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Adi Shankaracharya 1 VIVEKACHOODAMANI – ADI SHANKARACHARYA SEMINAR BY JAMES, TRANSCRIBED BY MYURI 1: VERSES 1-2 What is Vedanta? Vedanta is a means of self knowledge and it works for sure. And part of the reason it works is because we have a scripture. It's a scripture based tradition. And this scripture has shown itself to be infallible. In other words, the teaching here and the logic here has never been refuted. In India they use to have great debates that were financed by the kings. And all the spiritual people, worldly people, philosophical people came. India's had a great tradition of intellectual brilliance in all levels. Great thinkers came from here. And they use to have these great debates. Particularly around the time Buddhism was coming up. Buddhism it seems was making inroads into the culture because Brahmanism had produced a lot of problems, similar to the problems produced by the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages when the reformation came up. Buddha was a reformed Hindu actually. And they had these great debates which followed certain rules. And a great Vedanta teacher named Shankara whose text we're going to take as an introductory text, basically defeated everybody. And it was a huge revival of hinduism. The idea was you either surrendered to the truth and followed the truth, or you left India. And those Buddhists and those other people couldn't compete, they just packed up and left. So Vedanta was re- established as the truth of enlightenment, of the self, of the nature of reality. And part of that tradition involves criticism. I know this is a very bad word because everybody has this notion in the spiritual world that when you're critical you're judgmental, and you're not suppose to be judgmental. You're bad because you're making a judgement. Well that's not true. We have an intellect for a particular reason consciousness evolved an intellect for the purposes of making judgements for critical 2 thinking. That's the purpose of the intellect. That's the reason it's evolved. So we need to make judgements, we need to be critical in our thinking. And that involves critical of spiritual ideas, or bad ideas masquerading as the truth. And when I criticize an idea, if there's a name in your mind associated with it or if you have particular devotion to somebody who's presented that idea, mind you I'm not attacking the person. I'm not attacking the devotion you have for that person or for the devotion you have for that teaching. Mind you, don't take it personally. It's not personal. I'm not against anybody. All people we see as the self. Everybody is just awareness. But awareness can have some dumb ideas and those ideas need to be exposed. And you'll notice in our tradition, when we expose a bad idea we'll give you the logic. There's a logic behind these criticisms. It's not just because I like it or I don't like it. I'm not here to tell you what I think or feel. I'm very strong on my teaching but it's only because I'm identified with this teaching. So what you're listening is not a personal opinion, although my personal energy is behind that view but this is the scripture's view on these ideas that just don't work. Most of these ideas that we have, that we've picked up in the spiritual world, there's always some truth to it. They wouldn't last if there wasn't some truth to them. But because they haven't been crucially analyzed in light of awareness and the nature of awareness, there's also some ignorance or untruth packed into those ideas. And spiritual people are… I hate to use the word, gullible, but they want to give people the benefit of the doubt. They don't want to be critical, they want to have faith and devotion and believe that it's true just like a religious person wants to believe in God, so they'll glum onto the truth and ignore the ignorance that's associated with the truth. It's a problem, a big problem. You read spiritual literature. I'm working on an article now for my blog about this, showing how you can just have the ignorance woven so fine, so tightly woven that in your desire to understand, you swallow the ignorance along with the truth and you get confused. And Vedanta is very clear about that so we have to pick apart some of these ideas. And that's going to be uncomfortable, mind you. But I'm not trying to upset you but Vedanta is a provocative teaching. It's going to provoke you to think 3 clearly and we're going to give you the big idea to make these criticisms on your own. Because our idea here is to make you the teacher. Your intellect, your mind should be the teacher. But your mind needs to think clearly, analytically in a discriminating way so that you can do inquiry. You can't do inquiry if the ideas you use to do inquiry are fuzzy. If they haven't been properly vetted. So mind you, and I've got a bit of an edge and I'm sarcastic sometimes, I'm sorry. Just my personality. But mind you, I'm not against any gurus or any tradition. We're only against bad ideas. That's all. So don't say, 'Well Ramji's like this and he doesn't like so and so and he doesn't like this and so forth and so on.' And there will be certain names that will come up in your mind and I'll try to avoid saying those names, although if I do it's not because I'm talking about the name, it's just to point out the teaching, which most of you will be familiar with. Like Ramesh, for example, and 'I'm not the doer teaching.' Most everybody knows about Ramesh and I'm not the doer teaching? Yeh. And that's a good teaching but it's a bad teaching. So we have to understand what's the upside of it and what's the downside, that's all. I'm not saying believe it or accept what I say, I'm saying think about it in logic of Vedanta. Think about it and you choose for yourself what you think is the truth. We're not trying to push anything on you. Inquiry means you have to hear what's being said and put it up against what you believe and sort it out in your own mind. How Vedanta works So that leads to the next topic which is 'how this works.' How Vedanta works. It's important to understand this. Vedanta is called a shabda pramanam. Pramanam means a means of knowledge. And shabda means sound, means words or sounds. So it's a means of knowledge that's conveyed by words. Words are to be heard and hopefully listened to. You can hear things but not listen. You'll hear it but it won't register in your brain properly as it was transmitted. This is a huge problem. If you're not getting it, it's probably because you're not able to listen properly. If you notice, and I'm sure you have, in a conversation when somebody makes a statement and they have several sentences to say. They want to talk for a few minutes. Most everybody wants to talk for a few minutes uninterrupted. As soon as you hear something that triggers 4 a thought in your mind, you start forming an opinion or judgement or reaction or your contribution as soon as the word starts coming out, as soon as the idea gets clear. And what that means is, you're not listening to the rest of their conversation. This is where arguments start. A person may have a very nice thing to say, and work it all out, but you hear something you don't like in the beginning, which is going to be qualified later, and you immediately say, 'No that's not true, but I think,' and off you go formulating your argument on your side. And you never hear the person out. This is human nature because everybody just wants to talk. They want to be noticed, they want to be heard. And they don't want to listen to other people. So in this tradition, if you're able to figure it out on your own, you'd have figured it out on your own. That's just a fact. So basically, we're not saying you're stupid, we're saying you don't have enough information to figure it out on your own so please allow us to give you that information. So when I say something, what's happening is, you're going to have to manage your own mind. This is why it's hard. This is why Vedanta is very difficult. Because we come here with certain beliefs and opinions. We've got our own ideas how it is, how reality is, who I am, what's going on, what the world is like. We have these ideas. And as soon as you hear an idea that contradicts your view or brings into question your view, it creates an agitation in your mind and you switch off.
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