Dev Bhagavān
Foundation Series
The Foundations of Authentic Spiritual Life
Transcription Episode 4
Dev Priyānanda Svāmī Bhagavān
4—Four Levels of Teaching
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Namaste 🙏 Before we leave this subject of the four classifications, the four levels or stages of there Vedic Path, I have to revisit it one more time. Because I’m still getting the feedback that you don’t get it. We have to be able to think with this chart—what does it mean?
There are four levels. The person on the first level can maybe see a little bit of the second level, but they can’t really understand it. The person on the second level can understand the first level just fine, because they’ve been there. And they’re learning the second level, and they’re maybe just barely able to understand the third level. The people on the third level understand the first two levels, but they can’t really understand the fourth level because it’s beyond their experience. And of course, the people on the fourth level understand everything. But Rāmana Mahārṣi and people like that are so rare. There are only a tiny, tiny handful on earth at any particular time.
What does that mean in practice? If you have some friends who are sectarian religionists—Christian, Muslim, born-again Baptists or Jews or whatever, people who are committed to their religious faith—they’re solid dvaita-vādīs. They’re into duality all the way. They have an ‘eternal soul’, and they’re going to go be with God forever and ever, Amen.
These people cannot understand bhakti. When I became a devotee, a bhakta, and went to join my spiritual master in India, my family completely rejected me; and that was never healed. They could never grasp why I would want to go off and serve some brown guy in a dhoti on the other side of the planet; it was completely beyond them. Well to be fair, they weren’t even really 100% dvaita-vādīs; they were more half-and-half—half-animals really. Still eating meat, and all—blah, horrible.
Their minds could not grasp the ontology that God can appear in a form. This is very strange, because in the beginning, people give no form to God. Or maybe they do give a form to God: like the Sistine Chapel frescoes that show God reaching out and touching Adam, and giving him life. So, God can have a form; He can do stuff. He can be, like a person. And, you can worship Him in that form; you can have pastimes with Him in that form, and so on.
That’s the viśiṣṭādvaita-vāda platform, bhakti-yoga. Before you realize that, you can only do karma-yoga. And there are many, many sects that pretend to be on higher levels, but are actually just dvaita-vādīs, stuck in duality. The neo-Buddhists and the neo-Advaitins are perfect examples of that. They claim to be ‘buddhists’ or they claim to be ‘advaitins,’ but they’re actually just another sectarian duality.
Why? Because they believe this, and they don’t believe that; they accept this, and they deny that. That’s duality; that’s sectarianism. In the higher reaches of the viśiṣṭādvaita, or dvaitādvaita, or bhedābheda-tattva, or vāda, or siddhānta—the conclusion is that “Yes, ultimately there’s oneness, but at this time we’re still in duality and so we can’t really realize it.” But at the higher stages of that, there begins to dawn the realization that, “Oh my God—actually it could be all one.”
I remember one time, when I was still in the viśiṣṭādvaita mindset, I had several experiences of oneness, of nirguṇa-brahman—_Brahman without form. And I was very perplexed, I was very confused. I didn’t understand—_couldn’t understand with my present background, my present ontology, what was happening to me. So I had to go and approach different teachers, and I finally approached Osho Rajneesh. And I was with him for some time, to try to understand what was going on in my spiritual life, because I was getting visions of Brahman: wonderful ecstatic visions.
But that’s another story for another day. What I’m here to say today is that, in that state, I had to reach out for more knowledge, because my existing knowledge wasn’t adequate to understand or explain what I was going through. That led to the vivartha-vāda platform. Rāmana Mahārṣi says, in his book Guru-vāchaka-kovai, that his teaching—his public teaching, his open teaching that he gives to everyone—is on the vivartha-vāda platform.
What does that mean? That means that we know that nirguṇa-brahman is the Absolute; but we still see the material world—in fact, the śloka that begins Ulladu-Narpadu opens with the words nam ulaham kandalal, “Because we see the world.” Because we see the world, we know that—even though we may have experience of nirguṇa-brahman—but we still see the world as the world; we still experience the world as real.
This is the vivartha-vāda platform, the state of consciousness. And the sādhana—well, like the Buddha’s teaching: neti-neti. “This is not it, that is not it, these are not it, those are not it,” ultimately leading to nothingness, emptiness. At which point, nirguṇa-brahman shows up spontaneously as Self-realization occurs: the four Path realizations of the Buddha, leading to arahant and nibbāna.
Nibbāna is nothing but the Self. But the Self has to come spontaneously. It’s not something you can do, or attain; it’s something that’s realized. And on the ajata platform—Rāmana used to ridicule people mercilessly, who would come to him with all kinds of questions. “What is God? What is this? What is that? What is happening to me?” And he would answer them all in the same way: “To whom is this happening? Who is having this experience? Do ‘you’ exist?”
Rāmana could be so sarcastic! Completely straight-faced, in the way of the South Indians—but very, very sarcastic. He would say, “Whoever claims to be enlightened or Self-realized, or to not be Self-realized, exposes wide grounds for ridicule.” (See Ulladu-Narpadu, Verse 33) He said that!
All these teachers—Neo-Advaita, and other religious teachers who go around claiming to be enlightened—are ridiculed by someone in the ajata stage. Why? He knows well that we are already Brahman. There’s nothing to realize; there’s nothing to attain! There’s nothing to seek; then there’s no Path to seek it.
This is ajata—ajata-vāda. It’s inexplicable, inconceivable, oxymoronic, that as soon as you say anything about it, it’s wrong. Because the Absolute cannot be described in words. Words always divide up Reality into duality: good and bad, right and wrong, black and white, in and out, up and down. You can’t help it! As soon as you say, “X is right,” it means Y is wrong. But Y isn’t wrong; Y is also a part of God.
Just like the sectarian dualists who condemn other faiths: they say, “Ours is right—our guru, our Master, our lineage, our book or whatever it is—is right, and all others are wrong.” And by doing this, all they do is affirm that “God has created all these other things that we don’t like, or that we don’t know about, or that we don’t understand.”
Because by saying, “X is right,” you’re automatically saying, “Y is wrong.” But Y has to exist; and if it exists, it’s part of God. That’s why people on the ajata platform say, “The world is perfect; the world is alright just the way it is.” And everybody else is going, “No, we have to improve things, we need to be faster, or richer, or thinner,” or something. But “We have to attain something; we have to make progress! We have to get there, there has to be a Path! Cause and effect!”
Because we see like this, Rāmana came down from the ajata platform to the vivartha platform, and he’s teaching on that platform. “Yes, you have to still the mind.” That means accepting that you exist, that the mind exists, that the world, and God and everybody actually exists. But on the ajata platform, he knows full well that actually, it does not. And that only awareness, or awareness of awareness—‘I-I’—only the subject exists, and not the object.
But compromising with our mentality, he comes down a notch, and says, “OK, alright, I’ll grant you that your ego, your individuality, your mind, your body, the world, cause and effect, time, dimension, distance, all this good stuff, is real—provisionally. I’ll grant it provisional reality, while you do the process of stilling the mind.”
And once you still the mind, Brahman will manifest automatically, and then you too will realize ajata-vāda. And that’s the theme of this work.