Burning Toward Transcendence--Kenneth Rose on Substack

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Renewing the Spiritual Life After the Evaporation of Meaning. kenrose51.substack.com

  1. Aug 28

    Trusting Mystical Experience

    Revised Transcript Hello from a botanical garden in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where I have stopped on a road trip. I’m going to close my eyes for a moment. Wow, the garden has disappeared! Oh my gosh, that whole experience of the botanical garden was temporary. It’s gone! I thought it was so real, but it’s gone. Now, though, when I open my eyes, the beautiful garden is back! This thought experiment suggests that although mystical experiences are usually temporary, what they experiences of is not temporary. In each religious tradition that I’ve been engaged in, there’s always a divide between the experiencers and the theoreticians. The experiencers are Catholic mystical theologians skilled in the degrees of mystical union, Hindu yogis who access deep states of samādhi, and the jhāyins in Buddhism who are expert meditators. In these and other traditions, there’s almost always an opposing group of people who are anti-experiential. Either they haven’t had mystical and yogic experiences or they have had them but they see themselves as having transcended them. This is not a divide in just one tradition, but I’ve noticed it in three or more traditions. One day I’ll write a book about that, but I don’t have time right now. The opponents of mystical experiences see them as lacking in value or significance because they’re temporary. Before addressing the issue of their impermanence, we have to define mystical experience, which is a broad expression. For some people, it’s emotional fervor incited by sitting in a beautiful place like this botanical garden, where they feel an upsurge of delight or happiness. For others, it might be a psychedelic experience. And for others it might be a deeply religious, a deeply spiritual intuition. They may have an experience of God, of the divine, of grace, of a brightness or lightness within the heart, or communications with more subtle realms, with God, with angels, with devas. All of this as well as the experiences of mediums and psi phenomena are expressions of our soul, of our deeper selves, the self that is not identical with our conventional everyday self. Most people are not interested in or haven’t heard about or are incapable of doing high level analytical inquiries into being, into Brahman, into emptiness. Nevertheless, there are people who can self-liberate themselves by experiencing the freedom and infinity that lies behind every apparent surface. These people of deeply penetrative intellect are able to self-liberate themselves directly through analytical seeing. They see that everything yields upon analysis to a deeper and subtler level of knowing in which we experience pure freedom and infinity. In the case of those who are truly enlightened, as we find in the Buddhist tradition, this is coupled with omniscience. Freedom, the state of complete openness, or the ground of being, is formless because it’s not containable within a form. This is not just an intellectual knowing, on my part. It’s a direct result of engaging in analytic meditation of the kind in which Madhyamaka Buddhism specializes. You search for that which is abiding and what you find is that all formations dissolve into pure freedom, into emptiness, into Brahman, into śūnyatā, into Gottheit or whatever word you like. This ground of absolute freedom is the standpoint of enlightenment for those who are truly enlightened. There’s a hierarchy of mystical experiences that point to enlightenment. The mystical intuition that sees through forms to formlessness and is then able to turn around and abide in that standpoint is the highest level of mystical intuition. Elevated as it is, it remains a mystical experience. It’s realization. It’s direct seeing. It’s darśana—direct seeing of what ultimately is. It is what the enlightened see. It’s the standpoint from which they write, think, and teach. That is the supreme mystical experience in the hierarchy of mystical experiences. But if I come down from that standpoint to thinking about my toes or being hungry or what kind of a day it is, then it disappears. It’s gone for me, but it’s not gone in itself. It’s only gone because my attention has been averted from it. There are those who say that because mystical experiences are temporary, they have no real value. I might think that this chair in front of me is temporary because it disappears when I close my eyes. But when I open my eyes, it’s there again. The point is that although a mystical experience may be temporary, what it’s an experience of is not temporary. When we have mystical experiences, we should cherish them because they are signposts and signs of hope in our secular age in which materialists and physicalists see mystical experiences as mere products of the brain. In contrast, I would point out that mystical experiences, from the simplest to the most exalted, are evidence of our spiritual nature. Getting caught up in them and reifying them is a mistake, and monetizing them and building a religious or spiritual empire around them can be a path to personal self-destruction. All of the great spiritual teachers knew this, but the greatest spiritual teachers were also deeply illumined people who saw and lived from ultimate reality and in whom mystical experience had reached its culmination in continuous and perfect seeing and being in what ultimately is. The point that I want to reinforce is that while mystical experiences as subjective personal experiences are temporary, what they’re experiences of is not temporary. The standpoint of ultimate reality is not temporary, although our experience of it may be. The mystical intuition that there is a divine presence in my life that is benevolent and loving and that sometimes guides me is a valuable experience. If I turn my attention away from it and go back to a way of life that doesn’t cherish that experience, the experience of it becomes temporary. It goes away, but grace and divine love are not temporary, even if our experience of them is. For many people, an experience like this is the most extraordinary event that they have experienced in their lives. To systematically undermine that as materialists, physicalists, and dry, ascetical spiritual practitioners do is to undermine people’s spiritual life. It does them harm not to recognize that these valuable experiences are signposts toward and doorways into a different way of experiencing our lives, into becoming one with the divine, into awakening to truth, and to becoming enlightened. Many people who set out on the spiritual path want the ultimate teaching immediately. They don’t want to bother with the preliminaries or they’re impatient to get through them because they want the ultimate teaching now. Someone hears about Tibetan Buddhism and they immediately want to practice Dzogchen. A person becomes a Catholic and they start reading mystics and immediately they want to take the apophatic path of St. John of the Cross or Dionysius the Areopagite. They seek to avoid the graded path, which starts in the Catholic tradition with meditation, or meditatio. It proceeds through affective states such as the different stages of mystical union until, finally, we come to the transfigured life in which we live as the divine from the divine standpoint, with or without emotional exaltation. It’s the same in Hinduism and Buddhism—which i have more carefully detailed in my books. In our personal spiritual life, mystical experiences are what brought most of us onto the path. Not many of us came onto the path because we read a book and we thought it sounded interesting. No, we had a moment of insight, clarity, or awakening—all of which are mystical experiences. They’re temporary for people who have them until the final insight that fully awakens you becomes permanent. So, on this beautiful morning, I’m going to close my eyes again as I end this talk. Even though my eyes are closed and the experience of this botanical garden is not happening right now for me, I can assure you that this botanical garden is still here. If you liked this post, consider sharing it. If you haven’t already subscribed, you can here: More of my writing in written and spoken form is available on Amazon This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit kenrose51.substack.com

    Trusting Mystical Experience

  2. Aug 20

    Advaita Vedānta and Experience Seeking

    Edited Transcript (to be updated) Today I want to talk about Advaita Vedānta, because I’ve been in discussions with various people about what the genuine Advaita Vedānta is. That’s a difficult question. It’s a rich topic for an academic. As an academic, I could happily spend a lot of time going through the different varieties of Advaita Vedānta. And I’ve done that informally and provisionally in some of my Substacks posts here. What I’ve noticed about this topic is that there’s an academic discipline in universities that studies Advaita Vedānta, and there’s a lot of recent work in this area. But there’s an almost complete disconnect between the academic study of Advaita Vedānta and the popular versions of Advaita Vedānta that have become more familiar in recent years, like people who are followers of Neo-Advaita or the global communities of people who see themselves as disciples of Bhagavān Śrī Ramaṇa Maharṣi. The academics who study Advaita Vedānta as a scriptural tradition, Sanskritists and Indologists, don’t study or interact with these other groups. That’s left for academics who study contemporary religions. Then there’s another issue. There’s a strand of Advaita Vedānta that’s become increasingly influential that claims that the only way to mokṣa, to enlightenment, is through the practice of śabda-pramāṇa. The appeal to śabda-pramāṇa is the claim that because Brahman is formless and not identical with any physical, mental, or intellectual formations, there’s no way to approach it other than through the statement of the Upaniṣads, the great statements, the mahāvākyas. For instance, “tat tvam asi“ (“You are That”). Simply by hearing that, if you’re sufficiently purified and sufficiently prepared, you should realize instantly, instantaneously, that it’s true. That there’s only Brahman. There’s nothing but Brahman. It’s formless. It’s eternal consciousness. It’s what we fundamentally are. And there’s no division in it. There’s no cut in it. So there’s only one consciousness, one Brahman, and it is what it is right now. That is, of course, a completely understandable stance to take. But I’ve noticed two difficulties arise with this approach. The first is that often people who advocate it are exclusivistic. That is, they see it only as the only true path. They allow there are lots of paths, and you can follow them, although they think that they lead only to experience seeking. They lead to something other than mokṣa. They lead to more māyā, more involvement in saṃsāra. In the end, they leave you where you started, with maybe a more exalted sense of the deeper depths of māyā. So that is what you expect from exclusivistic religious teachings, because you always find among exclusivists the claim that they have the only truth. What’s really amusing to me as a scholar of religion for many decades who has written about pluralism is that all exclusivists from different traditions and schools mostly think in the same way. There’s a logical similarity between their arguments—different contents, same types of arguments. I’ve taken this up in one of my books, Pluralism, The Future of Religion. But that’s not the topic for today. The point I want to make that does bear repeating, though, is that the teachings of different schools of religious and philosophical exclusivists have different contents but similar types of arguments. But that is an argument that doesn’t prove anything to an exclusivist. So the second issue is that this approach to Advaita Vedānta not only assumes that it’s ultimately the one true teaching, but that the other schools of Advaita Vedānta and the other schools of Vedānta are also wrong—what to speak of the schools of Yoga and Tantra. They’re all just forms of mysticism, of experience seeking. So the issue then arises: is it true that śabda-pramāṇa is the only true or ultimate teaching? Well, let’s just assume that it is. Let’s make the assumption that reflecting on the statement “You are That” (tat tvam asi) is the only way to awaken. In my experience, most people who follow this path understand this intellectually in the way that I understand that today’s Thursday or that the sun doesn’t really revolve around the earth even though it looks like that—it’s actually the other way around. So that’s knowledge, intellectual knowledge. And I have no problem with intellectual knowledge. It’s important. But the real test for whether someone has actually attained realization of Brahman through śabda-pramāṇa is in the change in that person. Someone like Sri Ramana Maharshi spontaneously realized non-dual Brahman and lived a life that was completely different from the life of a person who just has an intellectual understanding of tat tvam asi. If we have only an intellectual understanding of Brahman, when we come to difficulties in life—sickness, illness, old age, loss—we’re deeply affected by it, and immediately we revert to that person who is actually not very enlightened. We can see that the enlightened saints and teachers of Advaita Vedānta actually realized that there’s only Brahman because when they were faced with illness, suffering, and so on, they didn't revert to being frightened, scared, or egocentric. How could they? There’s only Brahman for them, and all of this was really an illusion for them. We only have to look at how Sri Ramana Maharshi endured his final illnesses. I think that it’s important when speaking about śabda-pramāṇa to realize that most people who speak about attaining Brahman realization through śabda-pramāṇa have attained an intellectual realization. They know the difference between the rope and the snake. It’s pretty easy to understand the basic teaching that there’s only Brahman, we are it, there’s only consciousness, and any perceived distinctions in Brahman are illusory. The difference between knowledge (jñāna) and not-knowledge (avidyā) just comes down to knowing that that snake on the ground is actually a rope. What a relief! So this means that—and what I’m saying very informally here is also grounded in texts from the Advaita Vedānta tradition—there isn’t only one true school of Advaita Vedānta, especially one that just arose in the last century. That’s like what happens in other religious movements when a new religious movement arises and it claims to be the only true expression of that religion, even though the religion itself is a couple of thousand years old and the new movement is twenty years old, fifty years old, or one hundred years old. So the test is realization. The test is whether one has realized the import of śabda-pramāṇa, which means that there’s no one left to realize it, there’s no one left who can be subjected to suffering even if the body is suffering because that person has attained insight. So for me, it’s important to bring that point to bear. Because in my experience, which is limited, people I’ve known who are followers of Neo-Advaita and some other traditions and versions of Advaita Vedānta speak about enlightenment and talk about realization, but they have not proven that they have moved from an intellectual understanding to a profoundly enlightened standpoint. So that test is very important to keep in mind. I just wanted to speak about that for a few minutes today here. I want to raise another point: this more recent school of Advaita Vedānta often sees people who follow other paths as just being experience seekers. And that’s similar to religious traditionalists who judge people who travel from one religious tradition to another as like going to the cafeteria or the delicatessen and just picking something out, throwing it together, and calling it your spiritual life. This is a caricature. Surely there are people like that, but most people who are serious spiritual seekers do understand that there is a difference between having random, unrelated experiences and actual insight into the nature of reality. In the Christian mystical tradition, it’s clear that experiences of mystical union—which are very similar to the jhānas [Pali / Sanskrit: dhyānas] in Buddhism and to the stages of samādhi in the Yogasūtra (I wrote a book about this in a book called Yoga, Meditation, and Mysticism)—are not proof of sainthood or of the final level of transforming union. The experience of mystical union with God is not ultimately an emotional or physical experience. It’s not a feeling that comes from being intensely focused, as in the samādhis and the jhānas. It’s actually an insight, a clarity, a knowing that transcends every physical and intellectual representation of the Divine. This is not something that can be dismissed quickly as experience seeking. Because this ultimate mystical insight requires the surrender of all of whatever we think and believe—and, in the end, what we take ourselves to be. In the Catholic mystical tradition, the stages of union, the jhāna/samādhi-like stages of union, are interspersed with the nights of purification, of which there are two: the night of the senses and the night of the spirit (both colloquially referred to as the dark night of the soul). So there’s a purification that goes on as one more deeply allows oneself to be led into the depths of the spiritual life. And that’s quite different from what is derided as experience seeking, the behavior of spiritual junkies looking for the latest drug or something. That’s a caricature. It’s not a helpful caricature; it’s a hurtful caricature. Like most statements like that, it’s harmful to the people who hear it because it can discourage them in their spiritual path. And we know that it’s already difficult enough to live a spiritual life in this physically embodied form in a very secular and materialistic age which discounts spirituality in general.

    Advaita Vedānta and Experience Seeking

  3. Jun 8

    Recovering Being

    A slightly edited version of this video is available on YouTube. If you liked this post, consider sharing it. If you haven’t already subscribed, you can here: More of my writing in written and spoken form is available on Amazon This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit kenrose51.substack.com

    Recovering Being

  4. Jun 7

    Being, Consciousness, and Bliss

    I recorded this episode a couple of weeks ago while sitting in the middle of a vast courtyard opening out from a cathedral in an old Roman city in western Germany near France and Luxembourg. It was a bright and gently warm Saturday evening. The technical quality is imperfect because I was surrounded by tourists, passersby, and townspeople enjoying the mild weather. There are gaps in the recording when I stopped recording because people began talking near me. The style is informal, unlike my written style, but this approach encourages creative sparks of intuition. Below is an edited version of this podcast episode. There may be still some imperfections in it, despite multiple readings, but that shows that it was not written by AI! It’s a luminous evening in Trier, and I’m sitting on a bench while gazing up at the Dom, or the Cathedral of St. Peter, which lies at the heart of this ancient Roman city in western Germany. The townspeople and tourists are passing the evening in the European manner of promenading through the streets, enjoying ice cream, heading to restaurants, or, sitting, like me, taking in the sunlight after a long winter. The massive Romanesque church rising above me evokes a delightful sense of uplift and exaltation, making my seat here a suitable setting for raising ontological and metaphysical issues. In this essay, I want to write about a number of concepts that are central to the Upaniṣads and Vedānta. I’m not writing as a scholar of the Upaniṣads, an Indologist, or an advocate of a Vedāntic school. Instead, I utilize concepts from the Vedāntic schools to express the contemplative and ontological contemplative vision that I have been articulating in my books. These concepts are old friends, and I have been working with them, meditating upon them, and contemplating their significance since I first began to read the Upaniṣads and the Bhagavad-gītā almost almost sixty years ago. They evoke contemplative, ontological, and mystical intuitions left untapped for me by Latin, Greek, and English terms. The word Brahman has far more resonance for me than the word being, although it is an evocative term in English. This contemplative ontology is based not on the exegesis of a specific philosophical tradition, either in India or in the West but on my own contemplative experience with these concepts. Not merely guided or shaped by reading the Upaniṣads and the study of Vedānta, it has been evoked by the ontological insights coded into their venerable teachings and narratives. We can subject Vedāntic concepts to conceptual analysis, which is a venerable academic approach. But if we approach them contemplatively with a disciplined and purified consciousness, they can evoke a vision of ultimate reality and its attributes. This is the gift of a contemplative metaphysics and a contemplative ontology, which I broached in my last book, Reviving Intellectual Intuition in Metaphysics (Bloomsbury, 2024) and which I plan to expand in a later book called The Generosity of Being. A classic Vedāntic definition of Brahman characterizes it as having the three cardinal features, or attributes, of sat, cit, and ānanda. (In more proper Sanskrit that is saccidānanda.) Although it’s a canonical expression in Vedānta, this formula first appears in the Tejobindu Upaniṣad instead of the earlier classical Upaniṣads. In a later essay, I’ll compare it with an older formulation of Brahman as satyam, jñānam, and anantam, which occurs in the classical Taittirīya Upaniṣad. (In the European Scholastic system, these universal attributes of whatever is or exists would be known as transcendentals.) Sat is being itself and indicates the real and the true. As sat, Brahman is the bedrock reality of whatever subsists or exists. As being itself, nothing subsists or exists outside of sat. Sat grounds and guarantees the truth of true statements and genuine experiences. Sat is Brahman, or being, expressing itself in the ontological hierarchy of physical existence, mental and subtle (prāṇic) experience, and the subsistent hypostases of the formal and ideal realm of the intellect. Cit is usually translated as “consciousness,” but this wan word captures little of the plenitude of experience that occurs in cit. Over the last century and a half starting with Brentano, Western philosophy has asserted that all consciousness is intentional—that every state of consciousness has an intentional object. This conception of consciousness is richer than bare awareness but it introduces an insuperable divide between a mental intention, or representation, and its object, whether internal or external to the mind. On this approach, consciousness is always divided into an intending subject and its mental objects. Consciousness is always about something that a subject intends or points toward mentally. To avoid this necessarily dualistic conception of consciousness, contemporary spiritualities that posit pure, undivided, objectless consciousness as ultimately real replace the word consciousness with awareness. Contrary to Brentano’s intentional consciousness and the rich contents of phenomenological elaborations of consciousness, awareness on this approach is what remains when everything has been eliminated from consciousness except the bare registration of uninflected awareness. But there is far more to consciousness than the mindful registration of events such as my sitting at this table and writing while being surrounded by people. The third term, ānanda, which usually translates as “bliss,” seems the easiest to translate, although there is far more to ānanda than this overused translation suggests. Ānanda is not just ordinary happiness; it’s complete and unsullied bliss. It is supreme happiness. I’ll have more to say about it later. As being itself, or absolute reality, Brahman is the fullness of reality. The Sanskrit word for the fullness of being is pūrṇam, which implies that nothing that subsists or exists stands apart from Brahman. That is the sat aspect or Brahman. The aspect of cit suggests that Brahman is not only the real, or the ontological foundation or bedrock, of what subsists and exists, it is also conscious. It’s aware. These nonduality of Brahman implies that wherever there is being, or sat, there is consciousness, or cit. Conversely, wherever there is consciousness, there is being. These are convertible terms. You can’t have the one without the other. The conception of saccidānanda not only suggests this coincidence of transcendental attributes in Brahman, it necessarily implies them as well. This is an example of a priori metaphysics, which Hume, were he still among us, would cast into the fire. Contrary to Hume, I contend that an a priori metaphysics is what we’re lacking. We’re unable to construct a grounding ontology that unifies the totality of knowledge, being, and existence without recourse to an a priori approach in metaphysics. An a priori metaphysics is not merely grounded in conceptual analysis, nor is it merely a logical operation. Instead, it charts, designates, and symbolizes the fundamental structure of being. Because being precedes and undergirds everything else, an a priori analysis of the concept of being deduces the necessary undergirding structure of whatever subsists ontologically and exists physically as their realizations. This view implies that logic is ontology and that ontology is logic, a view famously associated with Hegel. In a priori metaphysical thinking that has not been stunted by Kantian transcendentalism or by the linguistic turn, the analysis of an ontologically grounding concept like being is also an analysis of a way that being presents itself. Because being as such precedes, or grounds, whatever subsists or exists, it’s impossible to do ontology except as an a priori exercise of the intutive intellect. Ontology and metaphysics are not inductive sciences. They are not empirical. They uncover and articulate the categories that ground experience and that make empirical research possible. Now, to return to ānanda, Brahman’s third cardinal and transcendental attribute. As such ānanda is also convertible with being and consciousness. So, wherever there’s being, there’s not only consciousness, or awareness, there’s also bliss. Conversely, wherever there’s bliss, there’s also consciousness and being. Looked at from the standpoint of ānanda, it’s logical and not at all controversial to hold that, as in the case of sat and cit, wherever there’s bliss, there’s also consciousness and being. But here we hit a sticking point. One might object at this point that an a priori metaphysics that depends upon the analysis of the concept of being, or Brahman, as being constituted of saccidānanda, fails for two reasons. First, the claim that where there is being, there is consciousness fails because we’re not conscious when we sleep. Second, the claim that where there is being, there is bliss fails because no one is always blissful. We live in a world where there is much woe, suffering and misery existing alongside much beauty, truth, and goodness. There’s too much suffering and pain in the world for anyone to countenance an a priori claim that where there is being, there is also bliss. If I were approaching the meaning of saccidānanda from the standpoint of an empirical, or scientific, metaphysics, this would be the place where I would have to abandon that project. There are a number of ways of dealing with these objections. Buddhists claim over against Advaita Vedānta that consciousness is, like everything else, anitya, or impermanent. It comes and goes. When we fall into deep sleep, consciousness disappears. Some consciousness remains while we’re dreaming, but in deep sleep, we’re completely unconscious. The traditional retort of Advaita Vedānta is that when we wake up, we yawn, and happily exclaim, “I slept well and

  5. May 10

    The Fullness of Being

    The question of why there is something rather than nothing is familiar in metaphysics. First asked by Leibniz, it was made more famous by Heidegger. More fundamental than the question of why there are beings rather than nothing is, in my view, the question of why there is being in the first place. Related is the question of why there are qualities, or qualia. So far, science hasn’t provided us with an answer to this latter question. As for being itself, it remains invisible to disciplines focused on beings rather than being. They measure the causes and effects of qualities, but why there are qualities and from where qualities come rank among the most intractable metaphysical questions. They rank with the question of why there is being in the first place and not just beings. Not only must we distinguish between beings and being, we must also inquire into what allows being to be? These questions will appear meaningless to some readers, but others will find them engrossing issues that appeal to the essence of ontology, metaphysics, and philosophy in their truest sense. Over the years, my ontological reflections have been formed fundamentally by the Vedāntic teachings in the Upaniṣads. Reflecting on these Hindu books has provided me with my clearest insights into being. My early upbringing in a traditional pre-Vatican II Catholic milieu in New York influenced me unconsciously as I imbibed aspects of Thomistic and Aristotelian philosophy. These were not communicated directly by my teachers or the parish priests but were implicit in the formation that I received in that traditional Catholic setting. My first conscious interaction with metaphysics came through reading, first as a teenager and then more seriously as I grew older, the Upaniṣads. The insights they afforded me were fortified through the practice of jñāna-yoga and bhakti-yoga, which draw upon Vedānta and the Upaniṣads. My intellectual awakening to the question of being happened while reading Étienne Gilson’s Being and Some Philosophers. I spent many months in the 1980s poring over this book and meditating over virtually every sentence. It took a couple of years before I sensed that I had grasped the import of Gilson’s critical views of essentialism. It took more years of rereading and reflection to comprehend the significance of the Thomist existentialism that he defended in the last chapters of the book. But understanding does not equal agreement, for the more I understood Gilson’s views, the less I agreed with him. That’s because I am congenitally a Platonist and not an Aristotelian. Those two words code contrary approaches to metaphysics. My early predilection for the Upaniṣads already predicts my penchant for a Platonic rather than an Aristotelian metaphysics. Despite my appreciation of Aristotelian defenses of universals against austere, deflationary ontologies, I see universals as subsisting whether or not there’s a physical world. Universals—along with qualia—don’t require instantiation in the physical universe because they subsist independently of it. On this central ontological issue, I depart from Aristotle and move decisively toward Plato, whom I find to be much closer than Aristotle to the the spirit of the Upaniṣads. This is the background for the issue that I want to talk about today. This isn’t the question of why there are beings, which is a mysterious issue, but rather the question of why there is being in the first place. To have any chance of answering that question, we first have to suggest an answer the question, “What is being?” Heidegger famously raised this question in Being and Time, but in an unsatisfactory way in my view. By temporalizing being, he reduced being to the status of a being. But being can’t be a being. It can’t be a something like numbers, essences, substances, or human beings because it is the ground of these various types of entities. Were it possible for being to become a being, a something, it would stand on the same level with other beings, or somethings, and would fall—which is impossible—from its status as being itself. A fundamental ontological truth is that being can’t be anything other than itself. This insight authorized Heidegger’s ontological difference and evoked Gilson’s relentless analysis of virtually every metaphysical school that he was familiar with as ultimately reducing being to beings. (In Advaita Vedānta this is the error of failing to perceive the difference between saguṇa-brahman and nirguṇa-brahman, which transforms Brahman into something less than itself.) Despite diversionary moves arising in deflationary, positivist, analytic, and scientific variants of metaphysics, the most fundamental questions in ontology and metaphysics are what being is and, crucially, why there is being. The clue that hints at answers to these questions is suggested by considering qualities, qualia. It’s a delightful spring morning at the Yoga Vidya ashram in northern Germany where I have been on retreat for the last four months. I am outside standing in the fresh spring grass gazing at a stand of flowering trees. When I consider the greenness of the leaves and the grass, I am not looking for a biological answer but rather for the source of the greenness of the leaves and the grass—for greenness itself. What is green? What is it to be green? Where does green come from? How is it that there’s a quality of greenness that suffuses these leaves, the grass on which I’m standing, the green shirt that I’m wearing, and the green lawn chair standing at my side. What is this quality of greenness? Related questions concern the other qualities that we experience in life. We might ask, “What is a virtue?” “What is goodness?” “What is honesty?” and “Where do virtues come from ontologically?” We can ask after the source of other qualities such as the devotion of religious people, the integrity of a reliable person, the feeling of friendship, the feeling of connectedness, the feeling of wanting to do something for others. We might ask after the source of melody, rhythm, language, cognition, and obligation. Besides these vexing issues concerning the source of qualities are questions about numbers and universals. When we analyze everyday experience, we see that it is pervaded with an ensemble of ethical, aesthetic, scientific, mathematical, and metaphysical qualities. None of these qualities can be excised from our experience through a monotonic physicalist understanding of life. We can’t easily and plausibly explain them away. Physicalist attempts to reduce them to something else inevitably fails. How do you reduce a virtue to a physical process? It’s just not possible. Attempts to explain away qualities as referring to or reliant on physical processes will fail for anyone with a classical formation, whether Hindu, Buddhist, Islamic, Catholic, or Orthodox Christian because they fail to come to terms with the fundamental, existential, phenomenological, and ontological reality of qualities, which pervade our existence and make our lives meaningful. Inquiring into their source and persistently asking why they exist leads me into deep meditative reveries in which I become quiet and still. These reveries kindle philosophical, metaphysical, and ontological insight at their highest pitch. Philosophy at this contemplative level is not the analysis of words and arguments. It’s not a reductive program dissolving all phenomena into physical processes. These contemplations lead to the contemplation of being itself, or Brahman in Sanskrit. As I am using the term being, it is equivalent to the most fundamental standpoint, which is the ground from which everything else emerges. The word itself is not as important as being’s status as that which is always prior to whatever is or exists. When the word being is reduced to a mere abstraction, we can drop it and speak instead of whatever it is that is prior to this reduced concept of being. In Platonic metaphysics, which is not as much studied or as widely known as Aristotelian metaphysics, being is not the ultimate reality but is a product of the interaction of the One, or the Good, and the Dyad. Being on this view is subordinate to these hierarchically superior aspects of reality. Both Plato and Plotinus refer to the most superior or most prior dimension of reality as that which is “beyond being,” or hyperousios (ὑπερούσιος) in Greek. This is not a mere terminological distinction but a contemplative gesture toward the hyperousios, toward that which goes beyond being—or, in Sanskrit, nirguṇa (qualityless) Brahman. As a contemplative move, it’s like trying to view the back of your head with your eyes. It’s bending the mind back to its ground to see that from which it emerges. The insights kindled by this contemplative gesture yield an intimate familiarity with being as such rather than conceptual schemes and verbal doctrines. As we become inwardly still in contemplative reverie, the mind perceives its ontological ground through noēsis, which is its highest capability. This is the intuitive seeing, or cognition, of the intellect, understood in its pre-modern sense of nous in Greek, or buddhi in Sanskrit. The intuitive intellect perceives being as a continuous movement of deferral whereby whatever we say about being recoils back upon us. The Taittirīya Upaniṣad characterizes Brahman—or being—as that “from which words along with the mind return without attaining it” (yato vāco nivartante aprāpya manasā saha, यतो वाचो निवर्तन्ते अप्राप्य मनसा सह, 2.4.1, 2.9.1). This is not a counsel of despair or frustration but a contemplative guideline. In the falling back of language and the mind from being, we catch sidelong glances of what being is. These sidelong glances of being show it as continuously evading capture wit

  6. Apr 29

    The Generosity of Being

    In this episode, I offer a short, off-the-cuff summary of the central theme of the ontology that I have developing to support my project of reviving intellectual intuition. Intellectual intuition is the main concern of my latest book, Reviving Intellectual Intuition: Contemplative Philosophies and Being (Bloomsbury, 2025). The fullest flowering of intellectual intuition happens when it’s directed upon Being itself. In this supreme contemplative act, what Heidegger mournfully named “the forgetfulness of Being” (Seinsvergessenheit) is overcome in a vision of Being as unlimited and infinitely endowed with potentials incessantly actualizing themselves. Being imposes virtually no limitations on or obstructions to whatever may arise from its infinite capacity. This is what I call “the generosity of Being,” which is also the title of a book that I am writing and plan on publishing after my current book project. The only limitation on what may arise is due to the character of Being itself as nondual and singular (advaita). Because Being is unbreakable, nothing negative and destructive can ultimately thrive. This impulse toward ontological oneness expresses itself on the human level as caring, concern, compassion, justice, and love. Although apparently weaker than their opposites, these attributes of Being cannot be vanquished because the indivisible oneness of Being is inviolable. Here is an edited transcript of the podcast The podcast is casual in tone, given that I hopped off my bike near a flowering field to record it. For a deeper dive, see my book on this topic—mentioned above and available through the Amazon link below. It’s a lovely spring morning here in northern Germany where I’m spending a few months at the Yoga Vidya ashram. It’s the kind of morning when you can’t stay inside, especially after so many weeks of gray and rainy weather. The beauty of a morning like this—the quietness, the coolness of the air, and the sound of chirping birds knowing that spring is here—makes up for all of those other days. It’s really a great morning to be outside, and it’s a shame to spend even a moment inside. I’m on my bike riding around in the hills around the ashram and admiring the beautiful farmland, the blooming flowers, and the golden fields of early spring plantings coming to maturity. Over the years, my most inspired moments often come when I’m outside. When I’m inside, I feel an enclosure wrapping around me like being in a city, a subway, or inside a car or plane for too many hours. Once I get outside and see the blossoms on the trees and the flowers that are poking up in the spring morning, I start to feel inspired. Many of the poems I’ve written in the last years came to me as inspirations while I was out walking. As I set out this morning on my bike, I thought about the affairs of the world right now and wondered why the values that many of us as spiritual people live by are only weakly reflected in the external world. Then I stopped to contemplate a vast field filled with the golden blossoms of Brassica napus, a common sight in Germany this time of year. I have watched this spring’s crop grow from small seedlings to plants as high as my chest over the last few weeks. Then a crow cawed and winged happily over the field. This reminded me of the central theme of my last book, Reviving Intellectual Intuition: Contemplative Philosophies and Being (Bloomsbury, 2025). In that book, I try to revive the conscious use of intellectual intuition for contemporary philosophy. It’s mostly unsung or denied, although it’s a cognitive faculty that we use constantly without realizing that we’re doing so. In contemporary Western philosophy, intellectual intuition can sound mysterious, even weird, but that speaks to the poverty and the impoverishment of such philosophies. Nourished for too long on desiccated physicalist ontologies, such philosophizing is unable to reflect on the cognitive instrument—intellectual intuition—without which we cannot know anything. When I speak about intuition in this context, I’m not merely referring to its everyday meanings of gut feelings and hunches. They’re part of intuition, of course, but, at a higher level, intuition is the cognitive tool through which we recognize a claim as true, valid, or correct. If I see that an argument is valid, it’s because intellectual intuition verifies that the conclusion logically follows from its premises. This is a common instance of intellectual intuition. When I sense the beauty of a field of golden blossoms and become illumined by its magnificence, my mind becomes still in admiration and awe. This is a higher exercise of intellectual intuition. In this inner stillness, I sense that the field and the sky spring from an ontological ground that eludes every attempt of the mind and language to capture it in a neat definition. This is the ultimate expression of intellectual intuition. In contemporary usage the word intellectual is often negatively contrasted as mere conceptualizing with words like spiritual or feeling. But the way I’m using intellectual goes back to the Latin intellectus, which is a translation of the Greek noēsis. These terms capture more fully what’s meant by intellectual intuition as an immediate apprehension of truth and Being, attended by a sense of sureness, certainty, and a sense of rightness. Alluded to but untreated at length in my last book is the claim that Being is generous, which is the theme of a book that I am now writing called The Generosity of Being. Naming Being as generous is a poetic metaphor warranted by the intellectual intuition that Being places no limits on the arising of phenomena. The generosity of Being is its non-obstructiveness, which places no roadblocks in the path of the actualization of the infinite array of potentials that is contained in Being’s fullness. As a verbal doctrine, the generosity of Being may appear dry and abstract, but the mystical contemplation of Being as Being overcomes what Heidegger eloquently but melancholically named the “forgetfulness of being” (Seinsvergessenheit). This forgetfulness pervades most of our everyday activity when people go about their business thinking about their cars, their relationships, their bank accounts, their pensions, their vacations, or, on a more existential level, how they’re going to make ends meet. This everyday thinking, so far removed from the intellectual intuition of being, is an innocent instance of the forgetfulness of being. Almost as innocent and also indicative of the forgetfulness of being is the acceptance without critical scrutiny of the constructed realms of artificial intelligence and technology that we’re all now completely encaged in. We get entangled in them when we fail to reflect on the character of Being as Being on which they are projected as if on a cinema screen. (I am, necessarily, using my phone to record this talk, using AI to generate a transcript, and using Substack to post it.) Less innocent and more banal is the forgetfulness of Being of people who believe that AI agents are conscious and now suggest that we may have to accord them legal rights as persons. It’s ironic that in a philosophical worldview that often denies consciousness to animals and deflates or denies our consciousness as human beings, there’s a sudden yearning to accord consciousness to AI agents. It’s like freezing your body for a thousand years in the hopes of attaining physical immortality. This banal outlook is a pure expression of Heidegger’s forgetfulness of being. The forgetfulness of being begins when the word being becomes a word without conceptual depth, lacking poetic energy and failing to grant us ontological zest. Metaphysical zest can only come when we begin consciously to evoke intellectual intuition, which, we all possess but rarely consciously use, as remarked long ago by Plotinus. The intellectual intuition of being is generally developed through meditation, the appreciation of nature, philosophical reflection on Being as Being, the practice of mystical theology in the Christian tradition, yogic meditation, Buddhist meditation, and other meditative practices. These exercises stimulate and awaken our awareness of the mystical capacity of intellectual intuition. Reflection on the ontological ground that allows a field of blossoming plants to explode in exuberant enthusiasm from Being suggests an answer to why there there’s so much negativity in the world. Because Being contains within itself infinite possibilities, it doesn’t exert forceful refusal over what can emerge from itself. That is the essence of freedom, which is the ontological ground of our own freedom. Whatever is potential in Being can become actual. Because Being doesn’t place ontological roadblocks on what may arise, it’s non-obstructive. This non-obstructiveness is the generosity of Being. Beautiful realities such as this spring morning emerge from Being, as do other less beautiful events, which raises the question of why Being doesn’t put the brakes on the emergence of negative events and things. To answer, I hold that there is one limit, or brake, on ontological generosity, which is a function of the unbreakable oneness (advaita) of Being. There aren’t two Beings. The oneness of Being explains why we often sense a drive towards harmony and unity. Expressions of the ontological principle of oneness on the human level include compassion, concern, care, and love. When we take care over our relationships and over the world, the nonduality of Being manifests itself directly through our actions. This expression of the oneness of Being in our actions is called dharma in Sanskrit. This ontologically grounded impulse toward nonduality evokes integrity in how we behave in our work and in our care for our families, our friends, and the wider communities of which we’re a part. Because, like Being, we’

  7. Apr 15

    Advaita Vedānta and Mystical Theology

    In this podcast episode, I speak off the cuff and informally. It would take a few days to write an article on this topic and longer to refine it for an academic journal. But in my Substack posts and podcasts, I want to speak more freely than possible when speaking in a course on mysticism at a university. It’s more fun this way and allows me more freedom of thought and expression, albeit somewhat imprecisely at times. In this edited transcript of my talk, I have attempted to straighten out some of the tangents and imprecision of a spontaneous talk but without refining away its directness and spontaneity. Well, it’s afternoon now at the ashram and it’s a lovely sunny day in early April, which in northern Europe is a month when there can be sunshine and rain and occasionally even snow. So if you hear some sounds in the background, it’s because there are people playing with the frisbee and everyone’s really delighting and having some sun after a very long winter. I want to continue talking about the topic of Advaita Vedānta and religious experience. This is a significant issue for me, and I think for many others as well. I want to make some comparisons to clarify what I’m trying to uncover in these informal talks. As a person who taught comparative religion for many years at the university level and who has written books on this topic and researched in this field, I would assert that comparative religion is a liberative technique in the history of human consciousness. It’s not in fashion currently in academic religious studies, although academic religious studies, as opposed to theology, was largely shaped in its origins one hundred to two hundred years ago by the comparative religionists who discovered commonalities between different religious traditions. Back then, the comparative religionists weren’t clearly distinguished from the comparative theologians, and they often had an ulterior motive in looking for comparisons. They were motivated by theological concerns. But soon there came a new stream of scholars in this field who began to distinguish between comparative theology and comparative religion. The early significant figures in the field undertook a quest to discover commonalities between religious traditions, religious doctrines, and religious experiences in order to demonstrate the underlying unity of human consciousness across different cultural divides. One of the significant liberative insights that comes through the practice and the study of comparative religion is that religions change, doctrines change, and descriptions of experience change. Religious authorities, religious institutions, religious customs, and religious practices are diverse around the globe. Nevertheless, religions express a set of fundamental ideas, experiences, and teachings. This discovery unveils the spiritually liberative potential of comparative religion when considered as more than just an academic field. When we take a comprehensive and non-exclusivist approach to spirituality, it’s natural to become a comparative religionist. If one has fluency in more than one religious tradition, it’s natural and inevitable that one begins to see the similarities between them. If you study German and English, you can’t help but notice similarities. If you study Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, you also can’t help but notice similarities. It’s harder to discern similarities across different language families, but even there, the quest can be continued to find similarities. There are scholars and academics who see the search for commonalities as a type of essentializing that does violence to the particularities of different traditions. No doubt a facile comparative approach can generate ahistorical essential concepts that are out of touch with the realities that they express. But generalization is essential to thought. Every concept is itself a generalization. Whenever we use the word dog or tree, we are already engaged in generalizations because all concepts are generalizations. So we inevitably use essentializing concepts. We use them constantly in everyday speech. These reflections about comparatives studies are meant as prologue to an intriguing comparison that occurred to me earlier today when I was thinking about the last post that I recorded on Advaita Vedānta and mystical experience. In that podcast, I spoke about four different kinds of Advaita Vedānta that I have detected. (There are others besides the four that I mentioned. Recent scholarly studies of Advaita Vedānta deal comprehensively with traditional forms of Advaita Vedānta in India and the newer, highly erudite expressions of non-mystical Advaita Vedānta. But they don’t venture into discussing more popular forms of Advaita Vedānta, such as Neo-Advaita.) These four varieties of Advaita Vedānta can be illuminated by drawing upon a parallel from Catholic mystical theology. Catholic mystical theology is a subject that’s long fascinated me, and not for merely scholarly reasons. This fascination began in my personal spiritual quest, which was deeply shaped in my early years by an encounter with devotional Hinduism. After that, there was a deep encounter with evangelical Christianity. The bridge between those two worlds was the writings of Thomas Merton, who opened my mind to a wider spirituality. In learning to engage his writings, I was inevitably led towards other Catholic mystical theologians and the so-called manualists. The most significant of the manualists for me is a French mystical theologian of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Jesuit Augustin Poulain. His manual of mystical theology, The Graces of Interior Prayer, remains to this day a valuable source of knowledge about mystical experience and the ways in which it has been articulated or schematized in the Catholic mystical tradition. A decade ago, I wrote Yoga, Meditation and Mysticism, a book in which I delved deeply into Poulain’s taxonomy, or mystical map, which he structured on the basis of Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross’s mystical writings. The detailed contemplative maps devised by the manualists in the Catholic tradition, a school of thought that extends from the 1700s to the early part of the twentieth century provide significant data for a comparative study of mysticism. After Vatican II, the manualist tradition seems to have slipped out of view in mainstream Catholicism, but among traditionalist Catholics and students of comparative mysticism, Poulain’s manual is still highly regarded. In Poulain’s highly articulated map of the spiritual life, there are two fundamental distinctions that have to be kept in mind. The first is the distinction between ascetical theology and mystical theology; the second is between acquired contemplation and infused contemplation. For those of you who are more familiar with Hinduism or Buddhism, this will likely be obscure language, but to put the shoe on the other foot, someone coming from the world of Catholic mystical theology would likely find the terminology that is used in Hinduism and Buddhism as equally obscure. The obscurity does evaporate, though, with familiarity. (On a side note I’ve noticed that here in the ashram in Germany where I have spent the last four months, most people are oriented towards Hinduism and to a lesser extent Buddhism. When I teach courses comparing the stages of samādhi in the Yogasūtra, the jhānas in the Buddhist Visuddhimagga, and the degrees of mystical contemplation in the Catholic mystical tradition, some ashramites react to my sudden breaking into what sounds like very traditional Catholic language as if I were speaking a language that they have never before encountered. Or perhaps they have, but their experiences with it have not been positive. It takes a little bit of getting people acclimated to these concepts before they feel at ease with them.) To say a few words about these two pairs of distinguishing terms, I’ll start with the fundamental division in Catholic mystical theology between ascetical theology and mystical theology. This fundamental division gave rise to two separate bodies of theological analysis in the Catholic mystical tradition. Ascetical theology is concerned, above all, with the penitential disciplinary practices that prepare one to go more deeply into the spiritual life. Mystical theology, on the other hand, is concerned with states of contemplative wisdom that are infused into the soul by God as an act of grace. The word mystical in the Catholic mystical tradition is thus a technical term with a precise meaning. Mystical contemplation is prayer that is infused into the soul by God through the Holy Spirit. It’s a gracious gift that cannot be procured by any activity on the part of the recipient. At best, one can only prepare oneself for the possible reception of mystical grace. In the Catholic mystical tradition, mystical theology is concerned with the graces that come gratuitously, or freely, from God, while ascetical theology is concerned with the practices of purification that dispose us and our awareness to the subtle state of consciousness that comes as close as one can come to mystical contemplation without actually producing the states of infused mystical prayer. On paper this sounds quite complex, and in early Christian mystical settings, these distinctions were not set out so clearly as they were later by Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, and manualists such as Poulain, Adolphe Tanquerey, Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, and Giovanni Scaramelli. But from a phenomenological perspective this distinction is experienced as the difference between laborious ascetical prayer, which Teresa famously likened to drawing water from a well to water a garden, and the more easeful stages of mystical, contemplative prayer that she likened to using a water wheel to irrigate the garden or letting it be watered by a nearby river or rainfall. Th

  8. Apr 6

    Advaita Vedānta and Mystical Experience

    Prompted by a recent discussion with an advocate of a school of contemporary Advaita Vedānta that discounts mystical experience, I explore the positive and indispensable role that mystical experience plays in awakening to enlightenment. (Revised August 6, 2026) You can follow along with the transcript on the audio or you can read the slightly edited version of the transcript here: I’ve been staying for the last few months at an ashram in Germany. It’s a traditional place where the Hindu deities are honored in daily pujas and ceremonies. It’s possible to engage in spiritual practice from five in the morning until ten at night. There are aratis, satsangs, yoga classes, and traditional teachers of Vedanta from India. Globally known yoga teachers and Ayurveda physicians are also in attendance here. So it’s an extraordinary opportunity to be here and to revive and deepen my spiritual life. I’ve been writing, reading, and doing my seva here at the ashram. I’ve also been deeply meditating, practicing yoga, and experiencing a reunion with the Self. That’s exactly what one expects from time spent in an ashram, and that’s the experience that I’ve been having here. I was listening yesterday to a teacher of Advaita Vedanta from India, who said something that set me to thinking about the different varieties of Advaita Vedanta that we can choose from currently. To put this quite simply, we might say that there is the traditional Advaita Vedanta that goes back to Shankara and is still taught and preserved in the ashrams, or maths, that Shankara founded in India. It’s an ancient and authentic tradition, though it’s unlikely that someone like me could study Advaita Vedanta in it. It would have been better to have been born into the Hindu tradition to be able to access this tradition in terms of language, background, and culture. There’s a second kind of Advaita Vedanta that has been popularized across the globe over the last century and a quarter by swamis such as Swami Vivekananda who began teaching in the West. They articulated a Vedanta that’s generally known as Integral Yoga, a concept introduced by Swami Sivananda but traceable to Swami Vivekananda. Integral Yoga integrates the four classical yogas that are often mentioned in connection with Hinduism. These include Karma Yoga, which is the yoga of seva, of work, of activity, of offering the fruits of your actions to your favored deity, to your ishta-devata. Second, is what are commonly known as Raja Yoga and Hatha Yoga. They are distinguishable and not quite the same. We can call them the yoga of the subtle body and the yoga of the physical body. Next is Bhakti Yoga, which is the yoga of devotion and of love for the Divine. It speaks directly to our hearts as well as to our minds. Finally, there’s Jnana Yoga, which is the yoga of wisdom, the yoga of knowledge. As presented currently among those practicing the Integral Yoga of the Sivananda traditions, which were inspired on this point by Swami Vivekananda, Jnana Yoga is an experiential practice. You can know that you are Brahman either through direct insight, or jnana, or through the practice of samadhi. On the direct path you say to yourself, ahaṃ brahmasmi, or, in English, “I am pure consciousness.” Then you remain still. In that stillness, there may be a twinkle, a sensation, an awareness, or an insight of the truth that there is only a singular consciousness of nondual, formless, and blissful Brahman—which is also atman, or the Self. To attain this insight, this spark of jnana, or to bolster it, you practice dhyana and samadhi as prescribed in the Yoga Sutra. A third variant of Advaita Vedanta comprises the recent movements mostly among nontraditional adherents of Advaita Vedanta known as Neo-Advaita. As with traditional Advaita Vedanta, Neo-Advaita teaches that there’s nothing to attain because we are already the Self that we’re looking for. To put that in the memorable saying of a recent Neo-Advaita teacher, we can simply call off the search. There’s nothing to search for because we’re already found! We are the Self that we’ve been looking for. There’s nothing else to do. And everything else is merely a distraction from just being what we already are, which is pure, eternal, formless, infinite consciousness. There’s a fourth kind of Advaita Vedanta, which is now becoming more influential, and there are many varieties and streams that enter into this view. It’s gaining ground among academic researchers on Advaita Vedanta, popular Advaita teachers opposed to Neo-Advaita, and in some Hindu ashrams—although it seem to have less standing among the most traditional Advaita Vedantists in the maths founded by Shankara. What unites the different streams of this recent variant of Advaita Vedanta is the downplaying of the practice and experience of samadhi as taught in the Yoga Sutra. One variant of this approach adds the claim that enlightenment, or moksha, is attained only through hearing and reflecting on famous sayings in the Upanishads such as “You are That” and “I am Brahman.” Another variant of this type of Advaita Vedanta holds that enlightenment comes only through an ongoing dialectical process of first affirming (adhyaropa) that Brahman is x, where x is any feature of experienced reality that you choose, and then subsequently denying (apavada) that Brahman possesses that attribute. Like Neo-Advaita, these schools retain the profound Advaita Vedantic teaching that we’re already enlightened. Since there is only pure consciousness, it’s not possible to be anything other than pure consciousness. But they also pose a challenge to Neo-Advaita by claiming that there is in fact one—and only one—practice that conduces to enlightenment: we recognize the truth of our natural enlightenment only by hearing and reflecting on Upanishadic statements such as “I am Brahman” or “You are That.” That suffices for us to throw off the shackles of illusion. Cultivating samadhi and attending to mystical experience are not avenues to moksha. Indeed, they may become impediments if we see them as more than preparatory practices Because the emerging schools of this fourth variety of Advaita Vedanta hold that virtually all of the other schools of Advaita Vedanta since Shankara and his disciple Sureshvara have fallen away from the correct path, we might name this approach “Revisionist Advaita Vedanta.” Because this carries a negative connotation, perhaps something like “Repristinated Advaita Vedanta” is preferable. It captures the intention of these movements to return to what they see as the pristine teachings of Shankara and Sureshvara. The arguments separating these divergent schools of Advaita Vedanta are subtle but also interminable, and they can also become a distraction from practice. In my own practice, I am drawn more to the teachings of Swami Vivekananda, Swami Sivananda, and Sri Ramana Maharshi than to the other schools of Advaita Vedanta, which has influenced me for multiple decades. The beginning of nondual insight, or jnana, occurred for me early in my spiritual practice over fifty years ago when my first guru asserted that “you are not this body.” That claim stunned me when I first heard it, because I thought, if I’m not this body, what then am I? That led to the classic practice of atma-vichara, or self-inquiry, which is the inquiry or the investigation of one’s experience to see what in that experience is actually the truth. If you really grapple with the statement that you are not this body, it can lead—as it led in my case—to an almost furious search to find out who who I am if I’m not my body. It’s an extraordinary claim for physicalists and materialists. It would be laughable to them at the outset, but even they might be challenged by it if they started to grapple with that teaching. If I’m not my body, who or what am I? Am I my mind? But the mind constantly changes, and what is a mind in any case? I can touch my body but how do I touch my mind? How do I define a boundary around my mind? I can define the boundary around my body, at least from a common sense standpoint. But how do I define, grapple with, or rope in my mind? These actions are impossible because the mind isn’t a physical object. It’s subtle and it eludes any sort of definition. I can’t really find my mind. There is a classic story in Zen Buddhism about a disciple who comes to a Zen teacher and asks for their mind to be pacified. The Zen teacher replies, “show me your mind, and I’ll pacify it.” There’s no way you can act upon that instruction. I’m not sure what it would even mean to say that I’m my mind rather than my physical body, although I do know that the mind can be both blissful and terrifying. Everything we experience, we experience only through the mind. That’s an old insight, and it’s not something that you have to go to India to discover. Simple reflection upon experience shows that we don’t have a direct encounter with the objects that we perceive except through our minds. This is an idea that was also discovered by idealist philosophers in the West. So, if I’m not my body and I’m not my mind, what’s left? Well, if we are familiar with the Hatha Yoga teachings and the tāntrika teachings of Hinduism, then we know that we also have a subtle body, which is the prana body. We can perceive it through Hatha Yoga techniques and through deep meditation when we become aware of the subtle body. But that body also is changing, and it’s not something that I can physically define the way I can define my physical body. It’s not always present in our awareness because we’re not always having deep, profound awakenings of Kundalini or the chakras. These are extraordinarily valuable experiences when we do have them because these experiences of the subtle realms reveal to us the presence of the devas in our completely flattened

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Renewing the Spiritual Life After the Evaporation of Meaning. kenrose51.substack.com

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