Transcriptions
Dev Priyānanda Svāmī Bhagavān
Video Link: YouTube
Prelude: Śrī Mahā-ṣoḍaśī Mantra
Namaste. So today, I want to talk about something very deep, very difficult to understand.
You know, if you look back at this channel, there’s a certain architecture, there’s a certain design. It’s not arbitrary. It’s not like, you know, I get up and talk about whatever I happen to feel, you know, whatever kind of mood I’m in in that day. Well, I do to a certain extent. It’s very spontaneous. But in the larger view, there is an overall architecture, an overall design.
This channel, if you go to the Playlists tab on the channel page, you’ll see there’s a long list of playlists going back, like, eight years. And these playlists, pretty much in order from the beginning, which is at the bottom of the list, to the new ones at the top, cover the entire range of spirituality. We’ve put up this chart so many times of the four views, but I wonder if anybody has understood that we’ve been going through these four views in order from the very beginning of this channel.
So I’m not going to belabor that point today, but I want to point out that we have gone from the duality of Being in the World through the different devotional practices, then to the meditational practices, and finally, now we’re starting to discuss the ultimate conclusions of all of that.
So what I want to say is that from the point of view of each of the four levels, the four views, the catur-darśanam, that view is supreme and complete; yet there is a hierarchy where the lower stages, the dvaita-vāda, are considered less fully realized than the higher stages, the vivartha-vāda and the ajata-vāda, especially ajata-vāda is considered full realization.
So now we’re speaking from the point of view of the ajata-vāda, and from that point of view, we can say the Self alone is real. Now it’s not that we don’t perceive the other levels, it’s not that we don’t understand the other levels, because we’ve been through all of them. But that we can see that all those views are illusory, they’re māyā.
This is what you should get, the understanding that you should realize from, for example, Śrī Lalita-sahasranāmam, that everything that you can perceive, everything that can be an object of awareness, including consciousness, is māyā, doesn’t really exist.
Now this is not something that we talk about or preach or teach to unqualified people. Why? Because they might think… they might first of all mistake it for nihilism or nihilism, depending on what brand of the English language you speak. But nihilism means that everything is unreal. There is no hope, no shelter, no real understanding.
That’s not what we’re saying. We are saying that pure awareness, Brahman, is real, and that Brahman alone is real, and everything else is māyā.
Now there is a sliding scale, and obviously the things that people care about in the world, the objects of name-and-form and so on, are very impermanent, very insubstantial, highly fragile, always changing, impermanent, unsatisfactory, and not-Self.
But the higher we go on the scale of views, the more abstract, the more—how can I say—conceptual, and the more permanent, relatively, they’re still impermanent, but they’re more reliable, more stable, than the more gross views.
For example, the vivartha-vāda. In vivartha-vāda one tries to realize that the Void is the supreme view. And actually this is a device. Actually it’s not true, you know. It’s not true in the sense of an Absolute Truth; none of the levels are.
So while some people say that, you know, everything is nothing, well that’s nihilism. But we can say that the various belief systems, philosophical systems, ontological systems, the various views, and the logical conclusions derived therefrom, are all māyā.
Why? Because they’re all name-and-form. They have forms that you can perceive with the senses, sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch, or the mind. And they have names, which can be manipulated by logic in various ways, which are more or less neither true nor untrue, because they’re only symbols.
But the reality is consciousness, or I should say, more correctly, awareness. Pure awareness without an object is Brahman. And Brahman is the foundation of everything. Without Brahman, nothing else could exist. And everything that is, is Brahman, and is within Brahman. And Brahman is in everything.
One has to realize this. It cannot be understood simply intellectually. Because it’s beyond the grasp of the mind. It’s beyond the scope of words and concepts. And that’s why my Buddhist mentor Bhikkhu Ñānananda—by the way that’s Kaṭukurunde Ñānananda.
He’s not the founder of a cult. There’s another Ñānananda who has a cult. That’s not him. But it’s Kaṭukurunde Ñānananda, who just had a small, very, very small monastery with five or six young monks that he was training, and he was primarily a writer.
And he wrote some wonderful things. Our whole Nibbāna Series is based on his writings, and some other series as well. But he always said—in fact this was his main teaching to me—that Nibbāna, which is equivalent to Brahman realization, “Nibbāna is non-conceptual.” It cannot be grasped with the mind.
Some people think there’s a shortcut where they can just intellectually learn and acknowledge certain Advaita teachings or Buddhist teachings about emptiness or whatever, and that’s the same thing as enlightenment. No, it’s not.
For the same reason that Brahman or Nibbāna is non-conceptual and cannot be grasped by the mind or described by words. So any attempt to apprehend it intellectually is just symbolic. It’s not the real thing.
So we’re not saying that all the other teachings are nothing or that they’re useless. We’re saying that there is a gradual step-by-step path from being stuck in material consciousness and suffering like anything, to complete realization and freedom from suffering.
But people don’t want to change. People don’t want to move. People don’t want to advance their concepts of reality until they reach the point where they can actually start to realize all this stuff.
People want to cling. They want things not to change. Yet the very things they cling to are changeable by their very nature. So of course they’re always disappointed. They’re always suffering.
My big lesson on this point was when I became a Hare Kṛṣṇa guru and I had a lot of followers all over the world. I had an āśram with a couple dozen devotees. Money was coming in. Everything was coming in.
And then in my research for a book on the Vedānta-sūtra commentary of one of the Vaiṣṇava Ācāryas, Baladeva Vidyabhūsana, I went back to the original manuscripts of the Upaniṣads and the Vedānta, and I found out all kinds of distortions and untruths in the Vaiṣṇava commentary.
They were misquoting the Upaniṣads and Vedas. They were misrepresenting Buddha’s philosophy and Śaṅkarācārya’s philosophy, making straw men that they could easily knock down with their weak arguments.
Because their whole thing is faith-based. You have to believe in Kṛṣṇa. There’s no proof of Kṛṣṇa at all. No historical records, no archaeological proof, nothing. It’s all simply an assertion. It’s just words.
Now at a certain stage of consciousness, these faith-based teachings are helpful. They get people to do things that will help them accrue good karma. But on the scale of Absolute Truth, they’re like a 3 out of 10, you know.
So when I found all this out, it destroyed my faith. And so I started to move on to what I felt was actually the truth. But my students couldn’t follow me. They were hung up on the words. They were hung up on the books, especially the books of my spiritual master, Śrīla Prabhupāda.
And I tried to point out to them, “Śrīla Prabhupāda is not your guru; I’m your guru. And if I’m still developing, if I’m still advancing, if I’m moving on to a higher truth, you should follow.
None of them could follow. They could not change their minds. Well they weren’t ready. They were still clinging to the old truth, the old faith.
So everything works out in the end. That freed me to make tremendous advancement. And the story of that advancement is here in this channel.
So if you follow from the beginning, all the different series from then—what was that, 2012—until the present time, it will be like a step-by-step path that will give you everything you need to approach the ultimate realization.
ĀŪṀ Tat Sat. ĀŪṀ Śakti ĀŪṀ.