Prompted by a recent discussion with an advocate of a school of contemporary Advaita Vedānta that discounts mystical experience, I explore the positive and indispensable role that mystical experience plays in awakening to enlightenment.

You can follow along with the transcript on the audio or you can read the slightly edited version of the transcript here:

I’ve been staying for the last few months at an ashram in Germany. It’s a traditional place where the Hindu deities are honored in daily pujas and ceremonies. It’s possible to engage in spiritual practice from five in the morning until ten at night. There are aratis, satsangs, yoga classes, and traditional teachers of Vedanta from India. Globally known yoga teachers and Ayurveda physicians are also in attendance here. So it’s an extraordinary opportunity to be here and to revive and deepen my spiritual life. I’ve been writing, reading, and doing my seva here at the ashram. I’ve also been deeply meditating, practicing yoga, and experiencing a reunion with the Self. That’s exactly what one expects from time spent in an ashram, and that’s the experience that I’ve been having here.

Just yesterday, I was listening to a teacher of Advaita Vedanta from India, who said something that set me to thinking about the different varieties of Advaita Vedanta that we can choose from currently. To put this quite simply, we might say that there is the traditional Advaita Vedanta that goes back to Shankara and is still taught and preserved in the four ashrams that Shankara founded in India. So this is a very traditional Advaita Vedanta. That’s one kind of Vedanta That’s a genuine tradition, but it would be difficult for someone like me to enter into it. I think that it would be better to have been born into the Hindu tradition to be able to fully access this tradition in terms of language, background, and culture.

And then there’s a second kind of Advaita Vedanta that’s been popularized throughout the globe over the last century and a quarter by swamis who came to the West like Swami Vivekananda. They articulated a Vedanta that’s generally known as Integral Yoga. This term, Integral Yoga, was first introduced by Swami Sivananda to refer to his approach to Advaita Vedanta. This is an approach that is traceable back to Swami Vivekananda. Integral Yoga is a yoga tradition that integrates the four classical yogas that are often mentioned in introductions to Hinduism. These include Karma Yoga, which is the yoga of seva, of work, of activity, of offering the fruits of your actions to your favored deity, to your ishta-devata. And then, secondly, there is what’s commonly known as Raja Yoga and Hatha Yoga—they’re distinguishable; they’re not quite the same, so we can call them the yoga of the subtle body and the yoga of the physical body. Then there’s Bhakti Yoga, which is a very popular form of yoga. This is the yoga of devotion and of love for the Divine. It easily links up with devotional traditions in other religious traditions. It also speaks directly to our hearts as well as to our minds.

Finally, there’s Jnana Yoga, which is the yoga of wisdom, the yoga of knowledge. This is what I want to talk about today, although it has become a difficult topic. The issue comes down to not only what is knowledge, what is jnana, but also how to attain it. From the standpoint of Upanishadic Advaita Vedanta, there’s nothing to attain because we are already the Self that we’re looking for. To put that in the memorable saying of a recent Neo-Advaita teacher, we can simply call off the search. There’s nothing to search for because we’re already found! We are the Self that we’ve been looking for. There’s nothing else to do. And everything else is merely a distraction from just being what we already are, which is pure, eternal, formless, infinite consciousness. This third kind of Advaita Vedanta, which is currently popular, is known as Neo-Advaita.

There’s a fourth kind of Advaita Vedanta—as yet unnamed—which is becoming more influential, and there are many varieties and streams that enter into this view. The characteristic of this approach is that, like Neo-Advaita, it states the profound Advaitic Vedantic truth that we’re already enlightened. We never were not enlightened if we define enlightenment as being pure consciousness. Since there is only pure consciousness, it’s not possible to be anything other than pure consciousness. We simply have to recognize this truth, this teaching, for us to throw off the shackles of our blindness. You can try it yourself: Say to yourself, aham brahmasmi, or, in English, “I am pure consciousness.” Then be still for a moment. In that stillness, there may be a twinkle, a sensation, an awareness, or an insight that this is the truth: There is only consciousness.

The teaching that really helped me with this early in my spiritual practice over fifty years ago was when my first guru said in his writings that you are not this body. That stunned me when I first read it, because I thought, if I’m not this body, what then am I? That led to the classic practice of atma-vichara, or self-inquiry, which is the inquiry or the investigation of one’s experience to see what in that experience is actually the truth. And of course, if you really grapple with the statement that you are not this body, that can lead—as it led in my case—to an almost furious search to find out, well, who then am I if I’m not this body?

It’s an extraordinary thought at first for a pure physicalist or materialist. It’s an idea that’s laughable to them at the outset, but even they might be challenged if they really started to grapple with that teaching. If I’m not my body, who am I then? Am I my mind? But the mind constantly changes, and what is a mind in any case? I can touch my body but how do I touch my mind? How do I define a boundary around my mind? I can define the boundary around my body, at least from a common sense standpoint. But how do I define or how do I grapple with or how do I rope in my mind? You see how difficult that would be. It’s impossible because the mind isn’t a physical object. It’s subtle and it eludes any sort of definition. I can’t really find my mind.

There is a classic story in Zen Buddhism about a disciple who comes to a Zen teacher and asks for their mind to be pacified. The Zen teacher replies, “Show me your mind, and I’ll pacify it.” There’s no way you can act upon that instruction. I’m not sure what it would even mean to say that I’m my mind rather than my physical body, although I do know that the mind can be both blissful and terrifying. Everything we experience, we only experience through the mind, which is an old insight. That’s not anything that you have to go to India to discover. Simple reflection upon our experience shows that we don’t have any direct encounter with the objects that we perceive except through our minds. And this is an idea that was also discovered by Idealist philosophers in the West.

So, if I’m not my body and I’m not my mind, what’s left? Well, of course, if we are familiar with the Hatha Yoga teachings and the Tantric teachings of Hinduism, of India, of Buddhism, then we know that we have a subtle body, which is the prana body. We can perceive it through Hatha Yoga techniques and through deep meditation when we become aware of the subtle body. But that body also is changing, and it’s not something that I can physically define the way I can my physical body. It’s not always present in our awareness because we’re not always having deep, profound awakenings of Kundalini or the chakras. These are extraordinarily valuable experiences when we do have them because these profound experiences of the subtle realms reveal to us the presence of the devas in our completely flattened age in which physicalism and scientism have deprived us of our spiritual birthright and spiritual confidence. These experiences give us the knowledge that there are subtler and higher worlds than this one, and that we’re not merely trapped in the physical world as randomly evolved entities whose death spells the complete and absolute end of any form of experience.

That’s why spiritual experiences are extremely valuable. They end, of course, and this is the point that one always hears from from the latter two kinds of Advaita Vedantists, both the Neo-Advaita Vedantists and also the fourth kind (I don’t have a name for it yet), who, unlike the Neo-Advaita teachers, at least accept spiritual experience. But they say that it only plays a purificatory role; that it’s only useful for bringing us to the place where we can recognize that we are eternal, formless consciousness, which is the liberative insight. Yet among these teachers there’s often a mocking of mystical experiences, a satirizing of them and of the people who have these experiences, who are sometimes depicted as somewhat sad and deluded because they supposedly think that these experiences are enlightenment itself.

This argument holds that experiences can’t be enlightenment because, like all other experiences, they end. Like the pleasure of a good meal, the happy events of a family celebration, or the excitement of a vacation, they all end in the humdrum reality once again of everyday life. So, because enlightenment experiences also end, they shouldn’t be pursued, the argument is made, and, it continues, they’re to be seen ultimately as distractions. Some of these teachers mock or satirize the people who engage in these practices, even though they themselves may have engaged in them and had profound experiences. We might say that apart from those enlightenment experiences and practices, they may not have gotten to the point where they actually are. So a point that needs to be made here is that while it’s true that enlightenment experiences end, what they are an experience of does not end. And that’s a point that needs to be made very forcefully. The experiences end, but what they point to doesn’t end.

It’s like when you’re traveling, and you see a sign that says that your destination is ten miles or a hundred miles ahead, you know you’re on the right path. It’s the same with enlightenment experiences. These experiences of ultimate reality have the characteristics of human experience because we process them through our physical body, our subtle body, our mind, and the intellect because we have these bodies, and we experience enlightenment as embodied entities. (That’s not to claim that we’re ultimately these bodies.) I’m experiencing the sky that I’m looking up right now. If I close my eyes, my experience of the sky disappears, although the sky hasn’t disappeared. Similarly, there’s an intimate link between ultimate reality and the experiences we have that point to it.

This is an important point—a balancing point. Hinduism is not just a religion of one or two schools of Advaita Vedanta. It’s a wide-ranging tradition that incorporates virtually every type of human spirituality and accords respect to these different kinds of human spirituality. But whenever exclusivists claim to have the singular truth, that’s a denial of the comprehensive reality which reveals itself to us through countless spiritual paths. That’s the deepest insight that I’ve derived from Hinduism, from the Sanatana Dharma: the realization that ultimate reality is so vast, so infinite, so formless, that it gives rise to an infinite number of forms. It’s through these forms that being expresses itself. I’m looking at a bird flying through the sky right now, which is as deeply connected to being as I am. In fact, there is only one being. We’re all that being, that bird, this grass, that sky, this field, that cow, myself, and the people meditating over in the ashram. We are all just forms expressing the formless. The formless infinite in its infinitude not only excludes everything because of its formlessness, it includes everything because it is the ground of form, the instigator of form. There is thus a balance between the positive and the negative aspects of Brahman. Brahman, ultimate reality, is ultimately without form because it cannot be contained in any form. As the formless ground, however, it inspires the free expression and the free play of countless forms.

Someone might say, “Well, that sounds wonderful, Ken! Great words and thoughts. But it’s not enlightenment.” Some teachers of these contemporary schools of Advaita maintain an anti-intellectual and anti-experiential stance. They speak about enlightenment as a form of jnana, but then they downplay the kinds of insights that I’ve just expressed. They often downplay the experiences of bliss and of unitive consciousness and of delight that attend these enlightenment experiences. So what kind of sadhana, what kind of practice would I suggest? I’m going to push against the claim that enlightenment is not evoked by anything that we can do. This is a subtle point, because in the traditional Vedanta path, there is a sadhana. There is a practice where you do something. What you do first is that you listen to the teaching, which is called shravana. You hear it from someone who’s awakened, who’s illumined, or you read an enlightenment scripture. There are countless enlightenment scriptures in Hinduism, Buddhism, and other religious traditions. You hear the teaching with an open mind but then you do something else: You reflect upon it; you think deeply about it; you run it through your mind. Now you’re doing something called manana. You ask the teaching questions, and it answers you. You get responses if you’re deeply intent upon the teaching, and your doubts are slowly cleared. Then, when your mind becomes still, just like any other meditator or yogi, you engage in deep meditation upon the teaching. This third thing that you do is called nididhyasana. According to the Upanishads and to traditional Advaita Vedanta, this threefold practice leads to the realization of Brahman.

In the course of this deeply informed meditation, we see that there is only one reality and that we are all it. There is only pure consciousness. We are not these bodies. These bodies are just momentary expressions like the budding leaves on that tree I’m looking at right now in early April in northern Germany. Our bodies, our minds, my sense of myself as Ken Rose are just momentary expressions of the formless consciousness that irradiates and embraces all of this. We are not these bodies. There is only consciousness. Everything is an expression of consciousness. If we sit with this teaching, we will start to experience the radiance of being, of enlightenment. That’s an experience. This insight itself is an experience.

If there were no experiences of our true nature as consciousness, if Brahman were just an eternal, formless, objectless knowing, then that knowing wouldn’t be reflected to itself. As a consciousness utterly lacking an object, it would remain completely unknown to itself. This raises a perennial criticism of Advaita Vedanta in all of its expressions: If there’s only nondual Brahman without an object, how does experience—even as an illusion—arise? How does a second something, real or imaginary, arise in pure nonduality? There has never been a satisfactory answer to those epistemological and ontological questions in Advaita Vedanta. Its final answer is that this is an unanswerable question and that maya and its origin are inexpressible. End of discussion.

As a philosopher, when you come to a point like this in an argument, you’ve come to a dead end. To simply repeat the position now is to persist in maintaining what is the dead end of a failed argument. That’s why it’s important to understand why the Tantric Revolution was so important in India eighteen hundred years ago. The rise of the different Tantric philosophies was a response to this negationist approach. The basic Tantric idea is that the unlimited being, Brahman, is also aware of itself, and in its awareness of itself, we arise as it mirrors itself through the creation of all of the forms of the world and of experience. This is the genius of the Tantric approach. We encounter it in the devotional movements of Vaishnavism in which we are expressions of and loving servitors of ultimate reality. This is the divine loving itself through itself, through us, that is. It’s also expressed in the notion of vimarsha in Kashmiri Shaivism, where the ultimate reality, Shiva, reflects itself through Shakti. It’s the unity, the oneness, of Shiva and Shakti. In the oneness of the devotee and the one to whom we’re devoted, we come to that place of perfection, of completion, in which ultimate reality, Brahman, Being God, the Divine, finds itself delightfully within our experience of it, which is its own experience of itself. This experience of itself is not diminished through the forms that arise, nor is it depleted by them, but it is this eternal play of consciousness that gives rise not only to liberation but to this world of forms. It gives rise not only to the insight that we’re only consciousness but also to the bliss and the delight and the bhakti of spiritual experience.

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