One of the most wonderful things that the Internet gave me is access to the lectures of Swami Sarvapriyananda, who made the core concepts of Vedanta accessible and understandable to today's generation.
Growing up, I had always been interested in our core philosophies and was curious to learn more. I have lived most of my life with a vague sense of void-- some strange intuition that something important is missing from my life. However, our mainstream education not only never taught us any core knowledge from Indian thought, but often dismissed all of them as primitive superstitions. Indeed, the only people who seemed to possess this knowledge all seemed to be tightly affiliated to organised religion, and whenever I've tried to approach anyone to learn about Indian thought, all they seemed to be interested to teach me was "submission" and "surrender". I do not know why we have attributed divinity (bhakti) to what is essentially slave training. For me, bhakti is about devotion and commitment and not submission and surrender. The latter requires acceptance without questioning, while one can verily be a devotee of the path of inquiry and questioning. I remember sitting in a class about Upanishads several years ago while I was in college, and all that the speaker was talking about was-- what is the correct way in which we should worship. I had walked out of the class in frustration.
Anyway, I am ranting. Let me come back to the main point of this post.
One of the biggest value addition that Swami Sarvapriyananda's lectures did, was to make Vedantic thought accessible to the inquiring mind, without passing judgments on our humility or any such thing. And indeed, after I started listening to his talks, the void that I had been feeling all these years, had suddenly begun to clear!
Indian thought indeed is profound and wholly different from what we learn in our mainstream education. So much so that, I now see mainstream science as overtly mechanistic, focusing only on processes and unable to distinguish between why and how questions. In contrast, for more than 6000 years, Indian thought has been arguing and debating whether consciousness has any material cause. Most schools of thought have rejected any material cause to consciousness, giving us some enormously cool insights-- like the ontology of thing, nothing, and no-thing.
Swami Sarvapriyananda however, subscribes to the Advaita philosophy, which argues that consciousness is all there is. The ultimate reality Brahman is the only entity that exists, which is featureless (nirguna) and formless (niraakara). The myriad of features and forms that we see in our existential reality (the Prakriti of Samkhya) is called Maya, which is essentially an "appearance" in Brahman. This is somewhat like how on a television that is showing a movie, all that exists is the screen. All the characters in the movie and its events are just appearances on the screen. The semantics of the movie has no bearing on the screen-- for instance, an explosion in the movie does not affect the screen at all. By this definition, Maya is at a lower ontological reality with respect to Brahman, or our consciousness, which is the only reality.
Advaita is indeed radical in its philosophy (not radical in the organised religion sense!) and offers a perspective on reality that is arguably unique only to Indian thought. It has greatly shaped our civilisation and culture.
But Advaita still leaves out some questions. If Maya is an appearance, what causes this appearance in Brahman? What is the purpose of this appearance? Advaita also can lead to a sense of nihilism if we (in my opinion, wrongly) interpret the impermanence of Maya to mean that Maya is "unimportant" and its elements like morals, justice, ethics, etc. are not worth pursuing or upholding.
Advaita is not without its detractors, and one of the biggest challenges for Advaita came from Madhwacharya, who was born more than 500 years after Adi Shankaracharya (who was the first to popularise Advaita into a movement).
Swami Sarvapriyananda defines the Dwaita philosophy of Madhwacharya as dualistic (which is fine), and equates it with theism like Abrahamic religions. Theistic religions argue of a God as an entity separate from the material reality that we live in, and one who is the creator of the material reality. Theism propound submission and surrender to God to achieve redemption.
I had not found this argument convincing. Madhwacharya was an astute philosopher and makes very sharp arguments. It is very unlikely that after learning Advaita in depth and realising reality in a whole new perspective, a thinking mind would come back and argue for theism which is way too primitive in the way it approaches the ultimate question of reality!
Today, my perspective again changed deeply after I came across this talk by Prof. Prathosh from IISc, who, apart from being a an expert in AI, is also deeply well versed in Dwaita philosophy.
The core question that Dwaita addresses is whether the ultimate reality is featureless (nirguna) or has features (saguna). If the ultimate reality is featureless, then good and evil, or justice and injustice, are all the same.
Dwaita basically argues that the ultimate reality is not "featureless", but "infinitely featured". It contains all features like knowledge, happiness, existence, etc. to an infinite extent. The limited existence that we live in, is brought about by the "filter" of existence that limits this infinitely featured reality into a finitely featured being.
As an example, consider white light. This is not a light that has no colour-- indeed, white light has all colours. If we subject white light to one or more filters, we get coloured light, which is but a limitation of the white light.
The sense in which we are "separate" from the divine in Dwaita philosophy is not that we are the "servant of God" as in theistic religions, but that our material existence entails that we possess these filters that limit the infinite reality into our finite existence.
This approach to modeling existence removes the nihilism problem of Advaita! It is not that good and evil are both parts of Maya and hence unreal with respect to the ultimate reality of Brahman. It is that what is "good" is that which helps us transcend our existential filters and realise the infinite reality, while what is "bad" is that which adds more filters and limits our existence even more.
The bhakti of Dwaita is not made of blind submission and surrender and irrational faith. The bhakti of Dwaita is a path of devotion and commitment, where we become aware of the filters that are limiting us and transcend them.
This is such great clarity!
