Transcriptions
Dev Priyānanda Svāmī Bhagavān
Playlist Link: YouTube
Music: Śri Mahāśodaṣī Mantra
I want to take this opportunity, where we’re kind of in between major projects, to give a summary and overview of this entire channel.
Now we’ve got something like a thousand videos.
So, are these all separate things or is there a common theme that ties them all together?
And yes, there is.
And this was our intention from the very beginning of this channel, like almost nine years ago, to make like a graduate or postgraduate level course that covers the entire spectrum of spiritual knowledge and practice.
So actually we have succeeded in that, which is kind of surprising to me anyway, even though maybe a lot of our smaller projects remain unfinished.
Still, the overview, the whole big picture, is largely now complete.
So I want to go over what that is.
The channel is called Dharmasār.
Dharmasār means the hidden core or essence of all spiritual teachings.
So how is that so? Let me explain.
First of all, the meaning of dharma from the Sanskrit dictionary,
that which is established or firm, virtuous, just, according to the nature of a thing; nature, character, peculiar condition or essential quality.
And in the context of spiritual truth, what is, the way it is, and why it is the way it is.
The Buddha’s teaching is known as the dharma. But that’s only one aspect of dharma. Dharma is actually a pretty broad term.
And in its essence, it really means the actual nature of a thing, or the actual nature of things, of existence itself.
And when this is understood, this is a great milestone on the road to Self-realization.
Now what about sāra? Sāra means
the substance, essence, marrow, cream or heart, chief ingredient or essential part of anything; best part, quintessence, the real meaning or the main point.
Thus, Dharmasāra means the essential core or real meaning of spiritual truth.
And before we knew enough Sanskrit to call it Dharmasāra, we used to call it the Esoteric Teaching.
Now what is the Esoteric Teaching?
Well, it’s a theory that I came up with very early in my quest, that because there are so many religions, and they all seem to disagree on the details, yet there is a common teaching, a common core amongst all of them, and that’s the nature of God, the transcendent, the Absolute, and the ultimate truth, and that this truth can be realized.
Now why is it called esoteric? Esoteric means:
intended for or likely to be understood by only a small number of people with specialized knowledge or interest; abstruse, obscure, arcane, recondite, abstract, inscrutable, cryptic, opaque, or occult.
But in our sense, we’re not using it in those ways because to us it’s not obscure nor arcane: it’s our everyday life.
But what we do is we pitch this teaching so that maybe some pieces of it can be understood by people of average intelligence, but the whole thing is really meant for people of extraordinary intelligence because it’s very abstract. It has to be, because it covers the entire range of being.
So the Esoteric Teaching is thus the essence of all spiritual paths and practices, the common truth at the core of all systems of philosophy and practices underlying all schools of enlightenment.
And we went very deliberately searching for this Esoteric Teaching, knowing that it had to exist in pure form somewhere. And we found little bits and pieces of it here and there in many schools and teachings and scriptures and disciplines.
And eventually we put it together into a coherent theory. And that theory has three components.
The three components are
Now each of these really demands some explanation because they’re not obvious on the surface or really easy to understand, any of them, what to speak of the relations between and amongst them.
So let’s look at the first thing, the science of becoming. Becoming is really the core of the Buddha’s teaching.
He calls it paṭicca-samuppāda. paṭicca-samuppāda means conditioned becoming or causation.
What is becoming? Becoming is change. But how do we change and why do we change in a particular way and not in some other way? And finally, how can we direct the process of change to get the result that we want?
Well, this is all explained by the Buddha. And what is really spiritual life or the spiritual path? It is a process of becoming.
Right now we’re not enlightened, but we want to become enlightened. We want to become Self-realized and gain wisdom and so on.
So how do we do that? Well, first we have to understand the general mechanism and nature of change. So this is given by the Buddha in his teaching of paṭicca-samuppāda.
And in the video description below, we have linked to some videos and courses on our site that cover this area of our teaching.
The next is ontology. From the very beginning of this series, of this channel, we have made many videos and many series about ontology.
And what is ontology? Well, ontos means being, existence in Greek. And ology, or logos, means words in Latin. So when we put these two together, we get ontology or the science of being.
What is being? What is existence? How do things come to be? And how do we recognize them? How do we explain them? And how do we predict them?
Well, it’s very interesting because back in the paṭicca-samuppāda, the Buddha reveals that the key to controlling the process of becoming is language, name-and-form.
If we can get control over name-and-form, meaning the terminology that we use to describe the world, we can actually control the process of becoming with very little effort, comparatively little effort.
And so the process of developing language is part of the science of ontology, the science of nomenclature or taxonomy. Why we call things by certain names is also part of ontology.
And finally, the science of relationships or the relations between different things with the object of making a model of the world and being able to predict how it works and what the outcomes will be.
These three areas are pretty much the essential part of the science of ontology. And again, down in the video description, we have links to videos that describe all these things in detail.
And finally, the last area that I’d like to call your attention to is the catur-darśanam.
catur-darśanam means four views of reality or truth, and it also refers to four stages on the spiritual path. And I’m not going to explain it in detail here, but you see over on the right, there are four levels of consciousness.
And this is given in many different scriptures. There are four yogas that explore those levels of consciousness. And then there are the views or the collection of realizations or knowledge that enable us to be aware of those states of consciousness.
And then there are the cakras, the parts of the body or the energy body that allow us to cognize those four stages of consciousness. And again, we have given many, many videos describing this system of four stages, and those are linked below in the video description.
So for those of you who really want to understand the overview or the big picture of our teaching, you should look into these things, watch the videos, and think over it for yourself. Try to observe it in your life, because everybody has, everybody is part of a process of becoming. And everybody uses ontology all the time, whether they realize it or not, to conceive of and describe and model their realities. And everybody is using, or I should say experiencing, the four states of consciousness every single day.
Every day we go from waking consciousness, and then we go to sleep at night, we go to dreaming consciousness, then deep sleep.
And those who perform yoga and meditation leading to Self-realization also know the fourth state, turīya, which we also call enlightenment, awakening, or truth, the Absolute Truth, Self-realization, the Reality that is behind all the different phenomena in the world.
So if you take this teaching to heart and learn it well and understand it, oh, we also have a series about that: how to learn, how to realize, and how to understand the deep teachings in this series.
Then we hope your path will be smoothed to a higher understanding of life, a deeper type of meditation that will bring you to the ultimate enlightenment and Self-realization of the Absolute.
ĀŪṀ Tat Sat. ĀŪṀ Śakti ĀŪṀ.