Episode Details

Speaker A [00:00:00]:

What is Advaita Vedanta? Advaita is the most fascinating philosophy which talks about the nature of reality and the nature of this universe. As I was searching for different teachings and different philosophies to find out the answers to the questions that I had, I came upon the ancient Upanishads, which talks about the nature of reality, and Advaita Vedanta is the most direct and the most clear interpretation of the Upanishads. Advaita literally translates to non dualism, and Advaita Vedanta simply tells us that the universe that we see all around us, the way we perceive it right now is an illusion. It is false. It is Maya, and it sees that there is no duality in this world. The duality that we experience is because of our minds, and it is because of a false identity that we have created for ourselves. But if we go beyond our mind And if we clearly see the reality for what it is, we cannot see duality, says Advaita. Now what does it mean, and how can we understand this? For someone who is new to this, it is very difficult, and it seems very complicated, and I get it.

Speaker A [00:01:21]:

But Advaita Vedanta is actually pretty simple, but it requires a lot of focus and an open mind to understand this knowledge. So in this episode, let us understand the true meaning of Advaita Vedanta. Now I will try to explain this through different examples so that it'll be easy to understand. Imagine this, a person is wearing his glasses, and these glasses are made of red colored lens. And because of the red lens, he is seeing this universe in a certain way. Wherever he goes, he is seeing the red sky. He's seeing the red cars, red trees, etcetera. Now this is not because the trees and sky all around him is actually red in color.

Speaker A [00:02:06]:

It is because of his lens, he is perceiving this reality in a certain way. Now what we need to understand as per Advaita is that The universe all around us is in a certain way. It is non dual. There is no duality. There is one pure consciousness everywhere, but your mind itself is a filter. It is a lens, just like in the example. Now because of The nature of your mind, you are perceiving this reality in a certain way, and you're perceiving this Body and mind to be you, and you are perceiving different objects outside of you as something apart from you, but all of this is because of your mind filter or because of your mind lens. Now if that person removes his lens, he will see the reality for what it is.

Speaker A [00:03:00]:

He will see a clear blue sky. He will see colorful birds, etcetera. Just like that, if we go beyond our minds, we will see reality for what it is as one pure consciousness. This is what we need to understand. Now our minds are a filter, and the parameters of this filter are time, space, and causation. Time, space, and causation are the boundaries of our minds, and our mind can never go beyond this boundary. And we see through the filter of time, space, and causation. So we can never understand something which is beyond time, which is beyond space, and which is beyond causation.

Speaker A [00:03:41]:

We cannot even think about something which was there before time, because even the word before will not make any sense in that context. And we can never think about an object which is beyond space that is impossible for our minds to understand. At the same time, we cannot understand and conceive something which is beyond causation. Causation is simply the concept of cause and effect. Within this universe, there is a cause for every effect, and there is an effect for every cause. For example, the day and night happens on earth because of the rotation of earth, different seasons happen because of the revolution of earth around the sun, etcetera. So like this, there are different effects for the cause, but we can never understand with our tiny little minds something coming into being wi