Transcriptions
Dev Priyānanda Svāmī Bhagavān
Video Link: YouTube
Namaste, and welcome to another episode of the Esoteric Teaching.
This time we’re going to talk about wrong views, and how they retard our progress on the Path, how we can overcome them and get to Right View.
So the first thing I’m going to do is talk about the different categories of Wrong View. There are so many wrong views, it’s impossible to talk about them except in general, in categories. And then we’ll tell some stories from our own experience.
The first Wrong View that you need to be very alert about is exclusivity: thinking, “I know the only way, the only truth, the highest teaching,” etc. like that, “and all others are wrong.”
Now, one could accuse me of having exclusive attitudes about the Esoteric Teaching; well, but I don’t say that other views are wrong. I say they are simply incomplete, taken out of context.
And that’s the problem with exclusivity. It takes whatever spiritual practice, or whatever philosophy you’re following, out of context. And so you lose perspective on it, it becomes everything, be-all and end-all. And then when things change, or you fail at it, or you grow beyond it, either way, you have to completely switch context—and this can be devastating.
So an example of exclusivity is thinking that a person has to have a particular qualification or background to practice or attain Self-realization. In other words, if somebody is from a different race, or a different culture, or a different sexual orientation, or any number of differences from the way we are, because we are right, they are wrong.
That’s a Wrong View. Why? It excludes people. You know, if you really want your path, whatever it is, to be successful, it should be as inclusive as possible. You should welcome as many people from many different backgrounds. Another point is, if you think, for example, “Oh, we can’t work with people of XYZ association, or background, or country, language, culture, sexual orientation, blah, blah, blah.”
This means your path has a weakness. You have a lack of confidence that your path or method can be effective with a certain group of people. And what does that mean? It’s not really universal. It can’t be the spiritual truth, because spiritual truth applies to everyone. And if your path is really the truth, it should be open to everyone. It should be available. It should be possible to succeed in it, no matter what background you come from.
People who are really confident about their enlightenment don’t exclude anyone. They say, “Everybody has a place in it.” This is why I love Rāmaṇa Mahārṣi so much. He’s open to being approached by people from any background: Easterners, Westerners, Hindus, Muslims, Catholics, whatever.
And why? Because everyone is the Self. The Self expands Himself into all and everything. So this truth of advaita-jñāna actually applies to everyone. And anyone can realize it from any point of view. That’s what’s so wonderful about it.
Oh, another one is about teaching, that “Only certain people from certain backgrounds can teach.” Brāhmaṇas, I’m talking to you. If a requirement for teaching a spiritual path is a certain type of birth family or certain type of culture, race, religion, etc., then whatever you’re teaching is not the Absolute Truth.
And it’s also weak. It can only be understood or only be applied or only be taught by a certain group of people. You just weakened your whole position.
People do this out of insecurity. They’re trying to strengthen their own position, but they’re really sawing off the limb that they’re sitting on. I don’t know if people from other cultures have that simile. I’ll try to find a cartoon and post it here, of sawing off the limb that you’re sitting on.
You’re sitting on a certain religion, a certain context, a certain teaching, or a certain way of meditation or whatever it is. So if you say only people who have XYZ qualification can teach this, what you’re really saying is “This thing is not universal; this thing is only sectarian,” which puts it way down the list, makes it an ordinary religion and disempowers it.
So don’t make this mistake of exclusivity, thinking “We have the Only Way.” No; you have a way, and that way is fine for you. If it works for you, then that’s great. But the whole path is much bigger than any one method, as we have shown in our diagram of the Esoteric Teaching.
Every method fits into one or more categories of yogas. And so if your method doesn’t have prequisite and a way to go after you complete it, then that’s not the real method, is it? Because you’ve taken it out of context. Context is so important.
So let’s move on: the Buddha. The Buddha enumerated 62 wrong views, or types of wrong views, in the Brahmajala Sutta. Now they include violations of spiritual ethics as one category. For example, if someone does something that harms another being, they’re off the Path. They blew it. Because now they’ve created karma.
Or if someone becomes greedy and starts going after material things that don’t come of their own accord. Because of that greed, now they’re creating karma for themselves, and that’s going to interfere with their spiritual progress. Why? They’re building up the mind instead of attenuating and dissolving the mind. Which is the actual purpose of the spiritual Path.
So ethics are important because we want to stay clean. If a person lies, deceives another, or engages in some cruel joke, this is a cause of falldown from the spiritual path. Because again, they’re creating karma. They’re strengthening the mind instead of dissolving the mind.
So this is a big mistake for anybody on the spiritual path. Don’t do it. Stay clean. Have integrity. Speak the truth. Stand on your word.
Another one is deviations from the Noble Eightfold Path. For example, wrong views. Right View is the first of the Noble Eightfold Path items. Right Meditation, or Right Concentration, is the last one.
So in other words, to succeed at meditation, you have to have the other seven elements of the Eightfold Path, and especially Right View. Right view is so important that if you actually get it right, then you’ll attain enlightenment very quickly.
Another one is the idea that enlightenment, or nirvāṇa, or Self-realization, whatever you want to call it, is attained by some material process. In other words, you follow some rules and regulations, you perform certain rituals, or you condition your mind in a certain way, and that will let you attain enlightenment.
No, no. That’s bogus enlightenment, false enlightenment, counterfeit enlightenment. The Buddha used to say, “The only thing that can destroy my teaching is if someone makes a counterfeit teaching and passes it off as a real thing.” And of course, this has happened.
So the same happens after every great master passes away. Their followers create a counterfeit, call it by the same name, but it’s actually different. It’s happened to yoga, tantra, Buddha’s teaching, Native American spirituality, I could go on and on. The list is endless.
After every great master passes, people change the teaching, but keep the same name. And of course, it doesn’t work. So by following any of those bogus teachings, you’re really wasting your time. It’s real important to go back to the original and find out what the real masters taught and practiced.
And then there’s various speculative cosmological theories. Most of these are simply nonsense, because nobody was there in the beginning of the universe to see the Big Bang or whatever it was. But some of the very common categories of these are eternalism, the idea that the world or the ego or soul or God are eternal. But nothing that exists, that has being, is eternal—it can’t be, because everything that has a beginning has an end. Everything that has existence is subject to time. And time, as we know, wears things out, and then they go away. Or actually, the matter and energy in them simply transforms into another form.
So everything that is, is temporary and cannot be the Absolute. The Absolute must be out of manifestation. It must be unmanifest, imminent. It has to be separate from being and becoming. So any cosmological theory, for example, that the world or the soul or the ego are eternal, or that the world is finite or infinite—either way, it’s wrong. Or that the world originates from some cause.
Now, this is very deep and subtle, but the world is, of course—how can I say—a result of our coming into being. In other words, the world exists within consciousness, not the other way around. Part of the illusion is that there is a world outside of the Self. Actually, the world, whatever the world really is, can only exist within consciousness, because consciousness is the Self.
Consciousness Being, with a capital B, without becoming, is the only thing that is really eternal. But in that case, we don’t need the concept of eternal because there’s no coming into being and no going out of being, no time, no change, no location, no movement, no transformation, nothing. So try to understand the nature of the Absolute that’s part of getting Right View.
So to go on, in regard to Self-realization, there are four categories of Wrong View, five categories of Wrong View that I want to bring to your attention.
And the first of those is acquisition. The self, or Brahman, is ever-present and is always I am, subjective. It is one’s very being. It never comes into being. It already is, always. So there’s no question of acquiring it or gaining it as if it was something outside ourselves. It is our Self. That’s why it’s called the Self. And we can experience it only subjectively. There’s no such thing as seeing the Self, or seeing Brahman outside of oneself.
If one sees, for example, the light of consciousness or the light of Brahman, we’re simply seeing a reflection of Brahman in our own purified mind through meditation. That’s a lower stage than actually realizing Brahman because then, when that happens, we realize that we always were Brahman. We were never anything else. So the idea of gaining or acquiring something is completely Wrong View.
Here’s a nice quote:
If it is a thing to be acquired, its absence before attainment is implied. If it can be absent even once, why should not its absence recur? Then mokṣa will be found to be impermanent, and so not worthwhile striving for.
Again, if it can be acquired, acquisition implies non-Self. So Tripura Rahasya nails it.
Next is recovery. It’s not the case that the Self was lost and it has to be recovered. No, we never lose the Self. We cover it over with the mind and with all kinds of other nonsense, the body and different ideas and activities and stuff. So we distract ourselves from our Self. But actually the Self is never lost. It always remains. It always is.
There is no creating or extending the Self because it is ever. Mokṣa is not anything to be got afresh, for it is already there only to be realized. Such realization arises with the elimination of ignorance. Absolutely nothing more is required to achieve the aim of life.
The next one I want to look at is the idea of transformation. We hear this word a lot, especially in New Age circles, all the way through this transformation. Transformation cannot apply to the Self because the Self is ever the same. It never changes. So then what transformation is even possible for it? It’s not that the Self becomes transformed into the mind. It can’t be transformed. The mind is something separately invented and covering over the Self.
So transformation and renunciation, retirement, giving up the world, all these ideas imply transformation of the self, and that’s not possible. So these are bogus ideas. We’re not to give up the world. We’re to give up our attachment to it. We’re not to renounce the world. We are to renounce the idea that the world is real. Then we can actually realize the self. The word transform does not appear even once in Tripura Rahasya. So it’s not even on the map.
Next is the idea of purification or practice. The Self is always pure. It never becomes impure. It never becomes subject to the modes of material nature, for example. It never becomes. It always simply is.
So there’s no way for the self to become impure. Therefore, what is the need for purification? The only need for purification is of the mind, which is full of so many stupid ideas.
Actually the mind itself should be done away with. The ego should be done away with. Then one can see the Self very easily. The popular idea is that mokṣa is release from bondage, meaning destruction of ignorance. Ignorance is itself a form of thought. Destruction is its absence. To bring about its absence is only another form of thought. So then on investigation, the whole statement gets involved and becomes meaningless.
So the idea of a practice leading to self-realization is ultimately meaningless. Now this only applies and is true for people who are already realized. Once you get realized, you realize, “Oh, the practice really didn’t do anything.” At most, the practice shows us how many wrong ideas there are. And when we get rid of them, only then the realization happens. Then we realize, “Oh, this was the way I am all the time anyway, duh.”
So get rid of this idea of transformation. The reason why we say that jñāna-yoga is the final stage on the Path is that all, in fact, all this information of the sequence of yogas comes from Rāmaṇa’s teaching. Rāmaṇa, in his Upadeṣa Undiyār, shows that the order of yogas has to be karma-yoga, bhakti-yoga, then rāja-yoga, and finally jñāna-yoga.
Why is that? Because someone like Rāmaṇa appears only once in thousands of years. You know, maybe Jesus was the last being of the quality of Rāmaṇa. Rāmaṇa could simply look at you and erase your mind, bring you to Self-realization just by looking at you.
He had that power. He had many other powers as well, but he didn’t think they were very important because they’re all temporary. So anyway, Rāmaṇa says, therefore, we accept he’s our guru. He’s our master. His view is right.
When I took shelter of Rāmaṇa, I had so many ideas for teaching and so many structures and this and that. I let go of all of them because Rāmaṇa, given his quality of being, his view supersedes everything, even in the scriptures.
Where else can you find a being who spontaneously attained the final enlightenment at age 16 without studying, without a master, without knowledge of the scriptures, without performing any religious rituals other than the ordinary South Indian family life? Where can you find another teacher of that caliber, of that quality?
Now, other people since then of lesser attainment have claimed to be his followers and successors. However, it’s very, very obvious if we actually study Rāmaṇa’s teaching, that nobody can come close.
So therefore, we accept his word. We accept his direction as final. And then we go looking for the scriptures, for passages that echo and support his ideas.
So in other words, the sage, the realized being, is the final authority. Not scriptures, not traditions, certainly not religious organizations because they always distort the truth. And even people who claim to be realized, who claim to be direct disciples and so forth, we can see they’re of lesser stature than the sage himself.
So yes, take the scriptural knowledge for what it’s worth, but don’t say that it’s the final word unless it’s corroborated and confirmed by an enlightened being. Now, this is getting long, so I’m going to have to put the stories in another video.
Aum Tat Sat, Aum Hariḥ Aum.