Upadesha Sahasri (2019) Talks by Swami Tattvavidananda Saraswati

Class 1, 2

• Life - infinite, vast, mystery, not just an occupation.
• Family people, society believes life means securing livelihood. Thinking like this we miss the whole point of life.
• The same life in you is in a bird, sun, stars, rivers, everywhere. Hiranyagarbha.
• Job, marry, children and become more and more like a machine. Example: wet grinder. Remain fearful, anxious, afraid of life and death.
• Sorrow and joys, both will be there in life. So what you should do is to know yourself. Varuna tells Bhrgu: dear son, go and find God, go and find truth of life. In Vedanta the teacher encourages to explore and investigate, not only converts - passes down a belief.
• If a belief system is offered it cripples the mind of a person.
• Body and the embodied are of two different orders of reality. Find out what is the embodied.
• Religious person is in time. Do karma and get the karmaphalam later.
• If time has no more meaning then life and death are one. No birth, no death -> timelessness. A spiritual entity is not concerned about death, nor birth, nor continuity. What is spiritual is timeless - eternal. Psychological time has no meaning to you.
• Only one word can describe you - aham. A (beginning) HA (end) M (silence - atma). Apartment standing, apartment collapsed has no influence on the space. You are that space.
• Fan is a fixed point, electricity is not. Fan is good or bad. Electricity is not.

Class 3, 4

• The only meaningful comparison of Brahman is to Akasha. Presence all-around.
• Truth never makes you suffer, it always liberates. The only reason for suffering is ajnana. Once you understand that you are liberated. Ajnana = taking names and forms to be real.
• Human mind comes always with the logic to support its folly.
• Boundaries are imagined by the mind and not real. Only the space is real. Contemplate on the external physical space and the inner space of consciousness with no physical and time boundaries - seed of Brahman - where entire universe abides.
• idam sharIram kshetra - this body is the field, which produces the crop of sukham or dukham (experience).
• Nothing exists unless it is uploaded to the consciousness. It must be shining in the consciousness. Nothing exists without someone knowing it. Without knowing the body the body doesn’t exist. Who is that who knows the kshetra? Don’t conclude nothing about the one who knows the body.
• Atma = pramatha = the one field knower in all the fields. That is your svarUpa.
• In the interfaith meeting, interfaith persons won’t be there.
• Any object which is perceived can only attract adjectives “it is” (sat) or “it is not” (asat). Brahman is not perceivable, not conceivable, beyond the domain of speech. It is one and it is yourself. You can describe something that is other than you, you cannot describe yourself. You can only be yourself.
• Don’t rush to conclusions. You’ll be overlooking other information.
• Your persona is based only upon the past. Historic self. Step out of the time (psychologically). You cannot step out of time tomorrow, you can only NOW.
• Step out of the conditioning (of gurudom) into the realm of Atma, timeless existence.

Class 5, 6

• Supreme self. If you are able to look at the body it proves you are not the body.
• Progress in samsara is regress in spirituality.
• Game: watch the mind. Try to understand it. Tell it to shut-up if it wants to make you a dog in the mirror house.
• Dynamic of your thinking: what you call present is sandwiched between past and future. What you call future is past only. A poet said: the past flows into the present and covers the entire present and then flows into the future.
• Step into the timelessness by objectifying the thinking mind (which is about the past only anyway), be aware.
• Prana means indriya. Ekadasha rudraha = ekadasha prana. Because they make people cry - people cry only because of the mind and indriyas.
• Whatever is not possible by logic is possible by Maya. Like infinite akasha sitting in the pot. Or the infinite being embedded in the finite body.
• There is talking. But I don’t have feeling that I’m talking. If I feel that I’m (guru, …) then I am talking. Yet I don’t have any objections against language conventions which distort reality.
• When you do karma with the idea of getting a result and you being the doer. Is your mind getting purer?
• Doing != being. Doing is time-bound, prakuruti. Being is timeless, purusha. “I’m a doctor” means your being is confused with doing. When mind and body change = action = doing.
• Meditation: Think of some enemies. See that the same Iswara is in them as in you. Visualise: When you are breathing, you are breathing the infinite.
• Only when you feel as ego you have enemies. Only when you shut your eyes to the divinity then you see the foe.
• Jada is a superimposition on chetana. All is chetana, only the upadhi changes. Like in a movie - mountain, person and a river are all the same light.
• Atma is not perishable nor not perishable. Doesn’t fit into the opposites. It is neither.
• Brahman = uttama purushaha = paramatma. If you are carefully looking at the world it points out to a mystery beyond itself. You look within and you can recognise a mystery beyond your limited self. That mystery is one without a second. Don’t keep a safe distance from it.

Class 7, 8

• Handing over a belief system to the student cripples his mind.
• Shruti - expression of direct experience vs. smrti - what you pull out from your memory (pickle knowledge, preserved knowledge). Smruti comes from human intellect, shruti’s origin is deeper.
• Smruti is valid only if it follows shruti in letter and spirit. Smruti gives laws to people to lead their lives.
• Vision of Upanishads replaced with sectarian belief.
• Manusmrti has made the vision of Sri Krshna from Gita into a dead letter.
• Vision of unity vs. support for fragmentary thinking. You have to find the correct kind of text. Whatever stotras you recite should not go against shruti. Study those smrutis and those stotras which do not contradict the shruti.
• Teach only those shrutis and smrutis which present paramatma as asamsari. Teach not text presenting atma (your self) as samsari - sukhi/dukhi, karta/bhokta.
• kimkara - dasa = slave. Master asks what to do and I do. Not having own thinking. Just following. Pushes the person into a system. Vision of atma should never be compromised. Never present atma as kimkara.
• Avoid all literature that does encourages subservience of the jiva to some higher gods and thereby encourages undesirable practices in the name of rituals. Same for formulas for more sukham less dukham.
• Study and think.
• Vision of every mahatma gets distorted over time. Shankaracharya, Krishna, Christ, Buddha … In generally it happened to shruti itself.
• Teaching: Paramatma is not different from anything else. Vision: when you see the world you see god. Like a god-expo. There is no seeing god apart from seeing the world.
• To see god is to be god. Is he not the very light by which you ask the very question? “I am” is the seed. God (all existence) is the tree.
• Christ doesn’t talk of eternal damnation. Theology does.
• Qualifications for Vedanta. Viveka - head, vayragya - heart. Be a sisya to the vision. Ready and willing to be instructed. Sisya must have a very clear understanding why is studying Vedanta. He must be done with the world and must want to be uplifted from samsara - life of becoming.
• After instructing test the student - “who are you my dear?”

Class 9, 10

• Look within, search within. In meditation you look within. This should be made clear to the student.
• Goal of student must be to escape samsara. He must be fed-up with life of becoming. Otherwise they will misuse vedanta. Samsari - unhappy with what IS, with the present, no matter what area. He has to change the world. Samsara - a general sense of unsatisfactoriness of it all.
• The teacher must always love the student. The student might or might not love the teacher.
• Look at the moon - you’ll become happy without any other reason.
• Kastvam asi - Who are you?
• Relationship between Atma and Brahman is identity, not equality.
• Weather also determines people’s pursuit of god. Paradise is green because those people were born and raised in a desert.
• Should you give up your honest profession to know yourself? No, keep it. Should I give ambition, insensitivity, greed in my profession? Yes.
• hamsa - jnani. He’s a holy hobo. Doesn’t stick to one place. And he’s supreme by the power of his knowledge. Western country - hippie. India - sanjasi.
• Samsaris take up projects. Cannot digest it, cannot spit it out. Example: a snake with a frog in the mouth. Caught between birth (they love and celebrate) and death (they fear). Samsaris create endless problems for themselves and blame others for them. Nobody can uplift them.
• Your goal must be freedom, then you are a student of Vedanta. Die hard religionist is not different from a die hard worldly person. Difference is in the means by which they pursuit they desires.
• In settling your motive you settle the journey and its outcome. Freedom is not doing what you want. That you do anyway. Name for it is independence. Here freedom is psychological freedom - from all desires -> from fear, insecurity, worry -> sense of freedom as one’s own svarupa, indefinable, space-like. Moksha.
• Net of desires is (psychological) time. The moment you desire something you create psychological time and move the heaven outside of now, to future.
• Vivekananda: “I don’t know where from my next square meal will come yet I am not concerned”
• Acarya: 1) presents the vision of the shastra in very clear terms 2) helps the student to live that vision. 3) lives the vision himself/herself.
• People who are afraid of death are also afraid of life.

Class 11, 12

• Worldly people: some like dog protecting hay, not using the wealth vs. people having never enough because of costly pleasures. Some balance between these two. Religious people not different, also under the illusion of being body and mind.
• Constantly contemplate so that the identification with the body will be resolved. Body will be destroyed, eaten, invaded by diseases … None of that can happen to myself. You might not be able to change what will happen to the body/mind, but you can always put an end to the imagination of being them. There is wisdom in doing that. Otherwise you are in for some serious trouble as the age comes.
• Swami Omkar (taught only in English): If you identify with the body, you may do any number of rituals, pilgrimages, charities it will account to zero. If you can disidentify with the body then you need not perform none out of that, you have made it to the highest divinity.
• Ideation. Forming nice ideas about a thing. All study amounts to ideation… Intellect feels more and more accomplished, acquires a title, gives eloquent speeches about those ideas. Idea is always connected with a (set of) words. An idea is never the thing. An idea of god has nothing to do with god. It is just elaborate Maya - Mahamaya [consort of Parabrahman].
• Intellectuals - very tough nuts to crack. For them ideation is the goal.
• First step and the most important step of Vedanta (spirituality) - disidentification with the body. Once you are trapped in a sick body, nothing will help you.
• Worldly view: body is the god and religion is providing for the body. Opposite view - harsh religious one (e.g. bhartrhari): body is the tomb of the soul, source of temptation or humiliation.
• Hurting the body to gain favour of god = superstition.
• When you excite the body mind you get a sensation.
• Monstrosity of ignorance and superstition.
• Right attitude towards body: brother donkey (stupid, lazy, sturdy) - generous indifference. Nobody in his right mind can’t hit nor love a donkey. Deserves stick and carrot approach. Put it to good work, keep it going hard, give it good food. Never identify with it.
• Transmigration of the soul - religion. Vedanta - soul is immortal.
• Samsara has no beginning. How can it be understood? But if it is repeated a few times - the idea is formed. Just like a pearl is formed.

Class 13, 14

• Straight line time is mind. Past, present, future. Psychological time. Makes you suffer. Makes things repetitive in life. Makes you meet the present with the ballast of entire past. Meet … fresh, there is love in it. We should meet life without the intervention of the burden of memory, then whatever it brings is divine.
• Circular time is chronological time. It doesn’t bother you.
• You don’t do, you are done. Are you doing or are you getting done? What is that is doing you? Karma (yours). Makes you go round and round.
• We inherit thoughts without thinking. Think, explore, contemplate upon it. Then it is not Mr. X’s thought, but yours.
• Nature: People get what they deserve. Iswara is like that. Instead of desiring it you deserve.
• Examine the joy you get as a result of karmaphala.
• You are your own guru. Be a light onto yourself (bhagavan Buddha’s last message). If you accept one particular person as your guru, then there is no more learning for you.
• Samsarchakrabamanam - I want to become that. You work for it. You get it. You become disenchanted. REPEAT. Or become disenchanted with it.
• Parable: hamsa (bird) sitting on the rim, becomes disenchanted, moves to the axle and is the sakshi, stable, enjoying the show .
• When you do upasana of the smart phone you become as jada as itself. That’s why the TV is called the idiot box -> couch potato -> idiotic. Stupid and idiotic describes the mental state of tamoguna.
• You don’t go to the guru do get another set of karma and upasana. That’s what put you on the wheel in the first place anyway. Proverb in Telugu: if you want to break your head, the stone you are holding is good enough. Examine the karma and upasana. You go to brahmanistha, who’s studied extensively and knows the life.
• Sharirat anyaha - I’m distinct from the body. The body goes through N changes, but the embodied is not subject to modification.
• Purusha is person, not male, in Vedanta. Male in karmakanda.
• Self-knowledge is not making the self the other, but develop a small space in regard to the body, you have to think (mind) and feel (soul) not as the body. This doesn’t you have to be harsh, cruel to body - superstitions. Thinking - knowing. Feeling - not emotional feeling, but inner transformation.
• Body goes to places. I am what I am. Always inhere in the heart, don’t come, don’t go.
• You worship gods and goddesses that are shaped by your desires and fears. You don’t know the real god - that you have to find out.

Class 15, 16 - Q&A

• Omkara meditation: sit upright. Chant OM while exhaling.
• If there are no human beings on earth, all other life is there, then there will be no time on earth. Time - mental category projected by the human mind. Time - duration of movement from point A to point B.
• Bonding means being sentimental. It is promoted by the society - it is a social morality. Don’t confuse between love and bonding. Love is freedom, there will be no bonding. Parents don’t know how to love children because they are so badly attached. Expressing in the form of domination, possessiveness etc. Bonding leads to competition, there will be no learning.
• What you call society is in your head. There is no society. Only you are there. Society is samsara. Vedanta is not about society.
• My world and your world. They are distinct, subjective. You are alone in your world. Every world description has a signature on it.
• In a dream there are other subjects and have their own subjectivity. Dream: projection of the mind without the contribution of sense organs. Waking state: mind + sense organs. “He’s my enemy” - no sense organs involved, entirely dream (subjective). This is a rose - sense organs + mind (subjective). Nothing (objective) is left now, therefore the entire world experience is subjective.
• Face life fresh, not through the prism of memory. Don’t make people known or unknown to you. They are all people. Then life is experience very fresh. Stop pursuing the future. Give up psychological future. Thumb rule: future is utterly unpredictable.
• If truth is simple, people don’t like it. If truth is complex, people don’t digest it. Welcome to samsara.
• Living thought (opposite of ideation) is superior to a ton of precept.
• Ego = identification with the body and believing you are the actor.
• Worshipping God, ancestors (who merge in Ishwara) is for me, not for God nor the departed souls.
• Awareness - cit - knowingness. Like electricity - you can’t see it itself but it makes all the things work.
• Just watch the mind. You are different from it. It cannot play any trick on you unless you allow it.

Class 17, 18

• Unless you are conscious, there cannot be any idea of beginning. So beginning doesn’t apply to the consciousness. First consciousness, then beginning.
• The way you think and feel about yourself determines whether you are intelligent or in the grip of Maya (space/time). Do you see yourself as a process?
• Upadhi - cloak. You are not whatever you wear. When you don’t know that, you’ll try to dominate the other. You’ll appear as a jivaatma (personalized awareness) to yourself. Yet the fact is that you are not a person.
• When you peel all the layers of an onion, boundless space is left. Paramatma (impersonal awareness). Sarvaatma. Because of Maya you believe you have one body, yet the entire universe is your body.
• Your personal body is part of prhitvi. Food will become your body. The wheat field is your body, by which it is sustained. Water is constantly getting exchanged with water outside. Therefore when you pollute a river, you pollute your self. Water outside is also your body. There is no boundary between the air outside and inside. Same for fire and akasha.
• The personal body comes and goes, the universal body is always there with you. The personal body blinds us so completely that we don’t appreciate the universal body.
• Effort (karma) binds you. You reach sarvaatmabhava by clarity of knowledge.
• If you are sentimental (about the unreal), then you are under the grip of Maya.
• First you sense something what IS. You become conscious of (its) Presence. Then mind comes and is anxious unless it categorizes it (pigeonholes). This is how the mind tricks you. It pushes you until you give a name to the form. Another name for the mind is Maya. When you don’t name it everything is Presence (sat).
• Nama rupa is what covers the truth. It is all superimposition. Presence is the truth. Mountain is a superimposition. Don’t be in a hurry to name it. Mind will learn not to name in time. There will be uninterrupted presence. No cutting into names and forms. Presence = brahman = atma = being = yourself. If you would be different from the being you’d become sunya.
• Better say “I is”, as the “am” divides the presence. It is the same presence everywhere. Go beyond the tense also. Drop “I” also, it makes you kind-of personal. Just be. That’s what you are - Presence - inside not different from outside.
• By associating the Godhead with a physical form, you are insulting the Godhead.

Class 19, 20

• Lakshana - pointer, as no direct definition of atma is possible. You begin with nama rupa, dismiss them, you arrive at presence (sat, brahman, self). Ornament -> gold.
• Don’t say “existence of nama rupa”, they appear, they are not real. If you do, you won’t be able to dismiss them. They don’t come into existence, nama rupas come into appearance.
• Just because a name is given, it doesn’t prove the name. It proves the namelessness. Yet we give the name to make the communication possible.
• Mind cognizes a particular object by modification. It modifies itself into a particular thought by obtaining the shape of it. Mind is rupa, speech is nama. By hearing a name the mind obtains the shape associated with it.
• First words, then words and silence, then silence (niddidhiasana). People who say only words and more words remain a bag of bones. If you only start with silence the issue of ignorance won’t be addressed. Therefore initially we name atma. Yet sentimental name is not good. So we give a name which is not a name (akasha nama). Generally a name brings a form to the mind. But because a form is not associated with this particular name, the mind resolves. The idea is not to move the mind, because wherever it gets it won’t be the truth.
• Sakshatkara happens in where the shining is, in the atma and not in the mind. It happens in between, when the mind is still. Therefore a name (akasha, brahman) is given that isn’t associated with a form.
• The moment you say akAsha the mind becomes silent. It merges in the inner awareness, which is boundless and timeless. Silence of mind is the harbinger of Brahman.
• Brahman means “bigger than space”. Bigger than the biggest. Brahman is spaceless (space-abhava upalakshitam brahman - pointer to brahman). Satyam is always pointed out by abhava. You cannot point out directly.
• Moksha, Brahman is also called Shanti. Shanti = ashanti dismissed. Any number of ashanti is created by mind, e.g. from anxiety or seeking pleasure.
• Atma doesn’t belong to the category of nama rupa, which are mithya. Whatever you are familiar with, is unreal
• When somebody says something, you only get hurt when you identify with the body. Nothing can hurt you. You are asarira. You are not the body, you don’t own the body.
• Holistic, threefold health. Physical. Mental - mind is quiet, not agitated, not worried. You don’t get agitated by what others say or do. Spiritual - you do not identify with the physical body (and mind, pancha koshas). I’m not the one who can be drowned by water, who can be burned by fire. Nothing more, nothing less.
• In atma there is no punyam no papam. They are in vijnanamaya kosha. That is what transmigrates. A criminal has the same atma as a saint.
• Ganga - flowers come and go. Dead bodies come and go. Same for punya papa. No trace of those sticks with you. They can never affect you. Jiva is essentially asamsari, just like Ishvara (there is no difference), only by ignorance he is a samsari. Your nature is divinity only.
• Sakshi (Brahman, yourself) knows. Sakshi doesn’t require pratyaksha (direct seeing) and anumana (inference - thinking). Mind is closest to the atma. States of the mind known to the mind is aparoksha knowing, they are known directly by perceiving (experiencing). Sakshi knows itself by being (itself) - sakshataparoksham. No pramana required. Role of sastra is just to tell what you are not.
• You don’t know atma by any pramana. You know atma by being.