SWAMI SARVAPRIYANANDA: So today, we
are going to talk about consciousness.
Consciousness is everywhere in our lives.
You are looking at me.
You're listening to my voice.
You're aware of sitting in the chair, your environment,
light and sound.
All of this is possible because you are conscious.
There's consciousness when we see and hear
and smell and taste and touch.
So consciousness is all-pervasive.
I remember last week, I was listening to this talk
by Christof Koch, the chief scientist of the Paul Allen
Brain Institute, where he was talking
at the Harvard bookstore about his new book,
"The Feeling of Life Itself."
And he said consciousness is the most important thing
in our lives.
So he humorously said that if you give me a billion dollars
and say you give up your consciousness
and you can go on living, you'll still be a living body,
you can just be like a zombie--
he said, I wouldn't accept a billion dollars.
I can't trade my consciousness for anything in the world.
And that's how important consciousness is.
Today, there is a great interest in consciousness studies fueled
by the developments in neuroscience,
by the new imaging technology of the brain,
by the development of the internet
and artificial intelligence.
There is a tremendous interest in understanding scientifically
what consciousness is, where does it come from,
what does it do, what are its possibilities, and so on.
But consciousness studies is not a new subject.
Consciousness studies is very, very ancient.
As the philosopher Evan Thompson has written in his book,
"Sleeping, Waking, Dreaming, and Being"--
he says consciousness studies goes all the way back
to the Upanishads, these very ancient texts in the Hindu
scriptures, the Vedas.
These Upanishads contain the final--
the highest spiritual and philosophical teachings
of the Vedas dating back-- who knows--
5,000 years or more.
And they made a remarkable breakthrough
in consciousness studies so many centuries, millennia, ago.
And those insights into consciousness,
into human consciousness, were developed
into this body of a philosophy called
Vedanta and, over the centuries, into this philosophy
of nondual Vedanta, which is a school of Vedanta, Advaita
Vedanta.
So that's what I'm going to talk about this afternoon
and this Google talk today in the next few minutes,
these very ancient insights into consciousness,
very profound and very, very important, first
of all, for our personal lives, and also
for what they can do for this modern investigation
into consciousness.
The whole purpose, let us remember, of Advaita Vedanta,
nondual Vedanta, was overcoming human suffering and attainment
of lasting, deep fulfillment.
We'll see how it works.
I'll try to present the essence of the teachings
of nondual Vedanta in the next few minutes.
I want to flag something here.
Though it's deeply rooted in the Hindu traditions--
Vedanta is the central philosophy of Hinduism.
But there is something unique about nondual Vedanta.
It's not religion, as it is generally understood.
You have to believe in something, faith in something--
not at all.
It's quite the opposite.
It's rather understanding something,
realizing something, seeing something, let us say.
It is not even about extraordinary, mystical
experiences with which religion, the mystical side of religion,
is associated.
Rather-- and this is important-- it
is about our daily experience, just this experience which
we are having.
Everybody has this experience of seeing and hearing and smelling
and tasting and touching, of waking
and dreaming and sleeping, just our daily lived experience.
And applying a certain logic to it,
a certain philosophical, logical investigation based
on experience and reason, we come to this startling insight
about ourselves.
Vedanta is an investigation into ourselves
to find out who or what we are.
And the claim that Vedanta makes is
that when we truly know what we are,
we will discover that we are not these limited beings of flesh
and blood born at a particular time, fated
to grow old and diseased and die sometime later.
No.
This remarkable discovery that we are
this immortal consciousness--
that is the discovery.
And Vedanta claims that we can all
come to an understanding of this if we
follow our experience guided by the insights of Vedanta.
So here is this journey.
It's not a journey from not believing
to believing in something.
It's not a journey from our present daily experience
to some kind of extraordinary experience.
No.
Rather, it's the journey from not knowing to knowing,
to realizing, to seeing.
That's what makes it incredible for this day and age.
There is nobody who is rational and scientific who
could have any kind of objection,
the usual objections which are leveled
against faith-based approaches.
It is true that the seer is different from the seen.
But you have to ask yourself, is the
seen different from the seer?
Consciousness is different, distinct from its objects.
But are the objects of consciousness
distinct from consciousness?
What kind of a question is this?
A simple thing would be these glasses
are distinct from this napkin and the napkin
is distinct from the glasses.
They are different from each other.
But there's another kind of difference--
for example, the waves in the ocean and the water.
The waves are distinct.
They come and go.
The water is apart from the waves in the sense
that the water can exist as waves.
It can exist without the waves.
It can exist as water vapor and what have you.
But the waves are not different from the water because they
cannot exist without the water.
You are distinct from your dreams.
All the characters that you see in your dreams--
you are distinct from them because you
can exist without them.
You can even exist when you see them.
And then they disappear back into you.
You still exist.
But those characters in the dream, the entire dream world,
cannot exist without you.
So they do not constitute a second reality apart from you.
So the first step in Advaita Vedanta
is to appreciate what consciousness really
is, what am I as consciousness, and then
to see whatever I experience is actually not different from me,
the one consciousness.
It's one consciousness, known as [? Brahman ?] or [INAUDIBLE]
Vedanta--
is nondual, Advaita, not two, with
regard to the entire universe.
So this is a tremendous claim and tremendous insight,
not new.
This has been pretty well-known in India
for thousands of years.
And there have been thousands and thousands
of people in every century, in every generation,
practicing it and deriving benefits from it.
So think about it.
Investigate it.
It's a huge amount of materials available there.
I think it is--
for me, at least, it's the best thing that ever happened to me.
And so I love talking about it and sharing it with people.