Swami Sarvapriyananda Immortality July 17, 2021

[Music] lead us from the unreal to the real lead us from darkness unto light lead us from death to immortality home peace peace peace it's wonderful to be back here some known face in spite of the masks i can recognize some of you and new york we have small gathering once in a while because of the pandemic i've gotten into the habit of saying some known masks some i can see some familiar masks so today just a little while ago we had a memorial to stevenburg who was a long time deputy and associated with with the santa barbara convent um it was a very moving memorial service i think many of you attended it in new york we suffered a loss yesterday um freedom a clue was close to our center and his wife susan sam she has been close to the vedanta society here and in new york especially in new york since 1970s early 70s so um he passed in vienna austria yesterday a wonderful couple lived a life of art she is an internationally uh known jello player she plays with the quartet and uh he was an excellent painter so they had this wonderful apartment at the very top of one of the tall buildings in manhattan and it had this remarkable light i remember i've never seen light like that they chose it because of that because of frida's painting it's like a kind of golden luminosity you know and i guess they it was not very comfortable up there i think they chose it because she could practice her music and he could paint and they would not be bothered by you know neighbors yeah and so they lived this life this wonderful life for decades i met him only a few times i still remember i've gone to the metropolitan museum of art and he told me something that said no no no swami that's not the way when you go and visit the metropolitan museum of art and go around and see the paintings he said if you were to visit your your best friends would you visit a hundred at a time so that's ridiculous you would visit one and you know sit with him for some time and that's how you appreciate art how you enjoy immerse yourself in art go and sit there with one or two of your best friends so death is is ever present and therefore the question of death the problem of death is ever present and that's what religion and spirituality is you know i was just thinking about it that the entire project of spirituality whether in the east and the west and certainly in the east in india has been a 5 000 years story of the quest for immortality you can you can see it that way actually very easily when swami vivekananda came to this country often he was he would introduce vedanta with one very stirring quote from the upanishads shrine listen the children of immortal bliss shrinvanthu vishway amrita even those who live on higher planes you know gods who live in heavens you listen to me also the sage says we do not know who from whom this poetry first came it's very ancient he says even the gods do not know what i'm going to speak about what to speak of mortal man what should we listen what is the message i have realized that infinite being i've realized that infinite being i've known that infinite being what kind of infinite being says blazing forth like the sun not with the material light like sun there but blazing forth with that glory but not with the material light with the light of consciousness forever beyond darkness beyond the darkness of death all right suppose such a thing is there and you can know it what is the use of it what do we get out of this by realizing that by knowing that one goes beyond death one goes beyond death one overcomes death one solves the problem of death any other way you know you can upload your consciousness to the cloud or something like that get a robot cybernetic body and i'm i'm not uh being humorous i'll tell you why you know in a while some way prolong your life store your body in a cryogenic container or something like that science fiction or almost science fact now can you do that can you become immortal that way na nifpanta with diyati ayanaya there is no other path to immortality everything else has a limit there's only this way that there is this infinite reality and it is forever beyond death and when you know it mortal man the mortal becomes the immortal you you go beyond death i think that really inc encapsulates the message of not only vedanta but all of spirituality that's one way of looking at it and it's a major way of looking at spirituality what spirituality is all about recently just last month i had this offer from hollywood wrote to me swami how would you like to be on a show with captain kirk with william shatner i said of course as kids in india we grew up at that time there were there were only two american shows on tv there was only one channel there were only two american shows on tv star trek and i love lucy so every sunday i would wait for a star trek i don't know when was i loved ducey that was that also which i think was on friday or something and of course captain kirk i didn't know that he was still acting i didn't actually know that he was still around but and then i looked him up he's been acting since 1951 and he's still acting and so is this for this history channel show he's hosting it and the subject is immortality yogis and immortality the search the quest for overcoming death for going beyond death i was thinking i told the producer that you right there in william shatner you have somebody who is a secret of immortality i mean if he's been acting since 1951 he's 90 now going by the wikipedia page and he's still very active so there you have it and i agreed of course to this thing and then they came and they had questions they interviewed me for more than one and a half hours and the question is that how do we live longer that was the basic idea there are we come across stories and even authentic accounts of yogis living for hundreds of years the most recent example celebrated example was trilanga swami in banaras if you look him up he's a very famous spiritual teacher in india and because he was in a recent history he passed in the middle of towards towards the end of the 19th century sri ramakrishna met him so he was 280 years old and because it was in the british period and they had multiple sources who attest to the fact that at least he lived for two centuries so 280 years by most accounts a very remarkable character enlightened being and i think he was there just to bless people and transmit spiritual knowledge and blessings he was in the holy city of benares it's a city of shiva and people used to call him the walking shiva srirama krishna called him the walking shiva the shiva was walks around in benares his meeting with sri ramakrishna is also interesting if you go to the little room where he lived trilangaswami in banaras there is a painting on the wall which shows sri ramakrishna visiting trilanga swami and sri lama krishna is asking him to see the thing is trilangaswami was mostly silent he would hardly speak so suramar krishna asks him in gestures is it two or one ultimate reality and trailing swami is replying one he was this huge man towering and you can see he's saying one like this and there's a funny side to that story i mean i remember i was telling this story to a friend of mine another monk and we were at at uh dinner in the ashram where i joined the order this was about 20 24 years ago and i was telling this other young monk the story and we are sitting down for dinner and i said you know i was pointing and showing me showing him my gestures two or one at that time the person serving the rotis the chapatis was walking by and he gave me one and he's gone before i wanted to but he gave me one and there's no chance of an appeal because he has to give it to 200 people so he's raised on her head and taiwan swami lived 280 years so and there are a number of other uh such accounts of yogis living for a long time so how do they live for a long time is it worth living for a long time what is the point in living for a long time you must remember if you want to live for a long time another way of looking at it is do you really want to be old for a longer time the oldest member of our vedanta society in new york is bill conrad he's 96 this year and he keeps saying almost every other day he would say old age is not for sis the buddha what made the prince gautama into buddha siddhartha into buddha is that he saw old age she saw an old person and a sick person and a dead body and so these symbolize the this face of suffering this symbolize what is wrong with uh life the the deep fault lines you know in california you have a fault line deep fault lines which run through life old age disease death and then he saw sorry he saw a monk and he wanted to know who is this monk and he says he's given up all worldly pursuits in search of enlightenment and then you know these are the four sites after which he decided to become to go out in search of truth and remember his quest for truth his quest for enlightenment was a quest to solve the problem of suffering not just for himself he was not really in a lot of suffering he was having a party he was a prince and kept in the midst of lap of luxury but he realized the pervasive nature of suffering that nobody can escape suffering he asked his charioteer who is this strange man why is he bent over why is he tottering why is he does he have wrinkles and his hair have fallen out his teeth have fallen out and he says he's old that's why will my father become old will my child become old and my wife become old yes prince they will all become old will i become old yes prince you will become old too and then death disease and death will my father die yes will my one day my child a little boy will he die one day yes and i yes prince you two will die so this inevitable nature of suffering that nobody nobody escapes it so this put him on the trajectory towards enlightenment the quest his quest was not just for his own suffering or possible suffering but for everybody the solution to the problem of suffering which includes old age disease death so really you want to prolong life physically in this way this is the only way we know it but then if you prolong it this way you're just being old a little longer a doctor in calcutta told me that swami these days our medical technology is so good we have advanced so far that we can almost more or less ensure that you will live long but we cannot guarantee you will live well you live long but probably not well so these are the questions they asked in that interview and we talked about it so initially yes thousands of years back if you go there were practitioners who tried to prolong physical life but they very soon realize first of all it is impossible and the consequences are not always desirable why is it impossible as the inside the buddha got this inside that everything is impermanent his famous insight anitya manityam sarva manityam impermanent impermanent indeed all is impermanent not just impermanent it's changing fast shani comes shanikam sarvam shanikam momentary momentary all is momentary and not just that shunyam shunyam sarvamshunyam empty empty all is empty because it is impermanent because it is momentary and because it is all empty comes suffering suffering indeed all is suffering now you might say what a way to rain on our parade but heinrich zimmer the well-known endologist he says the philosophies of india are not actually pessimistic they are optimistic they say that there indeed there is this grim picture of life that that's what they paint um a philosopher once told me there's an ancient sanskrit proverb i forget the wording but it what it basically means to the sensitive to the thinker all is suffering if you're hit with a spider's web you barely feel it but if the eyeball is hit with even a thinnest of silk of spiders web you feel it similarly for the sensitive for the thinker indeed all is suffering so the quest was how do you overcome suffering and ein rick zimmer says if you look at all the philosophies of india they say that it is possible to overcome suffering it is possible to overcome old age disease death it's possible to overcome death not in the way we might first of all think you know you live longer in a physical body that that's the first thing that comes to our mind not in that way the buddha also discovered because everything is impermanent everything that has been put together will one day fall apart everything that is compounded will decay ultimately so physical bodies haven't put together they'll fall apart machines fall apart artifacts fall apart physical bodies also will fall apart you cannot keep it going forever and in fact if you try to keep it going it can actually increase suffering around this time i'm talking about thousands of years ago across the civilizations of the world and especially in india they discovered that it's not just the physical body we have what came to be known as a subtle body sukshma sharira a subtle body now straight off the bat subtle body is is not something esoteric something mystical it's something very obvious what is the subtle body our thoughts feelings emotions memories basically the person we think we are when we say we are embodied you know generally we really do not think we are literally this body we think we are persons all of us we think we are persons sort of somehow embodied in this body a bit like software in a machine maybe a data in a computer or something like that so we are persons in encased in a physical body this person this is the subtle body and this is what they discovered across the civilizations of the world at the very beginning of civilization even before that all the uh you know the first nations the original tribes they all have this knowledge that one does not perish with the destruction of the physical body something survives something continues and there you have the beginning of religion you cannot have religion without something continuing after death somebody told me in new york that oh no after life is it's not there in in judaism i said that cannot be i don't know enough to convince you otherwise but you have to ask your rabbi and then later she went and asked and came back and said you're right there's a fully developed theory of afterlife and what happens you know you cannot have religion a spirituality without without a theory of afterlife something survives death and that's the subtle body you may say that hey wait a minute that's still the physical body a doctor or a scientist will tell you that's still a physical body but that's already assuming a lot you're already assuming what that what you call the subtle body thoughts feelings emotions desires the personality that's just the brain that's just neurons firing when the brain dies that's all gone the person is gone when the brain dies when the body is dead burned buried then the person is gone but then you're making this big jump this logical jump that somehow the physical body the brain and the nervous system produce the first person experience of being alive of seeing hearing smelling tasting thinking desiring loving hating you say so show me how show me how little bursts of electricity produce this they're correlated there's no doubt about it i'm not going to go into this as a favorite subject of mine it's a trap i said jump into it and we'll be there forever it's called a hard problem of consciousness if you google it david chalmers and she is from nyu so david chalmers is a leading philosopher in the mind brain consciousness unit at the new york university he is the one who coined the term the hard problem of consciousness basic idea is how does something physical like the brain generate first person experiences you know the feeling of seeing color the experience of taste smell all that you see in the brain if you scan the brain because your brain generates it but if you scan the brain even with your subtlest instruments what are you going to get you're going to get physical processes you're going to get arrays of neurons firing tiny bursts of electricity in the brain how does that translate into seeing the sunlight how does that translate into the feeling of grief at losing a beloved person how does that translate into the feeling of remembering something or having the feeling of it's on the tip of my tongue i cannot recall there are tiny bursts of electricity going on in the brain corresponding to that all of present neuroscience of consciousness is what is called a science of correlation what is this correlation you report a pain and the science neuroscientist is scanning your brain and finds that certain bits of your brain somewhere this little bit of bursts of electricity are firing oh this is correlated with that you can't yet say this produces that or this is the cause of that or this is basically that you can't say how where is the science in between i saw this cartoon which explains the problem a scientist is giving a talk step one two three four five steps one two three are you know mathematical equations a lot of detail and step five is again mathematics in step four it's just written miracle and another scientist is telling him i think you need to work on step four that's what's going on in the in neuroscience that more and more knowledge about the nervous system about the brain functioning and then somehow that becomes thoughts feelings emotions somehow won't do i've spoken with people working in this field in the cutting edge of this field and they don't have a clue they don't have actually to be honest they don't have a clue the best they can offer is wait for a wild swami in 20 years 30 years we will have an answer for you 50 years we'll have an answer for you and this is the theory they call promissory materialism it's a promise i will reduce consciousness to matter anyway so the idea is that it's it's like a body not reducible to uh brain or brain states connected with the physical body with a living body with the nervous system and brain no doubt intimately connected that is there is no doubt about it you take a cup of coffee you feel fresh take medicines affects your mind mind is disturbed it affects your body so mind and body are deeply connected intimately there's no doubt about it but they are not the same so this subtle body was discovered and this where was it discovered in every civilization every civilization wherever you felt that after the last rights of the departed person you have rituals and prayers for the onward journey of that person every civilization and pre-modern civilizations all of them they have this they have this insight there's something out there which which survives physical death you might even say it's just a hope but it's a hope grounded on solid reasoning it's grounded on phenomenological reasoning and you experience yourself so this thing how do you know this this is a reasoning let's think about it how do you know that when the physical body is dead the person inside is dead what i mean is when we interact with the person i'm talking to you or to him or to her i don't think i'm talking with a body i think i'm talking with a person right and i say the person is alive the person is here when the body is dead and that's what any doctor will tell you any coroner will tell you that the body is dead sorry but the body is dead there's a good way of keeping people awake they'll tell you the body is dead and we say that the person is dead do you see the sudden jump we are making when i'm interacting with the with you i'm saying i'm it with the person i'm saying i'm interacting with the person with the body just with the body no but when the body dies i say the person is dead how do you know what does the medical certificate say does it say the person is dead no it says the body is dead they have this they have nothing to say about the person in between is that same logical jump that the physical body the person is nothing more than the physical body but it's already that's assuming a lot and that's where modern the science of consciousness is stuck there so this phys this subtle body there is no ground to believe that it's dead when the physical body dies and every religion on earth every primitive so-called primitive the aboriginals societies and tribes they all had this understanding that the physical body death of the physical body is not the end of life and this subtle body goes on to other lives and other experiences in vedanta this subtle body if you ask what is it made up just like the physical body what is the subtle body what is the physical body here hands and feet and head and tummy and chest and organ systems and tissues and cells and those entire physiological processes which keep it alive so what is the subtle body what's it made of what are its parts in vedanta we say you can classify or you can analyze the subtle body into actually 19 parts and they are all known none of them are esoteric none of them are speculative they are all i mean when i tell you what they are you will say you can check them up one by one you can see yes of course what are the 19 parts there are the five sense faculties the ability to see ability not actually not the physical eyes these are part of the physical body but the power to see the ability to see ability to hear to smell to taste to touch five sense powers then the five motor organs you know the ability to locomotion moving around the ability to grasp something manipulate things the physical the hands and feet the ability to talk to speak the ability and the powers of uh you know uh elimination of wastes and reproduction these motor organs the five water organs so [Music] now we have ten and then there are the five physiological functions which i will not go into details they're called the five pranas they're basically physiological functions breathing and which takes care of the circulation of blood the assimilation of food and so on which keeps this physical body alive that is prana one word for that is for prana and it has five components so now you have fifteen high motor organs five sense organs and five pranas fifteen parts of the subtle body and then we come to what we most intimate to us thought emotion uh memories intellect understanding and finally the ego the feeling of i within ourselves thoughts and emotions the mind or manas memories the storehouse our likes and dislikes past experiences dramas all of that storehouse and then the buddhi the intellect the discriminative faculty the one which we enables and us to say that ah i get it or we screw up our face in puzzlement i don't get it what are you saying that faculty of the mind and finally the ego the the one which says i it's basically a coordinating i would call it an appropriating function which takes all the activities going on in the body and the mind and says i you're walking and say i walk and talking i talk want something i want something remember i remember these are all functions of different parts of the subtle body and i says i it's a coordinating function it's called the ego ahamkara nineteen five sense organs five motor organs uh five physiological functions of prana 15 and then mind memory intellect ego 19 this is the subtle body what happens to it after death here we have speculations in across the religious landscape that it goes from a physical body after the death of the physical body it goes to other planes of existence and has other experiences there something like our dreams and nightmares and then it gets embodied in a new body and comes back to life again could be a human body could be some other body it comes back it's like data being downloaded from the cloud into a new machine you had a machine it got old you discarded it but you backed up all your data and now you get a new machine and then you download it and then you continue working with it something like that so this subtle body it does not die with the death of the body why is all this happening why are we going from life to life from body to body what's the point of it all and what's making it happen so there you have another idea which is all pervasive in indian thought all pervasive indian thought there is the idea of karma and reincarnation you see that indian thought is enormously diverse just consider hinduism in buddhism hinduism believes in god in various ways and internal self which we keep on talking about today in the memorial we're talking about the self which does not change does not die and the buddhists they won't scoff they are gentle people but they will just roll their eyes what eternal god where what eternal self so they have such enormously different approaches to spiritual life and yet yet my point is this continuation of the subtle body from body to body to body lifetime to lifetime to lifetime this is an idea shared by all schools of hindustan all schools of buddhist art all schools of jaina and even much later sikhism all of them believe in multiple lives and what goes across multiple lives it's a subtle body bodies change we have had many many bodies many lifetimes we read in the gita today steve's stephen's favorite chapter second chapter it says krishna says to arjuna those who are born are bound to die no exceptions life is 100 fatal those who are born are bound to die but those who die are bound to be born again that's not at all obvious to us but this is a common assumption it was sort of taken for granted axiomatic obvious to all kinds of all shades of indian thinkers here of course i'm making one notable exception the charvak or the lokai the materialist there have been those all throughout and they deny any subtle body or anything like that they just say physical body and that's it and that's uh we should not deny it as being crude you know we should not say that the material is very crude there were a range of materialists then as there are now so there are materialists now i came across this new term i was introduced to it it's called yolo so apparently people take selfies and put it on on facebook or in like social media and they write yolo it means you live only you only live once what is the point of you only live once so that you pack your life with as many activities as possible 99.9 of them superficial and not worth doing but because you live once you live only once therefore you must do it all and take care to put it on facebook and twitter and whatnot that's always a given and that's the meaning of yolo but you know i recently i saw an article which said that the origin of this term originally somebody from california who designed this term no wonder but but it meant the exact opposite the idea was that because you live you only live once you have to commit to something and make something of this life because you only live once you cannot afford to uh you know um squander your days and hours in things which do not amount to much in the end so there were these materialists but even now there are materialists of very sophisticated um you know the shades of materialism you have you know someone like richard dawkins or christopher hitchens or sam harris so the the scientific material is some of which is very very sophisticated also so there's a whole range of materialists but other than them just about every other uh school of philosophy believed uh or held on to that the subtle body is there and it continues and it goes through life after life so it was common across the board every one of them and why is this happening life after life after life what determines it why are lives different why do we get these different experiences so behind everything again an assumption pre-assumption axiomatic shared by all schools of indian thought karma what is karma to put it very simply it's cause and effect it's not something weird it's something that's sort of natural to all of us anybody who thinks things in terms of cause and effect it's dry why or it didn't rain it's wet in new york why oh it rained cause an effect so this cause and effect if you extend it a little further this becomes the whole theory of karma i'll call it a theory because it's not a proven fact it's not uh you go as you've gone a few steps beyond what a scientist would accept but it just means that it's applying the law of causality to our moral life so if you do good the result is plus something pleasant something pleasant something good will happen to you in a future life if you do if you're especially naughty then something bad miserable painful will happen to you in some future existence if it's really powerful good or bad it might even happen in this life but generally the this whole developed form of karma which is accepted by most hindu schools and most buddhist and giant schools would say that every life we've got every life means every body that we are issued from the general store up there it comes with its own load of karma a part of this our stock of karma we have an enormous stock of karma built up through a beginning less time and that part of that stock of karma is exhausted in one particular life a little bit of that karma slice of it has produced this body given us our parents given us our talents and problems and issues in life and sort of generally drawn a kind of a canvas on which we our life will be painted not that everything is determined for us just the broad parameters then you play the game of life as best as you can as long as age birth and death determined because of our that slice of karma and that's why in this life also we do things and that adds to our stock of karma and we go on into future lives so that's the idea of incarnation how long has this been going on beginning less time we don't know how long will this go on endless until until here comes something interesting this you will notice is not a very satisfactory kind of solution it's a kind of immortality we after all are not dying with the death of the body we are not born with the birth of the body the body is born and we are embodied in the body but we are subtle bodies we have come to come from ancient past we come with our own karma we go through this life and when this body drops off we still continue we turn the page of life and go on but this is not a very desirable kind of immortality if you think about it in indian thought all schools of indian thought except the materialist all schools of indian thought they say this is the problem it's not an answer why is this a problem what kind of immortality would it be if you have to die again and again and again if you died once you would have been done that okay it's unpleasant but it's over now i'm nicely dead but no that's just one of an n number of deaths there are many many more waiting for you now that's not a very good situation to be in there was this cartoon i remember which showed an american person talking to an indian person the american person says i'm a barn-again christian and the hindu says oh i'm a born again and again and again and again but that's not a good thing that is the problem in indian thought and that is to be solved by spirituality now i haven't started actually so i'm almost out of time but here is what i was driving towards in all of this what they found was that beyond this notice i use the word subtle body i used physical body i am embodied in a physical body i said subtle body i did not say i am that subtle body i said that's also a body my real nature your real nature our real nature is not the physical body is not the subtle body is a reality beyond the physical body and subtle body which is not subject to death it is the subtle body which goes from lifetime to lifetime physical body which dies in each life but that reality beyond subtle body beyond the physical body which we might call this capital s self that's what you really are that's what i'm really am it's physical body and subtle bodies are like changing your overcoat and your shirt you're not the overcoat you're not the shirt either physical body dies in each lifetime and the subtle body continuously changes it's continuously changing that self beyond the body and the physical verb and subtle body is what the upanishad is saying you know i'm going back to where i started i have known that infinite being which is beyond darkness beyond death being full of radiance that is the atman the exact nature of that atman again there's a lot of debate what is it is it different for each person so do we all have different atmans or is it one reality is it a substance or it's not a substance is it pure awareness pure being all of these things we'll talk about it tomorrow so you can come to be continued tomorrow but this is the nature of the atman so now we have a trichotomous view of the human personality physical body subtle body and atman which means literally simply it means the self capital itself that's what you are that does not come and go that is according to advaita vedanta it's one reality we are all one atman many physical bodies many subtle bodies and that's why we feel we are different beings in in the gita shri krishna says in all beings in billions of beings human and non-human undivided that appears to be divided why appears to be divided because many bodies many subtle bodies so that is some that discovery uh in the indian systems solve the mystery of life that actually we are that and we are going through this process of spiritual evolution and the evolution is in terms of the body and evolution in terms of the subtle body until we realize who or what we truly are once we realize that then we are set free from this cycle of birth and death and that is true immortality there is no other way out of mortality other than that knowledge which tells us which shows us what we are once we know the answer to the question who am i what am i then we are set free from this cycle of birth and death we attain to true immortality this is called moksha there are many many words in indian philosophy for this moksha means freedom freedom from what freedom from this cycle of birth and death at this point one might say oh that's some indian thing you know suppose i don't believe in the cycle of birth and death i just see this one life where are many lives many births and deaths i see one life and i accept yes there'll be one death then how does it help me aren't you giving me a solution to an unreal problem you know there's a story in the old wild west us you know what they called him the snake oil dealers so he was arrested and the magistrate the judge sentenced him for selling real cures to unreal diseases and unreal cures to real diseases so aren't you selling me uh snake oil births and deaths it sounds like an awful thing but where is this cycle of birth and death so you can reduce the whole thing to something simpler which is universal everybody will agree to it it's a solution to suffering it's on a cosmic on a vast scale it's multiple lives and births and deaths but just in this one canvas of one life it's still this realization of what we are at the deepest possible level it gives us an answer to our existential problem the deepest philosophical solution to suffering it shows us there is at our core of our existence we our real nature which is beyond suffering so that is mukti or moksha or freedom once you realize that the upanishads say this cycle of birth and death stops not just the upanishads every again every indian philosophy says this there are various ideas in which this mukti or freedom moksha is put many words are used mukti is another word literally means freedom the materialist of course would say the death of the body is moksha freedom there's nothing more beyond that but the buddhist says the negative you know the desire and the negative tendencies they continue in the subtle body lifetime after lifetime generating new karma propelling new births and deaths so when those are purified then that series comes to an end it is extinguished literally it's called nirvana nirvana means extinction extinguishing it that was one of the earliest buddhist ideas of freedom but then the question would be if it's extinction then who is free so it was developed much further later on the idea became that it's a stream of consciousness the negative defilements are purified but then the pure stream of consciousness continues so that's what you would call a buddha or an arhat there are many distinctions i think umavidi is looking at me quizzically yeah so i'm painting with a very broad brush here jainism jainism says that no it's not just a stream of consciousness and discrete different streams uh flashes of consciousness uh yogacara the jainism would say no there is one consciousness one self and that becomes purified of karma and they use a physical space analogy it rises to the top of the universe and it is free it becomes omniscient the dualistic schools say there is god all perfect and in freedom individual we are all individual be us and we go and stay with god in a perfect realm heaven and enjoy bliss and you're never born again and there are different kinds of freedoms there we won't go into that there's a dualistic approach the sankey and philosopher where is sankhya outside the philosopher says that no no no the pure consciousness remains by itself when it is mixed up with matter it's in bondage when it is it sees its separation from matter that is the liberating knowledge that is called kaivalya the magnificent isolation aloneness that's also freedom never is birth and death anymore for that the sankhya and the yoga philosopher the advaithin and i'll end with this the advaita philosopher says you never had bondage never was there birth for you nor was there death for you you the infinite awareness empty like space it's like empty space filled with sunlight it's a buddhist metaphor used you're like pure you're like uh light and in you to you in you appears this universe and this series of bodies and minds they are nothing actually separate from you it's one um unrestricted unlimited awareness like space being awareness existence consciousness i know these are it sounds very speculative but we'll go deeper into it tomorrow and this one has always been our to our point this one has always been free it never entered into life as a body it never was born never died never was in the cycle of birth and death it always was immortal so that liberating knowledge is to know our immortal nature that we already are this advaita says after enlightenment what do we realize do we realize that oh we had this cycle of birth and death and now i am free of it it has come to that horrible thing has come to a stop no you realize i never really had that cycle of birth and that it's more of the nature of a nightmare so i always was what i am that reality is always there and that realities are what all of us are one reality that is the advaitic idea the basic idea is moksha immortality is our very nature the prayer we started with asato masad gamaya lead us from this appearance to the reality what is the appearance this what is the reality one existence consciousness one being light satchit unlimited and how do you do that gamer leaders from darkness unto light this is from the darkness of ignorance to the light of knowledge what are we doing going from the unreal from the appearance to reality how do you go from appearance to reality you can't drive there you can't buy it at the store how do you go there you go there only by knowledge so from darkness of ignorance to the light of knowledge and what's the result of all of that lead us not to death but to immortality the result is immortality it's a result which is already there it's not produced it becomes it becomes clear it becomes apparent the movie screen thought it was terrible why do i have to undergo this tragedy and a repeated tragedy and then it realizes i am the movie screen the tragedy was a movie you can play as many tragedies as you like as many comedies as you like it makes no difference to me the movie screen the movie screen made it possible to have those tragedies and the comedies but they are movies but the difference between the movie and the screen the screen is not affected by the movie when the difference is clear that is moksha that's why swami vivekananda when he chant that quote island where i started listen the children of immortal bliss and he says i have realized that infinite being by knowing which is radiant like the sun and beyond death by knowing which you go beyond death now think about it by knowing something immortal how do i become a model by knowing a clock i don't become a clock but knowing a table luckily i don't become a table so by knowing something immortal how do i become immortal only in one case if i am already that i did not know it somehow i realized that and that is athletic liberation that is immortality from the non-dualistic perspective but more of that tomorrow [Music]

Channel: Vedanta Video

Views: 10,041

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

Id: JCAOlWd5RjQ

Length: 52min 47sec (3167 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 17 2021