Transcriptions
Dev Priyānanda Svāmī Bhagavān
Video Link: YouTube
Namaste and welcome to the third episode of the Esoteric Teaching Series, Context and Meaning.
Now, we’ve been over this subject before in some earlier series, but I want to go into it again, specifically with reference to the Esoteric Teaching, because it’s very, very important for understanding the spiritual path.
Now, let’s take a look at the meaning of Esoteric. It means:
intended for or likely to be understood by only a small number of people with specialized knowledge or interest.
Unfortunately, the Esoteric Teaching is only going to be understood by a very small number of people. And who are they? The Esoteric Teaching is intended for those who are determined to attain complete Self-realization.
So in other words, it is actually the highest level of the spiritual path. And we’re going to see very clearly in this episode why that is so. And it has to do, of course, with context and meaning.
So why is the Esoteric Teaching so high on the path? Because the Esoteric Teaching is the absolute truth, the origin and destination of all authentic spiritual and religious paths, and the context that gives them meaning.
Okay, we’re not just throwing words around here, although these words are very significant and profound. But actually, what we’re talking about here is the operative principle of the spiritual path, which is ultimately meaning.
Without meaning, life loses its juice. If life becomes meaningless, or if our spiritual path becomes meaningless, then what’s the use? Why go on with it? Because meaning and value are very closely associated.
We say to someone that we care about a lot, “you really mean a lot to me.” The meaning of the relationship determines its value. So therefore, we want to have the maximum amount of meaning available so that our spiritual path becomes all-inclusive. And at that point, we reach the origin and the destination of all spiritual paths, which is the absolute Brahman, or the Self.
How does that work?
Well, then let’s go into the subject of context and meaning, the ontology of the path. Let’s take a little passage and read it without context.
A newspaper is better than a magazine. A seashore is better than a street. At first, it is better to run than walk. You may have to try several times. It takes some skill, but is easy to learn. Even young children can enjoy it. You need lots of room. Too many people doing it can cause problems. It can be very peaceful. A rock can serve as an anchor. If it breaks loose, however, you will not get a second chance.
What is this about? Well, let’s give it a little context and see. KITE
There. Is that better? Now it all makes sense, right?
So what is this thing of making sense? It is meaning. Without meaning, we say it doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t click. But as soon as the proper context is supplied in the form of a meaningful title, then it clicks into place and we go, “oh, yes!” there’s that satisfying feeling of meaning, closure, identification of the actual significance.
So this is key in learning anything: that one must identify the proper context. For example, our experience in school, government-run schools, especially in the U.S. and Britain, places like that, are not really about education. And if we try to hold them in the context of education, it doesn’t make sense. There’s a cognitive dissonance. It doesn’t resolve with a satisfying click.
But if we hold them in the context of social conditioning, then, “ah, yes, that’s what it’s all about.”
So let’s take a look again at this diagram of the Esoteric Teaching, the yin and yang of the ordinary life and the spiritual life. Now what happens if we take our experience of a specific stage of life out of context? For example, the birth and growth stages of life when you’re a kid. When kids consider their life, they don’t consider it in the context of the entire existence of a human being. Kids are just kids, right?
Well, what does that mean? Their life doesn’t have much meaning. And because of that, they don’t understand the significance of so many things. Ask any parent, huh? Kids are dumb. Any teacher will tell you that.
What does that mean? That when things happen, they don’t understand the real significance, and they certainly don’t understand the consequences of their actions. So they require education. So when they’re in the growth stage, they’re in school.
And what do kids talk about when they’re in school? They talk about school. School becomes their whole life. It becomes their whole world. And even if they have a family life, it often becomes secondary to being in school.
They take it out of context. You see, they don’t understand that school is preparing them for something. More or less, it’s preparing them to become slaves in the marketplace of the corporations. Poor kids.
So unless they have that context, they’re liable to take it all wrong, liable to misunderstand the significance of their experience. And then, well, once they get grown up and they start dating, like in high school and college, life is all about sex.
Now, many people get hung up in these stages. Like someone who is hung up in the growth stage thinks that life is only about the physical body. You see them in the gym building muscles and wasting a lot of money on diet supplements and stuff like this.
Why? To build the body, to get strong, to be beautiful. Why? For sex. And some people get hung up in this stage of the body as a self for their whole life. And so they completely miss the significance. Why? Because they took it out of context.
And of course, we can go on with work. For some people, their career, their job is their whole life. Everything revolves around that. Their status in the workplace, their ability to function and produce seems to be everything to them. And as a result, they miss so much of the meaning of life which is beyond that. Because, again, they’re taking their experience out of the larger context. So they don’t really get the meaning.
So let’s look into that. What is that all about? Without context, meaning is lost. Just like that passage that we read without the title. It didn’t make any sense. As soon as we had the context, “Oh, kite. Oh, of course.” Now it makes sense, right?
So life is the same way. Without context, meaning becomes ambiguous, unclear, and indeterminate. We can’t decide whether it’s this or that. Or maybe it doesn’t seem to be anything. But as soon as we have the right context, it clicks and “Oh, yes, that’s what it’s about.”
Okay. So just like the right context give meaning to words, the same is true of life. We need to have a context for life to give it meaning. Otherwise it becomes ambiguous, meaningless, valueless.
People tend to take their stage of life, the current stage of life, out of context, and make it the whole as if that’s all there is. But without context, it won’t have meaning.
And so we see people becoming depressed, anxious, taking pills to feel good, stuff like taking drugs, and even committing suicide when they think, “Oh, life is meaningless.” So this is a disease and it’s on the increase. It’s an epidemic, especially in the West.
So when they take their life out of context, their life becomes meaningless and they feel lost. They’ll even use those exact words: “Life is meaningless. I feel lost. Therefore, why not just end it all?” Isn’t it?
Now, the same thing happens in spiritual life. For example, in the stage of initiation, people get into a cult of personality around the guru. And they think like, “My guru is the best and only guru, and all other gurus are nonsense.”
And so they identify with a particular religion, a particular organization, a particular group, or philosophy, or mode of worship. And because of this, the meaning of their experience is less than it would be if they saw the whole picture.
For example, in karma-yoga, people are doing service. So they think, “Oh, doing service to this religious organization is everything. This is the most important thing.” And they even make gross errors in philosophy, like saying, “The organization is spiritual. The organization is transcendental,” even.
Of course, no organization can be either spiritual or transcendental. An organization is just an abstraction. It’s just a fabrication. It’s just words at best, agreements between people. And so they agree to act in a certain way and think in a certain way.
And because of that, they artificially limit their consciousness to one stage of the spiritual path. And they cannot see the other spiritual stages. And so they even deny them and say that they’re wrong.
So a person in the higher stages of the spiritual path knows that this is false. This is a self-limiting view, which is called an upādhi. And upādhi is a recognized yoga term, meaning a limiting adjunct. That a person limits their consciousness, they limit their understanding to a certain stage of the Path, and they can’t see beyond that.
When people see the spiritual life only in terms of the stage they are in, they imagine an origin and destination in terms of their current stage of realization.
For example, in bhakti, people imagine that the soul was created at a certain point or that they fell down from Vaikuṇṭha or someplace like that, although they can’t really explain without getting into serious philosophical contradictions. They can’t really explain how that’s so.
And similarly, they see their destination as going back to some other world where things are somehow different and where they’re in a relationship with a Deity who they imagine to be the one and only supreme, and like that. So in this way, they close off their understanding and they don’t see the other possibilities on the path. And so it becomes very difficult for them to advance.
So because of this limiting understanding, these upādhis, limiting adjuncts, the different religions have different conflicting models of life and the Path.
So the Esoteric Teaching resolves these conflicts by using an inclusive model derived from deep research into ontology, the science of being and meaning. The Esoteric Teaching does not deny any stage of the path. In fact, it sees the path as a spectrum—and we’ll go into this in a little bit, that everybody is at some point on this spectrum of spiritual realization.
And depending on where they’re at, they may see things differently. But actually, if you zoom out all the way and see the whole path, it’s very clear where they are at.
For example, when people are in the stage of Right View, they think that knowledge is everything. They get very attached to books or hearing from a certain personality, and they think that this one view, this one way of looking at things is everything. But again, they miss the point because they are too exclusive and they think that only this way of looking at things is right. But actual Right View is a broad outlook that includes and affirms everything.
Similarly, when they’re in the stage of initiation, their view is more authority-based, centered on the guru. When they’re in karma-yoga, their view is work-based. They think charity and organizations and things like that are the embodiment of spirituality. Of course, this is very limited.
When someone is in the stage of bhakti, they may think that their personal god, their particular deity that they’re attracted to, is the Absolute, is everything and the source and destination of everyone. But of course, this is still limited.
In rāja-yoga, emptiness or nothingness is seen as the absolute because rāja-yoga is based on meditation. So the idea is to empty and quiet the mind. That’s fine, except now don’t think because of that that rāja-yoga is the only thing and everybody else is wrong.
Finally, in jñāna-yoga we have an inclusive model based on the Self or Brahman. And because of that, jñāna-yoga can accommodate all other points of view.
The picture of the Path that we get from rāja-yoga as expressed by Rāmaṇa Mahārṣi in his book Upadeṣa Undhiyār is a spectrum that goes from karma, or selfish lusts all the way through the different yogas up to complete realization, realization of the whole, the Self, Brahman. And when one gains that realization, one sees that all these paths are correct for a given person at a particular stage.
So the lesson that we should take away from this is that we should hold our beliefs firmly but flexibly, tentatively, being ready to give them up for something higher, because the time will come when we have to move beyond them. And therefore we should look at our beliefs and our knowledge as being temporary, for now only, because ultimately all knowledge and even the mind itself have to be given up.
So the question when we look at a spectrum of spiritual stages like this is, where am I? We have to do a self-assessment and determine where we are on the Path so that we can see what’s coming next.
So the ultimate context, just like the title KITE on that little passage of text, is the Self-realized person. Now I’m going to glorify my guru Ramana Maharshi and the reason I’m going to glorify him is not because he happens to be my guru but because his qualifications are unmatched, at least in recent times.
Rāmaṇa Mahārṣi became spontaneously enlightened in the highest degree, at age 16, without any study, without any guru, without any initiation, without any sādhana.
But this is simply unmatched. No one can claim this. But he displayed all the symptoms of perfect enlightenment and was examined by great sages and declared to be genuine, the real thing.
So a person like Rāmaṇa is the context within which the entire spiritual path exists. And his philosophy, his teaching, is completely inclusive. He doesn’t deny anything, even other religions like Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and so on.
He could perfectly accommodate them and easily understand them from his point of view. Because his point of view is the point of view of the Absolute. So the Absolute is the ultimate context that gives everything meaning. So he is the guru. He is the ultimate truth himself.
Now let’s take one more look at this model of the Esoteric Teaching and see how this inclusive model actually includes all the stages of life, all the possibilities of human life.
Yes, you can go jump down the Fall. Slide down the slide all the way to the bitter end, and still remain attached, and go back to the beginning and start all over again. And in subsequent videos in this series, we’re going to examine each one of these stages in detail. So yeah, you can do that. And you can go round and round saṁsāra as long as you like, forever; it’s up to you.
Or you can go beyond that. And you can hear from a guru and get Right View, and then go on to accept initiation and then do the various sādhanas.
Now the point of view is that Right View is the key to the actual Path. Without Right View, if one tries to jump ahead and perform the various sādhanas, the various yogas, what will happen is that you will become stuck. You will become fixated at a certain point in the Path and not be able to get beyond it. And certainly you will not be able to reach enlightenment.
And we see this happening again and again. A very common problem.
Why? Because one never accepted Right View. Therefore one could never accept the initiation from the actual guru, the actual context of the Path that gives it the meaning.
Because guru is one. He may appear or speak through different personalities. But ultimately the understanding is one and the same. So the Esoteric Teaching reveals this and gives you the context by which to judge all the different spiritual paths and your own progress as well.
Now one more thing. On this channel there are many, many video series. About 250 videos at the moment. And of course that’s only going to increase. And they more or less correspond to different stages of the path of the Esoteric Teaching.
So here’s a view showing the progression from the beginning to the end or from the lowest level to the top. So we encourage you to go back and watch these because they give more context so that you can get more meaning from these videos and get the final benefit of complete enlightenment.
So ĀŪṀ Tat Sat. ĀŪṀ Hariḥ ĀŪṀ.