Mundaka Upanishad: Two birds living together, each the friend of the other, perch upon the same tree. Of these two, one eats the sweet fruit of the tree, but the other simply looks on without eating.
Hello! I’ve been trying to get blogging again for some time now, but haven’t felt clear on what I wanted to say. In the new year I’m going to relaunch the blog and share my journey studying vedanta as taught by a traditional vedanta teacher, James Swartz. Not all that many people have heard of vedanta, although some may be familiar with advaita, the principal ‘school’ of vedanta as taught by Adi Shankara in the 8th century. Vedanta is neither a religion or a philosophy but what is called in Sanskrit a ‘pramana’, a means of knowledge. What kind of knowledge? The only kind of knowledge that can set you free in life; Self Knowledge.
It’s an been an incredible journey. I’d been wading through the ‘spiritual maya’ for the best part of a lifetime, certain that there was more to this reality and to us as human beings than is perceptible to the body/mind sense complex, but unable to find a teaching that connected all the dots. In the west there’s just too much fuzzy-thinking, half truths and new age-ified nonsense to make proper sense of it. Elements of truth are invariably sandwiched between falsity and ignorance. And that’s before we even go near religion!
I’d seen and experienced the bigger reality countless times but was not at all clear on how to reconcile it with the apparent reality. So it was with an immense sense of relief and gratitude that I found perhaps the clearest, most comprehensive and logical teaching with regard to self realisation and enlightenment. It’s about as close to a science of consciousness as there is; working on so many levels, from the grossest to the subtlest, taking into account every facet of our nature. It’s the foundation of what Aldous Huxley called the ‘perennial philosophy’ and elements of it can be found in every age and in every culture. But in order to make full sense of it the full system has to be in place. You need the whole picture to be able to put the puzzle together.
This is why vedanta has been closely guarded over the millennia, and passed from generation to generation via Sanskrit mantras, an unchanging and extremely precise language, in a way that was incorruptible and time-locked (just the way this teaching has been preserved and transmitted is astounding). I love it. It’s changed everything for me. It takes a heck of a lot of time and effort to assimilate what is essentially quite a radical vision of nonduality, but the knowledge works bit by bit, chipping away the hard-wired ignorance that compels us to seek wholeness and happiness outwith our self. As Arthur Schopenhauer stated: “in the whole world there is no study so beneficial and so elevating as that of the vedanta. It has been the solace of my life — it will be the solace of my death.”
It’s set up a particular way and needs to be taught from the beginning to the end as it runs through a precise sequence of logic. It requires a great deal of the inquirer and a list of ‘qualifications’ or requirements are listed that have to be met if the teaching is going to mean anything. This simply highlights the necessity of an open, inquiring, discriminating and dispassionate mind. It’s also necessary to have dropped the notion that anything in maya, the apparent reality, can bring lasting happiness.
It took me a great many years in the hamster wheel of maya before I realised the utterly futility go trying to extract lasting, unchanging happiness and fulfilment from experiences, objects and people, relationships etc. Everything in maya is in a constant state of flux. The thing, event or person that brings me joy today is just as likely to bring me misery tomorrow. But finding the changeless amid the changing and placing our sense of fulfilment, security and joy upon THAT is the real key to making life work. I was so thoroughly sick of the painful nature of samsara, of seeking happiness in things that didn’t and could never last. I failed so miserably that it ignited in me a burning desire to break free of the matrix; a deeply-rooted desire to discover the true nature of my self and reality and to achieve what in vedanta is called moksha or liberation. Liberation is being free of dependence on anything outside of us for our happiness and fulfilment.
One of the most sobering but important realisations I gained from vedanta is simply this: the objective world/maya is not set up to fulfil you. It’s set up to frustrate and break you until you wake up to the true nature of your Self; until you realise that the subjective reality — that which is You — transcends the objective. When you know you are and really assimilate that knowledge into the core of your being, you’re free of whatever shit is going on around — and indeed within — you. You see life as the strange dreamlike show that it is; an appearance in awareness, always changing, always unfolding according to its nature, and while we have a limited ability to change and manipulate certain aspects of the show, ultimately things just do what they’re going to do, regardless of our desires and aversions. Phenomenal reality is governed by its own set of laws and an unfathomable chain of interrelated causes and effects over which we have no control.
The main cause of human suffering is expecting reality to conform to our likes and dislikes and our notions of what it should be. Because life doesn’t give a damn what we like or dislike. It’s a completely impersonal unfolding. It does what it does, based upon the nature of the field. Vedanta is for mature minds, advising us to get with the system and bring ourselves and our lives and actions in harmony with the nature of the field (dharma) and our own nature (svadharma), or else be ground down by life and suffer accordingly.
Life isn’t about what ‘I’ want; it’s about aligning myself with what life wants. The field of life is bigger than the little human ego and has no qualms in grinding that little ego to bits. Suffering drives us to seek an end to suffering, to seek liberation from the pain. The solution is not to try to control maya and try to match it up to our likes and dislikes — which are always changing anyway. That’s a fool’s game and it never works for very long.
It was kind of crushing at first when I first realised what an utterly futile endeavour that was. How many times can you chase after love and success only for it backfire and end in tears before you realise that if it was gonna work out, it would have done so long before now. You can’t beat the system — life is what it is and it does what it is. But you can transcend the system…and the power of Self Knowledge changes one’s outlook on everything. Outwardly nothing changes, but inwardly everything changes.
More words will follow!
