 |
Burning Toward Transcendence--Kenneth Rose on SubstackRenewing the Spiritual Life after the Evaporation of Meaning Author: Kenneth Rose
Renewing the Spiritual Life After the Evaporation of Meaning. kenrose51.substack.com Language: en Genres: Religion, Religion & Spirituality, Spirituality Contact email: Get it Feed URL: Get it iTunes ID: Get it |
Listen Now...
Advaita Vedānta and Experience Seeking
Thursday, 20 August, 2026
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. It’s hurtful for adherents of exclusivist spiritual traditions to join in that materialist critique of the spirituality of other people, even when done unwittingly.So that’s the second point that I wanted to make today about so-called spiritual experience seekers as spiritual junkies.So what about the ultimate claim that reality is one, consciousness is one, that’s all there is to it, and that enlightenment is a stance that transcends all experience?Well, when you press this a little bit, you actually ask: what, then, is the content of that enlightenment? What is it actually like?From our intellectual, psychological, and physical perspective, it’s a blank screen. We can’t understand it. There’s nothing like it because all of this is an illusion; all of this has form. Fair enough. So in order to know that, we would have to become completely other than what we are—formless.But when we do realize it—if there is a realization—advocates of this position often simply say that the realization is merely to experience this world without attachment to it and without an ego center.We know the old saying that before enlightenment, the mountain was a mountain; while we were searching, it was some mystically transformed object; and afterwards, it’s just ordinary reality, except that we’re no longer deeply invested in it.If that’s the case, then as an enlightened being, I would experience today, Thursday, like everyone else, and I wouldn’t be looking for any mystical depth to Thursday. Because I am not egotistically invested in it, it wouldn’t affect my fundamental consciousness.The question then arises: why, like materialists and physicalists, should we limit what we experience today as an enlightened person on this Thursday morning to just what my physical eyes see? If you’re an enlightened being, if actually you are Brahman itself, why not include the subtle realms of the devas that are a part of traditional Hinduism, traditional Buddhism, traditional Christianity? Why see them as just products of the feverish, experience-seeking, spiritual-addict mind?They’re actually part of Thursday’s reality, except most people can’t see them because they’re not interested in them or they haven’t engaged in the spiritual practices that awaken our knowledge of these subtler realms.That’s my basic response to the idea that enlightenment is just understanding a few basic truths from the Upaniṣads and then going back to your everyday life just like it is right now, except now you’re enlightened.It reminds me of someone I met years ago when I lead a group dedicated to practicing Vedānta. One person said to me, after having gone to a workshop with one of the then very well-known Neo-Advaita teachers: “You know, Ken, I’m enlightened now. And my question now is: what next?”A good question. What next, now that I’m enlightened?This speaks to the reason why, I think, Neo-Advaita has waned in the last decade after bursting onto the alternative spiritual scene a couple of decades ago. One reason is that it’s really easy to learn its lingo—the snake and the rope, “I am That,” “there’s only one consciousness, we’re all it, since we’re already it, it’s nothing you have to do.” Since you don’t have to do anything, you can go do whatever you like; it doesn’t make much of a difference.In the end, you’re just the same old person you were before, but with a new vocabulary. You go check your computer for whatever you need to do for the day. When you get ill, you still feel it; when you’re frustrated, you feel your frustration; when you’re angry, you get angry. Then after a while, you realize—and if you have any disciples, they realize—that you’re just another person like anybody else on the bus. People leave you as their teacher, and you give up being a teacher and walk away from that scene.Another problem with this approach is that it quickly becomes empty and boring. There’s nothing much more to attain there.This is a caricature of real Advaita Vedānta, in my view, because the greatest saints of that tradition were fully enlightened, but they weren’t just enlightened to Thursday morning in its boring, banal qualities. Many Hindu spiritual traditions bring this out clearly: the siddhas are omniscient. Why are they omniscient? Because they aren’t “themselves” any longer—they are Brahman.And Brahman includes all of this, even as an illusion. If it includes my banal, ordinary Thursday morning experience of the street outside my window, why wouldn’t it also include the spiritual realms? Or are we going to become physicalists and think that this physical world of Thursday morning is all there is, that everything beyond that is just a fabrication of a fevered brain?No, clearly not. The integrated understanding of the spiritual life, even from the perspective of Advaita Vedānta is that if there is only Brahman, and I am Brahman, that includes everything in reality, including the subtle realms detailed in the Upaniṣads in the pañcakośa teaching of the five bodies, or sheaths. Brahman realization isn’t limited to just this physical realm.Perhaps Brahman is engaged in experience seeking because it contains within itself all of the subtle realms and the experiences one has when traversing them?It’s not experience seeking for the spiritual seeker; it’s actually the experience of the deeper depths of reality.Sure, you can get caught up in this kind of experience. People often get caught up in it. They try to profit from it, monetize it, make a name for themselves. But we all know that’s a spiritual dead end. Every spiritual tradition of any depth teaches against monetizing and becoming addicted to spiritual powers.But the spiritual powers are there. One only has to look at the life of some of the realized teachers. Look at the Buddha—he also exhibited these powers and omniscience.The powers are there, and they can become a trap, but they’re not non-existent. They do exist. So a full-bodied spiritual life can include experiences of these realms because they’re part of reality.You might say, “No, they’re māyā, they’re illusion, not part of reality.” Well, that leads to a deeper issue: why are they there? Why is there anything at all?If Brahman is all there is and it’s formless, how is it that anything with form arises even as an illusion? That’s a question that Advaita Vedānta just can’t answer. Whenever you raise that question, adherents will say, “Oh, well, that’s a non-question,” or “It’s a non-starter,” or “Who cares? It’s purely head stuff.” Even Śaṅkara avoided the question when he was asked one time about why there’s the appearance of duality when there’s only non-duality. He said it only appears to the one who is illusioned! It’s a good answer, but it doesn’t answer the question, because it still implies that there’s an experiencer experiencing something that’s not supposed to be experienced!That’s why I’m not ultimately an Advaita Vedāntist. It’s why I’m an eclectic, but it’s not an eclecticism that’s purely willful. There’s been a definite pattern to this spiritual development over the decades.That’s why I tend more toward positions that actually take our experience seriously as expressions of reality because although Brahman is formless, it’s the ground of form.You might say that’s just pure intellectualism, but it’s also grounded in insight honed over decades of study, reflection, meditation, prayer, reading the scriptures of different traditions, interacting with teachers of different traditions, and laying myself open as honestly as I can to whatever the truth turns out to be.I’m not a religious exclusivist, although I have been. Many years ago, I was a religious exclusivist in two traditions. And that’s what taught me that exclusivism can’t be true. Because I was an exclusivist in one religion, and then an exclusivist in another, and a very intense one—as only a 21-year-old in the early 1970s could have been. But the intensity of exclusivism doesn’t make it true. I was intensely exclusivistic sequentially in two traditions, but both of them could not be true. They could both be false (because maybe the physicalists are right), but they couldn’t both be true in all of their details. And that’s what led me to become a theologian, and then a religious philosopher.Well, I think that’s enough for today. I enjoyed that, and I hope that a few of you will get some insight from that. Take care. Be well.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
