related but funny um many many years ago when we uh we become monks and these young people who become monks immediately it arouses tremendous opposition among parents and especially more than the parents the uncles and aunties and so so so often they come charging to get their boy back from the monastery there's a story of i don't know how true it is somebody came say i want to talk to the person in in charge here we went to the main monastery because my boy has run away without my permission so i want to talk to the person in charge so that he will send my boy back who is the person in charge oh he's the general secretary of the order but no good talking to him why because he also ran away from home without him no why i'm saying this is once when i was an um novice a new brahmacari in the place where i joined another brahmachari young young man joined from the same place i had come from a place so his parents came looking and his his father was a big man in the police department he came with a detective fully convinced that his boy had been kidnapped now the swami in charge he said uh i'm too busy he didn't want to speak with him and then he said you speak that language he told me you speak that language go speak with them and the boy the their son disappeared he didn't want to speak with his parents he didn't want to confront them so i was facing this really furious mother and father luckily they didn't seek the detective on me but another parents that come with all sorts of arguments why you should not be a monk and why you should go come back and back home and they couldn't tell their son from whom they prepared all those arguments so they got hold of me and they tried out all their arguments on me why should why shouldn't be a monk and go back later on in the evening the swami asked me how did it go i said i don't know about that boy but i'm convinced i told them even if your son doesn't come back i'm sold i'm coming back with you and in spite of their fury they smiled you will be scared if you read this these tremendous attacks on non-dualism you think that's gone but wait there are answers to all these questions remarkably good answers in fact it's available in english too there's a book seven great untenables professor john grimes he's in canada in alberta he has collected these all these arguments and given a very lucid english translation so and it's useful if you read that you begin to get a deeper understanding of non-duality if your position is attacked and you can defend it successfully you have understood your position even more deeply so you get a much deeper understanding of non-duality when you face these questions and then you understand maya in depth now all this is very philosophical tremendously dialectical logical what vivekananda does is you will see same things the same idea of inconsistency contradictoriness paradox he brings it to our life and he points out in our life instead of talking the language of logic he points it out the language of life and shows maya in our lives one by one and this is maya and this is maya and this is maya i counted 17 times 17 times let me give you some examples powerful language there is the tremendous fact of death i'm quoting him there's a tremendous fact of death everything dies all our progress our wealth our achievement our knowledge all goes to death cities crumbled cities are overtaken by forests in india we have a saying um a thousand years a city a thousand years of forest same place it says mountains crumble to dust planets are blown away and into dust and they become parts of the atmospheres of other planets these are his actual words and today we know tremendous explosions of supernova and entire solar systems wiped out death the poet rabindranath tagore says a leaf dry leaf falls from the tree into a pond setting of ripples these ripples spread out into the universe among the stars and galaxies change and death everywhere vivekananda says saints die and sinners die kings die and poppers die the learned die and the ignorant die all must die and yet there is this tremendous clinging to life we know it is certain that we will die and yet the most powerful is clinging to life and this is maya he says and this is maya i was reading ernst becker's the denial of death it's a pulitzer prize-winning book a very dark book there he says his basic thesis is that this tremendous fact of death is the prime motivating factor the fear of death is the prime motivating factor for humanity this fact of death is there and we say no no i'm not afraid of death i don't think about it he said aha you don't think about it remember he's a psychoanalyst freudian repression you have suppressed it so in freudian psychoanalysis and this is new york the at one time it was in in fashion everybody like say my gurus my therapist so everybody had a therapist the pricier the more well-placed you are thank you and if you say you have a problem yes there's a solution if you say you haven't you don't have a problem i'm all right i have a more serious problem repression you suppressed it somebody asked freud actually did they asked what is not what is normal because whatever you say you're abnormal there's something wrong with you and fried gave a beautiful definition of normality he said um the ability to do your work and to love so if you're functional in your life more or less you can just take care of your your business your life and you can relate to others normally then you are normal a very beautiful definition actually so uh the in that book he says this tremendous fear of death is there it haunts us but we repress it and you know in friday in psych analysis you cannot repress anything forever it comes out so it comes out he says in the form of what he calls immortality projects all the great endeavors of human life from raising a family to making a business to conquering an empire all of that is our struggle to conquer death i know i will die and my reaction is this i suppress it and my reaction is this whether it's children or a big organization or an empire or art writing a book becoming famous i will live on but they are all doomed to failure because the kind of immortality we want this is not that kind of immortality or nationalism i will die for my country and i will be immortal as the person who died for his country but this is not really in our hearts this is not what we want what do we want we want to live like this not uh in that kind of immortality woody allen here he somebody asked him do you want so you want to become immortal on the silver screen you want to live forever in your movies and your books he said typical woody allen he said no i want to live forever in my apartment that is true we don't want we really that kind of immortality we all try to get it but that's a poor substitute for what we secretly want we want to exist this clinging to life this is maya it says then this tremendous contradiction in knowledge we feel that we can know and we are knowing more and more and more but as we go forward we run into paradoxes we run into eternal time is his words we run into immeasurable space and the endless walls of causation time space and causation seems to hem us in bind us set a limit to our knowledge um i was reading godel there's a biography written by rebecca goldstein she's a professor here in barnard college so she in the introduction she say she says the great discoveries in physics of the 20th century look at the names einstein's theory of relativity heisenberg's principle of uncertainty goodell's theorem of incompleteness look at the names so when she writes that i just it struck me suddenly relativity uncertainty incompleteness these are the very words used by the ancient philosophers to describe maya and these are the final almost discoveries of physics in the 20th century john barrows wrote a book called impossibility where he shows in every field as the field advances far enough as it advances you get the feeling we'll know everything but as it advances far enough deep enough you end up with certain insoluble contradictions paradoxes limits to knowledge by the way it's interesting in the first week of april here in new york in the new school there's going to be a workshop two day workshop and guess what the title is unknown unknowability each session unknowability in in life in social sciences unknowable in physics unknowability in mathematics john barrows is speaking rebecca goldstein is speaking also and it's open to the public in the new school fourth and fifth april unknowability the limits to knowledge i was in the shiva and the yoga ashram in bahamas in a few a couple of weeks ago not for a cruise for giving talks and there was this mathematician from oxford who was going to give talks afterwards marcus de satoy and the subject of his talk was on science the subject was what we cannot know so the limits to knowledge vivekananda says we feel we should be able to know but very soon we come up against the more we know the more we see we do not know and this is maya the limits to knowledge our senses drag us out outwards to see to hear to smell to experience this world to taste this world and sense pleasure promises enjoyment and satisfaction and happiness and gives us some satisfaction too but always unfulfilled always unfulfilled the more we try the more our hunger and our barrenness increases somerset mom very beautiful he says that that quote um the more single-mindedly you chase pleasure the more you find nothing pleasing anymore the limits to the and the vivekananda says we are drawn yet we are drawn again and again like moths to the fire and we keep after knowing this also we keep repeating those behaviors those learned patterns of behavior his words until crippled we are swept away by death and this is maya the limits of sense pleasures with every breath we feel we are free we have freedom i i'm acting off my own will and yet when i investigate when i try to act in life do something in life i run up against barriers i see that there are limits to my free will the more i investigate it is one of one perpetual favorite for philosophers through in the east and the west throughout the world throughout history is their free will because we feel there is free will and yet science seems to say determinism that that cannot be free will religion says all is god's will not yours philosophical investigation even neuroscience investigations the libert experiments and all so many kinds of ideas have been generated which all of which seem to show that we do not have free will this every breath we feel we are free and the universe telling us again and again we are not free at all and this is maya so i'm here i can't say so this is maya then he says happiness our pursuit of happiness the more we change social reforms feudalism unhappiness we change it into communism into capitalism into socialism becker the denial of death he calls them our bloody utopias as we try to get happiness from this world and make great changes in this world we seem to redistribute misery that's all swami vivekananda says like rheumatism you chase it from here it goes there it's just redistributing misery and this is maya he says as we increase the power of enjoyment we are increasing the power of suffering too in he says he says in geometric progression little bit of increase in the power of enjoyment multiple times increase in the power of suffering he says who um who can enjoy food like a dog eating but the dog suffers also tremendously this is the the primitive man in in the cave uh age society you know could take a cut on the hand it would heal him very soon he would be very hardy but crude will be completely unable to enjoy the products of our broadway and the museum mile no makes no difference to that person but in them he says the modern man cultured and refined can as power of enjoyment and aesthetic sensibilities multiplied many fold but a pinprick can kill him [Music] and i was thinking in our modern context there's a lot of psychological studies going on the new generation of children coming up protected nurtured to be super kids no exposure to dirt ex vulnerability to infections the number of studies are showing multiple kind of allergies are coming up why where did these allergies come from they're coming because they were not exposed to nature no contact with but not just physical vulnerability emotional vulnerability all the time saying you're great you're the greatest if you've done if you got it right the greatest if you got it wrong you're still pretty great and shielded from failure shielded from criticism shielded from any kind of humiliation nothing there are hard knocks of life shielded by parents the result is when these children come out into society a little bit of criticism a little bit of failure automatic it's going to bound to happen a little suffering physical and they fall apart they become they become outraged and indignant and why is this happening to me how can like a little child who has never been scolded the first time the child is called it it throws a tantrum how can you do this to me it's like but suffering is often necessary for growth i don't know if the example is appropriate there's one uh i i heard this several years ago the japanese are fond of a particular sea fish which is uh very tasty so they decided that they are going to cultivate it in um in enclosed fishery lagoons you know so that they can cultivate much more instead of trying to going out to sea and trying to catch those ones have a whole crop of them so they cultivated and they got a bountiful crop of those uh yield of those that particular kind of fish but there was no taste anymore in those fishes they're bigger but more of them but no taste then what is wrong why aren't they tasty and then they discovered in the sea they chase those fish are chased by sharks and when they chase they they fear they produce a particular kind of hormone or something which gives taste so what they did was a solution they introduced a baby shark to that litter to that lagoon and so that baby shark you can't eat too many so if you eat it eat it up there's no use but it's enough to scare the fish and so this fish should go round and round and the cha little shark chases them around and their fish become tasty now this development and we have heard the story of how if you try to help a cocoon and by opening it up and letting it the butterfly can't fly because that exercises we have heard the stories i don't know how true it is but it is true that the more you increase the power of enjoyment the more refined the more uh protected the more vulnerable the more weak the more prone to suffering and this is maya swami vivekananda says he speaks about the he says a mother loves her child no end dotes upon the child it is her whole life the child is her whole life and the child perhaps son grows up to be a brute and abuses the mother and is a source of misery to her and yet she cannot give up the child and society perhaps praises her for it and criticize the child for being ungrateful and yet the mother knows it is not really love it is something that she ca she cannot shake off it's a kind of obsession kind of a weakness and she would perhaps be better off checking that thing off and yet she cannot and this is maya it's from vivekananda directly the drama of life we come into this life not a blank slate we can't just say is it like the poet said coming become trailing clouds of glory but he says some of us come training clouds of black smoke too so some scars past life we have had many past lives and we live in this life in youth it is all golden full of hope and and possibilities as we go grow older uh we become older and more disappointed and bitter maybe wiser but bitter and then finally death comes and sweeps us away from the stage of life we see in a stage of life we were kids there one monk dutch in our order he is from the netherlands so when his parents were about to pass of it or to die he went back to netherlands to see them for one last time and he said later on he came and told me they were in an assisted living facility but he went to their family house and he said how interesting the same house where i and my brothers and sisters we grew up we played there in that garden we lived in those rooms other children are playing there other children are living in those rooms other dads and moms are living there the stage is the same the actors are different we are gone death sweeps us away and vivekanda adds poignantly victorious or defeated we do not know and this is maya krishna and narada they are walking together and narada says to krishna same question oh krishna can you tell me what is maya krishna says ask me something else and now this is no i want to know this krishna says all right you asked for it but um before that could you i'm very thirsty could you go and get me a little water to drink narada says immediately i'll do that please wait here and he walks to the nearby village to the well there and he sees this girl drawing water there when he comes near the young lady he's captivated by her beauty and he says could you give me a pot of water a jar of water and she says certainly sir and then he starts talking with her and they become friendly and he's so enamored of her she brings him home and introduces him to her father and they like him so much and he likes them and he falls in love with this girl and he proposes marriage the father accepts him and gives him the family business and he settles down there and they are very happy they have their first child as years go by the second child and the third child and um years later one day at night and he's a busy householder now with a lot of responsibilities a flood comes a flash flood no alert those days mobile phone and the water is rising in terror narada gets up and grabbed sold off is the baby child and the other child and the more grown teenage child i mean i mean the the first child and his wife three kids and some a bundle of the possessions and somehow staggers out into the rising flood waters before he can do anything the baby swept away from his shoulders and the other child is swept away from his arm finally his eldest child and his beloved wife they're all swept away and he's thrown on the on the shore weeping and lamenting and he loses consciousness and he wakes up slowly and he sees krishna standing and looking at him says narada where have you wherever have you been it's nearly half an hour i've been waiting 12 years of his life have passed and it's been half an hour only and this is maya very kinda says sri ramakrishna he gives the example of a of a monk in dakshineshwar he says there's a wonderful monk who came to the temple garden of dakshineshwar and he would stay in his little room and he would never come out he would never mix with anybody he would never talk with anybody he spent the whole day in meditation and prayer one day you know the bengal monsoon dark clouds come and covers everything the whole sky is covered and the whole the temple and the river and the city they all become dark and and gloomy and then a strong wind came and blew the sky at the the dark clouds away and there's a blue shining sky again and this monk he for the first time came out of his room and he laughed out loud and he started dancing and then sri ramakrishna goes to him and asks him you did not come out all these days now what is it that you have seen that you are laughing and dancing and then the sadhu said in his hindi broken uh he said in hindi he said yes the maya of samsara is just like that blue shining sky everything is all right suddenly dark clouds come and it's all dark and gloomy and terrible and then wind comes and blows it away and it's all back and shining again this is the maya of samsara swami vivekananda gives his approach to maya he says our very being our life our very being is this contradiction this contradictions he showed series of paradoxes and contradictions and this is maya this is our very being in this is this maya is not a theory is not an explanation of the world this is this word very important because so far the non-dualists have been struggling to provide an explanation because they've been asked for an explanation maya is not an explanation not a theory to explain the world then what is it he says maya is simply a statement of fact it's simply a description of these sheer contradictoriness the sheer paradoxical nature of life just a simple description that is maya he says this common folk in india they say all is maya sub and he says that i think that's as wonderful a statement as you're going to get about the state the state of things in this world all this is indeed maya now there are um two powerful objections to this approach one is vivekan himself brings it up one is why are you saying that all this is maya and this you should transcend this this is this is paradoxical contradictory there is a school of philosophical thought very powerful vivekan himself says in germany certain philosophers have proposed he meant hegel he actually meant hegel that if you look at hegel's philosophy this he says literally it sounds so vedantic he says the absolute the spirit is manifesting itself in this universe through lower to higher and higher manifestations till it will become the absolute perfect being so we are going from primitive manifestations to better manifestations things are becoming better and better and better it's a progressive development hegel's whole idea of dialectics comes from that and it's a very powerful idea and it influenced the course of western thought from hegel to um you know to marx is a direct line marx just removed the spirit aspect of it took the dialectics and material dialecticism and marxism and all of that so very powerful development of western thought comes from hegel and hegel's he said when you read his logic the very first line how pure being or the spirit manifests itself as non-being and from being a non-being uh this dialectical process comes this universe comes change and like that the hegelian dialectic now vivekananda strongly opposes this by the way when i read this first i was impressed by the with how vedantic it sounded if you read the first few lines of hegel's logic so there was a conference in the new school a hegelian scholar was going to speak a young hegelian scholar murder from from from slovenia stephen murder so i went to hear that the talk and uh this is a very um very philosophical crowd beards and backpacks and scruffy hair and intense looks and they sort of looked at me i was weird enough to fit into that so i when it was time for q a i asked the scholar murder that you know it just might be my conditioning but i see certain resonances between what hegel has said here at least at the beginning not later on but at the beginning what he has said and upanishadic sought and remember the background is hegel had a very poor opinion of indian and chinese philosophy he said all philosophy is there it's in europe and there's no philosophy worth the name in india or in china so but it seems very upanished vedantic and uh he said his response was very interesting he's a leading scholar of hegel now it seems it's a new trend in hegelian studies he said you are absolutely right swami it's it's entirely from there it's that very thought from the upanishadica that the expression of brahman and i said but maybe it's just they are echoes or resonances similarities then he said to be murdered in the whole gathering in front of everybody he said you are just being polite hegel stole it his words hegel stole the entire thing from there he says steal it from there my my idea no credit to them because they couldn't have invented it they're backward barbarians there's there's nothing there this i i thought this is i never heard this but i asked a hegelian scholar you know i own marriage so he is who gave a talk here he's a well-known scholar in hegels so he said yes this is a new line of investigation how much did actually hegel knew know about asian philosophy and how much he took from there i in fact asked another philosopher whom you might recognize zijek slavadz zijk he's a superstar crazy you just have to look at zed-eye zdk so he spoke in the um the schwarzman building the new york public library here in manhattan near bryant park so i went to attend that because i i have heard him speak on youtube and i've read his work earlier so i was very interested he is in one word crazy so if you if if you listen to him for 10 minutes also you will know he says the most outrageous things um for but he says it for effect if you actually wait a little bit it's not so outrageous he has got he is actually saying something good for example outrageous thing right here in the new york public library he was giving his talk he said this and even you are saying this can get me into trouble but listen to the whole explanation which is a very good point he makes he said gandhi is actually more violent than hitler everybody looking so outraged what how dare you say that and the people around me looking like this i said wait i know him so why why he says gandhi actually destroyed the british empire by his non-violence he changed the world what did hitler change nothing the same old world more violence and then it's same world continued after that so gandhi is actually more violent than hitler so he speaks like that anyway so that's why i was a little hesitant if i go up to him a monk like this and ask a question i don't know what he will say i don't mind but so i sort of i went up to him and asked him the same question about because he's one of the leading scholars of hegel in the world today so i asked him professor zijk what do you think of hegel's views of indian philosophy and he said he's a very strong slovenian accent oh he's just studied secondary sources he didn't know enough he didn't know enough and this is this is somebody remember who is saying this his background is marxist and freudian psychoanalytic and marxism this is the background from which he comes so he is absolutely no friend of any kind of religion or spirituality but he said uh hegel did an injustice to indian philosophy but he also said something interesting just as a way i'll just as an aside i'll share it i said what do you think about shopping however because you know shop in our loved indian philosophy he said he read the upanishads it was his favorite reading every day in the night he would read a few pages of the upanishads and go to sleep before that before going to sleep he would read the few pages of the upanishads he said i considered no other study in the world as beneficial as the study of these upanishads the translation except perhaps the original these upanishads have been the soles of my life and will be the soles of my death chopin his masterpiece the world as will and idea the world is willing idea in the first chapter he says what i shall say in these volumes shopping hours says what i shall say in these volumes was best known to the ancient hindus they called it maya so i asked zijk what do you think of chopin our but he had an interesting point of he said even i think even show up in our westernized indian thought right interesting because vivekananda also had to say has the same opinion so what is vivekanda's objection the spirit is expressing itself everything is getting better and better and better ultimately it will reach perfection hitler loved that by the way it's expressing itself and now the best expression now is the state and of course in the state it means the german state and of course in german state means a nazi state and of course the best expression of that is i hitler so the ultimate expression of the absolute anyway um vivekanda's objection is this any kind of expression is limitation right to actually what is expression name and form time space and causation a thing no matter how beautiful a thing no matter how advanced something it's still a thing it is one thing and not the other thing if it is an expression in time space and causation it's a finite thing the infinite can express itself only in finite things so any kind of expression no matter how wonderful will still be finite the infinite cannot be expressed as the infinite this is the deep fundamental flaw in hegelian thought that ultimately will become the absolute no it will become an imitation of the absolute so then what is the answer vivekananda says the answer the ancient vedantins found was not in the flow of maya but against the current that the infinite is expressing itself and experiencing itself in all these ways and finally realizes that true peace is not to be found here true fulfillment is not to be found here completion is not to be found here infinity is not to be found here and then begins the movement inwards vivekander says two words pravriti and nivriti paravrty means circling outwards wider and wider circles into the universe navrati means circling inwards and he says true spirituality begins with this inward movement he says renunciation therefore is the basis of spirituality not peace is not to be found in a thing out there peace is not to be found in the object it is to be found in the subject so the source movement back to the source to brahman that is spirituality that is vedanta another objection the second great objection comes he says which is more common here in the world today very few of us seriously in manhattan if you ask are you a hegelian or something what they'll look at you strangely and walk away from you so very few are hegelians but many people are what might be called vivican this is the second objection agnostics we really don't know all this absolute expressing itself maybe maybe not who knows all we know is this life and try to make the best of this life somehow muddle through try to you know make hay while uh uh what make hay while the sun is shining yes while the sun shines vivekananda says this position has a great flaw the flaw is this it says take life minus the ideal component the moment we have life moment we are here all of us we seek to transcend it we want more we want we want something transcending this world we want god nirvana moksha transcendence fulfillment the moment we have something we seek to overflow life overflows it so this ideal component which has been there from the memorial times from the from the primitive uh societies up to modern times in all our religion of spirituality our idealism agnosticism seems to say that just take the material aspect of life just the commonplace aspect of life and leave out all of that that's a very limited point it might satisfy you it will not satisfy the next person why religion art spirituality scientific quest all of them seek to go beyond what we already have how can you say that this much only is life so agnosticism has this great great defect it takes a very limited snapshot of life and leaves out that it cannot fulfill your heart you will go beyond it what is beyond it the quest for freedom quest for freedom beyond maya it has always been there something within us says not this not this nativity there is something higher than this freedom vivekananda says that in the most primitive of religions when you have all these deities the god of thunder the god of sun or the rain we have these ideas these gods who are these gods that personified ideas of our freedom i cannot do these things i am subject to death disease and hunger here is a god who is free of these things beautiful perfect immortal the polytheistic religions began that way with multiple multiple manifestations of our conception of freedom freedom from maya as religion advanced we came to the idea of one ultimate reality beyond maya this ultimate reality beyond maya beyond time space and causation who creates this entire universe this is the god of the monotheistic religions that one god the great insight that the religions in the middle east had and the abrahamic religions that there is one god that one ultimate reality rules over this entire universe beyond this universe and there the monotheistic religion stopped whether it's the jehovah of the jews or the father in heaven or allah or the theistic religions in india with vishnu or the divine mother or shiva but vedanta begins there vivekananda said that's the beginning of vedanta that is in fact dualistic vedanta vedanta goes further further that god who is beyond time space and and causation is also within time space and causation as the immanent reality of this entire universe everywhere in this universe is that one react one reality within all beings in and through all these existences an immanent god transcendent and immanent all this is indeed that divinity spinoza's god the great um philosopher 17th century spinoza einstein here by the way i mentioned rebecca goldstein she's one of the leading authorities in spinoza so she in her book in a talk she mentioned einstein in fact einstein said here here in princeton he he was here he said the only god i believe in is the spinosaurus god the god who reveals himself through the orderly workings of the universe as this universe not the god who concerns himself with the doings of mortal man and then he wrote a poem einstein wrote a poem it's available if you see einstein's poem on spinoza full of he says the this this holy man he says to an admiration of spinoza spinoza's god a pantheistic i'd say a little bit of injustice to pinochet spinoza to call him pansy stick pan anthistic would be a more precise word but anyway god has this entire universe as appearing as this universe and yet this is not non-dualism all this is brahman if you literally take it that way it is vishishta dwaytha qualified monism spinoza's god is this this entire universe is god or a part of god the entire insanity universe and us sentient beings we are parts of the divine so this is spinoza's conception like our body hands and feet and head all parts of one integral entity called my body similarly we are all parts of one divine reality goes further when you say all this is brahman it can be interpreted as vishishtadvaita but when you say all this is not brahman alone is then you come to advaita mary hale wrote in a poem to vivekananda i have understood what you have taught that all you are saying you are teaching everything is god and vivekande said i have never taught such strange doctrine that all is god mary hail protested she said you said it you said those very words that all is god he said no what i meant is all is not god only is brahman only is the only reality that which was outside time space and causation as the god of religion which becomes the vishishtadvaita the one divine unity of this universe spinoza's god in advaith of the final development it comes it is none other than you yourself you the individual being you appear as subject and object as a sentient being as insentient universe as the one and the many advaita comes to this grand conclusion vivekananda says human thought reaches there such heights that the human lung can scarce breathe there aham brahma has me i am brahman when i truly realize i am that which i was looking for outside tattwa masi that thou art this is the reality that was hidden by maya all along what was hidden by maya you were hidden by maya maya did not hide the truth from you you are the truth so the play of maya was your own play and finally you see now you stand in the bright sunshine sunlight beyond darkness forever and look back upon the same world the same world is now transformed from a hellhole from a struggle and strife and darkness and death and unhappiness into an immortal reality and all this becomes you are the stage upon which the drama of life is being staged you transcend sorrow you transcend misery transcend death listen ye dwell in higher heavens for this is the truth that even you do not know the gods do not know this truth i have realized that infinite being blazing forth like the sun forever beyond the darkness of sorrow and death and limitation tamaeva viditwa by realizing that alone one goes beyond death and suffering there is no other path all other paths lead to maya there's only this path how do you realize that that ultimate being you realize that that's the god of religion devotion as the god of spinoza that reality all around and finally as i myself me i pray to sri ramakrishna to the holy mother and swami vivekananda that these insights may shine forth in our hearts in this very life and may we be blessed by the glimpse of light beyond maya oh [Music] hurry [Music] be

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Keywords: Vedanta, religion, god, karma, meditation, ramakrishna, vivekananda, brahman, hindu

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Length: 79min 36sec (4776 seconds)

Published: Tue May 18 2021