Discussion on Vedanta | Swami Sarvapriyananda and Deepak Chopra

Thank you for being here. We have approximately 40 minutes to solve the mystery of existence. So without wasting any time, I'm going to start talking to Swamiji. Thank you for being here. Thank you for having me. And I'll just give a very short introduction, and then we'll get going, OK? So how many people here have heard the phrase, the hard problem of consciousness? How many people have not? OK. Well, if you do a Google search and you ask, what are the 150 open questions in science, the first open question in science is, what's the universe made of? And the answer is, we don't know, because 96% of the universe is mysterious dark energy, dark matter. I'm not going to go into that. 4% of the universe is atomic. Of the 4% of the universe that's atomic, 99.99% is invisible interstellar dust. So we can't see it. The visible universe, which we are now told, according to the scientific model, is 2 trillion galaxies. 2 trillion galaxies. So we live in the Milky Way galaxy with 100 billion stars. Next door is Andromeda, same number of stars, Virgo, on and on, keep going. 2 trillion galaxies, 706 billion planets. I don't even know how to write that. And according to current scientific models, trillions, uncountable trillions of planets, possibly 60 billion habitable planets in our own galaxy, based on what they call the Goldilocks zone. That's only 0.01% of the universe. That's 0.01. The rest is unknown or unknowable. And the 0.01% that's atomic, if you go deep into the nature of atoms, they become particles. And then particles have this mysterious behavior that when they're not being looked at or they don't interact with other particles, they become waves. And unlike particles, which have units of mass and energy, waves just exist as possibilities. Bottom line, the universe is made out of nothing. So why does it look like this? That's the hard problem of consciousness. Why does it look like this? How do atoms and molecules in the brain, or electrical impulses, create this experience? This experience, the experience of your own body, the experience of your own mind. And actually, most people now think this hard problem is unsolvable if you think of matter as foundational. If matter is the ontological primitive, then the problem is unsolvable. So that's why we have Swamiji. He's going to solve the problem for us very quickly by telling us there's no hard problem at all. If you take the reverse point of view, and that is consciousness is fundamental, and matter is a human construct. But without now me going on and on, Swamiji, Vedanta has solved this problem. What is Vedanta? Well, thank you for the introduction, Deepak. Vedanta is a philosophical system, or a family of philosophical systems, based on very ancient texts called the Upanishads. And these Upanishads are the final, the highest teachings of the Vedas. The Vedas, as we know, are very ancient scriptures of the Hindu religion. So these Upanishads, they contain certain insights about who we are, what we are, and what reality is. The rishis, the ancient sages who came upon these insights, they found that by knowledge of these insights, by getting these insights, it actually solves the very human problem of suffering, the problem of death, of meaninglessness. The crucial human problems, they are actually solved if you have knowledge about what we are and what this reality we live in is, what we are experiencing. If you want me to put it in one sentence, and happily we can do that, the sentence is, that thou art. You are. Tattvamasi. It means there is an absolute reality of this universe which can be known or realized. And luckily for us, we are that absolute reality. Tattvamasi means that, that you are that absolute reality of which entirety of this universe and the person you experience yourself to be, these are manifestations of that one absolute reality, which is called Brahman in the Upanishads. Tattvamasi means that thou art. And this identity is the essential teaching of Vedanta. And they claim that it actually can be experienced in life. It's not speculation. It can be experienced, and it must be experienced in order to overcome suffering. So this is basically the core teaching of Vedanta. And that absolute reality is usually expressed in English as pure consciousness. Yes. Pure consciousness or pure existence, the Sanskrit terms are sat, which means pure being or isness, existence. Chit, which means awareness, consciousness in itself. But also, happily, and pun intended, ananda, which means happiness, so joy or bliss. So as Swami Vivekananda put it, existence itself, consciousness itself, and bliss itself, that is the nature of the ultimate reality which Vedanta speaks about. So let's now use one term for convenience, sat, chit, ananda, just for lack of economy of expenditure of energy, let's just use the word consciousness. Absolutely. And so consciousness is the basis of every experience we have, whether it's mind or body or the universe, right? Right. So give your definition of consciousness and how you would experience it. You've got only the easiest questions for me. Give your definition of consciousness. In fact, it is interesting that we live in interesting times. I was just talking to Deepak a little while ago. Consciousness studies has become very important in the last 20, 25 years. Scientists were not so interested in consciousness until about 25 or 30 years ago. But right now, consciousness studies is booming. Psychologists are obviously interested in it. Neuroscientists are interested in it. Linguists and philosophers and people. Cosmologists. Cosmologists are interested in it. Computer scientists are interested in it. So you think that all of these people are interested, so they know what they're talking about. Well, they cannot agree on what they're talking about. What is the definition of consciousness? There is no consensus. There are multiple definitions of consciousness, but none of them are acceptable across the board. In fact, a friend of mine who is a mathematician and a monk, he told me that I don't take this entire field of consciousness studies too seriously. I said, why not? Because it seems to be what we are doing as monks. He said, any field of study where you cannot define the subject of study is not yet a mature field of study. All right, now what Deepak is asking me is give me a definition of consciousness. So I'm going to give you a definition of consciousness from the Vedanta perspective, where actually they are very clear on what they mean by consciousness. Get this. Whatever you are aware of is not consciousness. It's what is called a via negativa definition, a definition by exclusion. That means anything that you're aware of. Right now, you are aware of sights and sounds and smells, all of this. So they are objects of consciousness. You are aware of them. And that which is aware of them is consciousness. So then consciousness is basically awareness of experience, right? Is the awareness in which experience becomes possible. So here, I attend these conferences that you're talking about. And people come up with all kinds of definitions. Some materialists say consciousness is first-person experience. Others say consciousness is the knowing element in every experience. But I think the non-dualists these days, you know, a lot of non-dualists in the West too, they're saying that consciousness is the knowing element in every experience. So right now, you know that you're having this experience. You also know that you have a body. You also know that you have a mind. So what is it that knows this experience called mind, body, world? Other non-dualists have expanded on that and said consciousness is that in which all experience occurs, all experience is known, and out of which all experience is made. So you started off by saying consciousness is not anything that is an object. So what is this? This is an experience in consciousness, right? Right. Look at the words which Deepak just used right now. The knowing element, that by which knowledge is possible. Now, what Vedanta would say is that if you carefully look at knowledge, all your experience, and eliminate mentally in your understanding, eliminate from your experience whatever is objective, by which I mean you're looking at this beaker, this jar here. This is objective because it's an object of your, you're looking at it. It's an object. But what is looking at it? Your eyes. But you're aware of your eyes. Your eyes are open, closed. The guy is boring me so much, I can't keep my eyes open. You're aware of that. So the eyes are also objects in your awareness. Now, you are aware of your eyes with your mind. You're thinking about your eyes. So the thoughts in the mind, you're also aware of that. So even the thoughts in the mind are objects of awareness. In this way, if you eliminate, again, in understanding, everything that is objective, everything that is an object in your experience, you are left with consciousness as it is. And don't try to catch it. Ah, now we'll get consciousness as it is. You will never get it that way because that would be an object. So it is the you, the real you. In fact, one definition of consciousness offered by one of the disciples of the great Shankaracharya in Sanskrit, anidam chaitanyam, very elegant definition. What is it? Not this awareness. From your awareness, from your experience just now, if you eliminate in your understanding everything that you can call this, this jar, this body, this eye, this mind, this thought, if you eliminate that which shines upon all of them, that is consciousness. And what shines is the knowing elements. As Swamiji said, you can't go looking for consciousness because it is that which is doing the looking, right? You can't find it out there because it's that which is looking at what's out there. But let's go a little deeper now that you have created the basis now that consciousness is not an object. The object is experience in consciousness. Now, this is also an object, right? This body is also an object. And the thoughts are also an object. So can we say, let's say you're a baby. You just showed up in the world, which, by the way, has already been interpreted for every baby for 2,000 plus years ever since people started to speak in language and created culture and started telling stories. People started interpreting experience. And we are born into an interpreted world before we are born. So you're a baby. What you see here is not a shoe. You see a color, a shape. If you touch it, it's a sensation. If you can smell it, taste it if you want, or make noise out of it. So these are sensory experiences without labels. But then humans create labels and create constructs. We call that a shoe. We call this a hand. We call this a body. We call this the world. And then we give names. And you were earlier on explaining to me this is the whole phenomenon that we call nam rupa. But this naming creates a human construct of what is really a sensory perception, which in turn is a mental activity, which in turn, as you just said, is an activity in consciousness. So if we take that literally, then this is also made out of consciousness. This is, I think, Deepak's favorite theme, that everything is made out of consciousness. But here's the thing here, because that's what one of the schools of Vedanta, Advaita Vedanta, these Upanishads I was speaking about. So great philosophers came along. And they took these Upanishads. And they developed very complex but very coherent and consistent systems of philosophy based on these Upanishads. So they became the different schools of Vedanta. One school, which is very well known, is Advaita Vedanta, non-dual Vedanta. There, the idea is that not only are you consciousness, but then everything else is also consciousness. This might sound, as somebody told me recently, a materialist. It's a wacky idea. It's a crazy idea. How can everything be consciousness? But it goes like this. Once you say that whatever is objective is not consciousness, that which is aware of the object is consciousness, then you are left with the entire world of objects, entire universe out there, my own body, even the mind. They're all objects. Now I am the consciousness witnessing all of this. Now your question is, then what are these objects? That's where Vedanta becomes very interesting. It says, all of the things that you experience in consciousness as objects are actually nothing other than consciousness itself. You, the pure consciousness, the entirely subjective consciousness, appears out there as a world set in space and time and full of objects with the help of name and form. So this names and forms. Another name for this is maya, name and form, nama rupa. So what you're seeing here is you, the consciousness, in yourself appears a mind, a body with its senses, and the senses reveal to it a universe of objects set out there, apparently, in time and space, including this glass jar. And all of this is name and form. Interpretation, as you said. Somebody put it very beautifully. Language is the knife with which you cut reality. So this patch of color, what it might look like to a baby, but the mother comes and explains, this is a jar of water. And this is your body. This is your body. This is the hand. This is the world. And a concept of your body. That also, slowly, a baby learns over time, that it's my body. So given this understanding, and given the Vedic worldview, and given the fact that, as humans, we can only speak in language, explain things in language, and as soon as we create a word, we, in a sense, create a construct of the fundamental reality, which, right now, you said, is conscious. Tattvamasi, that's aham brahmasmi, tattvamasi. Given this construct, for our audience who's not familiar with these terms, can you help explain the difference between jiva, atma, and brahman? And then let's go further after that. This is an opportunity to get Vedanta in less than an hour. So we can't waste time. Let's get it all out here. Oh, Vedanta 101, then. Yes. That absolute reality which Vedanta speaks about is called brahman. And the word brahman, etymologically, if you look at it in Sanskrit, it simply means the vast, that which has no limit, just the vast. It's not the name of a particular god or anything like that. It's just the limitless, the vast, the infinite. And by the way, when you talk about infinite, a mathematician or a scientist might want to ask you, what exactly do you mean by infinite? Because they are precisely defined infinites, more than one infinite in mathematics, for example. Vedanta has a very precise definition of the infinite. It says, that which is not limited in space, time, and object is the infinite. In Sanskrit, desha, kala, vastu, pariccheda, sunyam. Divide of limitations in time, space, and object. What are limitations in time? Born at this time, dying at this time. Created and destroyed. So that's a limitation in time. If you do not have a limitation in time, what happens? You're eternal. There's no point where that is created, no point where it is destroyed. So here's a very important thing to understand. Eternal doesn't mean stretching in time forever. Eternal means timeless, not in time. You're right. It's not something which lasts a long time. That's one way of understanding eternal, but that's just a preliminary step. The real thing is, your time is in you. You might ask, that sounds confusing. What do you mean, time is in you? Vedanta means it in a very simple sense. When you experience time, right? That Tim just told us we're going to wrap up by 8.30. So it's in Tim's consciousness all the time that we're going to wrap up at 8.30. 8.30 is not aware of Tim. Tim is aware of 8.30. That's all that Vedanta means when it says that time is in consciousness, and not consciousness in time. Another human construct. And no limitation in object. That's an interesting thing in Indian philosophy. Limitation in object means this glass jar is just a glass jar. It's not the table. It's not Deepak or me. So each object has its own identity, and it's different from everything else. That's called limitation by object. And being infinite means it is not limited to any particular object, which means no object in the universe is different from Brahman. If no object is different from Brahman, there's no difference between Brahman and any other object. There is no second thing apart from Brahman. So that no second means Advaita, non-duality. So Brahman is that non-dual reality, which is not limited by time, space, or object. The objects in consciousness cannot limit consciousness. Consciousness is not limited by its contents. But now, Atman. Atman, yes. That's the second important concept in Vedanta. Atman means you. So when Vedanta says that thou art, what it basically means, Brahman is equal to Atman. It means that infinite reality not limited by time, space, and object is you. You might say, that sounds cool, but I can't really believe that. But it's you in a very special sense, not you as a body, not you as the mind or as the limited person, but as that absolute consciousness, which shines through that particular mind and body. So which, in fact, shines through and reveals the person you take yourself to be. So that reality, beyond the person, that pure consciousness is called Atman. And Atman is equal to Brahman is basically the teaching of Vedanta. So if you say, what is Atman? The real me, or the real I, which is the reality of this universe. It's the self, not the selfie. This is a selfie, right? Yes. Deepak Chopra is a selfie. Your name and your form is your selfie at the moment through an act of perception. But when we say I, what is the I that is experiencing this name and this form, right? I think the selfie idea, it struck me, no? In Vedanta, we keep saying that you have to find out who am I or what am I. Because if you discover that, you have discovered the reality of the universe, self-knowledge. I think that's the real selfie. Instead of taking a picture of the body, if you could take a picture of yourself as you really are, that would be the ultimate selfie, I think. That would be a nice topic for a talk, I think. The ultimate selfie. So now, what is the difference between Atman and Jiva? Ah, the Sanskrit term Jiva, it's as we experience ourselves right now. If I tell you that you are pure consciousness, you might say, Swami, that sounds nice. But that's not how I see myself. How do you see yourself? How do you experience yourself? We experience ourselves as persons, as embodied in bodies which are born and change and age and decay and die. We enjoy and suffer. So this being, which is definitely a conscious being, but which finds itself limited to a body and mind, this is called a Jiva. And even that body-mind is an activity. It's not a noun. It's a verb. It's a changing process, right? True. In pure consciousness. True. The body is a series of changes. We all know it. From birth till now and eventually from babyhood to childhood to being a teenager to a young person, middle-aged and an old person, it's a stream of changes in this physical matter. That's the body. And the mind changes even faster. I mean, today, from the morning till now, how many times you've been happy and irritated and curious and bored, the mind changes continuously. It's a series of changes at a subtle level. You experience it within yourself. And this body-mind series of changes appearing in consciousness, having forgotten its consciousness nature, is what we call the individual, the Jiva. That's the Vedantic understanding of the person. And this Jiva is, and correct me if I'm wrong, because I'm a novice. You're not. He's been at it much longer than I have. Yeah, but you have the training. Jiva is programmed by, if I may use that word, by sanskara, karma, vasana at a very fundamental level. So can you explain these terms? Well, yes. Our story does not begin at birth and does not end with death. We are very ancient creatures. Even the most newborn baby is actually a very, very ancient creature. We have existed many lives before, and there are possibly many more lives ahead of us. That's the Vedanta worldview. This Jiva existed before it came to this particular body. It existed in other bodies, in other worlds. And so over an infinite period of time, through actions, it has been accumulating, through cause and effect, what is called the law of karma. The law of karma, to put it very briefly, every action has its reaction or its effect. Every cause has its consequence. And this is something very fundamental in Indian philosophy. There's an enormous variety within Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, all the Indic philosophies, but they all accept the law of karma, that there is causality. Now, because of this, we are what we are today. It explains the differences between each Jiva. As consciousness, we are one reality, but when you come to the mind and the body and the person, we are so different. We have different stories, different abilities, different problems, and different possibilities. All of these differences are the results of past karma, and what we do with it right now generates new karma for future existences. So this is karma. Now, karma has two effects. One is it gives us this life, and the other is it has an effect on our minds. So the effect on our minds, our individual likes and dislikes, whether you prefer this or that, whether you hate this thing or that thing, those individual preferences are called samskaras, and they exist in the mind, in the subtle body. That's what the Jiva takes away after death. So the karma, the samskara, the vasanas, is that the personality with which, say, you have two identical twins? They have the same fertilized ovum, but any mother will tell you that they're two different personalities. Is that coming from samskara? True, true. I mean, even children in the same household, you mentioned twins, but parents know how different they are. So these differences, though they come from the same parents, they're probably brought up in the same kind of environment. Nature and nurture both seem to be similar, but then there's tremendous difference between children. So that comes, it's inherited from past lives. That's the Vedantic understanding of how we are so different. Completing this map step by step, then even in Ayurveda, we talk about physical body, sthul sharir, sukshma sharir, subtle body, mind, intellect, ego, causal body. Explain this map just a little bit, the physical body, the subtle body, and the causal body. That's an important concept. But one thing I want everybody to know is Vedanta, it's not speculation. It's not even metaphysics. It's firmly grounded in experience. Whose experience? Your experience and my experience. So when you talk about physical body, subtle body, causal body, it's all experiential and right now. You can see it right now. What is the physical body? That which you can see. You can see it. You can touch it, taste it, smell it. This is the physical body, yes. That which you see, which you can weigh, that's the physical body. Now, within this physical body is what Vedanta calls a subtle body. How do you know? You just have to close your eyes and look inside. You see, I'm happy. That's a subtle body. I'm unhappy, subtle body. I remember, I forget, I want, I dislike, I understand, I do not understand. All that you directly experience within yourself, this first person experience which we are having right now, that's the subtle body. And beyond that, Vedanta talks about something a little more obscure called the causal body, which is the blankness which we experience in deep sleep. If you right now try to experience yourself beyond the subtle body, what is it which is experiencing the subtle body? You will tend to hit a blank wall if you see it right now. That is the causal body. And Vedanta says the real you, the Atman, is not the physical body. You are not this body. Is not the subtle body. Not even the mind, not even the person. Is not even the causal body, but that consciousness in which all of these are experienced. And the way I put it is, you can drive a car. That doesn't make you a car. You are embodied. We have a body. Vedanta doesn't deny that. You are experiencing a body and a mind. That's all there. But you are not that. You are not limited to that. So every day, Swamiji, we go through this experience, waking, dreaming, deep sleep, right? So we understand waking. This is waking. Unless somebody is dozed off. Yeah, unless somebody is dozed off. Always a problem with Vedanta. Hopefully, everybody is in the waking state right now. OK, then the dream state, we also experience every night. And deep sleep, we also experience every night. But in deep sleep, there is awareness, right? Not conscious experience, but awareness. He has touched upon a very important subject. If you are saying that you are awareness, I am awareness, and this is constant, body changes, mind changes, then somebody might ask, what about deep sleep? What about the stages we call unconscious or under anesthesia? There's no awareness. There's no consciousness there. So where is this pure consciousness Vedanta talks about? Vedanta insists there is consciousness there. And that's where you begin to understand what Vedanta means by consciousness. See, a fundamental difference has to be understood here in concepts. Normally, in ordinary discourse, especially here in the West, we take the mind to be consciousness. So hearing, smelling, touching, talking, thinking, desiring, willing, remembering, this is called consciousness. But what Vedanta says is, this is consciousness plus the activity of the mind. So all the changes that you see are the mind, but consciousness is not the mind. It reveals the activity of the mind. And when the mind shuts down in deep sleep, the blankness, that nothingness that you experience in deep sleep, it's still an experience. I put it this way. Deep sleep is not an absence of experience. It is an experience of absence. So that's what Vedanta, you know, experience comes when consciousness has an object. In deep sleep, consciousness has no object because the world is not revealed, body is shut down. I mean, you're not using the body to experience the world. The mind is shut down. There are no dreams. So because there are no objects, it seems to be nothing. But you do wake up, and then you do say, I slept like a log. I didn't know anything. I slept like a baby. This phrase is there, similar phrases are there in every language showing that it's a common experience across all of humanity. So that means it's an experience. It's not nothing. So there is consciousness in deep sleep. That's what, in fact, a recent book which talks about the phenomenon that consciousness is there in deep sleep. It's called Waking Dreaming Being by Evan Thompson, who's a philosopher in the University of British Columbia. He says that even in deep sleep, you have to admit consciousness. And he makes an interesting comment at the very beginning. He says that consciousness studies didn't begin 25 years ago. It began with the Upanishads 5,000 years ago. And he makes a tremendous statement. He says we should not date our history from AD and BC. We should date history from before Upanishads and after Upanishads. They are so important. Yes, a tremendous assertion he makes. Let's talk about deep sleep and the relationship. Is deep sleep a kind of a clue, a window to what we call death? Death, OK. Now we are moving into grim subjects. When we go into India, when they do a cremation, or frequently Bhagavad Gita is quoted, and Lord Krishna says the real you is not subject to birth or death. Water cannot wet it. Wind cannot dry it. Weapons cannot shatter it. Fire cannot burn it. Ancient weapons cannot cleave it. It's unborn. It's not subject to death. And many swamis, like yourself, when they say what happens to you after death, their answer is I was never born, which is very confusing to people. But what is the connection between, say, waking, dreaming, sleeping, and turiya, and death? All right. You've used the term turiya, which is a common term in Vedanta. It literally means the fourth. What do you mean by the fourth? Vedanta looks at it this way. There are different procedures, methodologies, if you will, for discovering ourselves as pure consciousness. And anybody can try them out. One of the methodologies is to use our common experience of waking, dreaming, and deep sleep to come to an intuition of ourselves as the witness consciousness of waking, dreaming, and deep sleep. When you are identified with this person, this waking person, you're called the waker. Call it the first. When you are identified with the person you are in the dream, you're not aware that you're dreaming. It's a dream which you realize later. But you were there in the dream as a person. That person, we call it the dreamer. Then deep sleep, that consciousness associated with deep sleep, when you wake up and say, I slept like a baby, call it the third, the deep sleeper. So you have the waker, the dreamer, and the deep sleeper. And these are the three which we are used to. We think of ourselves as this is our experience. And what Vedanta teaches us, the crucial insight of Vedanta is you are not the first, the waker, not the second, the sleeper, the dreamer, not the third, the deep sleeper. But what it calls the fourth, the consciousness in which all of these are appearing and disappearing. So the consciousness is apart from these three and yet underlying all of these three. That fourth is called Turiya. And that is not subject to birth and death. That is not subject to birth and death. What is subject to birth and death? The body. What is subject to change? The mind. But the Turiya itself is the witness of the birth and the death of the body, birth and the aging and the decay and the death of the body. It itself is not born with the birth of the body. It itself does not age with the aging of the body. It itself does not die with the dying of the body. And the changes of the mind, Turiya itself reveals the changes of the mind. The Mandukya Upanishad, which is a classic text of Advaita Vedanta, it says that you are the Turiya. You are not the waker, dreamer, or deep sleeper. And the whole point is to realize yourself as the Turiya. And it's not really the fourth. Really, when you come to an understanding of it, it is the one which appears as the three. So now, earlier in the room there, we both were talking about Wittgenstein, the German philosopher. And Wittgenstein said, in one of his writings, our life is a dream. We are asleep. But once in a while, we wake up enough to know that we are dreaming. So by tonight, whatever happened today will be a dream. Your childhood is now a dream. What happened five minutes ago is a dream. What happens to my words by they reach you, they're gone. So actually, this right now, in a sense, is a waking dream, because it's ungraspable, right? One minute ago is ungraspable. And so this is a waking dream in what we might say a lucid now. And the reason I'm bringing this to our attention right now is this waking dream is frequently referred to as maya, right, because it's a projection of consciousness. But anyway, how does this all help us? How does this help us alleviate our existential suffering? What has this to do with the five kleshas that the Vedanta talks about? Yeah, before I get to that, I know when you, when Deepak says this is all a dream, I would see some skeptical faces. He'd say, no, no, this is real, and the dreams are dreams, and this is real. But, you know, look at it this way. What, if you imagine something, eating a cookie, you'd say that's an imagination, it's not real. And if I eat a cookie, that's real. But now do this. Imagine eating a cookie, and also remember that a cookie which you ate maybe one day ago or two days ago, the memory of eating a cookie and the imagination of eating a cookie, they seem very similar, because both are in the mind and mental. And what Deepak says is this very thing which seems very real now is going to become a memory every fleeting second, it's retreating into memory. When you compare that memory with a fantasy. When we came into this room, that's memory, right? Right now, if you imagine us walking into this room, it's memory. How is that different from the memory of a dream? Every fleeting moment which we call real is quickly, at tremendous speed, disappearing into a dream-like memory. You would still argue, no, but this particular moment feels very real. And Vedanta agrees with you. This present moment feels very real because you are here. You are reality. This moment borrows its reality from you. See, wherever you are, that feels real to you. Imagine, even in your dreams, when you are actually in a dream, you don't know it's a dream, it feels very real. It feels very real at that time. It's because of the presence of consciousness at that present moment which lends reality to it. So the only continuity in any experience is that which you say, I. When you say, where are you? You say, I'm here, right? But if you go inside the body, there's no one there because this body is in I, being experienced in I. Mind is being experienced in I. That I is the only invariant in every dream-like experience. Absolutely. It's your only constant. Absolutely. When you were a baby, when you were a teenager, different body, different mind, but the invariant is that luminous consciousness that brings that experience, the light of awareness that brings that experience to what we call reality. I'll make a small distinction here. When you say, I, that I is not the ego. Yes. I would call it the witness of the ego. The witness. The ego comes and goes. So when you are deeply absorbed in something, playing a game of tennis or something like that, or immersed in a beautiful musical experience, you lose sense of self. So you'll say, has the I gone there? The ego is not apparent there. But consciousness, that's always there. Otherwise, you wouldn't have that experience at all. So that's what he means by the luminous I. But going back to the very important question which Deepak asked, what good is all of this? What's the point of all of this? The point is, it's the most important thing in our lives. The whole point of this, and of all of Indian philosophies, the different schools, it doesn't have to be Advaita Vedanta. It could be Buddhism, it could be Nyaya, Sankhya. The whole point is overcoming suffering and attainment of true, lasting peace and happiness. How does that work? Think about it. Where is suffering? There is suffering in the world, suffering of the body, suffering of the mind. But that consciousness which reveals the body, mind, and the world, does it suffer in itself? You will see, no. I'll tell you a very funny story. This person goes up to a Swami in the Himalayas and asks, Swami, I'm in great suffering. I'm suffering, I'm miserable, help me. And Swami says, are you aware of your misery? He says, yes, of course. That's why I've come here. I'm unhappy, I'm deeply aware of my unhappiness. That's why I've come to you. And Swami says, if you are aware of your unhappiness, of your misery, then that misery is an object, and you are the consciousness aware of that object. You are aware of the object means you cannot be that object. You are aware of unhappiness means you cannot be unhappy. You are aware of unhappiness in the mind. Think about it. The funny thing is, it works like this. The person goes and thinks about it. If you do that, you will see a certain distance opens up between you as the experiencer and the experienced unhappiness. And he comes back and says that, you're right. I am not unhappy. I'm experiencing an unhappiness in the mind, and I'm so peaceful now. And the Swami scolds him immediately. No, you are not peaceful. You are the witness of the peace in your mind. And that's important because the moment he distances himself from his unhappiness and he thinks, I'm at peace, you're trapped again because that's the peace in the mind, and the mind is changeable. It will change into unhappiness again. And you think, I was very happy at the Rubin Museum, but now I've stepped out into Times Square. I'm unhappy. No, both of them are appearances and disappearances in the mind. And this is not speculation. If you look at it, this is an accurate report of what's actually happening. Vedanta just brings it to your notice. The more we notice this, the more we stabilize ourselves in that witness consciousness, the more we are free of the ups and downs of the mind and the body and the world. So that's where the whole purpose lies. Going back to the five kleshas, with this basis. So you know the five kleshas in Vedanta are... Yoga, actually. Yeah, yoga. Not knowing the true nature of reality, grasping and clinging, that which is ungraspable, fear of impermanence, identifying with the ego, the fear of death. They're all connected, right? Right. So if we ask this question, what am I? Who am I? Go through the process, Neti, Neti, Shankaracharya's great hymn, and we get to this source, then all these things disappear, in a sense, including the fear of death. Right. What, in your view, how should we explain death in this scheme? It's interesting. What is death? What is death in this scheme, right? You remind me of this meeting I was in. I saw, there's something called meetup these days. And you see, there's something called a philosopher's cafe. In that, philosophers get together in the New York Ethical Society, and they discuss the great questions of philosophy. And I said, the five great unsolved questions of philosophy, we're going to discuss it in such and such day. So I turned up for that meeting, because I was attracted. And what are the five great questions? If you Google it on Oxford University Press website, you'll find the five great questions of unsolved questions of philosophy are, I'm telling you this, because one of those questions is what Deepak asked, and four of the five are related directly to consciousness. The first question is, do we have free will? The second question they discussed was, what can we know, if anything at all? The question of epistemology and skepticism. What are the limits of knowledge? Of knowledge, yes. And the third one is, straight away, what am I? Or who am I? That was the third question, which is the fundamental question in Vedanta. Then the fourth question was, what is death? And the fifth one was, what is justice? But the fourth question, what is death? The philosophers themselves said, we are not talking about death from the point of view of a doctor, which Deepak is an expert in, and he knows. It's an interesting topic for a doctor, too. But in this system, as a person, what is death to me? If I'm not the body, then what is death to me? In Vedanta, death is the passing away of this particular body you are embodied in. This experience. This particular experience, it stops, because this body cannot support the jiva any longer. Maybe it's old, maybe it's damaged, so it dies. And the jiva moves on. The individual person moves on. And all of this is, again, an experience in consciousness. So in consciousness, birth and death of the body take place, which means you as consciousness, even you as jiva, you are not subject to death in the sense that you are not, that death is not the end of us. Death happens to the experience of body, mind, and the world that goes with it, which is a changing experience anyway, but not to that which is the witnessing awareness in which that experience happens. Absolutely. Let me make a point here, it's a subtle point, but very interesting. You know, when people say, how do you know a person exists after death, that the person is dead? Obviously the body is dead and you burn it or you bury it or whatever, it's gone. So how do you know the person is also gone? But notice something, there's a very quick switch which has happened, which goes unnoticed. As long as I'm alive, when you say the person, by that I understand I, this entity called Sarvapriyananda, which is encased in this body. That's what I understand as the person, right? And death is understood as death of the body. But the moment the body is dead, the materialist will say, that person called Sarvapriyananda is gone. But you at no point, did you see this person called Sarvapriyananda disappearing? You saw the body dying and being burnt or buried. And at no point did you actually see a body that was a fixed entity as Sarvapriyananda, right? That's another point, it's a stream of changes. It's a stream, intermittent flow of sensations, images, feelings, thoughts that we call a body. Yes, yes. In fact, this lady, she told me in Santa Barbara, she's a nun there. She said, recently Swami was passing by a shop window and I saw my reflection in the window and I thought, who is this old lady? And Swami, life went by so fast. I still think of myself as a 20 something. Yeah, the I never changed, right? Only the experience of the I changed. This body, this mind, this experience of the world. Right, so death from a Vedantic perspective or a yogic perspective is the moving on of the jiva from one non-functional body to another experience in maybe another body. So you started off by saying, this is not philosophy. This is actually not even religion in a sense. It's not a system of thought. It's based on experience and knowledge directly. And that comes from, I would say, yoga, right? The word yoga implies union with the self. I would, in fact, it's equally true to say that it's all of these. You can regard Vedanta as a philosophy, Advaita as a philosophy, and certainly it is taught in departments of philosophy in India. You can regard it as a system of thought. You can regard it as a religion because it's actually the foundation of religion. I would look at it that way. Religion is experience. Yeah, the foundation. But it's grounded in experience. All the time, it does not talk about a single thing which is different from what we experience all the time. So yes, direct experience of this, what we are talking about, there are techniques in yoga which help us. But maybe we'll talk more about that. No, we have two minutes. Okay, two minutes. Very quickly, Raj Yoga, Bhakti Yoga, Gyan Yoga, Karma Yoga. And then we are done. We have everything done in less than an hour. Yes, and thanks to Deepak. He structured it so well. You would say, so what are the procedures? There are basically four major classes of practices. One class of practice is what you might call meditative practices. And there's a vast range. In the Rubin Museum itself, there have been exhibits and talks and demonstrations of various kinds of mostly Buddhist tradition practices. So there's a wide range of meditation practices. In Hinduism, you have the Patanjali Yoga Sutra, which is a classic manual of meditation. So that's one group. The other group is based on emotion and feeling, the Bhakti traditions. So that's called Bhakti Yoga. Love. Love, yes. And then there's a third group of practices which seeks to convert our action, work, into spiritual practice. So what you might call, in a generic way, doing good to others, living unselfishly, living for a higher purpose. So all of that comes under Karma, Karma Yoga. How do I transform my action from a negativity, from a prison, into something that frees me, takes me to freedom? But the one which is a personal favorite, so I've saved it for the end, are the Jnana Yoga, the path of knowledge, which are, like I just mentioned, the three stages, waking, dreaming, and deep sleep, or the seer and the seen, Dhrigdrishya, or the method of the five sheaths, the physical, the vital, the mental, the intellectual, and the causal sheath, and so the bliss sheath. So there are different, you might call them, philosophical, spiritual philosophies, sciences, which are investigation, directly based upon what you experience right now to lead you to that intuitive experience of I am that immortal pure consciousness. So yes, four yogas. Verifiable, verifiable. Directly verifiable. Yes, yes. Okay, so that's Vedanta 101. All right.