The Spiritual Heritage of India

Aaaaah. Asa to maa sadga maya, Tamasoma jyotirga maya, Mrittiormamrtaṁga maya, Om shanti shanti shanti shanti. Sarveshams vasdhir bhavatu, Sarveshams shanti bhavatu, Sarveshams manggalambhavatu, Sarveshams purniambhavatu, Loka samastāsukino bhavāntu, Lidas from the unreal to the real, Lidas from darkness unto light, Lidas from death unto immortality, May all beings know happiness, may all beings know peace, May all beings know success, may all beings know completion. May all beings be free of suffering and from the causes of suffering, May all beings be protected from harm from within and without. May all our efforts contribute to this. Oooooooong peace, peace, peace. Om namaste namashkaram one and all. In your own time blink your eyes open and gently lift the chin, and we'll join each other now here in this space connecting soul to soul as opposed to roll to roll. It is with reverence and such humility that I receive you all today. Thank you so much for sharing this time with me. It's a joy to come together, Om. And we've got an exciting evening ahead. I'm sure some of you know that in America it's quite common. Yes, new moon. Not an exciting evening ahead. It's quite common in America when you go to an Indian restaurant that you'll see a buffet. I don't know if you've noticed that, but most Indian restaurants in America it's customary to do a lunchtime buffet. Welcome, Jhana. And you must ask why do you think that is? You know, why is it that Indian restaurants continuously have buffets? I'm in a big part of that is because if they didn't have buffets, you wouldn't really know what to order. You can imagine for a lot of people their first time at an Indian restaurant they're looking at the menu and they're like, "What is this saag paneer? What is this rune paneer? Rogan Josh? It's all very intimidating and confusing." So there's nothing better than actually seeing the food that you intend to eat. So having a buffet frees you from the difficulty of navigating a complex menu. And you can see with your eyes, you can see, "Oh, that looks pretty good." And before you know it, you've stacked your plate full of colorful, delectable goods. You allow your stomach to guide you, your eyes to guide you. And generally speaking, the meal tends to be quite good. And you go home rather satisfied. Similarly, tonight's lecture will be like that. It will be a philosophical buffet of ideas, so to speak. Some of these ideas will appeal to you. Some of them won't. And that's the joy of it. You know, I intend to provide you with this broad and overview as possible while still getting into each of these philosophies as much as possible. And essentially, we're going to be tracking the history of ideas. That is the way ideas emerge and have developed throughout the years. So it's going to be a little bit of a historical survey today, the history of yoga. But in history, in the study of history, historians have often been criticized for focusing too much on extraordinary people. So we have a lot of historical sources on kings and queens and extraordinary individuals, but not a lot on the everyday man, woman and person. So history as a study has often been criticized for not being inclusive enough. We don't really know that much, hi Emily, about what life was like for the everyday person. So in today's discussion, we're not so much focusing on the history of people and events as much as we are on the ideas that emerge from those people and from those events. So yes, we will be talking about extraordinary individuals like the Shakyamuni Buddha of 6th century BCE. We'll talk about Shankaracharya and Mahavira who started the Jain movement. But we're also going to talk about events like the invasion of the Margules in the 12th and 13th centuries. But really, we're talking about those events only with regards to how they affected the ideas of that time period. So that's one thing to note. Secondly, the question is, why focus on ideas? Ultimately, because ideas are what live on. While the concept of India as a nation changes throughout the ages. What it means to be Bhadata or Arya Varta, the realm of the Aryans, what it means to be Indian will always change. It means something very different now than it did many years ago. And it's probably going to mean something very different in the years to come. So while India arises and disappears, much like every sensation arises and disappears in the field of your awareness, the ideas tend to persist because the ideas are about the awareness itself most of the time. So when we talk about these ideas, you might ask, what's it to me? Why does it matter to me to learn about these ideas? Well, for three reasons. One, because they're friggin cool, you'll hear a lot of cool stories, exciting stories. So just on an aesthetic, artistic and cultural level, they're very enticing and interesting. And if nothing else, just for a trivial fun, they can be fun. But deeper than that, because the ideas pertain directly to the deepest questions of life. Now, what is it to be human? What is it to be embodied? What is a body and what happens when this body dies? What is happiness and how can we go about obtaining it? Is there such a thing as stable, everlasting happiness? Or are we doomed to suffer pleasure and pain in an inevitable cycle of change? Essentially, what does it mean to be alive? What's the purpose of life? These ideas pertain directly to those questions. That's why they are important ideas. Thirdly, they are in your care now. So these ideas have been entrusted to you or given to you by numerous ages, saints and mystics, yogis, pundits, who have come to the west from South Asia throughout the ages to share some of these ideas, so that they may be a common treasure for all. So we can think back to Swami Vivekananda, who in 1896 gave a fine speech at the Parliament of World Religions. And this was the first statement of South Asian philosophy in the west, except for maybe Alexander the Great's interaction with some of the yogis back in the day. This was the first, let's say, formal statement, the formal address of South Asian philosophy to the west, liver. It was a thunderous, thunderous voice of India's foremost ambassador. And the first line that we hear from South Asian philosophy here in the west, the first statement ever made was, my sisters and brothers of America. He didn't really get past that line because there was thunderous applause and everybody stood up and they were so excited because unlike many of the speakers that came before Swami Vivekananda, this speaker spoke directly to the audience. You know, he hadn't prepared a speech, no formalities, no, oh thank you, Chicago, Parliament of World Religions, there was no preamble. He just came right to the point and said, I love you, you're all part of my family. They felt that vibration. When Paramahansa Yogan, under came a little later, he would say something similar. The message of yoga would encircle the globe and create a brotherhood and sisterhood, a family of humanity. And sitting here today with all of you is truly a testament to that. People from all over and we've all come together to celebrate something. And I want to zero in as to what exactly it is that we're celebrating. Ultimately, I want to say we're celebrating a feeling. före celebrating a vibration that has nothing to do with the vibration. at all with the ideas, language or metaphors that we have used throughout the ages to describe it. The vibration goes way beyond any of the stories I'm going to tell you about today. It goes way beyond any of the schools of philosophy because they will all be forgotten. It's inevitable. Some of them are as old as 9,000 years by some liberal estimates and by conservative estimates 5,000 years but they will go. India will disappear. Things come and things go but these ideas they will persist. They will be taken up again by some other culture, by some other people's. They will be expressed differently perhaps with different mythologies but they will almost always point to the same thing and that thing is a felt experience. So as we go on our tour today, remember that each of these ideas are pointing to something as the shakyamuni Buddha famously put it, we must not confuse the finger pointing at the moon with the moon itself. And there's also a sufi proverb, do not confuse the reflection with the moon in the pond with the moon itself. So ultimately we're into the moon. It's a new moon so this metaphor might be a little off the mark. But this feeling is something that anybody can feel anywhere. So the reason these ideas persist and there might be several. Some scholars will say it's because of the traditional rigor or the conservatism of Indian society, the memory of the Indian youth because we memorize these texts and it's an oral tradition. Scholars will give you various reasons for why these ideas have persisted, why it is we are talking about them today and 9,000 years later. But I'd like to just humbly propose that the reason these ideas exist, the reason they have persisted is because you've all felt something. Whether it was in a New York yoga studio lying in Shavasana at the end of the day, whether it was in a TikTok, whether it was in a sentence in a book, whether it was an image that you saw while walking down the street one day of a meditating Buddha or Shiva or something. Being stuck and what happened was you experienced something, you experienced a feeling of vibration and it was so authentic, so real, so legit that it drew you in. And here we all find ourselves. We're all coming to this a different way. Some of us came through postural yoga and we were so surprised when we found that there was a lot more to this than just poses that poses had very little to do with yoga and we started to read Patanjali and then we realized oh my god, even that Patanjali's yoga sutra was only one grain of sand in the beach of South Asian philosophy. And then we realized there was more and there was more and here we are. And some of us are pundits and we've been studying this for a really long time. We've read all the texts and we're veterans of this South Asian philosophy. And yet we know that there's still more to discover. We know that perhaps we haven't turned the ideas into a lived experience. We feel somewhere deep inside that there is a gap between our knowledge and experience. We haven't yet maybe digested some of the ideas. And some of us don't know how we got here, we're complete beginners and these terms are going to sound strange and alien and hopefully we can unpack them together. Okay, so let's go on this journey. Before we do that, two disclaimers, the first is, I'll give you a metaphor. It's from Paramahansa Ramakrishna. And he once said, "Religion is like this" or "At least spirituality is like this." There is a mountain of sugar. One day an ant approached the mountain of sugar, picked up a little grain of sugar, turned around and walked away. It looked over at shoulder and said, "Tomorrow I'll come back and take the whole mountain. I'll bring the rest of the mountain with me." What hubris, right? It's very unlikely that this ant is going to carry away any more than a single grain, perhaps too if it's lucky. In the course of its lifetime, it might only be able to pick up one grain of sugar from that sugar mountain. Now Ramakrishna's metaphor is pointing out the ineffable nature of the divine, that the vibration we're talking about is so profound that it is inexhaustible in terms of expression. You can say so much about it. Christianity is one grain of sand. Islam is another grain of sand. Hinduism is a grain of sand. Janism, Buddhism. They're all grains of sand. All of them pointing at this one thing. Industriously we taste the sugar. But it would be very foolish to taste a grain of sugar and say we know the whole mountain. And yet, and yet the taste of your grain is very much like the taste of all the other grains in that mountain. So do you notice that? While any one way of speaking of this mountain is incomplete, every little part is only a part and not the whole, yet through that part you glimpse the whole. And so Paramahansa Ramakrishna also said, "Many parts, one truth. He of course was citing or referencing the Rigveda, one of the oldest living texts of our human existence here. And in the Rigveda, there is a beautiful line. And that line is, "Ekham Sat, truth is one." Vipra Bahu Dha Vadanpe, though Sajas talk about it differently. So truth is one, though it can be spoken of in many ways. Many, many years later, mystic, a healer in the Levant would say something similar. He would say, "I am the way, the truth, and the life." He didn't say, "I know the truth," or, "I have the truth." He would say, "I am the truth." And not only would he say that, he would later say, according to some gentleman named John, he would say, "These and even greater works shall ye do. For now I'm going back home. I'm outy five thou, and I'll leave it to you." You know? And this healer, Yezuz, the Christ, and many years after him, a gentleman named Paul, a Jew living in Rome, would have powerful visions of this healer. This healer appeared to Paul as Ben Kenobi appears to Luke Skywalker in the Empire Strikes Back, and this healer would say to Paul, "That you have a mission. You must teach this liberal philosophy all over the world. You must bring everyone into one family of truth, not a truth of dogma or belief, but a truth of experience." And so Paul, this gentleman, set out. He sailed the seven seas like Sinbad, you know, spreading these truths. And he would say, as you will read in his letters, "Ye sons of God, ye sons and daughters of Mary," he would say, plural. So ultimately, we're gathered here today to celebrate a vibration, and the idea that this vibration can be expressed millions of different ways. And today I'll try to express them many different ways. All right. The second disclaimer is that talking about it is not enough. Paramahansa Ramakrishna produced a beautiful disciple, one of the figures you will meet today, known as Swami Vivekananda, who he introduced already. And he said, "If there is a God, I must see him. If there is a truth, I must realize it." So another thing that we take away from South Asian philosophy is that mere belief will not do. Even the faith-based parts of this philosophy, like vyshenavism and dualism, will say, "No, it's not enough to just believe that faith must take you to experience." Religion is realization, as Vivekananda said. So it's not enough that I give you philosophies. I must also provide practical means that you can use to verify the truths of these philosophies for yourself. So practice, practice above all. And today we'll be talking about various kinds of practice in the hope that you will find one that appeals to you. So in terms of a path, I've often been asked on TikTok and I've often been asked in other places, what path should I take? Here again we will cite Swami Vivekananda, whether by philosophical inquiry, Gyanayoga, whether by devotion, bhakti yoga, whether by selfless service, karma yoga, whether by psychic control, raja yoga, by any of these or by any combination of these, become free. Do you see? So don't worry about committing to a path. Feel free to be syncretic, to mix and match. You have been given the license not only to practice, but to practice eclectically. Okay. The next disclaimer is that please feel free at any point in today's discussion, to ask a question, to put it in the chat or unmute and say that doesn't quite sound right niche. Because ultimately for something to be true, it must be true for you. If I say anything that does not check out in your own reasoning, if it doesn't match your own experience of life, call me out on it. This is after all Indian philosophy and Indian philosophy thrives on debate. It thrives on rigorous, diacletic. You know, the very word Upanishad implies a student and a teacher fighting it out to arrive at truth. Okay. And my final disclaimer before we start is thank you, thank you, thank you. You know, thank you for coming on Saturday. Thank you for supporting our make art from India for India effort. On Saturday we have. had an art show and I'm so excited to tell you that we raised $6,000 that day. You know that afternoon it was so exciting and thank you all for coming and supporting that. Thank you for being there and celebrating because as you know it's not just about raising material funds. Yes, that's part of it. But it's also about cultivating a feeling, a vibration and sending that over to India. So right now there are Tibetan monks who are chanting Om Manepadmehom up in the Himalayas you know and they've been chanting it for centuries out of the belief that they will send that vibration out from the mountains to englobe the world in a peaceful feeling. And so you might imagine that as you sit in your meditation every time you feel a meditative absorption you can thank those Tibetan monks. They are praying and they are clapping in the breeze sending vibration out into the world. Every time you feel happy and peaceful it probably has to do with someone else feeling happy and peaceful. So the file disclaimer I want to make is if you feel compelled to donate fiscally that's very welcome. Any way you'd like to do so is welcome. If you feel compelled to leave for India and do some work there that's great. But know that those are the only ways to help. By simply feeling good, by sitting where you are and rejoicing, by meditating this too is a form of hell. So let us say that we are all now enmeshed. We're enmeshed in a quantum web if you will. We're enmeshed in a field of vibration and every time we feel good it contributes to the overall goodness everywhere else. So what we do tonight I believe with every fiber of my being God willing will resonate everywhere else in the world. So I intend to hold the highest possible vibration for the longest amount of time hoping that that will do something. Okay. So that being said, if you feel at any point in tonight's conversation that you feel like oh, I want to participate in India's COVID relief effort. There are many ways that you can do this. So I'm going to put in the chat some of those ways. You can of course, Venmo at Yoga World Heart, any contribution. Yoga World Heart is the studio that I teach at and we're sending all of our income from this conversation and from the make art for India event to charities. We're distributing it to several charities or you yourself can send directly to those charities. Some that I recommend are the give India org or give India fund and feeding India. There's also yoga gives back and these are all charities that we love and you're welcome to send some money to them. Also if you don't want to send any money to the studio, if you don't feel like sending any money to those two or three charities, you can of course send money to me. Thank you for this. That's my Venmo and anything that you send me tonight will go to give India or to feeding India. It is that you can fiscally contribute but please remember that's not the only thing that we can do. If you fiscally contribute but you feel bad, it's better that you didn't give that money. Actually honestly, feel joy and that's what matters. So when someone gets a respirator because of our efforts tonight, when someone makes it through the night because of what we're doing, it won't just be because of the respirator. It will be because we are flooding the astral vicinity. We are vibrating the quantum web with joy, with goodness, with celebration. So I cannot thank you enough for coming here and celebrating with me. This little boy is elated. Is elated beyond any words he has to describe it. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. Let's start. So we're going to start. Let's take the conservative estimate, 3,800 BC India. Yes, Ryan. So glad you're here. Some of you have been here for years now. Some of you I've known for years and some of you I'm just starting to meet and yet it feels like we've known each other forever. Destiny last week and it still feels like we've known each other for many lives now. So we're all amongst family. Please feel free. We are recording. So note that. But please feel free to share. You know, feel free to be vulnerable because you're in a community of yogis, spiritual practitioners of many different faiths. And we're all here to celebrate the oneness that all of those faiths point to. Okay. So we'll start 3,800 BC India. Some estimates place this at 7,000 BC India. But this is generally our point of departure for conversations about South Asian philosophy. So we call this Vedic India. There was a civilization that thrived in a region that is today Pakistan. And this is known as the Indus Satasvadi Valley. That's what the anthropologist are calling it now because it references a river known as the Satasvadi river that used to flow in this region. But today has dried up. It's also the name of the goddess, one of the goddesses. One of the many goddesses will be encountering tonight in our tour. Oh, keep your hands and feet inside the vehicle at all times. Just kidding. Feel free to jump out of the vehicle and run around. In this safari, the lions hopefully won't eat you. Yes. So the Satasvadi Valley features the intersections of three rivers. Yes, questions about speculative history are fair game. Everything is fair game tonight. Don't even worry about it. So the Indus Satasvadi Valley, named after this river that has now dried up, is really a valley and intersection of three rivers. You know, there is the Yamuna, there is the Ganga, and there is the Satasvadi river. And they all meet in this valley. And two imported cities thrived in this region, the Mohenjo Daro, city and Harapah. These are two cities. Now the Vedic India, before these cities even emerged, was a pastoral and nomadic community that first conceptualized God as various natural forces, which of course they personified, much like any early culture, any early pastoral culture, they personified these forces as gods and goddesses. They called them devas and devis. So deva literally means the shining one. You know, interesting word, the shining one. We might see today why that word is so special. So devas and devis, first were about natural forces. So there was Vaya, which was the deva responsible for the wind. There was Agni, the deva responsible for fire. There was Varuna, the mysterious Seagod. But of all these devas and devis, the most important ones were Indra and Agni. Now Indra is a lightning god. You notice many early cultures start with some kind of virile, strong man Zeus figure. You know, Baal or Marduk or Mitra. This was Indra's Zeus figure. He was a lightning god, Indra, very virile, very strong and much like Zeus, he was the king of the gods. You know, now it's important to remember that these gods, Indra, Varuna, Agni, they weren't exactly beings as much as they were offices. So dig that. These were titles given to beings. But the name Indra isn't a reference to a being as much as it's a reference to an office. This is kind of a trippy idea, but generally the belief is the Indra that we have now is very different from the being of Indra back then. The office has been vacated and other souls have been filling it. Isn't that strange? So it's almost like souls graduate to higher positions and it's kind of like we live in a hierarchy of spiritual offices and the highest offices are the Vedic gods. The second thing to remember is that the Vedic times do not feature idols of those gods. So there was no image of Indra. There was no image of Agni. There was no image of Vayu. Why would you need one? Vayu was the wind. Agni was the fire. And there were no idols. There were no stone statues. So if you go to a Hindu temple now, you'll see bronze sculptures. You'll see beautiful reliefs. And you might in your mind be seeing the figure Shiva or the figure Vishnu. Those don't show up until much later. So all the idea of Vishnu Shiva, banish it from your mind now. It don't exist in Vedic India. The only iconography we get from this time is a fire pit. Remember this is a nomadic pastoral people. So they're moving around a lot. And so the only thing they have time for is to create a little pit in the ground in which they will light a fire. And the ceremony they did around the fire is known as the Yagna. So that's the name of the ceremony. Yagna. Sometimes spelled like this. Oh, sorry, it's spelled like this. Yagna. When you see a JNN in Sanskrit, it's a Gya. Like Gyaana, or Nossus. So the Yagna ceremony was basically a group of men standing around the fire throwing clarified butter into the fire. and chanting mantras. And they would be chanting these things that sounded like spells. They would be very hypnotic and trance-like. And you can imagine many people chanting them together would create quite an effect on the practitioner. But importantly, these rituals weren't for everybody. You know, it wasn't for everybody. It was only for a specific group of people known as the Brahmins or the priests. Now, it's important also to remember that most pastoral, shamanic cultures outsourced their shaman work to a specific group of people. So it wasn't like everybody was practicing. Everybody looked to a group of people to be their intercession between them and the gods. So there was a kind of intermediary between them and these realms. So what were the shaman's doing? Well, essentially, they were placating the gods to extract what is known in the Vedic rassa. Rassa means juice. It literally means juice. And it's a reference to a few things. Rain. Rain is rassa. Minerals are rassa. Crops are rassa. Anything that helps you survive on earth is rassa. The devas and devis are the forces in nature that provides you with rassa, but they have their opposite. You know, the opposite of a deva, the opposite of a devi is an asura. An asura means a chaotic or the word demon doesn't really apply since the asuras and devas are both seen as kind of like not within a moralistic framework. You know, so devas are good. Asuras are bad. There's no moralizing here. In the same way, you don't make a moral claim about gravity. You also don't make a moral claim about helpful natural forces and harmful natural forces. Right? When you fall down the stairs, it's not like you say, "Oh my god, gravity is evil, the devil pushed me." No, no, no, no. You fell down the stairs, you recognize it was an impersonal force, and you called it gravity. You know? And then you learned how to work with gravity. Now you can do a kick flip on your skateboard and your advantage beach every day, impressing people. Okay, so you learned that there was a force and you learned how to interact with that force, but never was there any moralizing. Similarly, in the Vedic times, there also was very little moralizing. It was like, "Look, there are certain forces in nature. They are helpful to us. We'll call them devas and devis." Then there are certain forces in nature that are harmful to us. We'll call them asuras. Asuras can become devas. Devas can become asuras. That's an interesting facet too. They're sometimes also interested in the same goals, although most of the time they are posing and fighting one another. Humans are caught in between. Does this sound familiar? It's Zoroastrianism. So remember, in the Indus Valley, there is the Vedic people. Our closest cousins is actually the Avastani people who are today, what we might call, Iranians. In the word Iran comes from Aryan. The Vedic people were calling themselves Aryans. Aryans means noble one, by the way. Horribly appropriated many years later by certain individual in Germany. So I'll explain a little bit how that happened today. How is it that the swastika and the word Aryan came to be misappropriated and misused? We'll discuss that. But for now, just know that we have a brother or sister community living alongside of us, known as the Avastani's, and they have a completely different worldview for them. The Asura's were the gods and the Davies are the, you know, it's funny that these words get interchanged. Sanskrit and Avastani are very close languages. They're both Indo-European languages and they share a lot of words. You know, so in Iran, or at least at this time, early Persia, there was a philosopher. His name was Zoroastar or Zarthustra and he formulated a philosophy known as Zoroastrianism. In this philosophy, there were two beings, two primordial beings. One was Ahura Mazda. The word Ahura comes from the word Asura. Interesting. Ahura Mazda means Lord of wisdom. Ahura Mazda is the good guy, right? And his opposite is Ahriman or Angra Manu. Now Angra Manu is like the evil force, the force of darkness. Angra Manu and Ahriman, sorry, Ahrimanu and Ahriman are the same beings. Sorry, I'm just going to say Ahriman. Now Ahriman and Ahura Mazda faced each other at the dawn of time or before time actually. And they were both like sizing each other up. They were like, "Who are you? Who are you?" You know, like two children in a play pen. And first Ahura Mazda's first instinct was to make friends. He offered his hand. Ahriman saw that as a sign of weakness, slapped the hand away and said, "I will make war upon you." Ahura Mazda said, "Fine, let's go." And then they created a battlefield known as Earth and the two of them fought on that battlefield. So you can imagine this Earth plane is really just the table of arm wrestling. You can imagine Sylvester Stallone there saying, "When I turn my hat around, it's like a switch." And his arm, you know that movie? Is that reference going over your head? There's an arm wrestling movie with Sylvester Stallone. Anyway, so these two beings are arm wrestling. You can see how this dualism, this idea of good versus evil, finds its expression in Christianity many years later. The idea of God versus Satan. You know, you'll read it in the book of Inak that there are good angels like Mikael and his host. And then there are the fallen ones like Lucifer and some of these names ought not to be spoken in polite society. But if you'd like them, they're all in a book known as the lesser key of Solomon. The Goescia, I don't recommend you read that book. But there are names for these dark beings and they fight. Importantly, look what Solomon did to build his temple. Oh, thank you, Mikey. And Mikey provides a technology adversarial neural networks. They're opposing creative forces. And we can see them without any moralistic framework. Now look at what King Solomon does. He isn't like demons. You, let's not work with them. No, he recruits them to build his temple. You see, interestingly enough, the idea here. Is that there are forces and they can be worked with. That's it. So these Vedic philosophers, these early priests, were just finding ways to work with those forces. That's it. And in order to do so, they developed what we call the Vedas. So this is today the oldest literature in the world. It's four principal texts. Veda, the word "veda" means knowledge. It comes Darth Vader. Veda. We're going to talk a lot about Star Wars today because there are a lot of threads. Yoda, yoga, Mace window, Mace hint. I won't get into it. We should perhaps do a separate day, you know, just Star Wars and yoga. But for now enough, it's enough suffice to say. Vedas comes from the word V, which means to see. So Veda literally means knowledge. And knowledge literally means to see. That word V is the same as in the English word "video". Vision, the French, "vous". You know, so we share a lot of these words because of the Indo-European languages, no? And the Hellenistic culture, the Greeks are also Indo-Europeans. So when the Romans came and took over Greece, some of those words like "vision", "V" came in there in Portuguese. Yeah, so the idea is video to see. The Vedas are revelatory meaning. What ended up happening was these priests opened themselves up to something, to what we don't know. But according to myth, according to legend, they heard something. And so much like the Prophet Muhammad was revealed to by the angel Jibriil in the mountain named Thower, much like Moses met, sorry not most, Abraham met the angels, much like Jesus was the son of God from the beginning according to high Christology. But much like these beings had revelatory experiences. You know, you can imagine Moses on the mountain. They're having these experience, this revelation. Like that, the Vedas came to man. So the idea is nobody wrote the Vedas. Nobody sat down and figured it out. It was given to us. It was a revealed scripture. So the Vedas are sometimes called "shrutti". Shrutti means revealed. But you know, shrutti actually means the root of the word shrutti is the same as shravana, which means to hear. It's a heard text. So the Vedas means the scene, but we heard it. So it's very synesthesia, you know. So apparently we heard it from these beings and these beings taught us how to work with them. So if you read the Vedas, some parts of it are super alien. You know, they're like, "Oh, this is so weird." So the first book reference I'm going to give you, you're interested in reading the Vedas. I actually recommend the secret of the Vedas by Sri Aurobindo. So Aurobindo gives you a book describing the Vedas and some of the symbols of the Vedas. But of course you can get Rigveda translated by like Tanguin classics or whatever. Now there are four Vedas, the Rigveda, Yajurveda, Samaveda and Atharvaveda. So the Rig is the oldest, welcome Amanda, the Rig is the oldest Veda and the Atharvaveda is the newest. And remember, this is all during 4000 BCE India. Now importantly, the Vedas, what we have of it, are references. differences in older text. So some more liberal estimates place this culture at 7,000 BCE. Now just note that. And there's also some geological data for that too, given the river and all that. OK, so we won't get into too many historical details. Suffice to say that in the Vedas, we have a few things. One central part of the Vedas is litany. So the word litany means ritual text or liturgy. It basically is descriptions of how to perform rights and ceremonies in order to cajole the gods. So if you're interested in performing the ceremonies, it's all there in the Vedas. And today, it continues to be practiced by a branch of Hinduism known as purva mimamsa. [INAUDIBLE] Purva mimamsa. So I put that in the chat. Mimamsa means to reverentially read. Mimamsa to read with reverence. So the purva mimamsa are the oldest, most ancient, most orthodox Hindus, because they are interested above all in preserving the rituals of pastoral, nomadic, Vedic India. That was a wordy sentence. So purva mimamsa means like, oh, it's funny. Saravana is coming. After we talked about Saravana, there's someone here named that. It's a common name, you know, Saravana. OK, so purva mimamsa is ritualistic Vedas. But there's another part of the Vedas, too, which deals with philosophy, which is, how do these rituals work? This is known as the Gyanascandar, the part of the Vedas that's interested in epistemological philosophical questions. So while there was the karma part of the yoga, what do you do? There was also the how should you think about it part of the Vedas. You know, this is where things get interesting. So here's what we know about Vedic times. Their first interest was in securing material goods. You know, so at first they were curious about how do we live better in this world? Crops, how do we triumph over enemy tribes, all of that. But then their interest started to become more, let's say, mystical. They started to propose the existence of various realms. These realms were called locas, planets or swargas, heavens. There were many of these that were spoken of in the Vedas, and there were two paths you could take. One was known as the Pitriyana. Pitri means father. Ayana means path. No worries, Saravana. It's all OK. Welcome. Welcome. Now Pitriyana is the way of the fathers. Pitriy father, same as patear. You'll see it in the Latin. And how do you say in French, frer? No. Père, mon père. Yes, like that. Or father, it comes from Pitri. Ayana means way. Ramayana, Rama's way, Rama's journey. It means Odyssey. So the Odyssey of the fathers is one way you can take. Now, and I am reading the chats. It's just that I can only respond on Zoom. So the Ayana of the fathers is the way that you go when you've done meritorious deeds in life. So if you're a hero, you fought for your tribe, you defended virtue and morality, you go the way of the fathers, and you go and enjoy a kind of Elysium. So this, you'll find in Greek myths. If the Spartans die in battle, they go to Elysium. This wonderful field where they can hang out with their ancestors. So a Spartan is really excited because when he dies, what does he get to do? He's not really interested in having virgins or whatever. Really, he wants to go and get an autograph from Leonidas. You'll see in the writings of some Spartans, happily I will die in battle, because then I will meet Leonidas, the great Spartan general who led the movie 300. He took a stand at Thermo-File and defended Greece against the Persian invasion 300 men, defending slavery against the onslaught. Of liberal values and the abolition of slavery. Call it what you will, but there was a brave start. You do know the Persians allowed a lot of autonomy in its cities and they were also anti-slip. Anyway, so there's Leonidas defending against Xerxes or whatever, and the goal of the Greek hero is to go to Elysium and meet his fathers. It's a very masculine kind of thing to want. I just want that to be proud of me. You know, I just want to bat him back from dad. So that's one way. Another way is you could go to Devayana, which is the way of the gods, and that will take you to a place called Bramaloka, the realm of the gods. And this is where you can enjoy learning and all these beautiful things. So the idea is the Vedas were first about material welfare. They realized that sickness is a thing, death is a thing. Life basically sucks. I mean, you're in pastoral Pakistan, Sursa 7,000 BCE. Mortality rates pretty high. Infert mortality rates is pretty high. You know, life expectancy is pretty low. Life is rough, and it remains to be rough today. So at first they were interested in making life better, but then when they realized that this world is kind of doomed, then they realized, oh, there's actually other realms, realms in which there is no sickness, realms in which that the body doesn't continue to punish you. So let's go to these realms. Okay, so we'll leave it at that. The Vedas were interested in going to these various locusts. But then this is interesting. A group of sages emerge that started to ask even deeper questions. They asked, is there more to life than cows and cattle? Is there more to life than getting Leonardo's autograph? Is there more to life than sporting with celestial nymphs in heavenly spheres? Absorba is their called, nymphs. Because pleasure comes and pleasure goes. Doesn't matter how sublime the pleasure is, whether it's a taste of your favorite sweet, or it's the rapturous encounter with a shining being like a deva pleasure comes and pleasure goes. So why chase pleasure? Because even the most sublime pleasure will come and will go. So today we're all asking the question, is there more to life than breast implants and bank balances? Is there more to life than climbing the corporate ladder? Is there more to life than these 80 or so years if we're lucky of chasing pleasure and power? These questions were asked. And it produced what we call the Upanishadic India. The Upanishad, and this is our next stop on our tour. So we're passing by the Vedas now, by Vedas we're going to the Upanishad. There's so much more to say, but also so much more to cover. We're still in year 7,000 BCE. We literally have 9,000 more years to go. And at least that many books for me to share with you. So let's move on. We're now in the Upanishadic times, which is marked by a spiritual maturity in India. The maturity that says, hey, you know, maybe there aren't many gods. I don't know, maybe there's only one god. Just the thought, guys, you know, hear me out. And in Upanishadic India, here are a few key discoveries. The first, whatever exists out there exists in here too. That's an important discovery. Yes, there was wind, via you out in the world, but notice, there's also wind in your body, sneezing, coughing, breathing. So there are internal values too. So the same way winds have a law-like quality out there, and you can harness them for certain things. The winds in your body also have a law-like quality, and you can harness them for certain things. Isn't that interesting? So it means that your emotional quality kind of correlates to your breath. When you're feeling happy and peaceful and relaxed, the breath is deeper and slower and richer and fuller. When you're stressed and nervous and excited, the breath is shorter and quicker and shallower. So what if, if you know emotions change the breath, doesn't the opposite also apply? Like when you change your breath, you change your emotions, so they started to become interested in that. Okay, tracking the movements of winds in the body, then they realized, "Augney is like fire," right? But there's also fire in the body. The same way the fire was central to a Vedic ceremony in that it's spiritualized as stuff. So what fire does is if you put something inside, that thing becomes spirit. You take ghee, you see, it's so dense, it's like matter. And then you throw it in the fire and it becomes subtler and subtler. It becomes smell. And that smell goes up, the saver, if you will, goes up into the sky where supposedly the gods live. But it's not like the gods live in the physical sky. In Zoroastrianism, they also say, "Ingra Manu and Ahura Mazda don't live in earth." They're like kind of apart from the earth in that they're in different realms. So when you burn something, you help it go into different realms. You make it subtler and subtler so that it can penetrate into subtler and subtler realms. So in the same way, physical fire spiritualizes physical stuff. So too does your stomach fire, known as jattaragni, jattaragni means stomach, Agni means fire. Jattaragni, the same way fire digest things in the world. Jattaragni digest your food, but it also processes your emotions, your traumas. So if you had a strong digestive fire, not only would you have a good metabolism, you could eat whatever you want and you'd be chill, but you'd also be able to deal with emotions better. If you had a low jattaragni, you might feel like unmotivated or unable to digest things that happen to you. You might find yourself clinging to events and traumas unable to move beyond them. So they became interested in stoking the stomach fire. So you can see in the Upanishatic Age, people were beginning to turn their attention away from nature and towards something more subtle. The inner realm. Why did they do this? What was responsible for this shift? And the answer is India at this time had achieved very complex systems of science. You know, they already knew about atoms. They knew the world was made of atoms. They knew about nine planets and the Vedic times the sun was known to be the center of this solar system. This solar system was called Booloka and it was one among many floating in an ocean of milk. E really liked the Milky Way of today. You know, so the science was very complex. The mathematics was very complex. The logic was very complex. And as we learn in one Upanishard, someone says, I am skilled in all the astronomy. I am skilled in all the math. I understand all the arts. I can play all the musical instruments and a great sage, sage says to him. Everything that you know is butter name. Kind of an interesting line. It's saying like everything that you know isn't really worth as much as you think. So one thing these Indians discovered very early on. It might be wrong to call them Indians since now they be Pakistanis, right? One thing they discovered very early on was that everything changes. Everything they looked at in the world changes. Everything dies. So yeah, you could go to Bramaloka. Yes, you could go to Svarga. But doesn't that end too? Isn't change all pervasive? Isn't the experience of life, whether in this realm or in other realms, isn't it always going to be susceptible to change? And if that's the case, shouldn't we be interested in finding the thing that doesn't change? Isn't that more noble request? And so they started to look for the changeless thing. They looked for it all over the universe. You know, they astral projected into other universes and realms and they realized after that extensive mystical search, nothing was the changeless one. You know, so they started to look within and then they uncovered a secret, a powerful secret, a secret that back in the day, you had to climb a mountain to learn about, a secret that it would have taken you years to even control out of your guru, a secret that you can now buy for $8 or something on Amazon. You can purchase the Upanishads on Amazon and you can read them, you know. But I want to impress a point now that that was not the case back then. Back then, if you wanted to learn the secret that I'm about to share with you now, you would have to make a journey far up into the mountains to go and meet some reclusive sage who probably wouldn't even teach you this stuff until he sure they were sure that you really could learn it. They would probably Mr. Miyagi you for years. There's a Buddhist story of the famous Buddhist adept, Millerrepa and his master, Marpa. Marpa refused to teach Millerrepa anything for years. He forced Millerrepa to build a house and every time Millerrepa almost finished the house, Marpa would wreck it. And it'd be forced to build the house over and over. You know, even Marpa's wife felt bad for Millerrepa. I was like, "Teach the God damn thing. Look at this boy." He's approaching the end of his life, but Marpa refused to teach him, you know. So if you were around in 7,000 BCE, India, you would probably have to live an entire lifetime in the service of one of these masters before you learned what we're about to talk about. So, Danish asked, "Why are the Vedas considered important when they didn't deal with more subtle realities? Aren't the Upanishads most important in that sense?" I would say yes, and the reason I say that is because I'm a Vedantist. A Mimamsa practitioner. A purva Mimamsa practitioner would disagree. A purva Mimamsa practitioner, which, like I said, is the most orthodox form of Hinduism, interested in preserving the ritual culture of nomadic pastoral India? They don't think the Upanishads are that important. They think it's mere philosophy, "Bah, to hell with all your intellectual theorizing. Better to do the work." You know. But I will tell you why the Upanishads are more important than the Vedas. So the Upanishads are part of the Vedas. Don't forget that. You know, the Upanishads are part of the Vedas. Just like there's a ritualistic portion of the Vedas, there's also a philosophical portion of the Vedas. And more important than the Upanishads are the commentaries on the Upanishads that would come after. Most notably by the famous Vyasa and the even more famous Shankaracharya, two figures that you will meet today. So if all of these names sound like too much or you're feeling overwhelmed, don't worry. Just relax into it and carry away what water the palms are able to hold, even a little bit from this river shall nourish you for a lifetime. And today I will attempt to pour the whole ocean into your cup. So don't be afraid if anything spills over and certainly don't try to remember all of this. We are here to celebrate India after all. So if you feel good, that's enough. If you're just feeling happy right now, you don't even need to listen. Just sit. And look at Roxanne. She'll smile at you and you'll feel happy. And look at Caleb. You'll be happy. Okay. So the Upanishads deal with these subtler questions and there are many of them. I'm going to talk about two of them now. Just the two, like there are generally considered maybe 10 that are particularly important because 10 were commented upon by Shankaracharya. So Shankaracharya among the many Upanishads chose those 10 because he saw that those 10 were the most pertinent. So I'll tell you two. Actually three. There are three, I think they're important for discussion. The first I'll tell you about is the Katta Upanishad. You know, some of you were here for my deepest ideas in yoga lecture. For those of you that were here for that, you'll notice this lecture and that one was very much similar. Except this one will go a little deeper and be a little bit more extensive. But in that lecture, we started with the Katta Upanishad. Yes, Jeremiah. Is there a more perfect and beautiful place? Some of the Vedas suggested that there was Svargas or heavenly realms. Anyway. So in that lecture, in the deepest ideas of yoga lecture, we started with the Katta Upanishad because I think it's the one Upanishad that summarizes everything we're talking about today. Symbolically. So I'll tell you that now. The first today is our first story. Okay. So in the story of this talk, I will embed smaller stories. This is the first story. This is the story of Nachiketa and the Katta Upanishad. Now it's important. You know, we teach in stories. The same way Jesus taught in parables. The reason these traditions survived is because they are story traditions. Right now is we're talking. There is an Indian mother telling it to her child. You know, and that child knows not the symbolism of the story, but the story is interesting. So they remember it. And then when they become 20, suddenly they realize the symbolism. They realize what the story was saying. So I'll tell you the story first. Then I'll break the story down for you. So in the Katta Upanishad, it tells the story of a young boy named Nachiketa. Welcome everybody. And I will answer that question, Danish, about the Upanishads. So now I'm actually now, Danish, Danish asked me, how did the Rishi's discover the Upanishads? So remember, the Vedas are revealed scriptures. They are shrutti. They just came to us from these beings. The Upanishads are different. You know, we discovered the Upanishadic truths by studying ourselves, by going inward. And this story now will tell you how we did that. So in the Katta Upanishad, there is a young boy named Nachiketa. Casey, it's good to see you again. I've missed you, my nalstick brother. So in the Katta Upanishad, Nachiketa is a son. And his father is like little Richard. He's like a famous preacher. He's a big deal. He's like the Elvis of Vedic society. So he's like, you know, everywhere he goes, he waves his hand and people are cheering. He's like a patriarch of Vedic society. And he performs these elaborate ceremonies. So he's kind of the symbol for Purva Mimamsa, a ritualist, a traditional orthodox Vedic guy. Right? His son is pretty skeptical of that. One day, the father is about to sacrifice some scraggly cows. And the son says that, surely you can do better than these cows. I mean, if you really had reverence for these gods, why are you sacrificing something so cheap? It seems like you're more interested in the pomp and appearance than you are in the actual nature of what you're doing. Do you see this is a critique of exoteric religion? Now remember, the Vedas are like a social social project. The Vedas are entrenched in a hierarchy in which the priests preside over these elite ceremonies and the rest of the community depends on these priests for crops and good weather and etc. Nachiketa questions that. He questions this exoteric religion. So all true spirituality begins with questioning the dogmas that were forced upon you when you were born. So all true seeking begins with rejecting, begins with questioning. And you know, usually if you ask your orthodox exoteric religious leaders, about stuff in the Bible or the Quran or the Vedas or whatever they won't be able to answer you because they don't know they're just maintaining a tradition. You know the rabbi cannot tell you why these things exist and he probably won't even discuss Kabbalah with you because only Gohan can practice Kabbalah by the way. So you see most exoteric religion fails to answer your questions when you ask them. So Nachikata asked the question his father was made very uncomfortable by the question and he said fine you being so insolent what would you have me sacrifice. Nachikata said something you truly value that and Nachikata is surprised to hear his father say okay then I sacrifice you. You go you jump in the fire. Nachikata as a deutiful son says yes, Pithri I will jump in the fire. So Nachikata dutifully with typical Indian melodrama jumps into the fire and self emulates upon dying he is transported to death's house. Death is Yama his name is Yama and his name is Yama Roger means King death. So he's transported to King death's house and in the house death is not home. Yama Roger just isn't there that day. So this boy has to wait three days and three nights on the threshold of death. And when death does come home after these three days and three nights he is horrified to find his guest so poorly treated. And you know if you know anything about Indians you know hospitality is more important to us than anything. What will neighbors think is more important to us than even our familial relationships. So Yama Roger horrified by his lack of hospitality brought Nachikata into the house gave him food gave him yes there is a reason it's three days and three nights and I'll tell you why. He gave him food gave him refreshments and he said my boy I'm so sorry because you are so patient I will give you three wishes anything actually I think it's like two what do you wish. You know so there's exoteric and esoteric religion so now Nachikata is leaving behind exoteric religion. How does he leave exoteric religion first by questioning it and then by stepping into a fire so mark these symbols well questioning exoteric religion and stepping into the fire. Him stepping into the fire is the moment in which he moves from exoteric state control programs commonly called religions to the esoteric spiritual program called philosophy or esoteric practice or whatever so now in the god of death's house he's given two wishes. Watch this very carefully notice what he asked for his first request is to learn a specific ceremony a specific Vedic ceremony now one thing you need to know about the Vedas is the ceremony sometimes are days long they require intense intellectual prowess you got to be really smart to be able to do this. Honestly like you need to memorize a lot of stuff and not only that you need to know a lot of math and a lot of astronomy and you got to be able to deal with very subtle and complex and intricate things like how to place the fire on the kusha grass and all of that so he asks how to perform a ceremony the god of death teaches him and he gets it on the first try. He learns how to do the ceremony he memorizes it all this demonstrates that notchikatha had an extraordinary intellect like he was a really smart guy the god of death was impressed he was so impressed with the natchiketas intellectual prowess that he named the ceremony off the natchikatha. So he said here henceforth this ceremony will be called the natchiketa and whenever people practice it they will remember you so not you got this like cool cool whatever then the god of death says what's your second wish and he says oh I don't really thought about it but you know I want my dad to forgive me my second wish is just this please make my dad feel better so when I go back he'll accept me as a son again. Okay the first wish demonstrated notchikatha's intellectual prowess the second wish demonstrates his large openheartedness what a selfless person he could have asked for anything but he asked first a religious question how to perform a ceremony then a social question how to make his father feel better as a beautiful son as a loving son he impressed the god of death with his like compassion. So impressed so moved the god of death gave him a third wish and the third wish was and this is the clincher notchikatha says I really want anything but I am curious what is the secret of life and at this point the god of death says what notchikatha says what is the secret of life and the god of death begins to sweat bullets this is something he's not sure he should reveal to mortals you know it will threaten the very fabric of society for a person to know this. So what does the god of death do he tempts notchikatha to choose something else he says oh that's good my boy but I have I have a menu here there are other things you can wish for don't you want more don't you want to like have sons that will have sons that will bear your name into eternity notchikatha says nah and then he goes don't you want celestial dancing girls that can pleasure you for all eternity whose beauty is exquisite and ever new he goes nah. Like don't you want power over all three worlds the earth plane astral and heavenly plane you would be the king of all three realms buvara loka svarga loka he goes nah and the god of death says why ever not why wouldn't you want all of these things notchikatha's response mark this well is beautiful he says all these things that you offer to me Yamaraj are good. Notice he doesn't moralize or reject the he doesn't reject pleasure is bad in Hinduism we see comma as a very legitimate thing to want comma means sexual self expression or the desire for pleasure that's perfectly fine you should desire pleasure and deliver meaningful life you should experience pleasure you know the more you do the more good good works you do you will gain something known as punya or merit what the Islamic philosophers call pahala which basically means brownie points with god and the more punya or merit you acquire the more pleasure will come your way the more beautiful your lovers the more exquisite your delights you'll be born in a kingdom with good musicians so notchikatha doesn't say pleasure is bad nor does Hinduism reject or repressed repressed pleasure he says it's good next artha material accomplishment or power he says this is good to it's good to want wealth it's good to establish yourself on earth and in other planes you know power is good you should pursue it you should have it it's good. It's good then he says while these things are good Yamaraj ultimately they wear out the senses so this is important he's making a point here that the Buddha would make later on it the monitium Sarva monitium changing changing all is changing impermanent impermanent all is impermanent while power and pleasure are good ultimately they won't always be good. I'm going to tire of these pleasures and watch this in your own life what pleasure you yesterday does not pleasure you today the more you chase your pleasures the more elusive your satisfaction becomes the more you drink from your salty ocean to satisfy your thirst the thirstier you become you know how transient is pleasure even the most exquisite orgasm comes and goes away leaves you horneer than ever before the most exquisite chocolate cake diminishes in pleasure with every bite you can try this you know the next time you're hungry go and get your favorite pizza and notice how every slice is a little less good than the slice that came before anybody who's tried heroin knows this acutely they call it chasing the dragon no high will ever be as good as your first high Nachikata realize this and he's like dude pleasure is great powers great but the intoxication of pleasure and power won't do it for me forever I want something unchanging so see this is the you punish rite question what is unchanging and the god of death teaches it okay so the Danish asked the question how did we discover these truths Danish sorry chandra means moon so I love that Danish chandra is here Danish of the moon now how did we discover these truths oh everyone on tiktok just fell into the abyss now how did we discover these truths the story of Nachikata tells you yes son and the moon which I love the story of Nachikata is a metaphor it's a metaphor for how to learn the king of death secret so first of all step one is to question everything you're told reject everything that has been forced upon you as dogma do not accept anything unless it's true for you question your religious leaders deny them and reject them when they cannot provide you the answers that make your life meaningfully better secondly you must step into the fire what is the fire spiritual practice austerity what we call an hour called tapasya. Tapas literally means heat or glowing. So here's the next book I'm going to give you. It's by George Fustin or Gorg Fustin. I'm not sure he's German and he's a brilliant scholar. He's an Indic philosopher who does a lot of really good work explaining yoga to a Western audience in a very authentic way. So I recommend George Fuhr, let me spell it right, Fuhr Steens book The Deeper Dimensions of Yoga. The deeper dimensions of yoga, it's a book about yoga and about the various schools of thought in yoga. And in this book, George Fustin says "Etymologically, he's also an etymologist. He's very good at finding roots of words." He says "yoga, the word yoga as a spiritual practice, a word connoting a practice was at first the word tapas." So the word yoga and tapas get used interchangeably like you can see in the Chandogyao PaneShot, one of the many Upanishads. So tapas means heating or glowing and really means austerity or spiritual practice. So here's the thing gang, spiritual practice is hard. You know fasting is hard. Standing on your head is hard. Meditating is all this sorry. Remove the word meditating. I didn't say meditating. Forget I said that. Practicing asana, practicing proper diet in the Buddhist system, samyak vaj, right speech, telling no lies, you know practicing non-vas, all this is hard to do. So it is like stepping in the fire but it will purify you. So what happens? When not you get the steps into the fire, he gets purified and purified for what? For meditation. So he goes to the God of death's house but the God of death isn't whole. This is clearly a metaphor for meditation, no? So think about what is meditation really? If not, simulating death. What do you know about dead bodies? They don't move. What do you know about meditation? You don't move. You don't breathe. What do you know about yogic meditation? You try not to breathe. Thirdly, what do you know about dead bodies? They generally don't express themselves, implying a lack of mental activity. They're not very chatty. These corpses. Unless you're in Victorian England and you're out of sayons and your grandmother is just, you know, okay but generally speaking corpses aren't very chatty, right? So your mind should be quiet too. That's meditation. Now meditation according to archaeological evidence was known to the early Indians at least since 4000 BCE India. We have something known as the Pasupati Seal. This is a lovely Google but it's called the Pasupati. Pasupati. So actually Pasu means beast. Pati means like the Lord or father of wild beast. And you know whose name that is? The Lord of wild beast. That's Shiva. It's one of Shiva's names. The Lord of wild animals. So the Pasupati Seal is an image of what they call the Proto-Shiva, a very early form of Shiva. And he's kind of like seated in a cross-legged position and he's got like his crescent moon which looks like horns, a raging erection which we will talk about in a little bit. Why the erection was there. And the Pasupati Seal showed a man meditating. So that's important. Meditation was already known to the Indians as early as 4000 BCE. But in the Nachikatha story you're seeing what meditation is. It's the question what is death and the following scientific experiment to figure that out. So if you wanted to do science, what do you do? You replicate the conditions and test the variables. You know, so if you wanted to test death, the best way to do it is just replicate the variables. So the person sits still, they quiet their breath and they quiet their mind. But notice this. If I ask you to stop thinking right now, I try it. Stop breathing. Stop moving. Stop thinking. It's damn hard. You know, you immediately start to think a thought. You immediately fidget. You're uncomfortable in your chair. The breath is wild and erratic. And you couldn't. No, not quite done it. The secret of life is not meditation. Meditation is the means. So let's work with the story bit by bit. And it's sequential. Remember, we're outlining the journey now. First you reject all authority and truths that aren't your own truths. Then you step into the fire of purification which prepares you for meditation. Then you meditate. If you're successfully able to meditate, then you will meet the God of death. And then when you meet the God of death, you will be tested. Much like Jesus was tested in the desert. Satan was like, "Don't you want to be super powerful, bro? Don't you want to turn rock to bread?" My previous incarnation was as a musician. And I used to make a joke like, "That's what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to turn my rock into bread so I can pay rent." If the devil came up to me like, "Nish, do you want to turn rock into bread?" I am Robert Johnsoning that faster than you can say the blues. So, you know, Jesus was offered this stuff. He was offered temptations much like the God of death offered the yogi temptations. So, here's what will happen. If you manage to strike out on your own, if you manage to practice severe austerities that can tune you for meditative experience, you will get power. They're called cities or perfections or accomplishments. When you get these powers, they will tempt you to re-engage with the world. Now you can go and satisfy the pleasures that you might have been leaving behind. So, you will be tempted. You will acquire power. You will have energy. You have more energy than you know what to do with. You know, you will never get tired. You won't need to sleep. You can memorize entire books. And you know what? That will make you a really good dinner party guest. You might even start to look like a guru to others. And then you're really in danger, right? Then you're like, "Ah, I'm the leader of man. I'm the I'm the I'm the shit." You know? So, when these powers start coming, their temptations away from the path. If you manage to stay the course, if you manage to continue focusing on your quest for the secret of life, it will ultimately be revealed to you. So, I'm going to give it to you now. It's not a secret because it's there. It's a secret because it might mean nothing to you. After I tell you this, you might just not get it. And you know, the reason you won't get it. Hopefully, hopefully you won't get it. Actually, in fact, I'm kind of banking on the fact that you won't get it. If you think you do get it and you still feel desire and fear, something's wrong. You don't quite get it yet. What I'm about to tell you is the secret of life. But as the Buddha pointed out, destiny, I won't answer that question because this is the drunken monkey niche, the body, the mind, the personality of niche, all just illusory appearances. Don't ask if niche gets it. Niche certainly doesn't. You know, niche is a fool. He has nothing to offer you. But if you get it, you'll be free from desire, free from fear and you will have your cities, but they will not impress you. Now, the Buddha was so careful to say that this isn't a concept. If you only get it on the level of a concept, if you only know it in the mind, it's useless. It won't actually help you in life. The Upanishads are a little bit kinder. They say actually even knowing it in the mind is sort of good. It's a blessing to know it. It's a blessing to talk about it. But the true blessing is to live it. So in the Buddha's case, someone we will meet in about 30 minutes. Don't worry. We will fast forward. I know we're still kind of like in 7,000 BCE India, but these are important foundations to lay. And then we can go through the Buddha and Janism quite quickly, actually. Thanks to these foundations. So, Dhanesh says growing in an Indian household with all these stories, I never looked deeply into a metaphor. Yes, I will give you readings, Dhanesh. Don't worry. Many readings will come today. So far, you have two, right? You have the Secret of the Vedas by Aurobindo, Rigveda by Penguin Classics, Upanishads by Penguin Classics. If you're interested in reading the Upanishads, I recommend Swami Nikke Lannanda and His translations. They're great. Swami Nikke Lannanda is from the Ramakrishna Mission. His translations are beautiful. And so the Buddha was saying, thank you Rahul, Buddha was, Buddha was saying, I should have had my black side with the t-shirt today, Buddha was saying, these are concepts and they don't help you. You know, they might help you sleep better tonight. You might feel happy that you learn them, but you wake up tomorrow the same person with the same problems. So the Buddha didn't want to define it. He just called it Nirvana, which means the end, the blowing out, actually cessation, cessation of mind, body, personality. And he's like, you figure it out for yourself. The Buddha's last words, you know, on his deathbed, he said, be your own Guru, God damn it. His words will literally be a lamp unto thyself. Figure it out. Reason it out for yourself. Practice on your own. So there's no reason I should tell you this, the secret. In fact, I should just teach you how to jump in the fire. I should teach you austerity. And then when you practice those that austerity, after three years I will teach you meditation. And then through meditation, we practice and you will discover it for yourself. So me telling you this now is superfluous, you know. And most of all, you ought to not take anybody's word for it. But I'll tell you anyway, the Upanishads tell you anyway, it's no secret. And here it is. You're going to be rather disappointed when you hear this maybe. I built it up quite a bit. So get ready on your drums, go on the snare, what about to do, but I'm shh. You know, and here it is. The secret is, ah, here it comes. Bam. Atman equals Brahman. That's really it. That's the secret. Atman means self. It don't think it's a fancy word by the way. Don't think Atman is like some like, oh, soul, like soul is somewhere inside you. I've never contacted my soul. No, don't worry about it. Atman just means yourself. Your central individuality. Your feeling of being a person. Now, what that self is, turns out to be very different from what you thought it was. So you might have thought, me is my personality. You know, you might have thought, oh, it's my body. It's my mind. Soon, I'll give you another reponachal to show you why it's not. So the Atman means yourself. It's deeper than mine, deeper than body, deeper than personality. You'll see why in a bit. Now, Atman is yourself. What is Brahman? Brahman is a word that gets used or, ah, yes, Amanda. Yes. Atman awareness. You can kind of think of it as the same thing. So that's a difficult word actually because we have two kinds of senses in which we say awareness. We mean chit, pure consciousness. And we also mean, ah, ah, reflected consciousness or chit dabaasya. So when we say awareness, it's technical. So we have to be careful there now. But yeah, Atman basically means self. For now, let's just call itself capital S. What is Brahman? So Brahman is a word that gets used all over the uponishat and it's the word. It's like the secret word and, ah, it's the same as the word dao, the dao. You know, in the dao daching, we will talk about that. That will appear later. But the first line in the dao daching, you know what it is? Laozi says the first line is the dao that can be spoken of is not the dao. So the idea is it's something you can't really define. It's the one thing that can never be made an object. What is the word literally mean? Brahman is not a God. It's not Brahma by the way. It's distinct from the God Brahma. So if you have this idea in your mind of a God named Brahma, Brahman is not that. Brahman means the vast one. The Sanskrit root, bri means to grow. So Brahman is just the expansive one, the vast one, the spacious one, if you will. Now Brahman is considered the ultimate, the absolute God beyond all gods. The one God, the father, Yeheshua, Yadhe Vavhe, whatever you want to call it, this is God, capital G, right? So this is the ultimate cause of the universe. Everybody can think of this. Everybody has in their heart some notion of God. No, destiny, please take notes. There's no one way to enjoy this. But it's spelled Brahman from the Sanskrit root bri, meaning to grow. Brahman literally means vastness, the vast one. Shiva means the same thing as we will soon discover in the Tantra part of today's talk. And also please be reminded. You can leave at any time, okay? Don't let me hold you hostage here. I'm going to be lecturing for a bit because I hope to be raising some money for India tonight. And I'm going to give it my all. And I will run myself ragged, pouring this ocean into your cup as much as I can before my voice gives out. And I die here. And I intend to, I intend to self-imulate. And leave. This will be my Mahasamadi. No, I'm kidding. I'm kidding. I'm really kidding. I wish. So please don't let me hold you hostage. If you need to pop out, pop out. If you want to come back later, I'll likely still be going at least till midnight, at least. So at least for another three and a half hours, I'll be here and feel free to drop out, drop in, okay? So brijad, bri, oh yes, Mia. So if you're interested, so remember tonight is really about celebrating the spiritual heritage of India. Also, my best friend in the whole world and roommate Madeline Chan just arrived. Madeline quit law school. Harvard has nothing to teach you. All right, leave. Leave Harvard right now. Don't be a miserable corporate lawyer. I'm not leaving my firm just set me free succulent. So I can't leave. But I'm here before your lecture and India. Sucklands, secret of life. Hmm. Okay. So Mia, great question. So I will for the next three and a half hours continue. I'll take you through tantra, through yoga, through Buddhism, Janism, through modern yoga, Krishna Macharya, all of that. Yes, it's true Mia. Madeline is my lawyer. I'm making fun of her. But I do depend on Madeline when I inevitably the IRS comes for me. Thanks, Mia. So yes, please feel free. Don't let me hold you hostage if you need to leave. Leave. If you need to come back, I'll be here. Same link. And if you feel at any point tonight, contributing to India, first and foremost, I invite you to just do it in your heart with your thoughts. You know, so vibrations are a big thing for our culture. Like we said with the Tibetans chanting, all money, Padmehom, the send vibration. So just send that out. You know, think of the groups who might need it. That's good enough. Then if you feel like donating monetarily, you can of course send a Venmo to yoga world heart. Or you can give to give India.org. Or a feeding India. That's another one that I like. Yoga gives back, although I think give India.org is doing some really excellent direct work with respirators right now, as well as feeding India. So you might look at those two. Or if you don't know where to send it, just send it to yoga world heart and we'll distribute. Because day by day, it changes, you know, and we kind of like adjudicate between the various things. Unfortunately, I don't think there's a cash app. But we'll figure it out, Christina. Whatever you can do, do, you know. And yes, we will chant actually in a little bit and add to it. Yes, it would matter. Everything matters destiny. As we said, we're all in meshed in one quantum web of vibration. How we feel has far reaching effects for how everyone else feels everywhere else. So here's the central secret, right? Natchiketa denies exoteric religion. Step one, turn away from all that you have been told. Remember how Yoda says to Luke Skywalker in episode five, you must unlearn all that you have learned. So the first step is to realize that dogma belief isn't truth and to have the courage to set out on your own quest for truth. That's the hero's journey, right? You must leave home to a degree. So step one in Natchiketa's story, deny everything. You know, seek for yourself. Step two, purify yourself either through ethical codes or through some set of esoteric austerity practices. I will be giving you several today. It's called yoga and I'll be giving you a lot of yoga today. Things you can practice on your own. So do that. After you practice, after, after you do someone just said, I just unlearned what you said, yes, good. I hope that you will. Because these are all concepts. Remember, they are not, you know, let me do an asside. Once there is a text, it's called Punchadeci. Vidyaranya is a famous non-dualist and non-dualist love to debate. Like I said, debate is central to Indian philosophy. When Malin and I were in college, we had a very robust debating career. Social enjoy this reference. So debate is central to Indian philosophy. And when we make statements, we expect to be challenged because it's those challenges that help us develop our philosophy. So Vidyaranya, this great saint, is asked a question. If you're saying the mind, body and personality are unreal, then all the knowledge that the mind, body and personality has is also unreal and even the liberation of that individual is unreal. You see the, the, the rebuttal is against all of this knowledge, against the idea of enlightenment itself. You know what Vidyaranya says? Who can deny this? You're right. So the idea is all of these concepts are like taking a thorn, Ramakrishna said, when you are poked by the thorn of ignorance, you must take the splinter of knowledge and get rid of the splinter of ignorance. What do you do with the splinter of knowledge having taken out the splinter of ignorance? Do you put it on a pedestal and pray to it every day? No, it's done its job. You throw that away too. So when these concepts have freed you from all concepts, I hope to God you will discard them. So yes, first you reject all exoteric forms of religion. You step into the fires of purification. Then you practice meditation and Caleb asked why three days and three nights. It's an interesting question and hopefully the man du kiao panashad will show you Caleb. But you might think three times three is nine and there are nine states of consciousness. Broadly speaking, there's waking, dreaming and deep sleep. But then there's waking and waking, which hopefully some of you are in now, very alert and excited. You're awake while you're awake. There's day dreaming, which is dreaming. There's coffee, Amanda's got it. Cheers, here's my tea. There's dreaming and waking, which is kind of like day dreaming and there's deep sleep and waking, which is like being in a trance state or blanking out. So you can see, in waking, there are three states. In dreaming, there are three states. There's dreaming and dreaming, which most of us feel. But then there's also waking and dreaming, which some of you know is lucid dreaming and there's deep sleep and dreaming when you don't remember any of your dreams. So in dreaming, there are three states. And then in deep sleep, there are three states too. I don't even want to get into this because it's pretty mysterious and it will mean nothing to you having not had the experience. But basically every one of these states has three other states. So three by three makes nine. Maybe that's the reference. He spent three days and three nights in God of Death's house, meaning he meditated having mastered all nine flavors of conscious experience. At that point, he got powers. Of course you would, right? If you know how to lose a dream, if you know how to be awake while awake, you would be incredibly effective if nothing else, your productivity will shoot through the roof. A lot of Silicon Valley dudes come to yoga, come to Buddhism because they're really learning how to code better. And that's all right. Anyway, so you will be tempted by the God of Death with various powers. Sit these. Suddenly all the things you wanted in your life, you're now able to achieve. So will you just go and get them? Yeah, Nine Grahaz, Nine Planets, there's a lot of Nine in there. Nine Realms in North mythology, nine is the end of the number series. So it might mean an anyogram, Mikey talks about the any ads. Yeah, thank you. Thank you for crowdsourcing that. Yes, so Caleb, our community has come together to answer the question, why three days and three nights? Yes. So then he gets the secret. And the secret is just this. Atman equals Brahman, meaning the one God that you consider to be the ultimate cause of all things is no other than your very own self. Does that mean you the ego? God no. As you'll soon see, it's you in a different sense of the word you. And now we're going to turn to another two eponashod to show you what I mean. So that first eponashod, the Kutta eponashod, describes to you in a skeleton overview what we're going to be talking about for the rest of these nights. So you can use this as a kind of blueprint, everything that we speak about, we can plug into this model, you know. And I when I tell you something, I'll call it a fire. I will call it a meditation or I will call it an insight. These are the three things. The fire is purification. Meditation is the practice. Insight is what you get when you meditate, you know. Okay, so we're going to leave the Kutta eponashod behind. Now we're going to go to the next eponashod, the the Taitria eponashod. So what is the goal of understanding this? That you are God. Well, the repercussions are quite severe. Not severe, but beautiful. Most of us live in a state of restlessness. That is, we want things in the world. We desire things. And because we desire things, we feel restless. We chase after those things. Oh, the insight? Oh, yes, insight, meditation and fire or insight, meditation and austerity. austerity prepares you for meditation and meditation prepares you from insight for insight. What's important is insight. So if you can have meditation without austerity, awesome. By all means, do that. Very few of us can. And if you can have insight without meditation, by all means, that's what matters. Nobody cares if you meditate. Nobody cares if you practice yoga. Those are all just means to an end. The end of course, being the realization, according to the Kattava eponashod, the realization that you and God are the one and the same being. So what name do we give this? We give it sat, chit, ananda. And this is an interesting name. Sat means it's existence. It's not, it doesn't exist, by the way. It's existence itself. It's the one thing through which other things exist. So it's incorrect in our philosophy, in our language even, to say a table exists. No, the better statement is existence is the tabling. Do you see? There's a different difference. You know, a table exists or existence is tabling. So this is existence itself out of which everything else depends on for their existence. So think about your definition of God, right? God in most cultures is the primal cause. The headhandshow, the one thing without which nothing else could be. God is the creator. So God is existence itself. So that's the first definition, existence. Next is consciousness. Okay, the West would not understand this until, no, the Brahman is not the Holy Ghost. Now I'll tell you why in a little bit. Oh, wow. When we get into the Christian, Trinity, Nostics, comparison, first of all, KC will be excited. But second of all, it gets really interesting and very technical. So for now, uh, Denish, Brahman is not the Holy Ghost, not at all. And I'll tell you why Brahman is the father. Let's just say Brahman is the father. Yes, not the Holy Ghost. The Trinity is important. By the way, father, son, Holy Ghost, three and one. It's very important that we maintain the distinctions between all three because that will show us its unity. Okay. So the next thing, sat means existence itself. Consciousness means, uh, chid means conscious, oh, sorry, I just texted you, Denish my bad. I meant to text that to everyone. Consciousness, chid means consciousness itself. Hello, Heather's teacher. Heather's living Buddha. Yeah, welcome, welcome. So chid means consciousness itself. Look at what this philosophy has done. It said that God is consciousness. You know, God isn't a being in the sky. God isn't a thing. God is consciousness itself, awareness itself. And then the last one, this one might be most interesting to you. This one might, um, might excite you. Ah, Nanda. Ah, Nanda means bliss. And I don't mean like a flavor of it, of bliss. I don't mean like an emotion. You know, you think there are different kinds of emotions like joy, pleasure, excitement, different kinds of pleasurable emotions, right? The same way that all existence depends on this sat and all conscious experience depends on this chid. So too does all bliss, all feelings of joy depend on this primordial feeling of joy. Do you see? This is an important point. This is joy itself, goodness itself. It's not what is good. It's that by which goodness can be experienced. Shankaracharya, one great teacher who you'll meet today, says this, every pleasurable, exciting, worthy feeling you can have is but a spray from the ocean of Ananda. And for this spray, man, live and die. You know, so for just one spray from this ocean, you live your whole life in restlessness. If only you knew the ocean. And there's another quote, ah, look, they sit by the river. No, the quote is they are dying of thirst. And yet look, they sit by the river. So the idea is if you can taste this, you are ever happy. You know, and I don't even want to say you are ever happy because not that your house could burn down. Your most beloved one could die. And you would still feel grief because grief is a part of being in the body and being in the mind. But you won't experience it as suffering. I'm sure you've heard right? Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional. It's kind of a Buddhist statement. But if you feel this Ananda, I promise you, your most horrible experiences torture, grief, loss will no longer be felt as suffering. It will be felt as meaning. You know, yes. So all these emotions, no, destiny, there is nothing outside of bliss. That's why I need to stress this point. There is nothing outside of existence. Existence itself is the the base out of which everything exists. There is nothing outside of consciousness. Consciousness itself gives you every other form of consciousness. There is nothing outside of bliss. So yes, good, destiny. Be very careful. Do not call bliss one emotion in a spectrum of emotions. No, it's not that. It's not a flavor of happiness. It's not a kind of joy. Because if you think this right, if you think that this is a kind of thing, you will chase it and it will be threatened by everything that is not it. So you'll be like, Oh, I'm blissful. What happens when sorrow comes? Then you'll say, Oh, sorrow is opposite. I'm not blissful anymore. No. If this happens, you have confused Ananda with some other mundane feeling of happiness. You know, happiness will always be opposed by sorrow. Where happiness is sorrow cannot be and where sorrow is happiness cannot be. And Natalia says, Unplashable Events. Yes. Yes. Hell yes. A million times. Yes. If only and some of you can feel it now. Do you sense it? Do you glimpse this? It does not depend on anything that's happening to you. Your house could burn down. I cannot stress this enough and you could watch everything you love in this world come to dust and it will not touch your Ananda. I promise you because Ananda is not a type of emotion to be threatened by contrary emotions. It is an all-encompassing intensity that feels so legit, so awesome that it is self-sufficient. So what we call Ananda is the uncaused one, unconditioned one. It's not dependent on anything and it cannot be removed by anything. This is all very important. So why do you want to know Atman equals Brahman because if you knew that, if you but knew yourself to be the all, God will be all your restless craving. Nothing can complete you since everything is in you. God will be all your fear. Nothing can threaten you since everything is in you. So think of this. You only desire something if you consider it to be apart from you and therefore you need to bring it towards you. You only fear something when you consider it to be apart from you and therefore you need to run from it. A desire and aversion define your restless experience of this body and this mind. But if you know yourself to be the one in which all things exist, never will you desire, never will you fear and you will just rest. That's the secret. Not Rhonda Brian's Law of Attraction. Okay, there's some value to that but this is the secret. Yes. Okay, so let's elaborate a little bit. The next Upanishad and don't worry if you're not getting it yet, good, good. That's what meditation is for. That's what austerity is for. Once you get it though, that's all you need. You're done. And the practice of meditation austerity is just to remember this truth because, okay, also note this, right? It's not that you become God. It's not Atman becomes Brahman. No, no, no. Atman equals Brahman, self equals God, meaning you always were God. You always will be God and you are now God. The only thing separating you from this insight is attachment to the body and mind. You know, so yoga is not about becoming better. It's not even about healing. You know, it's about realizing that you are not the body that needs to be healed. You're not the mind that needs to grow. The one in which the mind and body are vibrating. Yes. Actually, there's a nice conversation we had about free will. It's a separate lecture. I refer you to that. It's a very in-depth. We spend two hours on the question of free will. We won't cover it here. It's too technical and I want to continue to move on. So let's look at the next Upanishad, the Taitriya Upanishad. So the Taitriya Upanishad is a story of a boy and his father. His father is a sage and the boy wants to learn about Atman or Brahman or God. So the boy says, how do I find it? And the father says, study the body. You know, Annamaya Akusha, the body. And he studies it and he realizes the body is changing. So notice this, your body is changing. Is it not? Every moment the body is changing. Even from the standpoint of materialist science, the body is changing. The body you're in now is not the body you are in when you are for and certainly won't be the body that you have when you're 85. Some of you are yogis. I always make the joke that you will stay looking like Ryan for a while. You know, you're doing your headstands. Your circulation is great. You won't see wrinkles for a bit. A lot of you are hotay yogis. But eventually you will. I'm sorry. Eventually you might see a little gray hair. Even if you're like a everyday ashtanga yoga practitioner. So the body changes. How can the body be the unchanging thing? It changes. No. Then he came back to the father and he said, I don't think the body is God. Or he says something like, I found God. But it must be beyond the body. And then he says, yes, yes. Now go and study it in the energy. So then the boy goes a little deeper. From the body, he starts studying the atheric body or the subtle body. Notice the pranomaya Akusha. Your energy body. This is your mood. Your. It's not so much thoughts. I don't even want to say emotions. They are like energetic state. Sometimes you feel alert and excited. Sometimes you feel kind of dull and dissipated. During the course of this conversation, some ideas will excite you. Your prana will increase. Some ideas will be like so convoluted and confusing. You'll be, what is this strange drunken monkey talking about? And you'll think about like tomorrow and you'll kind of get a little tired. But notice through the course of tonight, no matter how long you're staying, you will fluctuate in your energy. So how can that be the unchanging thing? Now go deeper. The father says, go deeper. Deeper than your mood, there is your mind. The monomayo Akusha, the realm of thoughts and emotions. If you thought the body changed, if you thought your energy levels changed, look at the mind. It changes even more. You know, the Katy Perry song, she goes, you changed your clothes like a girl, you changed your mind like a girl changes clothes. She makes that rather sexist statement in the song because you're hot and you're cold, you're yes and you're no. That's the mind, right? It just flits between those two poles. You're in and you're out, you're up and you're down, you're wrong when it's right, you're black when it's white, we fight, we break up, we kiss, we make up. Actually, Katy Perry can do the rest of this lecture for me because she encapsulated the Buddha's first teaching perfectly. Yes, the mind is polarity, it's dualistic, you're just going between these thoughts. So how can the mind be the unchanging thing? You tell me, it changes, no? You go a little deeper, the intellect. This is technical but the intellect is in yoga or in this South Asian philosophical tradition. The thing which by Nishper, Joe Perry, one of my favorite guitar players from Erasmith, so cool on stage, just leaning back with his, Gibson Les Paul. Anyway, sorry, I was thinking of Joe Perry, a bit of a man crush on that. No, the mind is changing, so how can you be the mind? Now you go to the intellect. So in South Asian philosophy, the intellect is your ability to make sense of the data that your mind receives from the sense organ. So this is yogic anatomy. You don't perceive the world with your sense organs, you perceive it with your intellect or with your mind. So what happens is something in the world outside comes to your eyes, but your eyes don't see. Don't make the mistake, your eyes are not responsible for seeing, your eyes are one part in a change of causality. So the eyes must transmit the data to the retina. If you didn't have the retina, it doesn't matter, you can have 10,000 eyes, you won't see a thing. So the retina is the actual organ of perception. This is called an indire, organ of perception. That carries data to the mind. And the buddhi or the intellect is what assigns a label and a meaning to that perception. So even that changes. And if you go a little deeper, even I don't really want to get into it, but the ananda mayokoshra, the bliss body or the causal body, even that changes. So essentially what the father is teaching the son is, God is the one thing that doesn't change. Therefore, it cannot be the body nor can it be the energy. And by the way, a Danish energy is Holy Ghost, right? Nor can it be energy capital E. So prana as a as a feel that's the Holy Ghost or the word of God, the vibration if you will. So that cannot be God. So if the body isn't God, if the energy isn't God, if the mind isn't God, if the intellect isn't God, what is God? So now you know something, God isn't a being out there. It's not a body. You can't go and meet God and give him a high five. He's not a body. She's not a body. It's not a body. Nor is it even an energy. Some people are like, God is energy. No, no, no. The upanashodic term for God is that which doesn't change, that which is eternal, but the body's not eternal. The energy is not eternal. So how can God be energy? Energy is always changing and it's not the unchanging thing. God is not not even a thought. It's not even a concept or a philosophical idea in the mind or the intellect since those things change. God is not even pure emptiness because that fluctuates. And the Buddhist might have a problem with that. We'll get into it when we start talking the Buddha. So what is God? God is you. You in the sense of your awareness. Here's the most important thing about this teaching. The only way you can perceive change. So follow this closely. In fact, this argument alone is enough to give you an insight. So it's worth following carefully. And if you don't get it, if this argument doesn't make sense, meditation. If meditation is hard for you or sterility. If austerity is hard for you, stop buying into so many beliefs. You see, so the method is there. It's there for you. So notice this. Follow this closely. In order to experience change, you must be apart from that change to perceive it. In other words, you don't notice that the world is moving, right? Because you're in it. But if you went out of the earth, you would see it moving. In other words, if you were a particle of water in a river, you wouldn't know you were moving. If you were on a train in uniform motion, according to Mr. Newton, the laws of physics work the same on the train as it does on the platform. So which is moving now? You tell me the platform or the train? From the point of view of Newtonian mechanics, it doesn't matter. This is the basis of relativity. You could just as well say the platform is moving and the train is stationary. As you can say, the train is moving and the platform is stationary. So why is it that you say the train is moving? Because you're on the platform. On the platform, apart from the change, you say the train is moving. Why do you say the river is flowing? Because you're on the bank. From the bank of the river, the flow of the river makes sense. So the only way to perceive change is to be not that change. This is important. So if your body is changing and if you notice your body is changing, you are not the body. Alligant, alligant philosophy. So why are you worried if the body dies? Why are you scared? Why are you scared of torture and pain? Why are you scared of sickness? You are not the body. What does it have to do with you? Of course, it's hard to appreciate this point. You can be like, yes, Nish, I'm not the body, I'm not the body. But someone pitches you and then you're reminded very much that you are the body. So it's more than a concept, of course, but yeah, so you can't be the body, the body changes. Are you energy? God, no, energy changes. The fact that you notice energy, yes, Caleb, thank you. Dennis, you're confusing. Oh, Dennis, if you could, message the audience as opposed to directly messaging me that would be helpful. So just use the chat, say everyone, because your questions are very good and you know our philosophy depends on questions. So the more questions you ask, the better for our chat. You know, because these are questions everybody asks. And yes, Destiny, exactly. These are concepts that should turn into experiences. These stories should be understood. So you're not, so you're not the body, right? You're not even in the body because you're not the body. You're just apart from the body. In order to notice the body changing, you are not the body. This is so important. Grog this. In order to notice change, you must be apart from the change. Since your body is changing and since you notice it, you are not the body. Now, Dennis, you're going to see why you're conflating awareness with the mind in a little bit. When I explain the next function awareness does not change, you're going to see why. Follow this. So the body change, not the body. God is not energy because energy changes. God is not the mind because the mind changes. You know, so what doesn't change? Anything that you can be aware of changes. So the objects of awareness change. The thing that doesn't change is the fact that you are aware. Dig that. And this is so elusive because you're going to be like, I don't get it. Good because this is not an object. You cannot define what it is I'm talking about. You can only show what it's not. So it's not the body. It's not the mind. It's not the energy nor is it any ideas in the mind like blue boy in the banks of the Yamuna Shiva in Kailash. No, it's not that. It's it's not any philosophy. It's not even what I'm saying now. It's the fact that you are able to be aware of my saying it. It's eerie and Danish. It's not your mind. And I'm going to show you why. So let's go to the next Upanishad. So this is the last of our Upanishadic tour. Okay. And then we're just going to go onwards because now we have everything we need for the rest of our our our our our history. It all gets founded upon this these stones if you will. So what is awareness? Now this is a central mistake in this teaching. Conflating awareness with the waking mind consciousness. Be very careful. When I say you are God, it's so dangerous if you're like, oh yeah, Nish is God. No. I am aware of Nish. Am I not? Nish is a construct. It's a conglomerate of thoughts that my parents gave me that some of you give me. But importantly, Nish as a personality is in my awareness as an object. And I notice Nish changes. And Nish has been changing a lot. I've noticed this drunken monkey. Can't decide what he wants to do. One moment is playing guitar. Another moment is teaching philosophy. Why don't earth is this drunken monkey doing nobody knows. But because I know that Nish is changing, I know I'm not Nish. That's what we're talking about. That awareness is of the quality. Shit. Chidabasha is the quality reflected in your mind. So here's something very important. Ah, Dennis, yes, we have a lot of work to do. These are all great questions. Yes, Douglas, we will talk about the realizations. Don't worry. So, Dennis is asking really great questions. And Dennis is asking, doesn't the body produce awareness since the body produces the brain and the brain produces the mind? Not so. This is called materialism in the school of materialism. Welcome, welcome. In the school of materialism, the body comes first, matter comes first, then the mind comes as a result of the brain. So awareness emerges from the body. This is materialism. And we did an entire like hour and a half lecture two weeks ago or three weeks ago as to why this idea is below me. It doesn't work. And the key is the hard problem of matter and the hard problem of consciousness. Okay, welcome. So I'm not going to discuss that. You know, whether the brain comes from the body and whether the mind comes from the body, I won't discuss that. What I do want to discuss though, very importantly is this argument. So follow it. Just don't worry about like concepts you've heard in the past. Some scientists somewhere on TV told you the body created the brain and the brain created awareness. Why take that on faith? Stop taking things on faith. And iPhone, you know, Swami Vivekananda used to say, God and truth are my only politics. So I'm going to stand by that. I'm going to give you tools now, hopefully to feel meaningful as an embodied being. And what you choose to do with that is up to you. So how you express yourself politically will be empowered by the philosophies we're talking about today. Okay, so this is so important. Okay, chit versus chidabasha. I won't get into why hard problem of matter or hard problem of consciousness exists. But at least I want you to turn away from accepting things on faith. That means all statements, whether they be religious or from the church of science. The church of science tells you you have a body and that body gives you a brain and that brain gives you conscious. How do you know? Has any scientist been able to show you a thought? No, the best they can do is neurosemnaptic firing. What does the word glycine means to you? Means to you? What does the word neuron or synapse or firing of neurons mean to you? Nothing. So do not work with that. Instead work with your immediate perception of of reality now. And follow this argument. You know the body is changing and you know you cannot perceive change unless you're separate from that change. So you cannot be the body. Infallible logic, right? Why do do I feel pain? All of that. These are good questions to ask. But this is not an Advaita Vedanta clause. So we won't really go I have to I you know, I'm an Advaitin. And so I really want to get into this because I believe that this philosophy can answer all these questions. And indeed it has been doing that for thousands of years. But I must restrain myself and just leave it at this. The Taitriya Upanishad gives you yogic anatomy and it shows you that God is not a body nor is it an energy nor is it a thought nor is it an intellectual construct. It's the awareness in which all of that comes and goes. Okay. Yes. You're learning me into my favorite discussion. Yes. Such a Nanda is the unchanging thing. Such a Nanda. And once you discover that you know it to be none other than you. So I'm going to give you one more Upanishad. It's very important and it tells you what Om means. So that word Om. It's chanted all over the world. It's chanted in studios. You'll see it on corny cheesy t-shirts. You'll see it in a corny title in a yoga studio. You'll just see it all over the place. Right. And so what does it mean? What is Om? Why do we want to think that phrase? Om, Om, Om, this Om. That what do we mean? So the Mando Kyo Upanishad explains Om. In the eighth century, very powerful mystic. One of my favorites. His name is Gauda Pada. Gauda Pada. Every time I say you are not the body. You'll end up in the. Yes. Yes. If you take a shot every time you say you are not the mind. Anvita Vedanta is all about a process known as Nethi-nethi, which means not this, not that. You come to what you are by realizing what you're not. So our project as a philosophical. We're not sticks, right? So Kasi understands this. Advaita Vedanta is our not sticks. We philosophicize. And what we do is we find out what we're not. And it's like when you're doing multiple choice. You know the answer is D because you know it's not A, B or C. But you arrive at D by elimination, if you will. So yes. Now Gauda Pada in the eighth century composes a text known as the Mandukia-Karika. Karika means something like commentary or verses or stanzas. Welcome. Welcome, Amulin. You're most welcome here. So Mandukia is in Upanishad. The Mandukia-Karika is Gauda Padas. What we say commentary on the Mandukia-Padas. So if you're interested you can check that out for the teaching I'm about to give you now. It's a great teaching. And I think a lot of you are here now because you heard this teaching on my TikTok. And it's the best I have to give you. You know it's the, and remember I'm just the messenger, right? So none of these teachings are mine. They're all there in the text. But this I believe to be the best. I would have shot my load after I give you this next piece. Honestly. And here it is. Here it is. There are three states of consciousness that you experience. You experience waking, what we call juggerat, which is this now. Swami Sava Priyanda makes a very nice joke. He says, "Usually when we talk philosophy, most of you aren't in waking." But on the off-chance that some of you are awake, this is juggerat, waking, right? The second one is Swapna dreaming. The third one is Shushupti deep sleep. Notice they're all categorically different from another. Now, Gauda Pada even goes so far as to say it's not even three. It's actually two waking and dreaming are practically the same. And think about it. Your memories in your waking life, do they not feel incredibly dreamlike? You know, your memory of a dream, right Amanda? Your memory of last night's dream and your memory of what happened to you last year so wispy so immaterial this is a dream do you not feel how dream like this moment is it's so insubstantial before you can grasp the moment it goes away so Gaurapada is so radical he says actually is only two waking/dreaming and deep sleep basically the existence of a self and a no self mandukya upanishad is a little more liberal it says dreaming waking and deep sleep okay notice this when you are in a dream you are unaware of your waking life you know yes meddling take care good to see you yes so while you are thank you for donating while you are in waking you take yourself very seriously oh i'm niche and i have my iresting to deal with this month i have these problems i gotta pay my taxes i gotta do all of this and oh no i gotta i gotta renew my visa all that stuff is niche is niche is waking life right um but that niche goes to sleep and gaurna is the visa concern gaurna is the irs tax concern gaurna is the delights and triumphs of the wake yeah we we raise six thousand dollars for india pat on the back nish good you know like all that nonsense of waking goes away when i dream i'm not even aware that india is going through a tough time right now no i'm in dream so everything you know about your waking life secedes when you go into the dream yes and by the way uh someone asked if you want it's a venmo uh we don't unfortunately we don't use the cash app i we should have thought of that but yes it's a venmo and remember it's not about just fiscally donating if you can just feel good now that's good enough just feel great you know that's all you need to do and all we're doing is sitting here to smile with ryan you know i look at him so sweet it feels so happy um and then that's all we want to do okay so uh when you go to dream you forget about waking completely you take your dream self very seriously no longer is it niche with the irs stuff it's i don't know joe perry what what have you it's like a dream niche perry i don't know uh you know it's it's it's an interesting question destiny it's an interesting question we will talk about it a little bit about India socially and these ideas so yeah there is a relationship of course Amy thank you for helping we are raising together you know uh there is a relationship between dream and waking i think that's what gaurapada also collapses them so dream does kind of mimic waking and the waking does kind of mimic dream you know some of you i had this experience niche the the boy came home from school went to sleep and dreamt a whole day now the dream wasn't so far fetched so when he woke up he wasn't sure which was the school day which was the dream school day they both seem very similar uh and of course the dream affected the school but maybe the opposite is also true maybe today was affected by what you dreamt i don't know so gaurapada actually collapses them and just says uh look you're in your dream self right um and you take your dream life very seriously it might be a nightmare you might hello Amy good to see you so always a joy you might be terrified by all the stuff going on in your dream but then you wake oh i wake up and you feel a great sense of ease and peace because you realize oh it was just a dream i was never in the dream the dream was in me i'm chilling chilling like a villain i never lost my partner she never left me she's right here in bed we're chilling and then you wake her up and you're like babe do you still love me and she's like i'm trying to sleep you doll yes i do and you're like who's the dream so you really took it seriously in your dream then you woke up and the dream was gone you took this you're taking this now quite seriously you go to the dream it's all gone you know so gaurapada is saying waking and dreaming are very different you have a waking self and you have a dreaming self now here's the third thing you also experience a deep sleep state so we define a deep sleep state by the absence of waking and the absence of dreaming this is a very important point because in deep sleep you are a no self but you as an awareness are not absent do you realize this because if your absence sorry if the happens of a self met the absence of awareness then you would be surprised every time you woke up in the morning you'd be like oh where you know because there would have been a discontinuity in your awareness so this is the point danish if we conflate awareness with the waking mind how is it that you are able to know you slept deeply and dreamlessly in the absence of a waking self in the absence of a dreaming self something was there no something was there that is enabling the waking nish to say i slept like a log i slept beautifully who was that it was a nish nish was not there nor was there and if you say oh it's your mind how do you know stop taking things on faith deal with this argument as it is right now which is do you not realize that in the absence of waking in the absence of dreaming in the absence of all selves something was there yes so Amy don't take that on faith some scientists told you that and and and you're just taking it on faith you're just like yeah i read it somewhere no no interact with your immediate perception here and now don't believe religious leaders don't believe scientists who is the professor to tell you what your quality of your awareness is only you are the authority of your life you know so in this argument it says absent from all our concepts of god or or or brainwaves it seems to be the case that when Amy isn't there and when dream maybe isn't there something is there something is there to be aware now we say that is it tattva masi that thou art aham bram has me when i say i am awareness i'm not talking about nish nor am i talking about dream nish nor am i even talking about causal body no nish i'm talking about the awareness in which all of those three things existed do you see okay so we're done we did the uponish odds okay we're done let's move on um and so here's the point i wanted to make i'm sure some of you will remember the conversation we had about the Vedic pastoral rights it feels like forever ago now since we went down this uponishotic rabbit hole let's go back there so the people who are more interested in the rituals went off and they're called purva mimamsa i will uh denish we will do that eventually we'll kind of break down some mantras oh whoops okay so purva mimamsa means to reverentially read the ritual part of the Vedas then there's something else called uttara mimamsa which means higher reading uttara means like north or higher actually uh doesn't mean north induction i mean south vama means north but it kind of means like upper uttara now uh it it means like no stick reading you know like a deep reading isoteric reading if you will there's a phrase for this in the Quran i forgot there's a way to read the Quran as an exoteric text and also an esoteric text i think rumi the great sufi mystic said the Quran is like a pair of breasts it's different from the child for the child and for the lover the lover and the child appreciate the breast differently one is more intimate with it one understands it more so rumi is rather a lewd way of saying there are different ways to read the same texts uh and and sufis are very interested in this which is reading the Quran isoterically not exoterically so uttara mimamsa you can compare it to that it's and not even that it's like looking at the upanishads more than the Vedas on a philosophical level so um this gives us what we call Vedanta okay Vedanta basically means anta means the end of Vedas mean the Vedas so Vedanta means the summary of or the end or the big point of the Vedas it's the but i'm s s s of the Vedas so you can think of Vedanta as the ghee it is the clarified butter once you've churned and churned and churned your ocean of the rigveda yajur samatarvaveda what do you get casted like when you read and have insight from that reading uh yeah you could think of that oh savanna these are all uh south indian phil- sorry not south south asian philosophy so we're talking about yoga jainism buddhism hinduism uh charvakar anything that you consider to be indian we're talking about that today you know and then we'll talk about nepal and britain and all of that in a bit so what is the Vedas the butter what is Vedanta the ghee the clarified butter now this is where it gets interesting Vedanta is probably the most orthodox part of Hinduism goodnight kelo thank you for being here Vedanta is probably the most orthodox part of Hinduism next to purva mimamsa purva mimamsa is definitely more orthodox Vedanta is orthodox now to confuse you further so thus far in your arsenal you have two terms purva mimamsa which means ritualist Vedic ritualist and you have uttara mimamsa reverential reading or Vedanta in Vedanta there are three kinds all right so i'll break it out three kinds of Vedanta my favorite the one we talk about a lot is advaita Vedanta advaita Vedanta advaita vaita midvaita means two advaita means not two so it means the not two philosophy and that's what we've been discussing for the past hour. Only such it Ananda exists. Everything else is a mere appearance within such it Ananda. And there are arguments to prove to you that because of thing changes, thereby it is unreal. So Advaita Vedanta is interested in this slogan or slogan. Sloka? Verse slogan slogan. Yes, it slogan becomes slogan. Wow, I had an Indo-European language like brain fart right there is like mixed up all the Indo-European languages. No, slogan is this. Brahma Satyam Jagat Mithya. Only Brahman is real. The world is false. False as a thing that's yes not to invite that not to philosophy. False in the sense that it exists apart from Brahman. So notice an Advaita Vedant this doesn't believe in God as a separate existence or as a creator deity. You know, yes in Maya meaning in this realm God is Brahman reflected in the all. You are Brahman reflected in the mind and body. There is only one Sun but if we had 10 cups there would be 10 mini-sons in each cup right. So do you realize there are many of us here what there is 41 participants apart from this one. There are 40 sons. But how many sons are there really only one right? We are all just 40 reflections of the same Sun. Yes. So if you're interested in Advaita Vedanta there are a few sources for it. So I'm gonna give you some books now. Let's go it's time for the book references. Gaurapadas Mandukyakaraka is a great one but Shankaracharya is the main head honcho. He emerged in the like 8th century AD or skipping around the timeline a little bit. He emerged in the 8th century AD and he was the one that formulated Advaita Vedanta most articulately. So he commented on about 10 Upanishads and he gave us the Advaita Vedanta readings. Obviously that's the school I'm from so when I teach you the Upanishads I teach you the Shankaracharya versions. There are other ways to read the Upanishads you know. So you might conclude that the mind and body don't they aren't illusory they're real they're changing but they're real and you might conclude that you aren't awareness I don't know there are other ways other conclude I think I kind of but you can still do it okay. So Shankaracharya formulated Advaita Vedanta and just so you know we have a very friendly kind of competition with the other Vedanta schools. We love each other we're like they're like the embarrassing cousins to us actually know where the embarrassing cousins to them because we're so eccentric and we don't care about caste or castlessness. Cast you know we don't care about caste or class. Someone got really angry today because I blew out some incense on TikTok they were like I am the daughter of a pundit and a scholar how dare you blow out Agra Bhatti you must wave it and I'm like sister beware of superstition. Then you're like this is not superstition this is tradition. I was like all right granted. What an Advaita Vedanta sees as superstition is definitely tradition for other forms of Hinduism. Let's respectfully disagree and they were like no here's why you know this violated the offering it's so classless of you to do that don't you know better your Indian have you ever been to India and I'm like is my breath any less God than the incense then the one who is holding the incense if your God is all pervasive what offering is a bad offering you know and then she got super angry so you'll notice the we're like the embarrassing cousin because we're always breaking rules we're telling Brahmins that they should eat with Shudras like disobeying cast so we're kind of like we're the most radical antinomian and progressive of the schools you know and and I think that's why Vivekananda brought it to the west and it was like fire in the west in a feudal istic Victorian transatlantic community how refreshing to hear that the royal family is no more God than you the proper God all is made of one same substance nothing exists apart from that substance with which to dilute the substance so how can there be more concentrated God and less concentrated God what's the diluting agent it's not there in order to have concentrated orange juice and not concentrated oranges you need water but if no water exists apart from the oranges to begin with no one is more God than any other person nothing is more God than any other person and to prove it the tantrikas in the 10th century AD would eat feces, mences, semen, flam and one more saliva I believe basically they would take the things that Vedic Brahmins Society thought the most repugnant and they would say God is here to I'll show you and if you think hygiene is an issue come on at this level of realization your metabolism is like you can digest anything relax so the modern day version of this practice is are you a vegan a raw foods vegan eat a cheeseburger this is tantra of course if these ideas disturb you they should tantra was very disturbing at some parts of tantra were very disturbing but anyway I'd like to be honest as God is everywhere the same and you are it so you in the world it's just awareness it's appearing to you as this world of many things we all look like 40 different people but that's just an appearance once you realize only awareness is you'll be able to see the sun and that doesn't diminish your ability to appreciate the reflection you know in fact you can appreciate the reflection a little more if you weren't trying to seduce it or belittle it do you realize that this notion of separateness gives us two things the desire to draw you towards me or the desire to push you away from me either I'm trying to seduce you or I'm trying to like repel you but Advaita Vedanta ends these two things why should I seduce anyone when we're all part of the same awareness why should I fear anyone or push anyone away with repugnance when we're all the same awareness you know so this is the castlessness of Advaita Vedanta and it's very radical so that's Advaita Vedanta then another philosopher appears or Shankaracharya appears in the eighth century and writes about Advaita Vedanta in the by the way Advaita Vedanta the the central text from Shankaracharya or Atma Boda I recommend Swami Nikkila Nanda's translation so great translation Swami Nikkila Nanda's Atma Boda another one that's really awesome is Viveka Chudayamini which means the jewel of discrimination so these are the two like textbook Advaita Vedanta texts they're pretty boring you might fall asleep they're very technical but they're awesome then the arguments you hear from me like the seer and the scene argument if you like that that's from Dhrik yeah it's kind of sad that the idea of castlessness is so radical yeah Dhrik Dhrishya Viveka that's by probably Vidya Ranya it's anonymously written but this is great Dhrik Dhrishya Viveka appears in the fifteenth centuries we call this prakaranas I don't worry about these terms so much but a prakarana basically means a preparatory text for Advaita Vedanta you know so Dhrik Dhrishya Viveka is one such text one of my favorites is Panchadeci by Vidya Ranya also then there is Vedanta Sada which means essence of Vedanta these are all great technical texts so if you were all monks right now and if we were at the ashram we would be learning these texts first so you would first learn Vedanta Sada it's like the most boring of them actually Vedanta Sada but the most technical so I would first ground you in Vedanta you must know what Brahman means what existence means what do I mean when I say real what do I mean when I say changing like I must define the rules of the game before you complete it's like math you can't do math unless you're aware of the axioms Euclidean axioms you know so like that Vedanta Sada Dhrik Dhrishya Viveka these all prepare you so there's your reading list for Advaita Vedanta however these are such technical texts that I think if you want to get into Advaita Vedanta study Swami Vivekananda probably the greatest saint whoever lived every Indian thinks that most of us actually but he's got great text Gyanayoga is a great one to start with I recommend his autobiography by Swami yes exactly Nikhilananda exactly that Garvit exactly that God is everywhere the same so God is no more in something than in something else importantly you must end the way in which you lose the world view the world so as long as you see the world as a racial racial place you will feel oppressed or you'll feel like the oppressor once you get rid of that lens and you see it all as one awareness you will effortlessly express that wholesomeness and it will permeate through all of your actions that's how you live a life as a radical non-dualist you know and that's when you get true compassion so now if you help people you're helping them condescendingly you're helping them as the other help them as them you know that's how Advaita Vedanta can be applied today as the same way it was being applied back then you know find out that we are all one and then you can appreciate differences you just won't be threatened by them you know so yes and think think of this if you end fear and if you end desire what harm can you do to anybody you know what slaves are you're going to go and take you know what holocaust are you going to start you won't you know there's nothing to fear nothing to desire so you won't really you won't be do anything and you could just kind of be. And if you can just kind of be and chill, then we have a very real way of approaching the problems in our world. You'll be much more effective at cleaning up society if you can remain in your non-dual awareness. It's a very politically powerful tool. Swami Vivekananda came here to teach it. He came here to say, "Anybody who tells you you are a sinner is a sinner because you only see in others what is there in you." So can you imagine how demented people have to be to tell you that you're demented, that you're broken, that you are born and guilt? I mean, what are you looking at? It's like the religious fundamentalist sees in the Disney cartoon sexuality because it only shows him his own repressed sexuality. Ramakrishna gave an example. In the twilight you look at a log. The lover sees the log as her beloved. The thief sees the log as a cop and the boy sees the baby boy sees the log as a ghost. What you see in the dim appearance of a log depends on who you are. So if you go around seeing sin and everybody, you might want to look at that. So we don't judge, right? And in Advaita Vedanta, it was very important. It's an interesting question, Nibirita. Very interesting question. And an Advaita Vedanta says, "Yes, doesn't exist. Nothing exists. It only seems to exist perceptually." Once you learn Advaita Vedanta, the body and mind might continue to be in the world doing good things. Shankaracharya, after all, continue to write dualistic hymns and he can continue to go all around the India teaching. Shankaracharya as a non-dualist set up ashrams and in each ashram he initiated people into Shakti worship. Why? Nothing's real, right? True. But until you can realize that, you might as well pretend like gods are real. I mean, it gives you something to work with, right? So yes, we must distinguish between relative truths and absurge truths. So after Shankaracharya, notice this is a very lofty philosophy. Some of you are just like, "What? What is this? How do I work with this? How do I practice this? We're going to move on because I could talk about this all day." But after Shankaracharya, he was the first, you know, he commented on the Bhagavad Gita, he commented on the Upanishads, "After Shankaracharya, you get a teacher known as Rama Nujja." Oh, sorry, Neva Dita texted you. Rama Nujja Acharya. Rama Nujja thought a philosophy known as Vishishth Advaita. So Advaita means non-dual. Vishishth Advaita means qualified non-duality. So this is the idea that there is only one thing, but that one thing has very real differences. So there are legit 40 different aspects of the one now. They're all real. KC's as real as Nish. But they're all just parts of a whole. But the parts are real. Advaita rejects that the parts are real. You know why? How can you divide space? How can you compartmentalize awareness into parts? Ridiculous. Yeah, okay, sorry. I'll restrain myself. Yet, Vishishth Advaita says, "You can do this. You can have sparks of the divine. Even if it's just one divine, each spark is distinct." The philosophy of yoga comes from the philosophy of Sankya. So we're going to, from Vishishth Advaita now, from Rama Nujja Acharya, we're going to fast forward. Actually, no, we're going to go back. We're going to, we're going to think about Sankya. So Purva Mimamsa is the first school of philosophy I gave you. Just to recap, it means ritualist. Then I gave you Vedanta, which means philosopher. Now, I'll give you Sankya. Sankya is a kind of philosophy that's different from Vedanta and different from Mimamsa. Sankya says there are two things. So Sankya is dualistic. Yeah, thank you so much, Abby. Yes, I know. Don't worry. We're recording it. It'll be available on Patreon. But we will take a break and do some questions and answers, you know, before we get to 20th century or whatever. So in Sankya, there aren't gods. There isn't even one god. There are just two things. One is parusha and the other one is prakriti. Parusha means spirit. Prakriti means flux or creatrics or nature. Sankya started around sixth century BC, I want to say. Sixth century before Christ, that is. And it was started by a guy named Kapila. Kapila was a university professor. And as a university professor, he was very interested in metaphysics. Obviously, he was like responding to the Vedas and responding to purva Mimamsa. But in the sixth century, he wrote a text known as the Sankya Sutra or the aphorisms of Sankya. And the Sankya Sutra, you can read it. There's a lot of good translations. I think, no, not Malonson. Good translations out there. But in Sankya, the only thing you need to know is that there is parusha, meaning spirit and that there is prakriti. Parusha and prakriti are always categorically different from one another. So this might excite you. Sankya doesn't say that god, parusha, created prakriti, the world. Because god is apart from the world, such that god or parusha has no desires in the world. Why would a being that is apart from nature, create nature or manage nature or influence nature? You know what's crazy about this? Kapila and Sankya are very materialistic when it comes to explaining things in nature. They really do say that everything in nature can be explained with regards to other things in nature. So they would be comfortable with the big bang. God didn't cause a big bang, no. But they don't reject god either. They say god is spirit, parusha, it's pure awareness and that awareness exists apart from nature. Now, the only reason you feel yourself to be an individual is because parusha and prakriti have come together in some mysterious way. They don't really describe how that happens, but it's enough to say that it happens. Yes, that which happens of itself. Anyway, so of itself, parusha and prakriti align, they don't touch, they never touch, they're always opposed to one another, but they align in such a way that parusha takes on the shape of prakriti. So you are parusha. Much like Advaita Vedanta says, you are awareness mistaking yourself to be the body and the mind. So too Sankya makes the same claim. Parusha forgets herself in this prakriti. She didn't create the prakriti, prakriti created itself and in Sankya we get the phrase, Gunas. Gunas means flavors or it means qualities really. So we are getting pretty technical here. No, cast, not like Shiva Shakti, not at all, not at all. And you'll see why it's actually the opposite of Shiva Shakti. It's the exact opposite of Shiva Shakti because Shiva Shakti is like too, no, no, sorry, because I know I reacted quite strongly there, but it's because it's such an important nuance and it makes the world of difference. You know, yes, sorry, I'm a little, I'm a little technical with the phrases like Shiva Shakti, Atman, Brahman, Prusha, Parusha, Parusha, because each phrase references a very specific stream of thought. So if we mix the phrases, it can be dangerous. We might mix the ideas and if we mix the ideas, we lose the diversity. The beauty of all these different schools of thought. All able to coexist with one another, even though they all defer metaphysically on how the world is. That's the beauty of Hinduism. They're all called Hinduism, yet they all couldn't agree, less. Couldn't disagree more. So it's like being at the Christmas dinner. Everyone has different political views, but at the end of the day, we still love each other. So because we're all brought together by one thing, which is the quest for meaning. Okay, so Sanghya is this. Prusha and prakriti. And after I describe Sanghya, we'll do a little more stories. So Prusha and prakriti, Prusha is different from prakriti, but somehow it's confused itself as prakriti. So you do some mystical technique to realize that you are not the mind, you are not the body. You never were the mind, you never were the body. Now, Advaita Vedanta says, prakriti doesn't exist. Maya, it doesn't exist. It's just illusion. It only appears to exist. And there are very specific technical arguments as to why that is the case. We won't do it. In Sanghya, it doesn't make that claim. It says, no, it does exist. It's just, you're not it. Stop mistaking yourself to be it. So the goal of Advaita Vedanta and Sanghya is very similar. Albeit one difference. Both of them are interested in detaching yourself from the mind, body, and world. Except the Advaita Vedanta takes one more step, which is to ask, what's the relationship of the world to me? So I know that I am not of the world, but what is the world in relation to me? Sanghya doesn't go that far. Sanghya is satisfied to have extricated itself from the world. Yeah, of course you can pick and choose. Absolutely. You can mix it in your own, but the only way you can mix it is if I isolate it for you. So I shouldn't mix it. You can. Yes, I have to make sure I give you each stream as clearly as I can. That's my work. Okay, so Sanghya says, Prushan prakriti are different. Advaita Vedanta says, atman and Maya are different. Sanghya says, Prushan, and prakriti both exist. Advaita Vedanta says, only atman/bramman exists. Maya exists as an appearance inside Brahmin. So they have a lot in common, but also a lot that's different. It's enough for Sankeya. It's enough to say about that. But the reason I introduce Sankeya to you is because it did come before the Buddha, probably. Kapila probably did proceed the Buddha. And after Sankeya, yoga appeared. So yoga is very related to Sankeya. So please distinguish between yoga lowercase y, which means spiritual practice or austerity. So remember Naciketa, he jumped into the fire. That fire is what we call yoga, spiritual practice. But to confuse you further, we also have a big yyoga, which is one of the six schools of Hinduism. So here are the six schools of Hinduism, yes? You have Purva Mimamsa, which we talked about, ritualist. You have Vedanta of which there are three variants. I've only spoken of two so far. Then there's Sankeya. Now you have yoga. So yoga comes from Sankeya. And the difference between yoga and Sankeya is this. Sankeya says God didn't create the world. Purusha, you, God, you are God. You didn't create the world. The world just creates itself. Yoga says no. Purusha, which is one thing in Sankeya, creates the world by setting into motion the three Gunas, Rajas, Tamas, and Satva. So the three qualities of nature and quantum mechanics speaks of quarks in eerily a very similar way as Sankeya speaks of these Gunas, flavors of reality, if you will. They're like the three primary colors out of which reality is made. So in yoga, the idea is that Purusha stimulates-- for some, I don't really know why, but they don't even know why either. But Purusha stimulates Sankeya. Yes, Kristina, take care. Thank you for being here and supporting India. And Purusha stimulates Sankeya. Purusha stimulates prakriti and creates this flux. Purusha is the creator. So yoga has a creator deity. And yoga says you are each Purushas. So now you get an S after Purusha. That's the difference. Yoga is Vishisht Advaita. So if you'll remember, Vishisht Advaita means qualified non-duality. Qualified non-duality means there is one thing, but that one thing expresses itself in little parts that are all parts of the whole. So according to Sankeya, and indeed according to yoga, and indeed according to Judaism, you are all sparks of the divine. You are each souls. You are very real beings, but you are all just a part. And the goal is to merge back into the whole, but when you do, you don't lose your partners. You just kind of like hang out with all the other parts in the whole. If you think it's weird, I think it's weird to. But that's the best description, I think, of Vishisht Advaita as you see it in yoga. So if you're interested in Sankeya, you would read the Sankeya aphorisms of Kaapila. Or you would read Plato. Plato is very much a Sankean, right? Because in Plato's worldview, there is this world, per-kriti, but then there is a world of forms, a world of ideals, you know, a world of archetypical things. There is all these shitty horses that you see here, but then there is horse, capital H, of which these are merely refractive reflections. These horses lower age are reflections. So Plato is a Sankean. He has this dualistic world. And according to Plato, they have nothing to do with one another. They're like reflections of one another, just like Sankeya says, yes. Okay, and they kind of emerge at the same time. Okay, we're done with Sankeya. This is how yoga is different from Sankeya. So if you're interested in yoga, you would read The Yoga Sutra by Patanjali. Patanjali was a sage, and I'm going to tell you a little story now about Patanjali. So it's story time. There is a myth. There is a myth that this world before it was created, Vishnu, the God Vishnu, was asleep in an ocean of milk. So Vishnu was sleeping on a serpent. The serpent, by the way, is a metaphor for a meditative seat. The serpent is stitum, meaning it's firm enough to hold Vishnu, but it's also succumbed. It's soft enough so he can sit comfortably. This is how you should sit in meditation, firmly, majestically, but also comfortably, no? So this serpent is known as Adi Seshah. And on Adi Seshah, Vishnu is sleeping, dreaming the world into existence. So this world is Vishnu's dream, so to speak. Now, Vishnu suddenly becomes hot and heavy. And Adi Seshah starts to buckle under the weight of Vishnu. When Vishnu wakes up, the serpent says, oh, why did you become so hot? Everyone just did a posture check when you see, (laughs) are you stitum, are you stable, are you succumbed, are you comfortable? Yes. Posture is very important for philosophy. If you find you're struggling to understand certain ideas, just fix your posture. You might see that it greatly improves your cognition. Buddha would say, sit with majesty, sit with the dignity of a mountain. You are all gathered here today to learn the secrets of the universe. Sit like you intend to. (laughs) (laughs) So Adi Seshah, the serpent asked Vishnu, what were you dreaming about? Vishnu said, man, do I have a story for you? While I was dreaming, I saw Shiva. Shiva was dancing. He was dancing a dance. And that dance was the dance of awakening. Adi Seshah said, can I see it? And Vishnu said, yes. In order to see it, you must do something for me. You must incarnate as Patanjali. And when you see the dance, you must teach people grammar. The first thing Adi Seshah was supposed to do was teach grammar, by the way. Because apparently, Sanskrit was going to the dogs. Like people weren't observing the rules of Sanskrit. People were mixing up words. Language was becoming a mess. So Patanjali, his first texts aren't about yoga. They're about grammar. He teaches you logic and how to speak. Then you have to teach people yoga. That's what Vishnu told Adi Seshah. So Adi Seshah turns into Patanjali. Incarnates as Patanjali. Patanjali practices meditation. See Shiva dancing inspired by Shiva's dance, known as the Tandava. He thereby creates yoga. So his text is the yoga Sutra, or the aphorisms of yoga. Later, a text known as the Patanjala, yoga Shastra appears. It's attributed to Vyasa, the sage Vyasa, who is probably a pen name for Patanjali. So it's Patanjali commenting on Patanjali. Anyway, we learn more about yoga from the Patanjala, yoga Shastra, than we do from the yoga Sutra. The yoga Sutra is very abbreviated. If you're interested in studying about yoga and Sankea, especially the relationship between these two philosophies, I recommend Swami Vivekananda's book. Vivekananda writes a book known as Raja Yoga. So earlier, I gave you Gyanayoga by Swami Vivekananda. Now I'm giving you Raja Yoga by Swami Vivekananda. Soon, you will have all three books. The red Raja Yoga, the blue Gyanayoga, and the green karma Yoga. Collect them all. Get your Pokeballs. So this is Raja Yoga. And Swami Vivekananda will take it from here. I've done the work. No more needs to be said about yoga. No more needs to be said about Sankea. Because now I want to talk about Shiva. So this is going to excite me the most because I'm also a Shrivaite. My name is Selva Lingam. Lingam means the phallic Shiva. And so my name is a little bit of a penis joke. And I'll tell you why. So we're going to talk about Shiva now. So remember how I told you in Vedic India, there weren't what do you say gods like Shiva and Vishnu really. Indra and Agni were the main gods. And there weren't really even distinctions between how these gods looked. Now, the philosopher Devduk Patanayik. So I'm going to give you another book now. It's called Shiva to Shankara by Devduk Patanayik. And I'm going to cite him for a little while. So he does great work into mythology and researching. So Devduk Patanayik said, it's very likely that Shiva is not a Vedic god. Shiva is most likely a Dravidian god. So now we have these two terms, right? Aryan means noble one. It isn't a race as much as it's a cultural term for people of India. But there's also another word, Dravidian. It means southern Indian or Indians in the south. Another word for these people are the Aran Yakhas, which mean people of the forest. Aran Yakhas means like forest. So while the Vedas are happening in the north, where it's like Pakistan, in the south, maybe around temple, what is now temple Nathu, there is a group of ascetics who are practicing their own spirituality in the forest. Now notice this, in the north, there are nomads. In the south, there are agricultural settlements. You know? Yes, Annie, thank you very much. So this is an important point, yes. In the south, they are agricultural, they are settled. In the north, they are pastoral. So when these two cultures start to merge, there is naturally a little bit of tension. So now I'm going to tell you a story about Shiva. If you want to learn the stories about gods like Vishnu and Shiva and Saraswati and Power of the, the place to walk is the Puranas. So I told you about the Vedas, yes, I told you about the Upanishads. The Vedas are like the ritual culture of India. The Upanishads are the philosophical culture of India and the Puranas are the folk stories of India. So if you've heard any folk stories of gods and goddesses, they come from the Puranas. Puranas are for the people. Vedas are for the priests. Upanishads are for intellectual, nostics and philosophers. Puranas are for everyone, for you and me, for children, because the Puranas contain allegory for the Upanishads. Okay, so we're going to switch modes now. I've been very like heady so far. I've been giving you some very technical philosophy. Now I'm going to step away from that and just give you some storytelling, yeah. And we're going to work out what those stories mean. What the allegory of those stories are, the laundry has arrived. How wonderful. Okay, so here are the stories. Shiva is very likely according to Devdutt Patanayak and outsider god from the south that makes a painful interjection into polite patriarchal priestly Vedic society. Now you're going to learn about tantra. Now you're really going to understand tantra and how tantra is opposed to the Vedas and also how it incorporates the Vedas. So here's our introduction to tantra. It's not one of the six orthodox schools of Hinduism. It's known as hetero-dox, meaning outside of the orthodoxy and you're going to realize why in a little bit. Okay, story time. There is a patriarch of Vedic culture, much like Nachiketa's father. His name is Dakshah. Oh, and if you're interested in where this story is from, it's from the Shiva Purana. There's also the Linga Purana and there is the Skanda Purana. The next few stories are going to come from these Puranas. Okay, so Dakshah is the patriarch of Vedic society and some of you were here for Shiva Rathri. So this will be a little bit of a reminiscent. So, and tonight is Shiva Rathri by the way. It's a new moon, every new moon night is Shiva Rathri. You were there Mahasthiva Rathri, which is the great new moon of the month Maga, usually around February and March. So now here you are the mini Shiva Rathri, you know, the new moon in Taurus. So let's tell some stories of Shiva. Shiva is my Ishtadevatha, my patron deity and it's my family deity. So do forgive me if I wax a little lyrical here. You know, there's a lot of emotion when it comes to talking about Shiva and hopefully you'll see why in a little bit because he's a little bit of a bad boy, a little bit of a rock star. He's a weirdo outsider that thrives on upsetting polite society, not because he's like a rebel without a cause, just because he's indifferent. He's a mystic. He doesn't care for your orthodox ideas. He doesn't trust scientists when they tell him, brains produce consciousness. He doesn't trust religious leaders when they tell him, "God exists, you should pray to him." No, he meditates. Shiva is known for meditating. Why? Because Shiva is a symbol for southern spiritual practice, which is all about meditation. Even today that remains true. Southern Buddhism is much more interested in meditation than northern Buddhism, you know. So the South is very into meditation. So this story, Daksha is a Vedic patriarchs and all the gods love him because he's so good at prop, I don't know how to say the word propitiating, paying homage to gods, right? He's so good at performing Vedic rituals and he's so rich and powerful that all the gods enjoy his ceremonies. So one day all the gods are gathered there, you know, Varuna, Valu, Indra, Agni, Vishnu, all of that. And he shows up and he's like, "Hello, hello, it's me, Daksha." And all the gods get up from their seats and they're clapping and they're blowing a trumpet and there's a fanfare, yay, Daksha, Jay, Jay, Dakshaji and they're throwing flowers. Daksha notices there's one fellow who didn't stand up. Of course it's our Shiva. It's not that he doesn't like Daksha. He's not sitting down despite Daksha. No, he's so absorbed in his meditation that he is indifferent to Daksha. Do you see? Shiva is just meditating. He cares not for social niceties. He cares not for proper behavior or how to be. He just wants to meditate, you know? And Daksha notices this. So this is the moment where Northern ritualistic Vedic society, exoteric religion comes into direct conflict with Southern, meditative, esoteric religion. David Patanayak calls this "yagna" versus "yoga tapasya." Me too. So I'm talking to Amy, yes, me too. So Shiva and Daksha, the patriarch of Vedic society, are at odds now. Shiva's meditating. Daksha wants to do ritual. So Daksha says, "This guy is not a god, but neither is he a demon either. He's just indifferent." So he's somewhere in between God and demon. He's a weirdo. He's an outsider. Daksha says, "I will never perform a ceremony for Shiva. Nobody should be worshipping Shiva. Good. Just the way he likes it. Thank you very much. Shiva's not interested in praise. He's not interested in your worship. He only wants you to meditate and figure shit out for yourself. That's Shiva. Shiva also loves to shash. Do you mean like Gang, Ganga? That's actually wrongly attributed to Shiva. And you'll see why. The Ganga is a very poor attribution to Shiva. Shiva is so blissful that he doesn't need external substances. Mind you, like cannabis. What poetry pleasures. What cheap delight. Shiva is above all of your worldly pleasures. Thank you very much. He's in the Himalayas. Where is the drug dealer in the Himalayas? You tell me? How can he buy some bang? Where is he going to get alcohol? There's no inn up there, mind you. There's no one that can give you a hand job, mind you. Shiva is always alone. Krishna and his incarnations are often surrounded by women. Do you notice that? Rama surrounded by women. Krishna surrounded by women. Rama and Krishna hang out in battlefields, in rivers, in forests, in cities where there are plenty of people and plenty of pleasures. Shiva doesn't hang out there. He hangs out in cremation grounds. If he's hanging out with anybody, he's hanging out with dead people. Ghosts. So he's often seen as the king of the ghost and the king of the goblins. He hangs out alone in the icy Himalayas. So you can see, Shiva is about asceticism. Oh, I'm going to talk a little bit about that, Jace, in a little bit. Shiva and Shakti. The Shiva I'm talking about now is the original Shiva, the ascetic Shiva. It's a poor association, Garvit. It's because a lot of Sadhus enjoy bang. So if you go to the Ganga and you see the, it's a funny Ganga Ganga. If you go to the Ganga and you see the, the, the, the, the, the, the sadhus, they like to smoke. So they often are smoking a lot and there's, there's a, like a relationship, right? Between psychedelics and like the stuff that we're talking about. So yeah, if you do some acid, you'll probably meet Shiva. You will. Because the energy is very much like that. But Shiva is beyond all of that. You know, Shiva is, we call him Svatantriya, which means effortlessly blissful and effortlessly free. His name is Pasupati, Lord of wild beasts. He's known as Maheshvara, King of all the gods. And here's the important thing. As you will read in Devduk Patanayi's book, the important thing about Shiva is he withdraws from the world. He's an Hermit. He's an ascetic. He's an, he's into isolation. So he doesn't want to smoke Ganga because he doesn't want to engage in the senses. Nor does he want to contribute to Vedic ceremonies. He's more inclined to just sit and meditate and be absorbed in that. Meditative absorption. So this is the Vedic Shiva. He's known as Rudra, right? Yes, exactly. Isn't that interesting, Denish? I'm glad you caught that. The Pasupati symbol comes. No, no, no, Amanda. Shiva and Pan cannot be more different. Do you know why? Pan, Priyapas. I'm going to give you a few kind of gods, right? Pan. Priyapas. Dionysus. These are all seen as mysterious gods with big erections. So we even have a word in English, Priyapatic, which means like, okay, one thing you're going to notice about these gods is that they are virile and fertile. So Pan like sports. He like engages with the world. He's a very earthy being. He places flute. He's very interesting. Priyapas and Dionysus are always like shagging people, right? Shiva is fertile. Sorry. Well, Shiva is phallic. Shiva is virile, but Shiva is not fertile. You'll read in the Shiva Parana, Skanda Parana and Linga Parana. Shiva to part from his seed. He's very possessive of his self-sufficiency. He does not want to become dependent on anything and nor does he want to give up his energy to anything. So to ejaculate is seen as a submission to the world. So Shiva never comes. That's one thing you will learn from the Shiva Skanda Purana. You know interesting questions to have. Anyway, so then as you're right and we think the Paschupate seal refers to the tribal shamanic folk religion that existed alongside the Vedas. So now you're thinking Vedic mainstream society. You can also think there was kind of a side thing going on which later becomes Tantra as you will see in a little bit. Right exactly exactly. Right amen. So Shiva never wanted adolation nor would he give adolation. I remember once my grandmother or my mother's side. So my father's side they're all southern Indians. My mother's side is more like Hindu, you know, whereas we are shy vites. And she asked me what's your Ishta Devata Nesh? And I said Shiva and she looked at me with fear and she said you chose a hard one. It's like being sorted by the sorting hat into slither in. Because this God generally seen as very ascetic. Yes, Shiva is Ganesha's father. We're going to see how that happens. Ganesha is immaculately conceived by the way. Anyway, so Shiva doesn't get up, right? So here's where the story gets interesting. Daksha says to hell with Shiva. I hate this guy. He insulted me. Ew, let's not worship him. Shiva doesn't care. So Daksha has a daughter. Daksha's daughter's name is Sati. Guess who Sati falls in love with? If you're a young teenager, the only person you're going to have a crush on is the guy your dad hates. You know, you want to shack up with a rolling stone. You want a biker. You want someone who's going to piss your dad off. So Sati runs away to find Shiva and Shiva falls in love with Sati, which is you can't even imagine. Shiva is so like self, you know, possessed. He's so self-sufficient. So we're getting into Tantra now. So if you're interested in Parvati, Shakti, we're getting there. We're getting there. Don't worry. Just work with this Shiva first. Okay. I know for some of you, you're like already really into Tantra. So this idea of Shiva as an ascetic is a little, what do you call it? Offensive to you for now. But trust me on this. In the Skanda Purana, Shiva, Parana, Linga, Parana, when you read it for yourself, you will find that this is the depiction of Shiva. Remember I told you about Rasa? Daksha is interested in keeping Rasa flowing. Shiva is interested in meditating and extricating himself from the circle of Rasa. He's kind of leaving the world. That's why he's seen as the destroyer. That's why he's seen as the outsider, the weirdo, because his goals are hard to understand. His motivations are hard to understand. He's mysterious and eagmatic and frankly quite scary. So some of his names are King of the Goblins, King of the Ghost, the destroyer. Not quite a god, not quite a demon, the outsider Rudra, which is his Vedic name literally means "howler" the one who screams. And now I'm going to tell you why. So Sati runs away from home to go and marry Shiva. What do Sati and Shiva do? They meditate. That's their game. They just like to sit and meditate. Sati is the perfect wife for Shiva, because she loves meditating. So they both sit there just meditating. And you know one day, the sage Narada and some Indians in the room, you know, "Nara, ya na na na na na na na na na na na." Do you know that? If you watched any Indian movies as a child about the gods, that phrase is burnt in your mind because the sage Narada just moves through all the realms singing "Nara, ya na na na na na na na na na na." And he's just like he does does that. But he's like the messenger of the gods. He's kind of like Hermes. So Narada is just going and he approaches Shiva and Sati and he says, "Oh hey, are you guys going to the party?" Sati is like, "What party?" And Narada says, "Crap. Never mind, never mind. I'm leaving now and Sati is like, "No, you come back and you tell me Narada, what party?" Sati says, "Damn, okay, so Daksha is throwing a party." It's a super big party. All the gods are invited. But I guess you guys aren't since you don't know about the party. And Shiva opens one eye. He's meditating, of course, and he's like, "Mah." And he goes back to meditating. Sati is like, "No, I have to go to the party. It's my father. I'm his daughter. I would be ashamed not to be at the party. Shiva come with me. Let's go to the party." And Shiva says, "Satvi, take my word for it. Don't go to the party. You don't want to have anything to do with Daksha and those gods. Like, they don't like us there, babe. Don't go." Sati is like, "No, listen, Maheshvara. I'm sure it's been a mistake. The invitation must have been lost. There's probably a seat for you." I mean, of course, you're Maheshvara. The resplendent one, the supreme yogi. He's also known as Yogeshvara, the king of the yogis. Maheshvara, the great lord. All his names imply the greatness of Shiva. He says, "You should go." And they will honor you. Trust me, babe. They will honor you. Shiva says, "I will not. I'm content. I'm going to sit and meditate." But he says, "Well, if you want to go, you can. I really wish you wouldn't, but if it's your will to go, go without me." You know? And bring me back a lot, though, or something. I'm kidding. He wouldn't, he wouldn't have said that. So Sati goes, she goes to the party and at the party, she realizes no seat was placed for Shiva. Sati feels indignation, the kind that only a slited Indian woman can feel. The mellow drama of an Indian woman compels her to self-imulate. She gets so upset. She jumps, she jumps, so you notice Nachiketa jumps into the fire? Sati jumps into the fire, too. It's actually the origin story of a rather primitive tradition they had in India where women would often follow their husbands as part of a beautiful wife. They would follow their husbands into death. Of course, this sounds scary to us. Remember Indians didn't really believe they were their body. They were happy to give the body up. So it might be pretty progressive from another point of view. It's true love, right? Even death of the body can't do a support. And if you listen to the death cap for Qudi song, I will follow you into the dark. Yeah. Anyway, so Sati jumping into the fire in protest. Shiva here is about this. Something, yeah, Romeo, do you like, or nothing on this? Something very important happens now, by the way. Shiva, for the first time in his eternal timeless existence, feels grief. He feels anger and he doesn't know what to do about it. I mean, he sat meditating as an ascetic for his whole life, but he fell in love and it's through love that he experienced grief and despair and desolation. And so driven mad by grief and rage, he starts to dance. Dancing is the only way he knows how to like deal with his rage and he pulls out a matted lock of his hair and he throws it on the floor. So a matted lock, the name for it in Sanskrit is Bhadra. From his matted lock, a demon appeared. His name is Vira Bhadra. If you've done any hatha yoga, you know Vira Bhadrasana, you call it warrior pose. Actually, it's a pose in honor of this demon. Vira Bhadra, so Vira Bhadra appears the demon king. And Shiva says, go, bring me their heads. You've seen Game of Thrones, the red wedding and got nothing on this. In the piranha, you will read a rather gory story. Vira Bhadra, at the head of an army of demons and goblins, riding rabid dogs, swept down into the party and killed everyone. Tor everyone, limb from limb, the demons destroyed the fire, burnt down the palace, grabbed Daksha by the head, dragged him in front of his wife and decapitated him. Kind of a horrifying story, right? And the dogs of war, Shiva's rabid dogs, Shiva's goblin armies are just running a mock. The world is torn asunder, so the gods are freaking out now, right? Bramha and Vishnu are like, "Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, what do we do? What do we do?" So they said, now they're the Shiva. Now they're that's kind of the go-between of the gods. Now this is Maheshwara. Your rage is understandable. You know, your anger is understandable. Your grief is understandable. But please, stop this carnage. You cannot bring Sati back by murdering everyone. Shiva sobers up. Notice, he's like super self-controlled, but also paradoxically he sometimes just totally loses it, which is an interesting thing about Shiva. Yeah, he just kind of, yeah, bet they really regret didn't send that invitation. So, you know, he's like, "Okay, you're right. You're right, Nader. He allows himself to be consoled, and he says, "I am not Daksha." One almost remembers Aragorn in Lord of the Rings. "I am a seal those hair, or not a seal lower himself." Anyways, so he goes, "I'm not Daksha. I won't do this. I won't do this." And so what does Shiva do? He goes back and brings everyone back to life, except instead of Daksha's actual head, he puts the head of a goat there. Just it's kind of like our tantrikas always make fun of a Dix society. Some stories say he puts the head of an ass. So he puts the head of an ass back on Duxha and revives him and says, "Duxha's wife, here you go. Enjoy. See your husband for what he is and ass." But he brought everyone back to life except Sathy. He can bring Sathy back to life. Her body was lying there burnt, emulated. And you know what he said? "I will respect her decision to leave. I will respect her emulation and in honor of her protest, I won't bring her back." You know? So for those of you doing sianses, have some respect for your dad. Leave them alone. No, it's just in his kidding. So yeah, she's like, he's like, yeah, it's okay. But I'm so sad. You know? So he picks up Sathy's body, holds it over his shoulder, and just walks. He forest gums it. He just like walks and walks and walks in grief. And because he's such grief, he's generating this tapas, this heat that's destroying the world. Shiva walks a path of desolation. Green Day writes the song, "I walk alone nearer road. He's walking." He said. And you know, it's just the gods are freaking out again because now Shiva's not fulfilling his role as the Trinity. You know? So what does Vishnu do? Vishnu sends his weapon, his discus, and starts to chop up Sathy's body. It's kind of a confusing metaphor. But every time a body part of Sathy falls off, it becomes a holy place. This is called a Shakti Pita. It's very sacred in Tantra, these holy spots. So each of Sathy's body parts becomes a Shakti Pita, a pilgrimage site. And when the body is completely dissolved, Shiva is done with his grief. He goes back and meditates. Now the story goes, Sathy re-incarnates as Parvati. Parvati is the daughter of King Himalayya. So you know the mountain, the Himalayas? Shiva meditates there. There's also a character named Himalayya. He's the mountain. He's the mountain king. And Parvati is the daughter of the mountain. So I'm just telling you stories. The metaphors are pretty obvious for those of you who have been meditating. I won't get in them too much. Just enjoy the story. So Parvati is born to Himalayya. And of course, yeah, interesting. Yeah, that's beautiful destiny. Very, very similar. Yeah, he just carries the body like the dolphin or orca. Yeah, Shakti Pita actually. This is Shakti Pita. It's like, yeah, it's a place. But yeah, Shakti Pata, you can even think of it as that. In Sanskrit, if words sound alike, probably because there's something to do with one another. It's not an accidental language. It was very carefully controlled. After all, who formulated Sanskrit? Adi Seshya himself, Vishnu serpent in the form of Patanjali. He taught Sanskrit. Coming, coming, Ganesh, don't worry. I've got a lot to cover, brother. It will happen. Trust, trust the process. These things cannot be gotten too so quickly. We'll miss the point. So we must circulate, you know, and hopefully we'll snap into focus. If it doesn't, I'm sorry. We'll try our best. So Shiva then Parvati is the wife, sorry, is the daughter of Himalayya. And naturally, as the incarnation of Shiva's ex-wife, I know, I know, Dinesh, I know, I'm doing my best. Got a lot to cover here. We'll get there. And I hope to be finished in about like 30 ish minutes so we can do questions and stuff. Tall order. So Parvati is born a Devote of Shiva. So all she does is worship Shiva. You know, meditate. And through her meditation, she contacts Shiva. And they're having like this Jedi kind of telepathic. Like, you know, you can imagine Luke in episode five. He's like, Lea, Lea hear me. And Lea is in the Millennium Falcon. And she's like, Luke, I know where he is. And Orlando is like, no, we can't go back. And so similarly, Parvati is calling out to Shiva with her mind. Shiva hears her. And she's like, he's like, oh, you are Sathy. You're looking for a husband? Oh, I'm in love with you anyway. I'll come and marry you. So this is kind of a cute story. All the sages, the Saptarishis, the seven great sages, go to Himalayas house to tell the king and his queen that Parvati has found a suitor. The suitor's name is Shiva. So this is a beautiful story of the wedding of Shiva. The day arrives. Everyone's so excited for this wedding. The sages have sung praises to Parvati's mother about Shiva. And on the day of the wedding, all the gods come. And the mother is getting so excited. It's like, is that Shiva? And Narada is like, no, no, no, that's the sun god. Shiva is even more pretty than that. And she is that Shiva. And he goes, no, no, no, that's the moon god. And the mom goes, is that Shiva? And Narada is like, no, no, no, relax. That's Vishnu. Shiva is even more cute than that. You know, so the mom is getting excited about all the gods that are coming in. But Narada, this Hermes figure, is saying, no, it's not that. It's not this. It's not this. Finally, Shiva arrives. He arrives, covered in ash. His hair is mattered. He's riding an ugly bull. Whereas everyone else came in and chariots, he's riding a bull. Whereas everyone came in with like a retinue of beautiful angels. Shiva comes in with his ghost and his goblins and his skeletons and the mom faints. The mom's like, this is your husband. So according to the story, the Shiva scares everybody when he arrives. But eventually they give him a bath and everyone falls in love with him because truly he is more beautiful than all the gods. It's just like that air. It's like the Jesus story, you know? Yeah, Nandi is beautiful, but you can see all these all these beings are like, oh, it's a cow. It's just a bull. It's not it's this bull doesn't match the golden chariot. So Shiva is understated at best, but kind of eccentric. Yes, the wedding of Shiva, the wedding of Roxanne came in in the bull. Yeah, I know, no, no, the gods came. Everyone came to the wedding. So then they saw Shiva for what is this guy like Jesus, you know? You might miss the Christ if you saw him at Whole Foods because he's probably going to look like a homeless man to you. You know, there's a whole this guy in Westwood. His name is Andrew. We do headstands quite often together. You might see us if you're driving by the chevron. Talk to him. If you're ever in chevron, across the in and out in Westwood and you meet a man named Andrew, he's a sage. He's a realized master, I believe. He's really really awesome. And his brother wrote the book Tantra Illuminated. Shiva was a catfish. No, Parvati was in love with him. Parvati's mom fainted. Parvati's mom was like, oh, I can't even imagine my daughter marrying this goblin king, this lord of wild animals. Another name for Shiva is Lord of the Crooked Things, you know, because he wears a crescent moon and he's all about like antinomianism. Anyway, if you were able to see Jesus for what he was and most of us would miss him, you know, we would realize that he was a king appearing as a beggar. Similarly, Shiva is the greatest god appearing as a demon, you know. So that's kind of beautiful. Hi, Rachel. So that's a beautiful idea that there's more to it than meets the eye. So this is where you're starting to come into Tantra. So notice the metaphor of Shiva is very important because Shiva is all about redirecting, inverting. Yogi's love hits stands. Why? Because it's an inversion where you might have spent semen or sexual energy, rasa engaging with the world. You now redirect that flow up the spine to awaken chakras. So in Tantra, we start to get language like chakras, language like either or pingala and all these kind of mystical phrases come from the Shiva Parvati thing. So now I'll explain Tantra very briefly. There is an eight, it's going to be a nine part series. Episode nine is this Thursday, but I do have a nine part series on Kashmirish Ravism and Tantra because it really is very complex. There's a lot to it and also a lot of misconceptions. Hint, hint. Tantra has nothing to do about Whitsex. Sorry. There's just nothing in the literature as to how to have better orgasms. The word Tantra has literally nothing to do with sex at all. It has a lot more to do with death than it does to do with sex. So there's a lot of misconceptions about Tantra and in that nine part series, we talk about what Tantra is and isn't and why it's very difficult to start Tantra practice because it's an initiatory tradition. You need initiation, Dekshah. But right now, all I want to say is this. You have Vedic religion, but then you have Shamanic religion, right? So you have the Vedas, then you have these folk practices that Shiva is characterizing. Oh, and if you want to get someone is asking where to get the nine part Tantra series, it's on my Patreon. And there are about eight videos, but you can also come and catch Episode 9 on Thursday live. And that will sum it up and then it will be available. It will just be recorded on Patreon. Okay, so I'm not really really gonna get into what Tantra is or isn't, but suffice to say this. Tantra comes a little bit from the intersection between the Vedas and the folk religions. So Tantra is like when tribal shamanism meets the Brahmin elite who are sick of their Vedas. Can you take that? It's like in the UK when there were these fancy rich art school boys who were getting into American blues. So American blues is a folk tradition. It's an oral tradition. Whereas these kids are in art school like Clapton and Sid Barrett from Pink Floyd. So it's kind of like emerging. You know, it's emerging of urbanized rich upper-class people, intellectuals, artists, and the tribal shamanism of these ascetics, these forest ascetics. So Tantra above all is a death cult. It's interesting and understanding what death is. It's very metal, by the way, because Tantra does hang out in graveyard. It's practicing yoga on dead corpses to try to figure out death. So the reason Tantra is difficult to talk about is because there are many different kinds of Tantra. Tantra emerged as a practice somewhere around the 5th century AD, probably earlier, and it emerged within shivism. Shivism is the religion devoted to Shiva. So Tantra first emerged as a ritual tradition honoring the God Shiva. But the rituals of Tantra are different from the rituals of Veda in one very important detail. And the detail is iconography. Remember how I told you the Veda's didn't have any idols for their gods? It was just a pit of fire. Tantra is the one that innovated that. So if you look at all these pictures behind me, all these images of deities, it was Tantra that gave us that. It was Tantra that created the images. So if you go to any Hindu temple now, you're going to see Tantra iconography. Tantra iconography is what we call Hindu gods. It's from Tantra. That was their innovation. It's called Murthy. So first Tantra gives us Veda's do mention Shiva. His name is Rudra in the Vedas. But probably because he was painfully interjected from meeting in the south. Okay, so in the Vedas, there's a Veda known as the Atharva Veda. It's the fourth of the Vedas, the newest Veda. And unlike the Rig Veda that seems rather alien, the Atharva Veda, when you read it, you'll relate to it more. Because in it, there's a bunch of black magic. There's a bunch of spells like how to win a lover, how to hex your enemies. There's some of these folk magic things in the Atharva Veda. So the Atharva Veda is like the book of witches, if you will, Indian witches. So Tantra came because of Shrivism. Okay, I know this is a lot because we are covering like swaths of history now, rather with grand sweeping statements. But suffice to say this, Shiva is probably a southern god, thanks to Dave Dukpatthaniyak's research. This is just, it's a mythological speculation. But in the Vedas, you will see that he is an outsider god. In the piranhas, you will see that even more. He's called Rudra Howler because of the grief he felt when he lost his wife, but also to reference how crazy and wild and weird he is. So in the Shiva pirana, Linga pirana, Skanda pirana, you'll see how Shiva is an outsider. In the same way that these shamanic practices were outside Vedic religion. But Vedic practitioners were becoming jaded like Nachiketa was with the exoteric religion they were born into and they started to hang out with these tribalists. And that produced Tantra. So Shrivism comes first and from Shrivism comes Tantra. So Tantra is intricately linked with Shiva. You cannot understand Tantra outside of Shiva. And hopefully now you know why. So from Shiva comes Tantra and there are three kinds of Tantra. I'm going to go very briefly here. There is the traditional dualistic form of Tantra that is still sort of practiced to this day. It's called the Dakshina mark. Dakshina means south. Mark means path. So Dakshina mark means the southern path of Tantra. It's a reference to the right hand Tantra. So this is a dualistic Tantra. It sees Shiva as a separate deity and it's mostly concerned with rituals. Its primary practice is what we call puja ritual offering flowers, incense, chanting mantras, doing essentially ceremonial magic, you know, in order to get closer to Shiva, to the deity, known as Shiva. From Dakshina mark, we get different flavors of Tantra. The one that you're probably most familiar with is Kaula. Kaula Tantra is started by a woman and it's the most progressive philosophy of India. So the mythology of Tantra Marga as Kaula lineage expresses it is as follows. There was a sage. His name was Gyanitranatha and he goes to a place known as Mangala. Sorry, known as Udhiyana. Udhiyana is in northwestern India. It's also the birthplace of Padmasambhava. So just remember this name Udhiyana because it's going to become important for Tibetan Buddhism in a little bit. Wow, we are really covering quite a bit here. Thank you for bearing with me. This is the difficult part. We're just about to get through the most challenging and intricate part, which is Tantra. Now, Dakshina Marga produces a brand of philosophers like Gyanitranatha who go to Udhiyana. Udhiyana is like a sacred place in India and according to myth or according to legend, this man, Gyanitranatha goes to a graveyard in Udhiyana. So the story of Tantra starts with a graveyard. Okay, so he goes to a graveyard and in the graveyard, he meets the goddess Mangala. We actually think this might be a person. Mangala might have been a woman, a woman practitioner or a woman sage, like a witch, you know, and he goes there and he's enlightened by her. Some people think Mangala is parvati or shakti. I haven't even started talking about shakti but I'm alluding to it. So Shiva's wife, Parvati, we're going to ask, how is Parvati related to Shiva? What does she have to do with Tantra? Okay, follow this closely. Mangala is the name of a goddess. Yes, of course, Jess. It will be available for you also with the questions and answers. Now, Mangala, which her name literally means success, right? Mangala teaches Gyanitranatha Tantra. We have a text now called the Chumma Sankehta Prakash, a great philosopher, Christopher Harish Wallace, whose brother is the guy I hang out with outside the chevron. So if you see me doing headstands with the homeless guy at chevron, know that he's the brother of a very famous Tantric scholar and they're both equally brilliant. One of them is in Portugal right now leading a kula and Oxford decorated scholar. The other is a sadhu practicing headstands in chevron. So do not be so quick to judge the homeless. They're not all crazy. Some of them are Shiva level crazy, which is enlightened. There. Okay. Christopher Harish Wallace writes a beautiful book, Tantra Illuminated. Ryan has it. So Ryan loves that book. I'm not sure where in Portugal actually, but he is there. You might check him out on Instagram. He's quite active there. He's a count is called Harish Wallace. He's doing a lot of great work right now to raise money for India too. And I love him. I love Christopher Wallace. Great scholar. He is a Sanskrit scholar. Sanskritist. He studied Sanskrit and he studied with Alexis Sanderson, which is one of the foremost scholars of Tantra in Oxford. And he's Christopher Wallace is like a new type of scholar who isn't just studying from an academic scholarly point of view. He's also a practitioner. So that's quite interesting. And if you want to study Tantra, get that book. Tantra Illuminated. It's really great. And Christopher Wallace is also now working to translate a never before translated task, task, text called the chuma Sanketaprakasha. Or in that text, right? It describes a very beautiful story. So I'm going to tell it to you now because it sounds a lot like what might have happened to Gyanetranatha in that cemetery. The central character of the chuma Sanketaprakasha is a man named Nishkriyananda, which of course delights me a lot. So Nishkriyananda is standing in the cemetery with his guru. His guru is called the Siddha Natha, meaning the Lord of perfection. So Siddha Natha and his disciple Nishkriyananda are in the cemetery. The chuma Sanketaprakasha describes Nishkriyananda's awakening, his enlightenment. And it describes it like this. This is how the story goes. I looked at my master, says Nishkriyananda. The wordless one, meaning his master didn't teach him through words. The wordless one looked up. I followed his gaze. And then the sky opened up and from it emerged the wild woman. The wild woman, her hair was all over the place. Her tongue was lollling. She was garlanded in skulls and she was laughing hysterically. With her intense eyes, she pointed to the book in my guru's hand. Now remember in Sanskrit texts, the books are like two boards of wood and a few leaves, bound by five strings. She explained the significance of the two boards and then she broke it. So this is called the breaking of the boards. It's very important in Tantra and it refers to an intense, almost orgeastic experience of revelation. And your mind breaks, language breaks, it's like a Zen Cohen and they're like, "Wah, you know, and you're enlightened." And stably you learn to become stable in that state. You become embodied in that state. So this is what happened to Gyanetranatha. He initiates two female disciples. So Tantra is very associated to female spirituality and that's where you get a profileration of female deities. So like you get a deity known as Parapara which later turns into the modern day Saraswati. So Lakshmi, Saraswati, all of these deities while they are mentioned in like the Vishnu Parana. Saraswati is the wife of Vishnu, Saraswati is the wife of Brahma. Yeah, it's not until this time that you start to see iconography about them. Like the cult of the goddess, at both Archa Mosam Hebaya. Now, sorry, just replying to it. Now the, the, the, nay, nay. Now the goddess, what do you call it? The goddess cult begins in India around this time like 5th century 80. So I want to point you to a kind of art movement known as the Arda Nareshwar. So this might be a nice Google, the Arda Nareshwar refers to a kind of sculpture and painting that emerged in India around the first century 80 and it depicts Shiva but cut in half. Shiva in a kind of not really hermaphroditic but kind of dualistic way where half is the male Shiva and the other half has like a breast and a sorry. One half has a cow, the other half has a tiger or a lion. Now you're starting to see a relationship between Shiva and Parvati, his wife. Now we get the word Shakti. So Kaz, now we're coming to Shiva Shakti. Yes, Denesh, thank you so much. Thank you for all the great questions. I'm glad I got to hit Tantra right before you left. You know, that was important for me. Just to hit Tantra there. Bye, bye. We are going strong. Thank you for sticking around everybody. I'm very, very impressed. But yes, there is more breath left. I will power forward. We're going to get to the Buddha soon. Yes, we're going to have so many questions are coming in. They will be answered, I hope, by the end of this lecture. Ideally. So Shiva Shakti is different. Thank you, Amy. Shiva Shakti is very different from Prusha Prakriti Kaz because Prusha Prakriti pits Prusha against Prakriti. They're seen as two different things that are diametrically opposed. But as you can see from the Arda Nareshvar, the statuary and the art, Shiva and Shakti are not two different things. They're one and the same thing. How should we understand this? Don't worry, we're getting there. So now you're getting Goddess worship, right? There's a lot of this talk of Shakti whose name means power. You're getting Lakshmi and Sataswati and Parapara and most importantly Kali. We're starting to get excited about Kali. Thank you, Sam. Thank you so much. It's not me, just a messenger. Don't shoot the messenger, but don't praise the drunken monkey either. Yes, Thadas, another name for Kali. So you're getting these kinds of like, oh yes, Amanda, don't worry. It will be available. Recap. You can watch it tomorrow. Or tonight, if I manage to not pass out, I won't. Now or rather, Nishvot, God willing. Now you get all these goddesses, Kali and they're all wild and ecstatic. You know, they're all these laughing hysterical goddesses in graveyards, teaching spirituality radically by breaking the boards. Now Kala, Kala Linj tantra is unabashedly non-dualistic. So this is why I had to introduce you to non-duality a little earlier. It's unabashedly non-dualistic. In that, it believes only Shiva is. So mark this carefully. Like only Brahman is so too, Shiva and Brahman are interchangeable at this point, but they prefer Shiva since, you know, by convention, since it emerged from shivism, they just plugged in Shiva. So what did I tell you? Brahman means vast, the vast one. Let's look at the word Shiva. What does that mean? So it comes from two Sanskrit words. Sanskrit for she is the same as in Shava, Suna or Shava. So Shava means corpse and that root she is the same as in Shava and it literally means like to lie down or the ground. Anand Meerotha said something interesting. I was attending one of his Satsangs and he said something interesting. I don't know how etymologically correct this is, but it might be a folk interpretation. He says she doesn't just mean ground, it also means silent. The silent ground and Vah means vastness, much like the English vast. Shiva therefore means the silent ground of all being. Non-conceptual. It's not the body, it's not the energy, it's not the mind, it's not the intellect, it's not a concept, it's not linguistic, it is just the awareness. The void out of which all awareness emerges, nice destiny is just embodying her Shiva nature because that's what you are. You are Shiva, Shiva hum. Now this starts to emerge around the fifth century, this idea, this Kaula idea that Shiva is the vast ground of being. There's no iconography for this, this is just awareness. But and this is important. And Advaita Vedanta, this world is seen as Maya, meaning it's seen as illusion. And there are some very sophisticated arguments as to why this world doesn't exist. They are premised upon it changing and as Fabricio points out, if somebody changes all the time we call them fake, right? That's a bit of a hint. We have this intuition that if something changes it's therefore must not be real. So in Advaita Vedanta they dismiss the world as an illusion. Actually Brahman exists, Maya is not another thing, it's not a separate thing. It's not even a part of Brahman. It just is and it disappears. And it never really was, never really will be. It's just an intellectual error. Now this is beautiful, what Kashmiri Shakhti, Tantra does. Tantra says, Shiva and Shakti. Julia Vishjana, I'm not familiar with that phrase, Kashmiri. Can you point me to the text? It might be a Pali phrase. I'm not sure. But there is actually a school in Mahayana Buddhism, it's called the Yoga Acharya School. Yes. And in the Yoga Acharya School they're super non-dualist. Yes. Okay, so a lot of books are coming at you tonight. For Tantra, Christopher Wallace's Tantra Illuminated. But before you do Tantra Illuminated, I think you should do George first thing again. So earlier I recommended George first things, deeper dimensions of Yoga. Now I'm going to recommend Tantra, Paths of Ecstasy. So in Tantra, Paths of Ecstasy, he kind of describes Tantra for you in the very wide world of Tantra. And you'll see how Kundalini comes, it Kundalini is a bit ridiculous. But you'll see how it comes out from all of this. You'll see the link between yogi, budget and all of this stuff. Anyway, so Shiva, in the fifth century ish, you start to get this language where Shiva and Shakti are two aspects of one thing. This world as you see it is an aspect of Shiva. It's as much real as Shiva is real, but it's still just one thing. So if you look around the way, you're like, there's Roxanne and there's Shannon and here's me and we're all three different things. You're unenlightened. You are a bound soul. But if I'm able to look at Roxanne and Shannon and this zoom screen and my ring light, and I realize that they are none other than another aspect of me and we're engaged in a kind of weirdly schizophrenia, masturbatory, self-titulation, flirtatianship, then I'm enlightened. So that's how Tantra phrases it. Shiva and Shakti are in love with one another, but there are two aspects of one another and creation is the dynamic interplay between subject and object, awareness and the things within awareness. Do you see the central insight here is that there is invariable concomitants and that's a kind of fancy philosophical way of saying there is an unbreakable link between the subject and the object. There is a subject, there must be an object now, without an object, how is the subject to know itself as a subject? Meaning how are you to do nethy-nethy? How are you to do not this? and not that if there was no this or no that for you to reason away from. Do you see that? It's such a beautiful move but the idea is that there is nothing that can be proven to exist apart from awareness and awareness cannot be proven to exist apart from the objects of awareness that create a kind of pivot for awareness to be aware of itself. So tantra gives you a beautiful intoxicating worldview which is why reject Maya as unreal. Shankaracharya was very likely a tantra but he recommended world renunciation. Tantra also recommends that but it doesn't recommend leaving the world behind to go to the mountains and closing your eyes and sitting in what the yogis call Nirvikalpa samadhi. It recommends something else called Sahaja samadhi which is enlightened while eyes open. And the only way to do that is to realize that this world is an extension of you. So the way the tantric worldview works is this. Shiva in a desire to experience himself. Okay, notice how this language is so foreign and alien with regards to Brahman. Brahman has no desires. We call Brahman Nirguna Brahman meaning Brahman without properties. How can a thing without properties have desires and why would it desire if the world is unreal anyway? So knowing the world to be unreal, what desires do you have? So tantra kind of changes the script and it says no, no, no. This being this Brahman which is really you, they call it Shiva now does have a desire. And that desire is known as itcha Shakti. The power of desire. What does it desire? So just think about this. If you were unlimited awareness, you know, if you were the iron soft hour of the Hebrews, limitless light limitless awareness. It's not a question of if you will create a world. It's a question of when as Christopher Wallace puts it beautifully because sooner or later a desire will arise in you to experience yourself as awareness. And the only way to do that is to create a seeming duality. So within Shiva, Shakti appears. Shakti is just Shiva seen from a different angle and she is this world. So now Maya, what the what the advice is called Maya, these people are calling Shakti. They're calling the vibratory world of existence. Now mind you, the language of tantra was incomprehensible to a Western audience until quantum mechanics started talking string theory. You know, so the language of tantra was so exotic. What do you mean vibratory universe? What do you mean it's all one vibration at different degrees of frequency? This is the very progressive language that tantra was using and you can read about it in text like the Spandakarika, which means the doctrine of vibration by the way. It was Spandakarika, the doctrine of vibration. And there's like cool works on this. But now this world is seen as the doctrine of vibration describes this world as an infinitely rich, exciting vibratory realm. So someone asked about the Holy Ghost earlier. I think it was Denish and then he disappeared. That's it. But Denish, if you're watching the recording, this is the Holy Ghost. The Holy Ghost is the Alm, the Pranava Shabda, the primordial sound, the word of God that was with God, that was God as the gospel of John talks about. That's the Holy Ghost. It's an ocean of energy. That's what Shakti is. She's an ocean of energy. So is energy different from consciousness? No. Energy is another aspect of consciousness. So remember in Spider-Man at the end of the movie Peter Parker learns with great power comes great responsibility. Tantraika would say no with great power comes in equally great consciousness and with great consciousness comes great power. You cannot have consciousness without power. You cannot have power without consciousness. Shiva is consciousness. Shakti is power is the world. Shiva is subject. Shakti is the object. Some of the art theorists in the room might be interested in the women and the male gaze and all that. I don't know. You can go down that route if you want. A lot of the Tantraika philosophers were art critics and drama critics and all that. So eventually, now in the sixth century we get a beautiful text known as the Vignana. Bhairava Tantra. There is a beautiful translation by Lauren Roche, PhD called the Radiant Sutra. Ryan has this one too. Now the Radiant Sutra is a translation of the Vignana Bhairava Tantra which means the terrifying wisdom of Shiva Tantra. So let's break down the word Tantra. Tant means to expand. Thra means device. So a Tantra is a device that expands. Expands what? Maybe expands your mind. I don't know. Now Tantra is a reference to a text. When you call something at Tantra, you mean that it's a text in the tradition of Shiva Shakti. Most Tantras are written as a dialogue between Shiva and Shakti with the full understanding that Shiva is not different from Shakti. There are two aspects of each other and Shakti asks Shiva questions. Like how is one to recognize the Shiva nature? How do people escape the wheel of birth and death? How do we make meaning of life? So essentially, a Tantra is like Anupanishad. Anupanishad is any text in which a teacher and a student are debating whether it's father and son, whether it's God of death and Nachiketa. There's usually two people debating. St. Anselm writes a Tantra. St. Anselm writes Anupanishad when he writes the three dialogues. That's essentially Anupanishad. What makes Anupanishad? It's a dialogue. Yeah. So Tantra is like that. It's kind of like Anupanishad, except instead of a teacher and a student, the teacher is Shiva and the student is Shakti, but Shakti is feigning ignorance. She pretends not to know stuff. She's like playing dumb. Partly because yes, Roxanne. Take care. Good night to you. She's playing dumb for our sake. Yes, Ryan, of course. Good night to you. This is like an endurance test. No, please sleep. No, don't. Go to sleep. I will keep going. Don't worry. And it will all be available as a recording. And actually in a few minutes, let's take a break and ask some questions. Let's do some sharing and some questions. So we'll close here. Vignana Bhairava Tantra is a Tantra and it describes some very weird practices, like spinning around in circles and then falling down. Like these practices that seem so simple and seem so obvious. So one of the strategies of Tantra as opposed to the Vedic orthodoxy that's obsessed with rituals, as opposed to the ascetic traditions, Patreon. All these recordings will be available on Patreon. As opposed to the ascetic traditions. Beautiful, Ryan. Tantra says, you can achieve enlightenment by being in the world, but not of it. But there are everyday opportunities for enlightenment because everything that happens to you happens in your awareness. So everything that you experience points you to the experiencer. And you can experience this with a taste of chocolate on your mouth. That's where we get these weird Western notions of Tantra and sex. Because Tantra isn't and anything goes philosophy really. It says that anything is conducive to spiritual liberation if approached with a certain meditative maturity. So you cannot practice Tantra if you're not a master meditator. I'm sorry, it just won't work for you. You'll get too caught up in the pleasure, you know? The point is to see the awareness in which that pleasure vibrates. So that's from the Vignana Bhairava Tantra. So let's end Tantra here. If you are interested in studying Tantra, it's an incredibly exciting world with Mudras, hand gestures, with Mantras, sacred invocations to do magic spells. Tantra is for liberation as in the case of Kaulad-Linit Tantra. Sometimes for black magic as in the case of left hand path Tantra or the more folk witchy stuff. That definitely exists. It's a world of gods and goddesses and mandalas, beautiful images that you can look at that can give you revelatory insights upon meditating. Yes, thank you Sam. See you soon. So that's Tantra and if you're interested, here are a few books to study. So start with George firsteens Tantra Illuminated. That, sorry, George firsteens Tantra's path to ecstasy. That will kind of orient you. Then you move on to Christopher Wallace's Tantra Illuminated. That will deepen your understanding even more. Tantra reaches its heyday during the time of Abhinava Gupta in the 10th century city Shrinagar in Kashmir. That's why it's sometimes called Kashmirishivism. I'm sure you've heard that word. And his main text is Tantra Loka. It's not really available in English translations, but that is the central text through which we get the language of Tantra. But you might be interested to check out World of Tantra by B. Batta Charya. So if you're interested in tantra, the world of tantra. gives you a first-hand account of an Indian tantra that is an Indian practitioner of tantra. So this book will show you the culture of tantra, how tantra is practiced, how weird it can be, but also how delightful it can be. Now this is probably the best book recommendation I can give you today. So if you take nothing else from from this lecture in terms of a reading list, take this. The gospel of Sri Rama Krishna. Sri Rama Krishna is probably the greatest sage India has ever produced. He's seen as an avatara meaning an incarnation of God herself and he started his spiritual journey as a tantraka. His guru was a female tantraka. So the gospel of Sri Rama Krishna is super tantric. You know throughout that book he makes very tantric statements like "Brahma cannot be separated from his Shakti." He's like conflating Advaita Vedanta and tantra. Instead of saying Shiva Shakti, he's saying Brahma Shakti. You know it's great. And tantra is seen as the householders path, the path for the everyday man and woman. So from tantra we get hattayoga and a lot of you might have come to yoga because of postures. So in part two we're going to talk what gospel of Sri Rama Krishna. It's by a man named M. Very mysterious. His name is M full stop and it's written in Bengali. But you can get an English one and the English one is really great. I am checking the chat. I just can't respond to it too much. Now the the English version is by Swami Nikkela Nanda. This is a nice name for you to remember Swami Nikkela Nanda. He's a great South Asian writer with a lot of resources on Advaita Vedanta and also other things. Okay so now you know and let's just make this overview. From Hinduism which is the practice derived from the Vedas, you get Vedanta. Vedanta has three forms. You have Advaita Vedanta of Shankaracharya and Gaurapada and Ramakrishna and Vivekananda. That's the Advaita Vedanta lineage. You have Vishisht Advaita, Qualified Nanduality which is very much like yoga and Sankeya and then you have Dvaita Vedanta which is duality. I haven't spoken about that yet since it's the latest one. We'll talk about it a little bit later. So Vedanta that's the first school of Hinduism. The second school of Hinduism is Purva Mimamsa. Sorry Purva Mimamsa is like more orthodox than Vedanta. So I should say that first. Purva Mimamsa then you have Vedanta. Then you have other schools like Sankeya. From Sankeya you get yoga. You also have Vaisheshika which is a school about physics and atoms and then you get Niyaya which is a school about logic. I haven't really spoken much about that but all these are considered Hinduism. These are the six orthodox schools of Hinduism. Outside of that you have what you call the Hatero-Doxy which consists of Chavaka which is materialism. The Chavakans reject all supernatural things. They're like the Western material, the Christopher Dawkins. Sorry Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens of India way before it was cool to be a pretentious atheist. You know they were doing that. Then you get Jainism, Buddhism and Tantra. Tantra is closest to Hinduism. You might even add it as like the seventh branch of the tree of Hinduism. So now we're going to take a break. We will do the Buddha and Buddhism in a separate class because as you know the 26th of May is a full moon and the full moon of May is known as Buddha Purnima. It's celebrated by Buddhist as the day of the Buddha's enlightenment or at least it's a day to celebrate the Buddha. So in that class I will give you a nice long lecture on the story of the Buddha. He's one of our greatest sages by the way and Swami Vivekananda said a beautiful thing. He said, "The Buddha was the sannest man who ever lived. There were no cobwebs in that brain." She's a beautiful statement. So the Buddha is probably one of our finest. Ramakrishna and the Buddha Shankaracharya and Chaitanya. These are perhaps my top four. Right? The Buddha's way up there. Ramakrishna, Chaitanya and Shankara. And of course Vivekananda. Okay. So I'm going to close there and open the floor for questions. In part two if you're still around for that we'll talk about modern yoga which is how did yoga come to America? How is it that the studio showed up? What kind of yoga are you practicing? What's Kundalini yoga? What's Ashdhanga yoga? What's Vinayoga? What's Ayanga yoga? And how did it get here for crying out loud? Okay. That's coming up in part two. For now though I do want to stop and I want to get a feel for our room. So let's just take a pause here and open the floor to any questions, shares, comments, use the raised hand function so I can see you. Yes. Okay. Douglas, please. Hello again, Nish. We met last week. Thank you again for having me. I remember how to read without reading. Yeah. Too many texts. But not a problem, right? So I had something I wanted to share and then I had a question for you. When you speak about, you know, we are not the mind and we are not the body. Your favorite thing to say. I had a realization last night during a show that I was watching with my partner. There's a video game and I can't remember the name of it right now, but in this video game there's a man who was like the last one to survive after some sort of apocalyptic event and he's trying to get to this place where he can upload his consciousness into what is essentially like paradise. And he, the whole video game is like working through all of these things to get to this place to upload his mind to this paradise to escape the horror of like what what he's in. And the twist at the end of the game is that he successfully reaches the place. He successfully uploads his consciousness to this paradise, but he still exists. He still exists in his reality and in all of his suffering and his pain and in this room that he wanted to escape, but his consciousness does get replicated and uploaded to this paradise. So it also simultaneously exists. Ah yeah, there it is, so much. So it simultaneously, he is like uploaded into this paradise. And last night I was finishing some of this show, this new show, Invincible. And in this show there is a bad guy who one of his things is that he replicates himself. He creates a what's it called a duplicate like a not replicates himself like he does it through science. He clones himself. There we go. He creates a clone and they go even further into this idea that the clone is a perfect replication of your body. And then he dumps his mind into it. It's a perfect replication of his mind, but it is not him. It is somebody else, you know, completely. And I feel like my partner made me realize because I'd been speaking about a lot of this with him. He was like, that's exactly what you're talking about. Like you are not the mind and you're not the body. And I was like, yes, that's exactly it. Like you can completely replicate your mind and your body into like this other being and it still won't be you. You won't be inside of it. It will be experiencing its own consciousness separately from you. And I just thought that that was a cool thing that might resonate with some people and wanted to share that. My question for you is I've been ruminating a lot specifically on the advice of a Dante. I know you speak on a lot of things, but that's what has been speaking to me the most. So I've been trying to do research on it and stuff. And I think sometimes it can be hard because I only speak English. So I'm sure like a lot of them were interesting questions and answers are probably written in another language. And I don't know how to search for these things. I was curious within Advaita Vedanta, like you spoke last week with someone who was talking about horoscopes and you spoke kind of with the sort of like, you know, it's not it's not that like we hate horoscopes or anything, but kind of unimpressed with the idea because it has to do with like your body and your mind. And that's not impressive. That's not you. So where does the concept of like personal identity come into the philosophy of Advaita Vedanta? Like I'm like a part of the LGBT community. I've you know dealt with a lot of situations where you have to like figure out like what things are me and what things are like things. I grew up learning a little while like the concept of personal identity is really important in a lot of just groups that exist. And I'm curious like what is where like is there any sort of like an inside or a teaching or an idea within Advaita Vedanta and like personal identity? Like is that something that you're supposed to completely release? Is that something that you would have already released if you were more enlightened? Like what is what is the conceptualization there? This the second one. It's something you would already have released as you approach closer and closer to the lofty heights of Advaita Vedanta philosophy. So you're very right. Douglas it's a you hit the tail on the head. Advaita Vedanta is a difficult philosophy when it meets identity politics or the DSM-5 right because basically the statement is this only the statement I am is true. Anything you put after the I am is false. So if you consider identity first of all Advaita Vedanta gives you very powerful argumentation working with your immediate perceptual awareness to show you that you are not the body. Yes? So we've done that together. We did earlier, we did Taitriya Upanishad, the changing versus the changeless. Then there's the Drig Drisya Viveka, which is the seer versus the scene. Anyway, all these arguments are designed first and foremost to show you that you are not this body. That's really important because then you will never make a statement I am and complete that with something about the body because you know it's not you. Then you go a little deeper and you realize you are not the mind or the subtle body. So all issues of identity pertain to thought constructs. Now, niche is a thought construct. So if niche wants an identity as a yoga teacher, what is that but a thought? Right, a thought in my awareness. It's a thought that I negotiate with other thoughts in society. So I'd write the Vedanta says, you are not the body nor are you the personality. So any I am statement that it involves an identification with the body and the mind will ultimately lead to suffering. If not now, then sooner or later. The reason it will lead to suffering is because nothing in the body or the mind is permanent. And it's not just that there's political oppression. You know, it's not just that buying into identity brings with it a set of political conundrums. It's that the body will die and the personality will change. And anything that comes and goes is unlikely to give you any lasting satisfaction. So if you are engaged in a process of finding identity, but finding it in the body and the mind, you will, according to Advaita Vedanta and Buddhism, be categorically disappointed. So Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta actually can become rather jarring for someone who's engaged in the process of formulating an identity because the Buddha is even more radical. So we say there is an identity, right? It's an identity more fulfilling than any other thing you might say. Like I am and then insert a statement here might be fulfilling for a time, but it's never going to be as fulfilling as just being awareness without any attachment to body or mind. A nice word is asangoham, which means I am the unattached self. And Douglas, I will refer you to the unattached self talk by Swami Sarva Paryananda. I know rather than reading, these might be good resources. Last week, Douglas, you asked for your resources and then I didn't give it to you. I just slammed reading. So this is an audio resource. It's a podcast and available on YouTube. And in this talk, Swami Sarva Paryananda discusses the mantra asangoham, which means I am without attachment. So ideally, you are without attachment to any identity, knowing it to be just a thought, coming and going within the mind and you are not the mind, you are the one who is aware of the mind. So you don't want to be attached to not being attached, nor do you want to be attached to an identity, you just want to be. The Buddha goes much further, because in Advaita Vedanta, we say, you are not your body nor are you your mind, nor are you any of the labels that you are giving yourself, but you are something. What you are is a self-capital S. That Atman or self is the same as Brahman, which is such a non-existence consciousness bliss itself. To be on all politics, it's beyond all societal ideas, but it is something, right? So you've got something to grasp on. Now, the Buddha was like, this is a problem, because now you're going to be attached to being unattached. So you're going to turn this Atman into a concept, and that's going to be your new identity. Do you see how this is a problem? For a philosophy that's interested in taking you beyond identity, it still has a trap, which is to identify as the one without identity. That's still an identity. Asangoham, the unattached one, is still an identity. So the Buddha was like, fuck that shit. We're going to go even more radical, and the ultimate insight of Buddhism is this. Ah, nothman. Ah, nothman means no self. So ultimately, when you master the Buddhist path, you will realize that within the five aggregates, the Buddhist call it Panchascanda, the five aggregates, Rupa Skanda, Vedana Skanda, there's like five things that make up your experience of life. In none of them is there you. It's called Ahnathman, it's felt like this. And you know, you can see why it's called Ahnathman. Ahnathman means self, right? In Advaita Vedanta, Ahnathman means self. So Ahnathman means no self. So the Buddha says, not only are you not in the body, not only are you not in the mind, you are not anywhere. So the Buddha's trying to take you even beyond the need for a self. Advaita Vedanta is trying to take you to your true self. Do you see that? Because they ask different questions. One of them asks the question, who am I? And the answer is not the body, not the mind, not any identities, not any political labels. You are just the one who is aware of all that. Let the body and mind have their political labels. You can operate on two levels at once. So if the mind must glum on to a statement like yoga teacher, let it just know that you are not the mind, you know? Ideally, once you really internalize this, the body and mind also will kind of give up their need to be attached or whatever. But the Buddha goes further and says, how do we end suffering? Who is not asking who am I? As the Advaita Vedanta is asking. He's asking how do we end suffering? And he's realizing his insight is that suffering will always exist as long as you try to identify with impermanence. And everything is impermanent. Ahnathiyam, Ahnathiyam, Sarvam, Ahnathiyam. So somebody made a joke the other day. We have a lot of conversations about politics and the intersection with spirituality. Spirituality is intensely political. As you can tell, right? These are intensely political statements. In India, they met the attacking of the caste system. And identity like, I'm a Brahmin. I'm a Kachetariya. I'm a Shrutra. Non-duality rubbish that notion. You are not any of those things you are aware of. So it does rub up against politics. But politics are more upset with spirituality. And spirituality is kind of indifferent to politics. So Vivekananda was often asked to speak on politics. It was a very politically charged time. The Civil War had happened. America was trying to figure out its identity as a new nation. Walt Whitman, Emerson, and Thoreau threw up their hands and stopped being the voice of America. So people were confused. And Vivekananda was always asked and talks. What do you think about this? Or civil rights? And he would often say, God, and truth are my only politics. All else is trash. I love that phrase. But inevitably, we do always have these conversations and we should. And one day, someone made a really funny joke. My friend, she made a really funny joke. She said, we're talking about Black Lives Matter and how in America there's these weird linguistic things where it's like, just weird linguistic statements that are super politicized. Although they are obvious statements, they become political statements. So we were talking about that. And the joke was, you know, the Buddha might have said, no, life's fair. Really, that might be in the Buddha's position. He's like, you aren't anything. You are not men. But look at this. With that realization, the Buddha spent his entire life walking up and down India, trying to free people. Yes, Amy. So the Buddha realized he wasn't a self, right? He was asked, what are you? Are you an angel? He wasn't asked, who are you? Are you an angel? He's like, no. Are you-- he wouldn't say angel, deva. Are you a deva? No. Are you a sage? You say, no. Then what are you? You'd say, I am Buddha. Aham Buddha-- Buddha asked me. I am the awakened one. Awakened what? Awakened to the fact that there is no eye in that statement. So what did the Buddha do? He didn't just disappear. He didn't go to the mountains. He spent his entire life teaching other people to realize the emptiness of their eye. But only a realized being is capable of such compassion. Now, on the question of identity, transgendarism, it's explored. Like, for instance, Ramakrishna, as you will read in the Sri gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, often dressed as a woman in a way to overcome sexual desire. So he said, if you're trying to overcome last, first of all, this is, why would you try to overcome last? Just direct it towards God. That was his typical statement, like a chuv tantraka. But he used to dress as a woman. And the reason he did that, the reason he cross-dressed, is because he was trying to train himself out of the male gaze and the male lust. And also in the viking of our tradition, they say everyone is a woman except for Krishna. So there's no genital politics. You are all categorically women-- sorry, even if you think you're a man, you're not. You're all women. And only God is the one man, you know? So there's a story of a naked female saint. She never wore any clothes, because Shiva's often seen as the naked one. So she was a shiver devotee. She never wore any clothes. And sometimes the orthodoxy would scold her. Be like, have you no shame, woman, coming here to a special meditation spot, naked at a woman? And she would say, why should I be a barist? I see no man here. She would often say that in front of all the men, you know? So yeah, there have been questions about gender. In tantra, they mix the man and woman together. Shiva and Shakti. And they express the infiniteness between those two polarities. So any mixture of those two genders-- it's gender fluidity, and it's best, because it's a vibratory world in which you are not any one body, any one mind, but a vibrating mesh of all the bodies and minds. So I think that's what I can give you, Douglas. Advaita Vedanta and Buddhism is a little more radical. Once again. to take you beyond all conceptions of self, whereas other forms of schools like Vaishnava is happy for you to conceptualize a self. I can't say this though, you should sort out your identity politics thing first. You know they say, if you wanna be a spiritual practitioner, you better be able to conquer a kingdom before you come to us. If you don't have the willpower to be an emperor of the world, you won't have the willpower to meditate. You are about to storm the fortresses of yourself. Also, if you don't have incredible intellect and open heart, if you haven't worked on yourself, then there wouldn't be very much to offer, would there? So the question is, you do need to sort some stuff out. You need to make sure your monetary stuff is okay. Your self-esteem is okay. You have to have a base level of psychological wellness in order to even start practicing spirituality, which seems like a catch 22, because the reason some of us practice spirituality is for psychological wellness. And here I am telling you that you need psychological wellness for the higher insights of spirituality. So just say it like this, we're all at different stages of our path and wherever we are is just fine because it's not a linear path. You know, all it takes is one insight and there's no saying when and how you will come upon that insight. So you might do it while articulating yourself within the gender politics identity matrix of America, you might do it in the agendered A identity nebulous of a Buddhist monastery where the women and men both shave their heads and they're like, "Ageender, you know, however you find it is the way you find it." But generally we could say, you practice spirituality first to heal only to realize there was never anyone that needed healing because there was never anyone home to begin with. You never left, you'll never get there. You are now as you are perfect, but not in any way in which you might have previously thought of you. Thank you so much. Yeah, I thought that was really beautiful when you were talking about people who make not having an identity, an identity. It brings to mind people who make the entire idea of ego death, like their identity. There's some people you'll talk to who are just like, "You a death, you a death." Do you know what that is? I killed my ego. And that's their entire identity. But I hear what you're saying. Yeah, and I feel like even within your state, what you're saying, it's hard to know whether or not the right thing is to reject your need or wants to change parts of your body and self or to lean into that and have no criticism of it. You know what I mean? I know attachment to it, but I thank you for all of your wisdom and I'll pass on to them. - No, thank you for all of yours because you're right. Tom Thore is about radical acceptance, which is accepting where you are in your path and remembering that everything is as much God as everything else, but not everything is as conducive to revealing that. So appreciate that point, it's very subtle. Everything is as much God as everything else, but not everything is as conducive towards revealing that fact to you. You know, so some things can inhibit your spiritual progress, so rejecting things, demonizing things and also indulging in things and being attached to things are two sides of the same coin. It's an over identification with the thing as opposed to the awareness in which it sits. So yeah, you're right Amy, it is a really great insight. Whether you should reject or lean into it and the answer is neither. In the vig yes, neither, exactly Amy, you got it, you nailed it, you got there before I did one punch, but the punch line is neither. Neutrality is generally what we look for. It's peace going beyond duality and in the vig nyanabhaya tantra, you will even see something like the tantrica. I just saw BS Bitmoji, and that's the most appropriate bitmoji I've ever seen for today's talk. Seated on two books, reading a third. I love it. But yeah, the vig nyanabhaya tantra says something like, don't throw yourself into sorrow. Don't cost yourself into despair. Nor should you abandon yourself to happiness in Star Wars. Yoda says to Luke, adventure, excitement. Jedi crave not these things. But of course it takes a lot of adventure and excitement until you're ready to finish with adventure and excitement. Ramdas gives a nice metaphor, he says, rather than making any moralistic statements about peanut butter, if you're really addicted to peanut butter, just eat the whole jar. Eat it until you cannot bear the sight of it. So one way to finish with your pleasures is to just be jaded with them. And the only way to be jaded with them is just to live them. Anishas drunken monkey case, he needed to have his rock star fantasy for a little while. You know, he needed to play guitar in a band and go up and down in the sunset boulevard and try all the substances and enjoy all those like egoic fantasies, only so that he could decide that they won't worth it. But there would be no value in sacrificing those things if I didn't first enjoy them only to realize their holiness. So Tantra is a path of engaging in the world. Be in the world, do the things that your heart wants you to do because ultimately no rush. You will eventually come here. Eventually you will arrive at the point where you crave to go beyond the body and mind and I promise you we will be waiting. - All right. Yes. - Yes, why are we doing episode four? (laughing) Yes, not talking about the prequels has put me in a different age group. - Yes, Alicia, goodnight to you. - And yes, Evie, I definitely mean other lifetimes. Although Advaita Vedanta rejects reincarnation but every other philosophical school in India recognizes reincarnation. When you come to the Buddha talk, you will see why. The Buddha says you don't reincarnate 'cause you don't exist, right? But the body and mind reincarnate are what he calls the Panchaskanda, they reincarnate. And in the text Pratitya Samudbhada, he gives you a 12 step process as to how reincarnation happens. It's all very scientifically explained and reincarnation is a scientific theory to kind of explain how it is that we, you know, when we learn we don't feel like we're getting something new, we feel like we're remembering something we already knew. You know, to explain why it is that you feel like doing stuff and not quite souls. I mean, it depends. Some schools in Hinduism, yeah, they like to talk about Atman as a soul, but soul is a very Christian word, you know? In Indian philosophy, we don't really have the word soul. The closest thing is Atman and Atman means self which means the individual experiencer. Yeah, they're feeling of familiar Amy. Good. Okay, Holly, please. Welcome. - Hi, Mish. Thank you so much for all of your shares. I've been with you for a few months now. This is my first time sharing. And I am doing a 250 hour yoga teacher trading course and it is a complete roller coaster and the amount of information is super overwhelming. And I had to do an essay on yoga philosophy and you have helped me out so much. I wish I could rewrite it now. I've been listening to you. I had a couple things. I want to say about Amulance comment about the perspective of the self and coping with chronic physical pain. When my mother was getting birth to my sister, she wasn't so much pain, she had actually left her body and described it as writing on this wave of pain but not actually experiencing it. And she believes it was like the only thing that actually got her through it. So I, from what I've learned to, from what she experienced, which I couldn't imagine, you kind of get to a place where you do kind of leave your body and then you're able to sort of identify with the higher self and let your body go through what it needs to go through and then come back to, which I think is beautiful. And I've gotten there a couple times during meditation, you know, without all the pain involved. But I did really want to bring up. I've been talking to my friends and family about, you say a lot how the real us is with aware of the dream state deep sleep in our awake state or dream awake and deep sleep. And I have been only dreaming. Every night I could take a nap for five minutes and I wake up from a movie, a story. I don't remember the last time I slept without dreaming. And honestly, it's kind of exhausting. So and then I wanted to ask, because you want to see Drunken Monkey, I actually really enjoy alcohol. So I've been trying to push that to the side. And I didn't know if that had anything to do with my not being able to deep sleep, but I've been trying to sort of get rid of alcohol even though nothing has happened to me that I should be, like you said, jaded by it. I never really got hurt. Nobody else around me got hurt. Nothing ever bad really happened. But I know that it's sort of encumbering on my practice and everything involved as far as becoming more realized and aware of being aware, which is a beautiful process. But alcohol definitely It holds me back a lot and so I did don't want to talk about why can't I just have deep sleep. I dream every night it's exhausting. I don't I don't never sleep without waking up and ruminating for at least 10 minutes of what I just went through. So I really want to hear your thoughts on that and thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me. I'm so happy you're doing your 250 hour yoga teacher training and YTT is a beautiful thing to do and it does put a lot on your plate very quickly. So it's important to remember that you have a lot of time to work with this material. You know you can digest it. Fabricio and Garvit in the chat are both referencing alcohol with relation to deep sleep. One thing we say is that we have a phrase it's psychically tired. A lot of people when they meditate they fall asleep because they are psychically tired in that their energy body is working to digest a lot of very undigestible things. With regards to alcohol you never really want to reject a diet or a practice. You want to allow that practice to naturally fall away from you. You know so the discipline is not to stay away from alcohol. The discipline is actually to intensify your Asana Pranayama and meditation. So you're already the 200 hour teacher program like you're doing a lot of Asana which is awesome. Involved the Pranayama and meditation a little more and then as you continue to practice you will notice in you a kind of wholesomeness a feeling of completion and a natural spontaneous intoxication that kind of edges out the alcohol. So it's not like you're giving up the alcohol. You're just realizing that there are pleasures that are a little bit more refined and beautiful and nourishing that make the alcohol redundant. It's like you're graduating to different kinds of pleasures so to speak. So that's the thing. Yes it's true. There are certain things that might inhibit spiritual practice. Like intoxication seems to be across the board something that every spiritual, most spiritual traditions advise against. So in the Quran for instance they talk against being intoxicated. You'll find that in the Quran. In the teaching of the Buddha in the Dharma chakra prvartana sutra one of the Buddha's first teachings in the deer park you will find the eightfold path, the ashtanga marga of the Buddhist. In there there's there's a recommendation as to right living or right conduct and it says avoid intoxication. It also says don't be a tax collector which is kind of funny. I don't know why that's a livelihood that's apparently not kosher but it's in the text. Anyways so it does say there don't be intoxicated and Indian society generally one of the rituals of tantra was to drink alcohol. Now the reason tantra says drink alcohol is because Indian society won't touch that stuff back in the day. Like Brahmin society like the last thing they will do is drink alcohol. So tantra is like oh you think god is everywhere then drink the damn alcohol. Show me. It's kind of the equivalent of a raw foods egan vegan eating the big Mac to prove that they've accepted all things. So the tantra ritual about alcohol wasn't about intoxication. It's more about confronting things that you don't want. So if you're attached to something like a certain kind of food or a certain kind of pleasurable experience or certain kind of alcohol it can be very difficult to push that away because the what you resist tend to persist. It's not the alcohol that you're working against. It's something deeper. It's something deeper that brings you towards contact with alcohol and that cannot be treated superficially by abstaining from alcohol. It can be addressed only through deepening your meditation. So I would practice maybe some Vipassana. You might try just following the breath and developing the ability to stay with the breath while remaining peripherally aware. You might check out John Yates's book. John Yates has a beautiful book called Mind Illuminated which is kind of a good manual for anyone getting involved with meditation. He can help teach you the Buddhist style of meditation. Just very good. And in time hall you might discover that there's a kind of feeling like a completion, a kind of kind of passive contentment that causes you to no longer desire the things that you desire that you suspect might be holding you back. And then you'll notice you'll be sleeping deeply. Maybe. I don't know. Oh my gosh, it's so perfect. Because I have these meditations that completely I mean Trump just any amount of alcohol or any type of alcohol that I could ever drink or any substance for that matter. It's kind of maintaining that. But then you realize during meditation what really kind of crops up for you and kind of disrupts that sense of like you said passive contentment that you may feel and sort of getting to know yourself that way. Yeah, for sure that's beautiful. Yes. Yeah, thank you so much for the recommendations. I love that answer. You should see Fabricio also recommended a lovely book. Yes, mindfulness in plain English. That's a lovely one. Actually Buddhist mindfulness comes from Buddhism. That word mindfulness. It comes from the Anapana Sati and Buddhist text. It's kind of a misleading word though because it does refer to a certain state of Samadhi and Sati. Samadhi is concentrated awareness focusing on the breath. Sati is peripheral awareness. Mindfulness is the overall quality of consciousness achieved by doing both at the same time avoiding distractions. So yeah, mindfulness is pretty good. As as beginner meditators should practice or get some grounding in that style definitely. Holy I will tell you a story. A lovely story from Paramahansa Yogananda. You can see it in the biographical documentary Awake. It's just called Awake and it's a documentary on Yogananda Paramahansa Yogananda. And in it there's an actor musician. There's a musician and he's coming to visit Paramahansa Yogananda at his ashram in his place of spiritual learning. And in the ashram there are monastics. So people who have chosen to abandon all possessions, all name. Again, something about identity politics, a lot of monks give up their name even. And he goes and he hangs out with the monks but he feels a little weird. He feels like he doesn't belong. The monks are so pure. They don't drink and they're celibate and they're so pure. And he on the other hand is addicted to many patterns of behavior that he considers kind of immoral. Yet he still is attached to them. So he goes to Paramahansa Yogananda, the great Indian saint and he says, you know, in every religion that I've encountered so far, there's a long list of what you can't do. You can't do this. You can't do that. You can't do this. But in your religion, I haven't encountered such a list. And Yogananda just smiles at him and he says, does this does this mean that I can go down into the city and do all my things and still come up here and hang out with you guys? And he's like, yeah. And he's like, I'm confused about that. So Yogananda says, do you drink? And he says, yes. And he goes, do you smoke? And he says, yes. Do you have extra marital sex with many partners? And he goes, yes. Which is I'm like, do you have promiscuous sex with me? He goes, yes. And he says, okay. You do not have to stop doing those things. And he's like, what? I can continue to do all of that stuff and come and hang out with you. And he says, yes, yes. And this is the clincher. But I cannot promise you that those things won't fall away from you. It's a beautiful thing. So the idea is don't worry about it. Don't worry about it. Just keep practicing. And the more you practice, the more any kind of extra need will go because you'll just encounter more and more the wholesomeness that is ever present within you. Maybe Holly needs a certain pattern of behavior. But the more you realize you aren't Holly, never were you Holly, never will you be Holly. You are the awareness in which the very vibrant and very beautiful yet albeit illusory phenomena known as Holly arises and dissipates. Then you'll be free of the Holly Karma, so to speak. But the key is to practice. So we try our best, not to moralize. And all the energy we would be spending moralizing, we devote that to practicing instead. Wow. Yeah. That makes that makes perfect sense. It falls away. And if your practice is tried and true, then then it honestly just lowers your vibration. Yes. You know, so thank you so much, Nish. I really appreciate it. You are most, most welcome Holly. Very good. Very good question. Very good discussion. Nam Geoho and Geoho. Yes. Because when I noticed here in the West and starting to be in Asia too, I noticed in India, it's starting to come. But this idea of like Catholic guilt. So a lot of people here when they were young, religion that first experience, yes, Amy, that first experience of religion is your wrong. Now here's how to get better. And it's pervaded even our yoga. So the idea is your broken will heal you. No. Yoga has never made such a claim. Yoga is not about healing or growing. As I've said numerous times before. Yoga is about recognizing the completion and perfection you already are that you just forgot. God. You know, so you never had a fall. You never left that state. But in the process of returning to that state, that is, and by that state, I mean the stable, unchanging, grounded experience of your self as awareness. That's what I mean. In coming back to that place, there are certain practices that you need to do. Certain abstinences, dare I say it, sexual continents is an important one, at least in the mind. You know, so when Jesus said he, whosoever looks upon a woman, commits adultery, he was very wise because he's pointing out, "It's not about what you do. It's really about what's going on in your mind." Because meditation is about your mind, right? So you might be like a celibate monk, but in your mind, you're just fantasizing about it. You're like, "Okay, that's not going to work for you. The idea is to be pure in the mind." So, yeah, that's going to mean questioning and perhaps, yeah, it's more about intention, more about vibration, if you will. And there's certain things that as Holly beautifully pointed out are lower in vibratory frequency that are not conducive to being stable and higher vibratory states. That's just the simple fact of it. Nothing moralizing about it is just gravity. You know, it's not out to get you. It's just physics. It's a vibratory thing. Now, because there are lower vibratory experiences like loss, like greed, and notice, the thing about lower vibratory states is that they always reify separate self. You know, so the only reason you feel lost, greed, aversion is because you're truly identified with the body and mind, and you see everything else is separate. So as long as you stay in that vibration, it will perpetuate a world view in which you feel separate from everyone around you. That's why you do need to some degree to discipline yourself against such thoughts, and you will need to recalibrate your language. You must be careful with the use of the word I or the use of the word B, you know, to be was is you must be careful before you give ontological allowance to anything. Be careful with how you use that word B, how you use that word I. Now, these are disciplines. Going to the mat every day is a discipline, and you have to do it every day. This is important. You cannot miss. Please mark my words. You cannot miss a single day of practice. You cannot. You just for the higher states of realization to truly ground welcome back Amanda to truly ground yourself in this understanding. You cannot drop a single day of practice. Does that mean your practice every day? God no. You will always fall short of your ideals. Are you kidding? You're human. Part of this quest starts from recognizing accepting and having compassion for human frailty. So now we've got something interesting, right? We've got the ideal, the spiritual ideal, which is to practice every day, to be careful with our languaging, to only live in higher vibrational thoughts and guide ourselves by ideals. The higher your ideal, and you should set very high ones, the higher your ideal, the more likely you are to fall short of it. So you have to skirt the timeline between discipline, holding yourself to your ideal, and most importantly, having compassion for the inevitable failure to do so. A thousand times you will fall, a thousand times you will get up. And importantly, during this whole process, avoid moralizing, avoid being like, "Oh, that's bad." No, actually it's good. It's good that you've recognized it. So celebrate the moment of awakening that comes right after noticing you falling into a pattern, noticing you falling into what you call it, "off the wagon," so to speak. And every time you notice that, it's a victory. The more often you notice it, and the more often you associate noticing with the feeling of joy and celebration as opposed to a feeling of self-recreamation, you know, like, "Oh, I fell off." No, say, "Ah, I discovered that I fell off." If you can create that positive association between falling off, and noticing that you're falling off, sooner or later the number of times you fall off become less and less, and after a while you will gradually, stably be in this state. You won't miss a day of practice. It will be natural. Practice will do you, though in the beginning you must do the practice. Yes. Yes. Yeah, it is like remembering, right? You've always known it. Oh, Fabricio, no, we did not do the Rambayana. Nor did we do the Mahabharata, the two greatest epics of India. Well, quite a bit of stuff, it's ambitious. I know. I was like, "I'm going to provide the buffet of all that India has to offer to raise some money for her, and all I've done is held up two or three grades of sand." And then I look at the beach and I'm like, "Oh, whoops, we tried." Okay, let's continue to go down this line of questions. Next up is Mads, I believe. Please. Hey, I guess I'm going to refrain from asking the technical questions that I haven't until I've finished studying Dr. Shabha Vekha. But I wanted to ask something, I guess, more topical to your lectures tonight about, I guess, different traditions. So one of these swamis who I've been listening to a lot was educated in the Chinmayana Mission or by someone who was in the Chinmayana Mission. And they, I don't know if this term is considered maybe a little derisive, but a called Ramakrishna Mission and Vivekananda, Neo-Viranda. And I was just kind of wondering, I know you refer to Ramakrishna and Vivekananda a lot. And I just kind of was wondering what you thought about that. Yeah, it's a great question. The Chinmayanda Gita was my first Gita. So I remember being a young boy in studying my first commentary of the Gita was Swami Chinmayanda's Gita. So I have much love for that school. But yeah, that phrase, Neo-Viranda, what does it mean? You know, it's funny because with Ramakrishna, it's so hard to, a lot of Western audiences dub Ramakrishna and Advaita Vedanta. Like they say, he is a Vedantist and particularly of the non-dual variety. But when you study the gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, he's not really that. He's more of like a dualist bhakti practitioner guy. He's always telling people, it's the Kali Yuga. You know, he's always saying it's the time of darkness. You're not going to be able to live by the standards of 7th century BCE India Vedantist. Good to see you, Holly. Welcome. So it's like Ramakrishna is always advising people against classical Vedanta in a weird way, right? But he does say it's the highest revelation. But the way he says to get to that revelation is through dualistic worship, which is through singing the songs of God, through praying, through dancing and singing. So he's kind of like more in the Chaitanya school when it comes to practice. But you might call him a Gyan in heart, but a bhakti in form. You know, Vivekananda is the opposite. He teaches Gyanayoga. He teaches Advaita Vedanta, but he's like a bhakta. If you notice, you know, if you read about Vivekananda, he's like really deeply down inside. He's a bhakta. You know, he worships Kali and Ramakrishna used to make fun of him and say, "Oh, now he rejects Kali. Just you wait, he'll come around." And if you read his writings towards the later part of his years, as you will read in Swami Nikhil, an autobiography, he waxes lyrical on God. He's super dualist. And he even asked him, "Ans you a non-dualist?" He said, "No. As long as I have a body, I'm a dualist." It's pretty funny, but it's hard to put Ramakrishna into a box because one must remember, either you think Ramakrishna is a madman. A lot of people think he's a madman. He's just a madman of Dukshaneswar. He's just a crazy guy in a temple who worships his own penis and puts his wife on the altar and worships her. You know, he was known for this holy madness, a kind of eccentric. He cleaned an untouchables bathroom with his hair. You know, he's kind of a eccentric fellow. So many people thought he was a madman. Some people thought he was just another sage, but legendarily he's an avatada. And many pundits came and confirmed that he was in fact an incarnation of God. And that means that he represents the entirety of South Asian culture. In fact, not all cultures. He practiced as a Muslim and he deemed that faith through true. He practiced as a Christian and he deemed that faith just as good as any other. So he's kind of like a world teacher in that sense. So to call him a Vedavid is weird. He's a Muslim and a Christian and a Tantrika to call him a Bakti practitioner is weird because he taught him a Gyanah. So I hope you can appreciate the point here, Mads, that it's hard to call Ramakrishna any one thing. Especially when we consider the connotation of the word neovedanta. So neovedanta often gets used with reference to the teachers of Advaita Vedanta in the West, teaching a brand of philosophy known as the direct path or the direct method. Now the direct method is the idea that you don't need to meditate or practice. You just need insight. All it takes is one insight, but here's the fine print people to have that insight. You need to meditate. You need to practice. But neovedanta generally refers to these new non-dual ideas. There's a book called non-duality and me. Or Eckhart Tolle for instance is what we might call neovedanta because he talks about Vedantic ideas without necessarily talking about the Vedas. It's just called non-duality. People like Rupert Spira is a Western non-dualist. He calls himself a Sufi at heart, which is funny. But he also might be put into the non-dual neovedantist camp. So man, if I understand correctly the term neovedanta to mean the teachings of Vedanta as it pertains to the direct path or the way it's developed since Shankaracharya, then it wouldn't be right to call Vivekananda or Ramakrishna that since they're when they talk about Advaita Vedanta pretty classical. So if you look at Vivekananda's Gyanayoga, it's classic Shankaracharya, classic Drig Drishya Viveka, classic Panchadeci. If you look at Swami Sarva Priyananda who talks right now on behalf of the Ramakrishna mission, it's like the most traditional Advaita Vedanta you can imagine. Of course he's a very charming fellow. So he's always kind of putting in some Harvard flair, but I would call it actually class assist. By no means neovedanta. What do you think about that man? I don't know if that helped. Yes, I was very interesting. I've actually been kind of avoiding Swami Sarva Priyananda until I was suggested I listen to the intro to the Janta series. Yeah. Because of that sort of warning that the other Swami who I'd been watching put out, I wasn't sure I'd be able to distinguish between the two at that point. And he had basically mentioned defective Prokaryas was like the exact term he used, but that's very helpful. Thank you. Yes. Also one thing it's important, there is a little bit of politicking between these various missions because when it comes to funding, it seems like there are some political or financial interest because it seems strange that anyone's school of philosophy would call out another school of philosophy as being wrong without like an argument or these schools do debate a lot and debate is definitely central to how these philosophies have developed over the years, but I also get the sense that there is some competition, you know, perhaps. I don't know, that's just a hunch. And ultimately only you can tell. So only when you're watching something, can you tell? And I don't think you should worry so much about something being neovedanta because ultimately if the argument works, the argument works, the test of any spiritual school is whether or not it can meaningfully create a state of desirelessness, fearlessness in you. So if it's a neovedanta argument and you got from Eckhart Toley, but you managed to stably maintain a state of non-duality, it did it for you. So remember Vidya Ranya, you know, in his text when he was asked, if the ego is unreal, then all the knowledge of the ego is also unreal, right? All your knowledge is false. All your philosophies are false. Vidya Ranya smiles. He doesn't smile, it's in a text. I don't know that he's smiling, but one imagines him smiling. He says, who can deny this? You're right. All this knowledge is false because he can only point you to the truth. It is not the truth. So you can throw it away once it's done its work. With that being the case, Ramakrishna was very clear. He said, what does it matter what you practice? And be free, that's it. And Vivekananda was radical. He said, either by psychic control, Rajayoga, or by Gyanayoga, philosophical inquiry, or by devotion, Bhakti Yoga, or by selfless service, or any combination of these, become free. That's the whole of spiritual practice. That's funny. That's the exact proctor that Swami was watching pointed out. Yes. I'm not traditional, the four paths of yoga. It's true. That's the innovation. Because in the Gyanayoga text, you have a hierarchy. And the hierarchy is, Gyanayoga is the highest. Insight above all. What if you can't understand these arguments? If your Buddha, your intellect is not purified enough to get the idea, then they say, Rajayoga, meditate. So right below Gyanayoga is Rajayoga. But when you come back and you say, Guru, I can't meditate. My mind is busy. Then they say, relax. Bhakti Yoga. Go and pray. Prayer will prepare you for meditation, meditation, prepare you for insight. And then if you say it, but I don't believe in this stuff, it's so weird. I don't want to pray. They'll say go and selflessly serve others. Maybe you'll start to appreciate God when you can see it in others. And then you can pray dualistically and then you can meditate. So you're right. Traditionally, Advaita Vedanta has a hierarchy and it puts Gyanayoga at the top. Dualism comes back and says, you know a ladder can be turned both ways, right? So there's also the idea that Gyanayoga comes first and from Gyanayoga with the insight, that's how you get meditation and from meditation you get Bhakti and from Bhakti you get service. So there's also the idea of an inverted ladder. The innovation of Ramakrishna and yes, Vivekananda is that. To instead of having this ladder and hierarchy to break the rungs off, scatter it on the floor and say, pick as many rungs as you want, just get free, do it now. I don't care how you do it. You know? Which is kind of a syncretic approach that maybe you're right, is unique to the Ramakrishna mission. Which is a good point, man. Thank you for that. I think you, that's helped a lot. Yes. It's exactly kind of what I was curious about. So thank you. Of course, also remember, Ramakrishna is a Tantraka. So he's going to inevitably piss off the orthodoxy. You know, like I said, we're the embarrassing cousin. But Chinmayana mission tends to be a little more proper, you know? So you can tell. Yes. Okay. Did you have another question, Mads, or are we good? I do, but not for now. Okay. I'll save that one. Good, good. Thank you. Thank you for that great question. Krishna P. Welcome. Please. Hello. Hi. So. Hi. So I actually, it's actually really surprising you came up on my for you page one day. And I'm currently going through some understanding of it because my family is Brahman. I come from a Brahman family and actually two sides. I have the Patels and then I have the Brahman. So my mom and dad are actually. I didn't even love to go on the biggest arguments. We, I think they both always do have. But my mom, she's always been into spirituality. And we've been surrounded by astrologists. We've been surrounded by mostly like her side of the family has always seen the spirituality. So me growing up, seeing them also believe in the Hinduism and doing all the, the poojas and everything and doing the rituals, every like, every occasion that they get like especially Navatdi and all those see during those times. It's like, I always wondered why do I not like to say here and listen to this? What is it? Like it's like I did, I just did not like it. There was so many things, especially. One of the biggest things that really upset me, I think I got into an argument in my family was us women. We go through menstrual cycles every month, correct? So the one thing, Brahmins are like, you cannot touch. You do not come around. You do not go around the temple. You do not do this and that. And I sat there and I was just like, you're going to tell me something that God has given me that you believe in that we've been created. So God has given me this body. I tell me I can't go into something like, for example, Mataji, right? She's a woman. So I was like, she's a woman. So she can't be there. You're telling me like, so I was just like, I told my mom, I was just like, mom, there's just something that I just don't, I just don't believe it. What is it? And then I would see her and she was just like, well, if you want to do meditation, it has to be straight. You have to wake up or during this time. It has to be up in yoga. You have to do this and that. And I was just like, what? And so I was in this whole path of in denial. I was like, no, there's no way because I do not sit for hours. I cannot just do it. And then the more and more, like September last year, probably when I started going more into it, 'cause I was just like, I wanna understand more to me, more to my life, more to understanding why everyone says certain things to me that Denver made sense and I was like, why do I feel like there's just more to me than just this simple little life that I lived in this Indian household being around strictness and stuff. Mother who believes in spirituality but also is very strict in everything. And then not only that, but it was all these confusing things. So when you tell me like it's, you do what you wanna do till you let it go. So you've come to that point. So I'm at this point, I was just arguing with them two days ago, I was just like, I cannot explain it about my past. I feel like I just woke up from a coma. That's all I can tell them. I'm like, I just woke up from a coma. I am now understanding like these little tedious things going around me having sex, going around me going parties, going around me trying to be a part of society, trying to going around me being a part of the higher power, money, everything. And I was just like, no, I can't do this. I, there is something more to it. It has to be not about great. It can't be about the society standards. It's about myself and trying to find the balance in all of it and being a human just to live that life and move on. So it's just like, it kinda makes it a comforting thing to know to hear that, okay, I am probably doing it the right way. I never have the full knowledge, but now it's making me seek more knowledge. That's all I wanted to say is like, thank you because I don't know how. It's just, I just say, I tell my mom, I'm like, mom, weird timing, weird things happen. People just walk in, answers are answered. I can't explain more to that. Just let me do it and I promise you, I'm gonna be fine. And but she doesn't believe it. And that's what I'm just like, come speak to my mother because I don't understand how it's explained to an Indian parent who also is into spirituality, but doesn't believe me, you know? - Yes, yes, you know, welcome to the spiritual path. Krishna, because I remember the Kata Upanishad, Nathya Katha begins the spiritual path by rejecting the orthodoxy of his Brahmin father. So he realized, as I was very early on, that something is inauthentic about this. As much as you realized about that weird temple custom about not being able to go into the temple and all of that. Yeah, and Subguru, some of the controversy around Subguru is his defense of certain Brahminical rules. And the Brahmin society is a very patriarchal and very elitist and very cost oriented. And so some defender, defenders of that, like Subguru is a mystic, right? So Subguru is giving a mystic reason as to why these rules exist. But us Gyanis are sometimes often a little bit, when you call it skeptical of mystics, because we shouldn't take anything on faith, right? Mystics, the best thing that they do is provide us a method to verify their mystical findings for ourself. Otherwise, it's just a religious leader that we're accepting on faith. We don't like that. Gyanis are more about self-discovery. So Nathya Katha, he has to start by rejecting everything that was offered to him by society. As you did, you have to ask why this rule, and when people can't tell you, or perhaps some of them give really good reasons, like I have deep respect for every sage in India. Every Indian is powerful spiritual teacher and I respect for all these sages. And they might be able to give you great answers. Subguru is an excellent resource. So you might hear answers, but they might not make sense to you. Some people are like, oh yeah. Okay, I don't go to the temple, but you're like, no, this seems kind of weird. Tantra is all about flipping the script. Remember, remember I told you that story, not just of Nathya Katha rejecting the orthodoxy of his time in order to go and find his own path, but remember also the story of Shiva destroying Daksha's party. Now, that story was pretty horrific, right? It was of like the demons and the goblins, riding the dogs of war and tearing apart this party and everyone's being killed and Daksha's head gets cut off. So Daksha is the patriarch of Vedic society. Shiva's beheading of Daksha is a sign of Tantra radically overturning the rules. It's very rock and roll, isn't it? Tantra is like the punk rock of Indian spirituality. It's like, I stick it to the man, you know, I'll find my own way. But here's the important thing, Krishna. We try not to make a big deal out of it. So Tantra does, even though they're breaking the rules, they're actually like law abiding citizens outside of their practice. So they learn to live a kind of double life. Tantra was very, like secrecy was very important for Tantra. So they're not like often, often they're not like out and proud. I'm snubbing the orthodoxy. No, they're like Shiva. They're just indifferent. The orthodoxy has nothing on them because they have something far more authentic and real. So I'll leave you with one last thought, Krishna, in navigating this relationship. Like say you have parents who maybe they're orthodox brums or maybe you have Christian parents or Islamic parents or whatever kind of parents, atheist materialist parents, how do you navigate a relationship as a spiritual practitioner, genuinely interested in the esoteric path with your family who might not be interested in that or might be interested in it in a different way. You know, so it's very important in this to recognize that spirituality is a personal path. As much as you want to share with others, this is probably the best that we can do. So we have these sangas, you know, so we can all come together and realize we're not alone. And if you're in Rio for Bricio, we'll, you know, take care of you, give you all a pause. If you go to one of his classes, he'll, you know, it's like the idea that we're all family and wherever we go, someone's there to take care of us. And all of us have had instances in which we've been snubbed by society because of our spiritual realizations. So this is our sanga, our society. But even in here, your experiences are highly idiosyncratic. You might recognize it in someone else like, oh, I resonate with that. But still, it's just you. It's you and the privacy of your own meditation, experiencing your own realizations. And so remember the Jack Cornfield quote, "My parents hate it when I'm a Buddhist." They love it when I'm a Buddha. Do you know the difference? The parents were really hardcore Christians or whatever. So they hated when he was a Buddhist, meaning preaching the ideas or telling them what he thought was right and what was wrong and arguing with them. But when he was able to be a Buddha, just peaceful, letting them have their own way of seeing the world but perfectly content in your own knowing, that's when they will love you. So one of the things I say is if you're on the spiritual path, one thing you might wanna do is call up all those teachers in high school that used to piss you off and go and get tea with them. If you think you're so far on the path, do spend a weekend with your parents, or guardian, most of us are like, we don't get along with our parents or guardian. So go and spend some time with them. Go and find someone who has a different political idea than you, someone who might think maybe all lives matter or if you're like a black lives matter. Someone who might think, actually immigrants should be in cages. I don't know. Go and find someone with like the craziest political idea that opposes you, hang out with them and try to understand things from their point of view. Essentially what I'm saying is you test your spiritual maturity by being in situations that trigger you and realizing that they no longer trigger you. The more they trigger you, don't be upset. It's just a sign that more work is necessary. - Nish, you were so right about that because I am at this point because okay, growing up, I used to be a very bubbly person. I love to care for everybody, no matter what it was. I never wanted to do the bad and nobody. So I am at that point where the only people I really are you or am really upset with are my parents, I think, because I think the idea that my mother being so spiritual but then also like saying that she doesn't fully believe and like all of Hinduism because of like some of the beliefs are wrong and like she doesn't really like fully believe in them Brahman and then you have a father who's a complete atheist, he doesn't believe it, you know? (laughing) But then he does. - It's hard to even explain okay? Until I think January, my grandma passed away so we had to do the puja and everything. So we, instead of having just a regular one, oh no, no, not yet. They were literally my mother will not listen, she will argue. But she, they had the spiritual priests come in. And in the beginning, I do not like pujas. Some say in there and I'm like, I'm like falling asleep and I'm like, I'm not gonna do this. I don't wanna be here, but I'm like, I'm just gonna listen. So he said something with ourselves. It was like, it's like trying to find yourself in anything. So I just started listening and I was just like, hold on, wait. Is he actually talking about the real Hinduism? The way it was before everything happened before someone tried to change up. everything. And I'm just like listening intensively. And I spoke to him before my mother joined. And I asked him, I said, I don't have to do it strictly, right? And he was like, no, it's your own path. It's your own journey. And I said, thank you. That's what I was thinking. I was like, if this is self, isn't it supposed to be our, just an art timing? And I, as I keep going and going, I tell him, just like everyone is just learning and healing. Everyone is learning and healing. As everyone was just like, like during last year, I was like, I was part of the, I was very like into the whole Black Lives Matter. I was very heavy into it. But then I stepped back and I was seeing it from every perspective. But as a one thing I can say about me, it's like, I like to jump into everyone's shoes and see it from every perspective. If I get in the fight with the friend, if I get in the fight with my family, I see it from their perspective. I see where it is. And that's why I am now I think more so I'm finding that peace and balance. So I can be okay. That can be content with myself and want to be able to move forward with everything and look for more, more of a positive path. So it's like, I move and I want to hear everyone's story. So yes, like you said, jump into a person's mind doesn't matter what they believe in. And hear the craziest, I love doing that because I want to hear it. So I do. I will join them. I'll just like listen to their part just so I can hear what's going on. And I'm saying and I'm like, wow, wow. It is so unique to see that a human that you are me. I am you. But we live these different lives and different thoughts. It's just the most unique thing. And I'm just like, wow, but then it's like, we live in this society. I hope one day you just realize too. And how that patient because it's like one day, one day. So I think that's why I'm at this point. So I see where you're coming from and I kind of gives me more insight into what more now. Of course. Yes, yes. And I think there's a very beautiful point that destiny is making, which is when the Buddha says to be a lamp unto thyself. And Advaita Vedanta makes the same claim, which Advaita Vedanta, it's important to remember that this is a phenomological approach. So that's kind of the name for it. Phenomological approach means argument based on immediate perception of now. So go with what is available to you in your immediate sense perception. So a lot of these arguments from Advaita Vedanta, that and in Buddhism, the central practice is meditation. You meditate to have insights, but you are the ones to have the insights. So the question is really great, which is what about physical reactions to scriptures or teachings? So when someone says something, what do you make of resonating with that? So when you feel like you're resonating with something, is that you just taking something on faith or is that something else? It's a great question, Destiny. Is that am I phrasing it right? Is that how you would phrase it? Yeah. It's a really, really subtle question. I'm happy you asked it because what do we, what do we make about resonating with something? So you'll notice, and we often talk about this in terms of reincarnation. When you hear something that clicks, it sounds like you're remembering it, that you always knew it, and now you're just hearing it again, articulated perhaps in this life for the first time, but you always thought it, or somehow you feel like you're remembering it, or picking it up off the shelf after having forgotten it. So what about this? Now in this sense, when I say something that causes a corresponding resonance in you, or when you read something in a scripture, what's going on is you're picking up on an insight you've already had in a previous life. That's what we describe it as. Okay, clicked, it resonated. That's one level of experience. Another one is inspiration. So it's okay to take things on faith if they inspire you to ultimately find out for yourself, but it's finding out for yourself that really matters, but that doesn't mean we ought to do away with faith because everything requires some level of faith. So see this, in the dualistic religions, you take on faith that God exists, like Krishna exists. So a good example of dualism is Vaishnava, and I'll interweave this here because in Vedanta, there is a school known as Dwighta Vedanta. I know not that much about it, except to say that from Dwighta Vedanta, dualistic Vedanta, there comes a character named Lord Chaitanya. So Chaitanya is a 15th century sage in Bengal, who popularizes what is today known as the Hari Krishna movement. So Chaitanya has a vision of Krishna in the forest, and he of course, as a monk, had his grounding in dualistic Vedanta. So when he sees this vision, he's not going to say, "Oh, I am Atman, and this is just Maya, it's an illusion." He's not going to say that. You know, Advaita will say that. He's not going to say, "I am a part of the one, and this vision is part of the one." Do he's not going to say that? He's not qualified non-dualist. Instead, he says, "God is real. I see him." Right? He's a dualist. Now, notice this. Chaitanya had a first hand experience of God. For him, he wasn't taking on faith that God exists. God actually appeared to him as Krishna. And then, he comes to the streets of Bengal, and he starts to sing, "Hare Rama, haare Rama, haare Rama, haare, haare." Because he's in love. He saw God. He's fallen in love. And what do you do when you're in love? You sing. You sing and dance like a fool. It's the basis of every Bollywood movie. A character falls in love. He runs into the streets. He sings a song. And somehow, everybody in Delhi knows the choreography and knows the words to his song. I don't know. But Chaitanya kind of does this forest gump thing where he walks and everyone follows him enamored by his song. So, he preachers with no uncertain terms that faith is central. God exists. God is Krishna. God is a little blue boy. He is that. You must take that on faith. But if you don't, if you don't, that's too bad. You're like ignorant or whatever. So, if you read like the Sikh Shambhryta, the Chaitanya Sikh Shambhryta, it says a very beautiful thing in the beginning. It says, "Have faith for other spiritual traditions. Recognize that they are worshipping in their own way." But whenever you meet hedonist, whenever you meet Buddhist, whenever you meet non-dualist, do correct them out of compassion. So, it does have respect for other dualistic parts, like Christianity or Islam. But it is a little against any Advaita Vedanta that they hate, Brahman and this idea of a formless God. You know, because for them, that's heresy. That's blasphemy. You'll see it with Christianity. Christianity is a dualistic tradition that often sees nosticism as like blasphemous satanism because it makes the claim that's kind of non-dual, you know? So, Chaitanya is often called Gauranga, the golden one. Sang his dualistic song. It's Bakti. It's called dualism, the path of Bakti. This is the most faith-based path and it's typical of Vaishnavas. So, Vaishnava is a follower of Vishnu and they tend to just worship on faith. So, they do puja believing that a God exists up there and the role of the individual or Jeeva is to be a perfect worshipper of Bhagavan or God. So, the Jeeva, Jagrat, the world, sorry, and the God all exist. Jeeva, Jagrat and Bhagavan. This triangle, right? Jeeva, Jagrat, Bhagavan. So, visualize this triangle. A Vaishnava says it all exists and they just pray. Now, notice this. The goal of Vaishnavism, as you will read in Chaitanya, is ultimately to realize God. So, you have faith in God, but the goal is for you to see it eventually. And Ramakrishna himself used to have these visions of Kali and he would talk to Kali and he was very close with his God and Vivekananda, his first question to Ramakrishna was, can you see God? And Vivekananda is like, you can see God as clearly as I'm seeing you now. You can talk to God as coherently as I'm talking to you now. And Vivekananda was very impressed by that. The idea that these people are saying believe in God, but so that you can see him yourself. See her yourself. See it yourself. See? So, even in that orthodoxy, yeah, Hali, it's beautiful, right? Even in that orthodoxy. And, and Vaishnavas, by the way, have a reputation of being rather bigotent. As you will see in the gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, Ramakrishna does a lot of work to kind of get them to be less bigotent. But you'll see very clearly that they are interested in realization. And Ramakrishna will say, one can see God through worship, one develops love eyes and a love body, and it's with the love eyes that one sees the object of the beloved. I don't know. So, even Vaishnavas, that faith asks for realization. Yes, Emily. Take care. Thank you for coming. Yes. Thank you for being with me. Now, look at mysticism. So, mysticism like yoga, yoga or maybe like Buddhism and yoga, both say don't take things on faith. So, they're very against Vaishnavism, right? Yoga is like, I'm not going to believe in a God. I rather discover something for myself. So they just meditate. Buddhist are also like, look, I'm the Buddha. I had an insight and in my insight, there is no self. There's no God apart from you. There's no God within you. Here's meditation. Realize that for yourself. That's the only way out of suffering. But look at this. Even though the mystic doesn't want you to take an ideology on faith, they do want you to take a practice on faith. Do you notice that? They're saying, here is a method. And if you practice that method, you will realize this. Don't take my word for it, but do take my practice. You see, there's still some faith involved. And the faith is in the Buddha's ashtanga-marga. Hopefully you can see the logic and reason of why you want to practice that. But hey, it takes years. You know, it takes years to meditate and get to the level where you have shamata. A Buddhist term for tranquility of mind. And it's true through shamata, the tranquil mind that you can glimpse the inside. And if you're going to sit every day and meditate for like 45 minutes a day at least, you better have some faith in that system, you know? And in the Buddhist system, they say doubt. Doubt in the method is one of the obstacles. It says don't take anything on faith, but take the practice on faith. Now, look at Advaita Vedanta. Advaita Vedanta is probably the most radical of all these schools. And it says don't take even a practice on faith. Good night Vanessa. Like don't even, you don't even need to practice meditation. Yoga. More importantly, discernment, philosophy. Discern what is real and what is unreal. Use your intellect, your Boothi. But what do you have to have faith in? Your reasoning. You have to have faith in your own reasoning process. And you have to have faith that reasoning can arrive at truth. Ultimately, you do have to have faith in something destiny. The beauty of South Asian philosophy is a tempered skepticism with a kind of devotion. So in the West, they say, teach me in the West, they say, know it and then try it in the East. They say try it to know it. So our mentality is where like kind of open minded about practice. We're willing to just try stuff out. Whereas here in the West, you don't want to practice until you convince the practice is going to work. So it's important to remember you can't take skepticism too far destiny because, oh yes, Vanessa, beautiful. Because that means you cut yourself off from from inspiration that can come from faith. So the Boothi said, don't believe me. Don't follow me. Become me. But you still have to derive inspiration from his journey. You know, you still have to feel like you can do it. And you still have to believe that he did it. You have to believe that his method comes from his genuine insight. It would have been easy for you to do that at the time of the Boothi. Why? You would have met him. And you would have met how what you would have seen for yourself what an incredible individual he was. Simple, calm, but infinitely powerful. If you met the Christ, wow. Granted, if you don't miss him, most people would have missed the Christ. And he's at the whole food every day. You walk by many masters. You don't notice that. But that's easier, right? Seeing is believing. So I hope that helps destiny. You are supposed to resonate with things and have physical reactions and things you're supposed to inspire you and you should take things on faith. But ultimately, remember that they are means and not ends. That's what I'm advising against. That's what this tradition cautions you against. Faith as an ends. No, faith is very good as a means. We call it strada. Yes, just a minute. Yes. Yes. And then comes Zen Buddhism who says, kill the Buddha on the road. And you're right. Zen is Buddhism hardcore. It's Buddhism squared. It's like if you thought the Hina Yana, the Pasana people in Burma and Sri Lanka were hardcore, wait till you go to Japan and meet the Zen Buddhists. Yeah, they're the Marines. They're so hardcore that they'll give you so little teaching. They're so austere that they strip away. The Buddha is a very verbose gentleman. He talked a lot and I often make this joke. If you go to a party and all the spiritual masters were there, they're all of the same realization, but the way they express it is different. So on the couch, Jesus would be playing guitar. He's that guy at the party that plays acoustic guitar, you know? But the Buddha would be in the kitchen talking someone's ear off about why nobody exists. You know, Buddha is a Giani. Jesus is a Bhaktah. So the Buddha was very verbose. He spoke a lot. Zen Buddhism strips that to its bare bones in order that you can experience insight for yourself. Yes, anyway, here's Wonderwall. Yeah, Jesus would have done that. He was a man of the people except when he was flipping tables. Yeah, so in Zen Buddhism, Fabricio's spot on. They're so careful, like along the lines of the Buddha, to make any concepts, to reify any notions. And they noticed the Buddha was becoming a bit of a deity. You know, there's that story where the Buddha puts the lotus on a river and he says, "If the lotus floats upstream, I will be enlightened." "Low and behold the lotus floats upstream." That's obviously a tantric metaphor, right? For going up the Shashumna Nadi or like moving or redirecting the flow of life force, it's very tantric symbol. And if you were a tantrica, you'd recognize it. But people were starting to make the Buddha a celestial king, not an ordinary person with an extraordinary question. I mean, that's what the Buddha was, right? Ordinary person, extraordinary question. Ordinary king in an ordinary kingdom with an extraordinary question. You are that too. But people were starting to put the Buddha on the pedestal look what they've done to Jesus. You know, how horrid they've turned him into a deity. You know, when in fact, he came to teach people how to be him, to show them how to walk in his path. But instead, he's been turned into some kind of unattainable goal. How dehumanizing. You know, it's like when you meet someone, they're really beautiful or whatever, and you put them on a pedestal for it and deny them their humanity. It's like that. So that's why the Zen Buddhists are like, "If you see the Buddha on the road, kill them." Yes, your physical emotions are completely valid. Here's one draw. Yes, at the end of the path, we're going to be coming down. Yes, exactly. All concepts, you know, the idea is to go beyond it all. And remember the term Nirvana is a very important term. It means cessation. You know, it means the end. And in fact, it can even be described as blowing out. You know, Holly emphasizes the point. The ending, the closing, the completion. So, yeah, it's true destiny. Different paths in South Asian philosophy meet people with different dispositions. Some people are really against worship and devotion. Why? Because they grew up in a Catholic like church and their parents forced them to go, yeah, Holly identifies. So for them, if you say, Krishna exists, worship him. They'll be like, sing a heart of Krishna. They'll be like, but they are ready for meditation. Because it's austere, it's pure, it's reasonable. And so people come through that. Other people are so craving something emotional and beautiful and sentimental that they gravitate towards the heart of Krishna thing. Notice this often, you come into this practice through one door. The door of the heart or the door of the mind. Often, you end up going to the other door. Eventually, sooner or later. So through the practice of Guiana, I've become incredibly devotional. You know, because now I realize that this drunken monkey niche is the reflection of Brahman. But there is another reflection of Brahman. And that reflection of Brahman is in Maya. And that to Nish is God. It is in everything. And this Nish is God as well. It's God worshipping God. But there's still joy in that worship. Now, I never could have appreciated that without insight, non-eval insight. But that's turned me into a bakta. So now I sing and I pray and I bow and I put the flower and I light the incense and I look at people and I'm like, "You are Kali." And I fall in love with everyone because everyone looks like God now. Everyone's so beautiful. It's bakta, bakta, bakta. And the other way is true. You come in as a higher Krishna person. You start to crave a little more than that. Your mind hunger is for insight. So whether you come in through the path of mysticism, whether you come in through the path of the mind, whether you come in through the path of the heart, ultimately when you become realized, you would have mastered all three, like Nachikatha in our story. Yes. All right, that's a beautiful. Yes. The Vaishtavas tend to push a lot of people away who aren't Vaishtavas. As indeed, does any dogmatist do? Yes. Yeah, that's really beautiful. It's very non-dual too, that idea of seeing oneness as opposed to difference. Yes, beautiful. All right, Douglas, I were circling back to you. I know you had a second question. Yes. And after this, I need to go to bed. I am on the other side of the country. So it's actually past 3 a.m. here. But that's normal for me. So it's not too bad. It's just the end of the night for me. So I wanted to say it's hard not to fall in love with Shiva with the way you talk about him. It's clear how much you know and how much you love him through the way that you talk about him. And it's so hard not to see that and the way that you speak about him. But I wanted to ask what may be kind of a rudimentary question or like a more technical question about reincarnation. And then you said that advice of the dance is sort of rejects the idea of reincarnation. But obviously I understand like the idea, but I don't understand in certain practices that genuinely believe in reincarnation what they're like belief rests on. And I was thinking about it and I was curious like, obviously, if the idea of like enlightenment is that you get to the end of the cycle of like birth and living in Dasha and you transcend that and you no longer reincarnate. I feel like in a rudimentary sense, it would say an reason that there would then sort of be fewer and fewer people. Right. Like they would transcend and they would leave and they would not reincarnate. But then you know, you see the population of the earth like is rapidly expanding and you have more and more people. And I was just curious about like what the explanation was behind that in different ideas of reincarnation. Like are there a bunch of like little baby existences that are brand new that are being created or because it seems like a lot of people talk about past lives. And you speak about just even learning as almost an experience of like recognizing knowledge that you knew before in a previous life. And if everybody is learning and everybody is recognizing knowledge that they saw in a previous life. Like has anybody not been reincarnated? Like what's the idea behind that? The great question and in fact now you could probably appreciate the beauty of non duality with regards to that question because it's not that there are more souls. You know, it's just that there are more reflections of the sun, but that doesn't mean that there are more suns. You know, so it's an interesting way that non duality says you can't cut up the space. You can't cut up awareness into little parts. And so you don't really have to deal with this question of are there more parts or less parts because ultimately it's all one. There always has been one always will be one as only one now reincarnation seems to be happening. But that's just in Maya. It's just an appearance within awareness. So non duality does kind of reject reincarnation along with everything else. The Buddhist also rejects reincarnation as you it's not the soul. There's no soul. Anatma. But they accept it as a scientific process. So reincarnation as you will see. And I know your question was about schools that really do premise their philosophy and reincarnation. And I can tell you this all Indians all South Asian philosophies accept Charvaca. It's obvious. That reincarnation is a thing. You know, it's just like duh. It's like such a obvious scientific point. And we'll tell you why. So what is science except an investigation into cause and effect. So I think a week ago we had a reincarnation discussion. We described it as we asked the question, what's the cause and what's the effect? We studied the effect and try to figure out the cause. That's science. Yes. Let's look at the data. One, all your learning feels like remembering. How do you account for the instinct of a little chick who is frightened of the eagle even before being socialized into that by the mother? You would say instinct, but instinct doesn't say anything. It's just a word. It's like a plug-in like dark matter or dark energy. It doesn't describe anything. It's just like instinct. Okay, convenient. Tell me what that is. How did it get there? You know, and there's this question. I was like, oh, it's in the body, but this is a new body. Then you have cases of past life memory like Dorothy Edie. So Dorothy Edie was able to show British archaeologist where tombs were that they didn't know because she had past life memories as a priestess in the temple of a bydus. They've made lots of documentaries about Dorothy Edie. She goes by the name Olm Seti, mother of Seti. But yeah, so you have these events, right? Reincarnation in terms of remembering, reincarnation in terms of instincts and animals, reincarnation in terms of past life memories. And most importantly, look at the Mozart case. Now Mozart at age three is like an accomplished musician, right? You have two explanations of this. One, the rather unscientific statement. Oh, it's just accident. How unscientific. The fact that effect is there, but you reject a cause. How about saying this? When is it when how do you know when a person demonstrates skill? Usually when they've developed a certain level of muscle memory. So when piano comes naturally to you, it's because you've been playing piano for a long time. You know, by your own observations of life, that a person needs to invest a certain amount of time to create the neuroplasticity if you want to use that term or muscle memory to be able to do something. So when someone is born with a natural proclivity of something, because you have data that says proclivity comes from training, they must have done that training. Obviously, they couldn't have done it in that life since they're two. So they must have done it in a previous life. If you don't accept that, then you're left with random chance. Einstein's brain was just different. No, it wasn't. We took that brain out and founded that it was the exact same brain. So for theory to be scientific, it must explain causes by positing the least number of entities with the maximum explanatory power and reincarnation seems to do that quite nicely. Now, I can understand why a materialist would reject reincarnation because it presupposes life outside of the body. So they're very scared to attribute to any kind of consciousness apart from the mind and they discount past life memories, even the very verifiable ones as just outliers, you know, whatever. So I understand the position of materialists, but we don't understand the position of Christians and Muslims with regards to non-duality. Clearly, all religious schools believe in an existence apart from the body. Every school believes in a soul, right? Now, Rumi and Shams, the Sufis within the Muslim tradition, believe in reincarnation and the Christian mystics believe in reincarnation. Jesus himself says a statement, "I am Elijah who is Eli or something like that." So yeah, the idea though is if a soul can exist apart from the body, doesn't also stand that it can come back into a body. If a soul leaves a body, what to say it and enter it? You know, so as long as you believe that something exists apart from a body, reincarnation is pretty inevitable, especially given the lack of accountability otherwise for some of these cases that we've mentioned. Now, here's how to explain Douglas the coming in of new souls. So you're thinking too humanistically. You're thinking that only humans have souls. Another mistake from the recent thought, because there is a worldview that says animals and trees don't have souls or that there aren't other realms. But if you account for a soul being an individuated being, then you must also account for the various unseen realms between these Buloka and every other realm. The new souls coming in are either coming from the animal kingdom into the human kingdom or coming in from lower realms into higher realms or coming down from higher realms. I truly think Jimmy Hendrix is a descended Gandharva. You know, so all these musical and artistic visionaries are just bringing down with them memories of worlds that they used to inhabit before they took a human incarnation. So you'll find this in the Yoga Sutra. It explains reincarnation as the world is a school. Whether you're a god or a demon, you will eventually have to pass through the world to be liberated. So naturally, a great number of new souls are coming into the world because universities tend to see an increase as Fabricio probably knows in people trying to come to the university as more people recognize the value of education. So truthfully, as we continue to go along this time period, this yoga, this age, you'll see more and more souls because more and more people are rushing to get into school so they can get out, graduate and finish with the Wheel of Birth and Death. That's how you account for the new souls. So try to avoid thinking just in terms of human to human souls, add also the souls of animals, plants and also other dimensional beings. And that should probably solve the problem. Makes complete sense. I was not at all thinking of anything besides humans. You hit that right on the head. But I mean, I don't want to lead you down a long rabbit hole, but it just immediately brought up the question of like, oh my gosh, I mean, do animals reach enlightenment, do trees reach enlightenment? Do you only reach enlightenment as a human? Like, you know what I mean? No, it's a great question. According to yoga Sutra, yes, you need at least an anthropomorphic body. They seem to say something about the spine. And it has to do, well, you'll notice like evolution seems to be taking a trend where it favors more upright spines or whatever if you will. I don't know this one too much, but I've definitely heard a lot of sad news talking about the spine as privileged in spiritual practice. Why does Moses have his like steak or Jacob's ladder, you know, with 33 bones in the spine? There's a lot to get into with regards to the spine. And why the spine is special for spirituality, but the general idea is you need to sit upright. That's what we don't meditate lying down. Not to say you can't be enlightened lying down. It's just that you need to sit upright to what do you call it make it more conducive. It engenders that state a little more. But there are people with broken spines that have become enlightened. So what we're really talking about? Is that, oh and Versa, I will answer that question in a little bit. It's a very good question. The state of an animal being higher than a human. Such a good question. I love that one. Yeah, why do we eat the corpses of other beings and mourn our own? [LAUGHS] Yes, that's so funny. It's the humanistic approach of some of that, you know. I think it happened in the 18th century. We started seeing nature as very mechanistic animals on its own. It's urbanization, you know. Anyway, not to digress. But the idea is that animals, they're more likely to become enlightened if they become humans. You know, so an animal's spirit desires a human birth. And if a human like messes up, they go back to an animal life. But importantly, we don't just consider tigers, tigers, by the way. There are different tigers. Some tigers are nice. Some are a little more mean. Have you noticed dogs have very clear personalities? Some dogs are assholes, dude. And some dogs, you're like, that dog is going straight to Buddha. I have four, so I understand that very well. Right. So Indians don't just say like dog. They're not like, OK, dog is a kind of thing in the world. And they're all the same. No, each dog has a soul. And that dog might take a human birth higher than yours. Because you might be here with a certain level of intellectual ability, right? When that dog takes a human birth, it's going to be super smart. I don't know, just based on its karma, right? Dogs are born with personalities, yes, because they have a Jiva. Jiva means like, it's a technical term, but Chidabasha refers to, "Chid pure consciousness reflected in a subtle body." So if you think of my metaphor that we are, it's a common metaphor of the sun and the cups. The reflection of the sun in the cup is your individual personality, but you must ask, what's the water? What's reflecting the sun? You need a reflecting medium to have a reflection. The water is subtle body. So we say we live in a world of two kinds of things, inert matter and Jivas. So like, for instance, the sun might be shining on a clay lump, and it might be shining on a cup of water. The image of the sun only forms in the cup of water, not on the clay, though both receive heat, right? One receives just heat, the other receives heat, and the image. So we say, every being is like the only difference between the being, yes, the dog is the Buddha, right? And the Buddha is the sinner, the sinner is the Buddha. So every dog is already the Buddha. But we say, like in this world, there are some things that are just inert, and there are some things that are capable of self-reflexing awareness, but to different degrees. So among humans, some people are more perceptive to the truth, and some people just are pretty dense. Among dogs, the same hierarchy applies, you see? So that's how we account for individual Jivas. And each Jivas is a reflection of the one consciousness. That's why we can accept reincarnation and deny it as an undualist. It's real for you as a Jivas. Buddha says the same. It's real for you as a mind and body, but since you are not the mind and body, and since you are not the Jivas, ultimately, it's not real. - As usual, your response has so much beauty, Nash, but I must go to sleep. So thank you for everything. This is the first time that I've gotten to see everything. I started at the very beginning of your lecture and made it to here. So I'm really hopeful to come back next week because last week I came in at the very end of your lecture and only got the questions afterwards, which are just as enlightening. But I hope to see you next week. - Thank you, Douglas. Good night to you. This little boy is so touched that his family would stay up with him, and celebrate this wonderful thing that he loves so much. Thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you. All right. So let's take maybe one more question. Fabrizio made the joke last week. Last week at about 9.30 or 10. I said, "We'll take this last question and then we'll close there." Three hours later. (laughing) And Fabrizio was like, "I remember three hours ago and you said this was the last question." Okay, no, for real though. For real, we'll take one last question and then we'll close it. - This is very quickly. - Yes, please, Fabrizio. - I'm starting to think that I was getting light and meant in your such songs because this song always rises at the end of it. - The symbol of the Ramakrishna order for Giana Yoga, the dawning of insight is the rising sun. So Fabrizio. (laughing) The hermetic order of the golden dawn. Fabrizio is in real. Yes, for me, it's a fact. Shankaracharya says, "Unless you can say, as Holly is sending you some love, "unless you could say, Shankaracharya says, "unless you can say, as surely as you say, "I am the mind and body, "and surely as you say, the sun is rising, "you should be able to say, "with that level of confidence "that you are the such an aunt on the. "You are a Brahman." So I'm happy for Fabrizio that you can appreciate it as a fact, statement of fact. You are not the mind, you are not the body. Yes. Okay. So we'll close with this final sentiment. At the end of Tantra, there is a special thing that happens, and that is the invasion of the maugles. So there is a northern invasion, and suddenly state patronage for the arts and spirituality was lost. This is a very pivotal moment in India, where India comes under foreign rule for the first time. And what that means is the temples are burnt down. It's blasphemy to practice Tantra in the open. So Tantra goes underground, and it takes a form that is called Hatta Yoga. So Hatta Yoga appears very late. It appears in the like 12th century AD, and the central texts are like the Shiva Samita from the 12th century AD, the Shiva Svarodaya, James Malanson has good translations of these. Yes. I like operating curses. Yes, exactly. Kali is pulling the strings. This is just an automaton. But yeah, James Malanson is a nice Shiva Samita. The great text is the Hatta Yoga Pradipika by the yogi Swatmarama. So I didn't want to close today's lecture on the spiritual heritage of India before I talk at least a little bit about Hatta Yoga. So Swami Swatmarama, will we get the second season? Yes. Yeah, maybe next week we'll do a more complete part too. But just to wrap it up, since I cannot guarantee that for Brazil next week before class, I don't know, some different inspiration might strike. And we'll be like, okay, now we talk about karma or something. So I've noticed myself making a lot of empty promises. Sometimes I'm like, we'll talk about this next week. And the next week, something becomes more pressing. So I do want to just close very briefly with Hatta Yoga. And that will explain how yoga gets to us, to the West. Now, Hatta Yoga appears and it's characterized by a figure known as Matsyendra Nath who was born a cripple to a fishing man's family, right? And fishing man, fishermen. And because they were unable to take care of an extra mouth, you know, poor fisherman, they throw the body in the water, just abortion, dumping the child, you know. People are arguing, first trimester, third trimester, they're like, no, no, no, after it's born, you can throw it. So they throw the child in the water, it's really pro-choice, right? And then throw the child into the water, a fish eats the child. And the child grows up in the belly of the fish, kind of like a Jonah and the whale, not Noah and the whale, that's a band. And the fish goes to the bottom of the ocean where Shiva and Parvati are talking. So this is the link between Hatta and Tantra. It comes as the end of Tantra, right? Shiva is teaching Parvati Hatta yoga. This little boy in the belly of the fish learns that, practices it and becomes super strong. He busts out of the fish, comes to the earth and initiates Gorakshanaath. So Gorakshanaath is seen as the founder of Hatta yoga. Importantly, Hatta yoga is a summary of Tantra. Tantra is super philosophically rich, super sophisticated, and generally only for really intelligent people, because it became so sophisticated by the time Hatta yoga shows up. Hatta yoga, in order to preserve the central teachings of Tantra and in order to correct for some of the degeneration of Tantra practice into black magic, provides the bare minimums. It strips away the complex philosophy and maintains the practice. So it's a mystical path that uses these techniques, known as Asana, Postural Yoga, Pranayama, Breath Control, which was known before, and most importantly, Shat karmas. Shat karmas are six things that you do to purify the body. It's like putting in anema, like bamboo, they put a bamboo shoot into the butt and then squat in the river to clear the colon. It's I think a caloric, a calonic or something, then they swallow a cloth in order to clean the stomach. They put a thread up their nose to clean the nose and something some of you probably do is the neti pot. That's from Hatta yoga. I was so surprised to find it at CVS. I'm like, how is it that the super obscure yogic practice is now 499 at CVS? I don't know, funny story. But Hatta yoga is really about radical purification of the body. If you're interested in this, please subscribe to our channel. If I actually told you what the practice of hatha yoga is like, none of you would probably want to do it. It's pretty gross. It's like squatting in the river and calonic, cleaning the nose. Now why are they doing this? The idea is, we live in something known as the kali yuga. Yuga means age, kali kind of means darkness, the age of darkness, the age of ignorance. If you try to meditate, you won't be successful. The idea is that the body is no longer predisposed for meditation. The way it might have been if you lived in nature. The truth of the matter is, you no longer live in the Himalayas, in a pastoral, sharing community, supporting poetic Marxist ideals. No, now you live in a capitalist city where every day your reality is defined by the brain of donkeys, by the harsh vibration of the marketplace and capital competitiveness. Now in such an environment, meditation cannot thrive. It's such a toxic space to be in, dare I say it. Vibes are rotted. So what does the hatha yogi do? The hatha yogi practices to purify the body first. Ramakrishna actually warns against the obsession, the body obsession that can come from hatha yuga. So hatha yuga is a body based practice, purify the body. Super obscure. This is one thing you need to know. It's like an underground movement. There's like nine guys. They're called the naths, the naths school of yoga. And it's just nine skinny bearded dudes teaching this. Nobody cares. Okay. So the yoga is super obscure. Okay. In the 19th century, emerges a man named Krishna Macharya. He's a 16 year old spiritual prodigy. And what does a 16 year old get interested in? Probably the physical parts of his craft, right? So this young Brahmin boy is so interested in hatha yoga, but no one is teaching it. His name is Krishna Macharya. He eventually goes to Tibet on his way to Tibet because he's told there's a master there who can teach him. So on his way to Tibet, lo and behold, he's stopped by a British border guard. Now it's British colonial India, by the way. And the British border guard says, you have no passport. I can't let you pass. And Krishna Macharya is like, no, I gotta go. I'm trying to get to Tibet. I need to meet this guru. He's going to teach me hatha yoga. The British officer says, hatha yoga, what's that? And Krishna Macharya, he's at a loss. There is a Brahmin spiritual prodigy faced with a westerner who knows nothing of spirituality. What does he say? This is an important moment. This is the meaning of east and west with regards to yoga. So what does Krishna Macharya say? He says, oh, it's a bunch of poses that make you feel good. Is that interesting? He reduces it. He reduces it so the officer can understand just so he can get through. Good night, Rissa. The officer says, I have diabetes. I'm suffering right now. Can you teach me? And if your poses make me feel better, I'll let you pass without a passport. This was the trade. So Krishna Macharya teaches the poses, low and behold, the British officer feels better. Yoga is now used as a therapy system. It's the first time yoga is used outside of a spiritual context. You know, remember this, yoga was preparation for meditation. The goal was never to have a healthy body as an ends, but as a means for spiritual practice. But Krishna Macharya teaches it as an ends to this British officer. He goes, he learns it into bed and his Tibetan guru says, now you go back to India and you teach it. The world needs this. So Krishna Macharya comes back to India. He teaches it on the street. Eventually a Maharaja becomes interested, invites him to teach it in the palace. The Maharaja is obsessed with British gymnastics. And so he's obsessed with the physicality of hatha yoga because he's in love with the body and the movements of the body. Krishna Macharya and by the way, the first group yoga class to ever be taught formally is Krishna Macharya standing in front of a room full of British trained Indian gymnast. So what does he do? He adapts hatha yoga to British gymnastics. So make no mistake, the hatha yoga you are practicing today is mostly British gymnastics with slight references to that obscure practice that most of you would not want to do because it's fairly demanding and rigorous and fairly obscure. So this is an important point to make. Krishna Macharya learns hatha yoga. He adapts it because he's teaching British gymnasts. He eventually gets two very important students. One is Batabi Joy who wants to teach his 80 D'shan yoga. So he creates a very 80 D friendly yoga practice. Lots of poses, very dynamic, very like active. He calls this ashtanga yoga, it limbed yoga and he comes to the west and he teaches it as as ashtanga yoga. It later turns into vinyasa yoga. Then another student, my personal favorite, BKS Iyengar, learned something from Krishna Macharya, he comes to America called it Iyengar yoga. Now Iyengar's story is he eventually met Yehudi Manuhin, a violin player. Yehudi Manuhin was playing with Ravi Shankar. So Yehudi was already a westerner interested in Eastern music. He eventually meets Iyengar and he says Iyengar was the best yoga teacher, music teacher he ever had because yoga improved his musicianship. Eventually through Yehudi Manuhin, Iyengar teaches the prince queen of Denmark or something and teaches her how to do a headstand at age 80. Kind of crazy right? So Iyengar gets into the west, Batabi gets into the west. There's a woman named Indra Devi who's called the first lady of yoga. She's a white woman who was into yoga way before any other white woman who was into yoga. So she's kind of like the prototypical white yoga woman. And she learned it with Krishna Bacharya came to the west and because she looked like other women in California attracted more people to the practice. So thanks to Indra Devi, BKS Iyengar and Batabi Joy, the practice of physical yoga became exported to the west. Now here's what I wanted to leave you with. It wasn't taken. You know, I want you to remember that yoga was a collaboration. It was a collaboration. We couldn't have developed it without British gymnastics and we came to give it. So Batabi Joy, Iyengar, Indra Devi, like they were exporting yoga to the west. Even before yoga arrived in like the 30s and the 50s and the 60s when it really started to take off and that was the 80s yoga boom and there was Bikram and all sorts of crazy stuff. And now here we are with yoga studios all over the world. Before that yoga boom, way before Krishna Bacharya, there were a group of sages. Ramakrishna, Ananda Maima, Maharaji or Niem Karoli Baba, Nisargadatta Maharaj and Ramana Maharshi. So I just want to tell you, these are the greatest saints of India. They emerged towards the end of the 19th century and their message eventually permeated into the 60s. So the reason yoga is here now is because of a variety of factors. One, it involves Krishna Bacharya being interested in Hatha Yoga and learning how to adapt it to the British interest in physical well-being. It happens because of teachers like Ramana Maharshi and Ramakrishna whose ideas are so powerful that the 60s hippie revolution in America eventually allows for those ideas to seep through in the form of Ramdas and Alan Watts. Eventually teachers like Yogi Bajan, Maharishi Maharishi Yogi appear in the West. Now I want to leave you with this. Maharishi Maharishi Yogi and we already talked about how Vivekananda and Yogananda came before all of that. But when Maharishi Maharishi Yogi came, he taught transcendental meditation for productivity. He taught people how to be more productive, how to be more happy, how to have better sex. I don't know. He was teaching people how to use meditation for material ends. When he went home to India, he was criticized by his fellow monastics and they said to him, you are a shiva, tantric practitioner. You are enlightened in the highest philosophies of India. Why do you debase that philosophy and teach people these parlor tricks? And he says something so beautiful. I give them only what they want. So eventually they might come to want what I want to give them. Do you realize that? Maybe for you yoga is healing. Fine. Heal the body. Heal the mind. So that you can realize we are not here to teach you to heal. We are here to teach you to be what you always were. And I will leave you with this one thought. This practice lives on in you. So if you look at the yoga studios, it doesn't matter how much you do. How watered down it is. How material it is. How base it is. Don't get the feeling that you do not belong in this culture or this tradition. I'm sure you've heard some of the language of open practice and close practice. Except for Tantra and some initiate traditions, this is the most radically open practice you can imagine. The slogan of South Asian philosophy and I'll leave you with this is unity in diversity. Let's not gloss over the diversity. Let's appreciate how every school of philosophy we've spoken about today is distinct. Has a unique metaphysical worldview. But there are all just many paths to the one sugar mountain. Each of them is a grain of sugar and each of them are equally sweet as any other. But ultimately, let the trail of sugar crumbs reach you. to take you back to the mountain. You are not coming into this tradition as people in the west. You are not here as guests. You are here as brothers and sisters. This is your house too. So please remember that when Ramakrishna sent Vivekananda to the west, when Sri Yukteshu sent Yoga Nanda to the west, we didn't come here because we were dragged by colonization and thrown in front of white people and forced the teach. No, we came here to teach out of the understanding that there are no white problems, there are no brown problems, there are just human problems and there are just human solutions. So right now India is going through a hard time and it's not the first and it certainly won't be the last. You know, as the Buddha taught us, suffering is all pervasive. But as the birthplace of spirituality, it is with such joy and such delight that we embrace one another as brothers and sisters and family and help one another. The goal was always to bring spirituality to the west so that we could learn the western penchant for practical material existence in the east. Both of us have half the picture and we complete each other. So before you abandon western ideals, remember there's value to that too. You know, there's value to learning how to structure society, have trends and electricity that works, have social empowerment for women and children and hygiene, bring that to India. And in exchange, please accept this teaching of what life is for. You know, so that's our exchange. Teach us how to live so we don't die in the slums and in exchange we'll teach you how to make this life meaningful. The spiritual gems in India are buried in heaps of conservatism, social conservatism, whereas in the west, socially we're very liberal but religiously we're very stunted. So let's trade. You know, and ultimately that's how brothers and sisters come together. So it's with such joy that I will close today's discussion. We managed to do six hours as opposed to the five that I wanted. So let's close with the oldest mantra in the tradition. And it's the Gayathri mantra from the Rigveda, very old mantra. And we will close with this mantra and it basically means, may the radiant sunlight of wisdom, illumine each and every thought that we have. That is, may we remain immeshed in the loftiest ideals of humankind. May we aspire to those ideals and realize we are that now. Om Bor Bhuvas Vaha, Tatsavitor Vaha.