MAYBE WE AREN'T WHO WE THINK WE ARE: ADVAITA VEDANTA
by the Rev Don Dyne
Since I started writing this sermon several weeks ago, the terrible events of September 11, 2001 have occurred and I find my subject even more timely, now. I choose the opening readings I did because I wanted you to begin thinking about what it is I'm going to talk about. I know that talk of God is uncomfortable for some UUs but, I assure you, when I talk of God I am not talking about the traditional Christian God or anything like that. I could just as well other use other words but God is right for me. While at Starr King in the early 70s, some words came to me, seemingly out of nowhere and I wrote them down immediately; they were,"God is a feeling I need to have." That feeling has been growing stronger ever since. As you will see later, the word"God" can be replaced by "Consciousness" or"Being".
Let me start right off the bat by giving you my own very simple definition of Vedanta. But first there are two types of Vedanta: Dual and Non-dual. I will be talking about non-dual Vedanta, or Advaita, as it's called. Advaita means"not two" or non-dual. Vedanta is an philosophy/religion started in India about 1300 years ago. Vedanta's basic teaching is that our real nature is divine and that God, the underlying reality, exists in every being. My own teacher, Swami Muktananda had only one simple teaching and that was,"God dwells within you as you - see God in everyone." We humans have become attached to our minds and our egos and this makes us think we are separate from each other. That is the problem in the world, to state it simply. We have long ago forgotten that God lives inside each one of us - we are all the same underneath our minds. Vedanta teaches that it is possible to transcend or stop the mind and establish contact with who we truly are, which is one with God. Not sons or daughters of God (that's not a bad idea) but one with God. We can learn to live in a constant state of peace and serenity, free from our addiction to our minds while, at the same time, having the mind available as a very useful tool when needed. Most of us think that we are our minds or our egos, hence the title of this sermon.
Long ago, John Donne knew about our oneness with God when he concluded his famous poem,"No Man is an Island" with,"and therefore, never send to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee." And when Jesus said, Love thy neighbor as thyself", Vedantins interpret this as meaning that your neighbor is yourself, there is no separation. I, like most of you, I suspect, have been very attached to my mind all my life and the concept of"losing my mind" is frightening. We UU's take great pride in our ability to use our minds. I am particularly attached to my mind because I am an engineer and you know what some people say about engineers! However, I started meditating while at Starr King and have never stopped. I think it has done me some good - especially in these days of uncertainty. Since September 11, I have been spending up to two hours each day in our meditation room.
When I first gave this talk to Rev.Al Thelander's congregation, The Unitarian Universalist Community of the Mountains in Grass Valley I spent a little time telling them of my UU history but you already know this so I will leave this part out. Suffice to say that I come from a family of seekers after truth. After graduating from Starr King in 1974 I traveled to India and there I met several well-known Gurus, at least two of whom are recognized throughout India as God-realized, enlightened or liberated beings. An enlightened being is a human being who has transcended the mind or ego and lives in a constant state of inner peace or serenity. He or she has realized that the same God force dwells within us just as it does in every sentient being. Unless you have spent time with such a being it is well-nigh impossible to explain what this experience is like. The est Training and, later, the Forum gave those of us who participated just a brief taste of what this state is like. This experience whetted my passion to find God within myself. Vedanta holds that Truth is One and that all religions lead to the same goal. It does not seek to make converts, but clarifies the principles underlying creeds and religions. Vedanta emphasizes that man in his true nature is divine and that the purpose of life is to discover one's divine nature and to experience divinity here and now. It is rational and non-dogmatic in its approach. People of any faith as well as people without any fixed beliefs can benefit from its broad teachings. We, who have been or are in 12-Step programs call this underlying reality our"higher power." My Zen Buddhist friends call it"true love" Advaitins believe that the problems in the world today are due to our ego-centered sense of separateness. By the use of certain spiritual practices including meditation, one can stop the mind, overcome the ego and contact this underlying reality within ourselves and live in a constant state of being in love with everyone and everything while, at the same time, being able to use the mind as a tool when needed and not have one's life run by it.
I believe that every person on earth is consciously or unconsciously seeking inner peace and serenity and as the Buddha put it,"the end of suffering." But most of us don't even know this is possible. My Zen Buddhist friends call this experiencing"the pure and perfect self." I suppose that even the Islamic fundamentalists who committed the most heinous acts on September 11 thought that they could achieve this state after they died. All religions claim to know the way.
Advaita Vedanta is the most well-known school of Indian philosophy. It dates back to around 800 AD and is generally attributed to the philosopher Shankara. Vedanta means"the end of the Vedas". The Vedas are the ancient Hindu scriptures and the end of these scriptures is known as the Upanishads. Vedanta is based on the Upanishads and the Hindu epic tale, the Bhagavad Gita and is at once a school of philosophy, a religion, a theology and a doctrine of salvation. All these roles are only different aspects of the various schools of Vedanta and Advaita stands out as the most important and oldest school of Vedanta.
Some of the outstanding later teachers of Advaita are Sri Ramakrishna and his disciple, Swami Vivekananda of the late 19th century, Ramana Maharshi, Nisargatta Maharaj of the twentieth century and the contemporary Ramesh Balsakar. And there are many other teachers of Advaita today including Tony Parsons, about whom I will speak briefly, - the movement seems to be spreading. One of the most popular teachers of this philosophy today is Eckhart Tolle who recently came out with a marvelous book entitled,"The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightment." He doesn't call himself an Advaitin but what he teaches is, to many of us, clearly Advaita. There are many other modern-day teachers of Advaita.
Ramakrishna, the great Indian saint of the end of the 19th century said,"You see many stars in the sky at night, but not when the sun rises can you therefore say that there are no stars in the heavens during the day? Because you cannot find God in the days of your ignorance, can you say that there is no God. Find God, that is the only purpose in life." His great, disciple Swami Vivekananda said,"The only God to worship is the human soul in the human body", and"He is an atheist who doesn't believe in himself." And, on another subject, in the 1890's said,"There is no chance for the welfare of the world unless the condition of women is improved. It is not possible for a bird to fly on only one wing." Vivekananda was brought here by the American Unitarian Association to speak at the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893. He won instant celebrity in our country and a ready forum for his spiritual teachings. As you might imagine, Unitarians were drawn to his teachings and he spoke at both our Oakland and San Francisco churches and, if I remember correctly, there is a plaque in the San Francisco church commemorating his visit.
The great Indian Advaita Vedanta sage of the first half of the 20th century, Ramana Maharshi said, " Existence or Consciousness is the only reality. Consciousness plus waking we call waking. Consciousness plus sleep we call sleep. Consciousness plus dream, we call dream. Consciousness is the screen on which all the pictures come and go. The screen is real, the pictures are mere shadows on it.""The state we call realization is simply being oneself, not knowing anything or becoming anything. He has realized that he is that which alone is, and which alone has always been. He cannot describe that state. He can only be That. Of course we loosely talk of self-realization for want of a better term. That which 'Is' is peace. All that we need do is to keep quiet. Peace is our real nature. We spoil it. What is required is that we cease to spoil it."
Nisargadatta Maharaj was one of the best-known Indian saints of the 20th century. He lived the usual humdrum and eventless life of a common man until his middle age when he went with a friend to visit the friend's Guru. The Guru gave him a mantra and instructions in meditation and early in his practice he began to have visions and even fell into trances. Something exploded within him, as it were, giving birth to a cosmic consciousness, a sense of eternal life. The identity of the former petty shopkeeper dissolved and the illuminating personality of Nisargadatta emerged. Although an uneducated man his conversation was enlightened to an extraordinary degree. He was warm hearted and tender, shrewdly humorous, absolutely fearless and absolutely true - inspiring, guiding and supporting all who came to him. One of his students became a great contemporary Advaita teacher. I will speak about Ramesh Balsakar later.
Nisargadatta's talks are chronicled in the book,"I Am That", a classic of mystical literature. Here are a few quotes from the book, just to give you a taste:"The seeker is he who is in search of himself. Give up all questions except one: ÔWho am I?' After all, the only fact you are sure of is that you are. The ÔI am' is certain. The"I am this' is not. Struggle to find out what you are in reality. To know what you are, you must first investigate and know what you are not. Discover all that you are not - mind, ego, body, feelings, thoughts, time, space, this or that - nothing concrete or abstract, which you perceive can be you. The very act of perceiving shows that you are not what you perceive. The more clearly you understand that on the level of mind you can be described in negative terms only, the more quickly will you come to the end of your search and realize that you are the limitless being, just as everyone else is."
Two of my best friends are followers of Ramesh Balsakar who is now quite old and lives in Bombay. I had the good fortune to have spent an evening with him in Santa Barbara in the 1970's. Balsakar began his adult life as a clerk in the Bank of India in 1940. He steadily rose through the ranks and, 1977, retired as the President and CEO of the this, the largest bank in India. Shortly after his retirement he read an article about a Guru named Nisargadatta. He attended this teacher's talks for quite a while and eventually experienced the"ultimate intuitive understanding" which, Balsakar calls enlightenment or realization. Balsakar's theme is that all there is is consciousness and he likes to tell a story about being taken to a restaurant where the specialty of the house was a potato baked inside a shell of clay. The waiter came to the table and tap, tap, tap, tapped on the clay shells with a mallet until they cracked open. He says his teaching is like that; he keeps tap, tap, tapping with the same mallet until the shell breaks, and there is no way to tell in advance how many taps it is going to take.
The essence of Balsakar's teachings can be summed up in 22 simple statements, a few of which I will relate here:"Self-realization is effortless.""What you are trying to find is what you already are.""Enlightenment is total emptiness of mind.""There is nothing you can do to get it. Any effort you can make can only be an obstruction to it.""For enlightenment to happen the perceiver must turn right around and wake to the fact that he is face to face with his own nature - that HE IS IT.""When the apparent but illusory identity called a person has disappeared into the awareness of total potentiality that he is it and always has been, this is called enlightenment.""The essential basis of self-realization is the total rejection of the individual as an independent entity, whether it comes about as a spontaneous understanding or through an utter surrender of one's individual existence."
Until now I've been talking to you about enlightened beings from India and a lot of this probably sounds pretty strange to us UU's. Now I will speak about a very popular, contemporary teacher, Eckhart Tolle. His book,"The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment" was published in late 1999 and the book and other teachings of his are available on audio tape. Tolle was born in Germany, where he spent the first thirteen years of his life. After graduating from the University of London, he was a research scholar and supervisor at Cambridge University. When he was twenty-nine, a profound spiritual transformation virtually dissolved his old identity and radically changed the course of his life. He had lived with feelings of intense anxiety and suicidal depression for most of his life. One day, at the depths of these feelings he heard himself saying,"I cannot live with myself any longer." This thought kept repeating itself in his mind and suddenly he became aware of what a peculiar thought this was."Am I one or Two? If I cannot live with myself, there must be two of me: the ÔI' and the Ôself' that ÔI' cannot live with. Maybe only one of them is real." He was so stunned by this strange realization that his mind stopped. For the next six months, he lived in a state of uninterrupted deep peace and bliss and for the next two years he sat on park benches in a state of intense joy. The rest is history. He spent a few years visiting various teachers in order to receive an understanding of what had happened to him and now he is a world-famous teacher of spiritual enlightenment. I highly recommend his book and his tapes. His teachings are in a very"spiritually digestible form" as one reviewer put it and I agree with another reviewer who says,"I believe our very survival on this planet is dependent on the inner journey that Eckhart Tolle is urging us to take." Here is a brief taste of what he says in the book:"The crowning glory of human development rests not in our ability to reason and think, though this distinguishes us from animals. Intellect, like instinct, is merely a point along the way. Our ultimate destiny is to re-connect with our essential Being and express from our extraordinary, divine reality in the ordinary physical world, moment by moment.""The greatest obstacle to experiencing the reality of God or being is identification with your mind. Not to be able to stop thinking is a dreadful affliction, but we don't realize this because almost everybody is suffering from it, so it is considered normal. This incessant mental noise prevents you from finding that realm of inner stillness that is inseparable from Being. It also creates a false mind-made self that casts a shadow of fear and suffering.""Thinking has become a disease.""The mind is a superb instrument if used rightly. Used wrongly, it becomes very destructive. To put it more accurately, it is not so much that you use your mind wrongly - you usually don't use it at all - It uses you. That is the disease. You believe that you are the mind. This is the delusion. The instrument has taken you over." Tolle goes on in his book to teach us how to stop the mind and experience that inner Being of love, serenity and deep peace and yet, to be a most useful, compassionate and effective citizens. All Advaita teachers have been saying more or less the same thing but have different approaches. It is my experience after studying Advaita for some 25 years that Tolle is the most easily understood teacher today.
Just a few days ago I encountered another enlightened teacher named Tony Parsons. Tony is from England and has written a marvelously simple and to-the-point book entitles,"As It Is." Tony was spontaneously enlightened at the age of twenty and never had done any spiritual practices of any kind. Here are three quotes from Tony's book ."One of the things I came to see is that enlightenment only becomes available when it has been accepted that it cannot be achieved. Life is not a task. There is absolutely nothing to attain except the realization that there is absolutely nothing to attain. No amount of effort will ever persuade oneness to appear. All that is needed is a leap in perception, a different seeing, already inherent but unrecognized."
So, how does one reach this state of enlightenment where there is no separateness among us - where we can spend much our time in a state of peace and serenity - and where we can use our minds as very useful tools when needed - where there is no suffering - where there is a constant feeling of intense love for ourselves and all other sentient beings? There are two schools of thought about enlightenment. One is that you can achieve it through many years of spiritual practice. The other is that we are already enlightened, and can recognize it any moment if we only stop and pay attention. Most modern-day teachers of Advaita are teaching the latter. It may be too late for the first method. I strongly urge all of you who have not already done so to read Tolle and/or listen to his tapes. His own voice on the tapes is very calming and soothing.
I close with my favorite poem by my favorite poet, Theodore Roethke. I think It's quite appropriate here as we are all being asked to wake up now:
THE WAKING -1958
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair,
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me; so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.
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