Mr. Swartz,

I have been reading your website. It is very well done. It also is provocative and I am quite often angered by your ruthless attacks on experience and your definition of enlightenment as ‘the hard and fast knowledge that I am limitless Awareness and not this body mind.’ My guru says that the mind has to be destroyed completely if I want to experience enlightenment and be free. Can you give me a scriptural reference to support your view? It seems I am meant to rely on your opinion only. I am not inclined to believe people, so I need more. I do not have much faith that you will reply to this.

Mike R.

Dear Mike,

You are absolutely correct not to blindly accept the opinion of others. However, I wonder why you accept the opinion of your guru. It didn’t occur to me that the view of enlightenment as Self realization might be considered an opinion because it is the fundamental view of the Upanishads. To be fair, however, your guru’s view also has support in the scriptures on Yoga. The conflict between the Yoga view and the Vedanta view can be resolved in a reasonable way if Yoga is primarily thought of as a means to purify the mind in preparation for Self realization. I also understand your anger concerning Vedanta’s views about the limitation of experience. Most people who are interested in spirituality come to it with the belief that enlightenment is some sort of discrete permanent transcendental experience, so the ‘attack’ on that idea will naturally anger them.

Actually I am not attacking experience. How can you attack it…it is just a fact. I attack the notion that there is some experience out that that you can get that will set you free. Chase whatever experience you want but don’t think that it will make you free or whole or perfect or endlessly happy or whatever. The argument against the belief in a permanent discrete experience of enlightenment is just common sense. Why? Because experience is impermanent and limited by its very nature. If you can’t see this then there is no way to resolve this conflict.

And, as I have noted many times in my writings, if this is a non-dual reality as the Vedanta scriptures claim, any and all experiences can only be the Self. So rather than wait for an epiphany or seek a discrete experience, such as one of the samadhis of Yoga or ‘transmission’ or shaktipat or satori, find out what the Self is and you will see that you are always experiencing it, that you have always been experiencing it and that you will continue to experience it as long as you are an experiencer. I won’t run through all the reasons why chasing experience, spiritual or otherwise, is foolish because if you have read my website you will be quite familiar with them.

Anyway, I’m not here to argue with you. I can understand why you might think this is my personal opinion but I’ve isolated my personal opinions on the section of my website called ‘opinion’ and tried to use the rest of the website to explain in clear English the teachings of Vedanta…which are not opinions. Vedanta is known as ‘shruti,’ which means unauthored revealed truth that has passed the test of time. It is an experienced based means of Self knowledge. There is never an argument with Vedanta. As Vedanta is not a religion one is not expected or encouraged to believe the teachings. They are to be scientifically investigated in the laboratory of your own mind.

Now to your request for source material. If you make a comprehensive study of the Upanishads, the Brahma Sutras, the Bhagavad Gita, Shankara and the many great Vedantic texts you cannot help but notice two basic views of enlightenment, the Yogic or experiential view and the Vedantic or identity view. The verses that I have copied into this email below are from an ancient and highly respected Vedantic text called Panchadasi that is attributed to Vidyaranya Swami. It lays out most of the fundamental teachings of Vedanta and the method of Self realization.

Verse 102 says, “When the intellect disregards the notions of duality, it becomes firmly established in the conception of non-duality. The person who is firmly rooted in the conviction of non-duality is called a Jivanmukta (liberated in life).

The purpose of spiritual life is liberation. As you can plainly see there is no mention of experience or the destruction of the mind in this definition. It defines liberation in terms of a strong conviction that non-duality is reality. This conviction takes place in the intellect so it is not unreasonable to assume that the intellect has not been destroyed by spiritual practice.

This conviction may arise as a result of a non-dual experience or reflecting on one’s non-dual experiences but a non-dual experience does not insure that this conviction will arise. In fact the spiritual world is little more than hundreds of thousands of people who have had many experiences of non-duality yet who are not completely convinced that non-duality is reality, that the world is non-dual, that there is only one self and that it is non-dual. The proof of this is to be seen in their continued pursuit of experience and the notion that the ‘I’ will only be complete when it has the ‘ultimate experience’: nirvana, samadhi or whatever.

It should be noted that the verse says, “firmly established in the conception of non-duality.” ‘Firmly established’ means that you don’t have any doubt about it. The proof of this conviction is that you stop chasing experience. This does not mean that there is no experience for the enlightened. The vasanas continue to outpicture and provide experience till the day the body dies. But if you have this conviction you know that you are non-dual and that non-duality means that you are whole and complete. When you know who you are you know that no experience can add anything to you or take anything away from you. No experience can set you free because you are already free. Freedom is something that can only be appreciated and it cannot be appreciated until you know what it is. As long as you don’t know you are free you will pursue activities that you believe will free you. If you give a child the choice between a one hundred dollar bill and two cent piece of candy it will choose the candy every time. This is analogous to the choice between understanding and experience. Your view of enlightenment is based on a lack of understanding of the value of understanding and an irrational belief that there is some incredible experience to be gained that will produce lasting peace.

Yes, you may argue that knowledge is an experience but it is not actually an experience in the conventional sense. Knowledge consists of shedding ignorance, in this case the ignorance that the self is limited and incomplete and made up of parts. The Yoga view says that you need to destroy the thoughts if you want to be free of them but this is not Vedanta’s position which is that you need to have a firm idea that you are the Self. This conviction destroys the idea that is motivating your desire for experience…which is keeping you in bondage. Thoughts are only a problem when they are coming out of a mind that is convinced of duality. A mind that knows the Self has no problem with any thoughts, positive or negative.

Here are two more verses from the same text on the same topic.

“103. Sri Krishna says in the Gita: ‘This is called having one’s being in Brahman (the Self). None, attaining to this, becomes deluded. Being established therein, even at the last moment, a man attains to oneness with Brahman’.

The word ‘This’ refers to the verse above that defined liberation as a firm conviction of non-duality. The next verse explains what the terms ‘at the last moment’ means.

104. ‘At the last moment’ means the moment at which the mutual identification of the illusory duality and the non-dual reality is annihilated by differentiating them from each other…nothing else.

If you had a problem with verse 102 then verse 104 makes it crystal clear what enlightenment is. It is the moment when one no longer identifies Maya with the Self. Maya in personal terms means your body/mind/ego. You no longer take the person you have always believed yourself to be as the Self. Up until this moment you had considered ‘yourself’ to be the body/mind/ego entity. At the moment of enlightenment you realize that this is not true. Simultaneously you see that you are the Self, whole and complete actionless awareness. Yes, this might be called an experience but once you make the distinction you don’t have to make it again. Knowledge is not something you have to learn over and over…if it is firm. You don’t have to set out to experience yourself every day to know that you are Mike. Experience unfolds in the dimension of experience and the knowledge of who you are remains constant in a place beyond experience.

Here are some more verses that make it clear that liberation is the discriminative knowledge that arises in the intellect when the Self and Maya are separated. This is not a physical separation requiring action. It is an understanding that the two are completely different.

105. In common speech the expression ‘at the last moment’ may mean ‘at the last moment of life’. Even at that time, the illusion that is gone does not return.

106. A realised soul is not affected by delusion and it is the same whether he dies healthy or in illness, sitting in meditation or rolling on the ground, conscious or unconscious.

107. The knowledge gained in the waking state is forgotten in dream and deep sleep but returns when you wake up. This is also true of the knowledge ‘I am the Self’…it is never lost.

109. Therefore the knowledge of the non-dual Reality established by Vedanta is not untrue either at the moment of death or at the moment of the discrimination of the elements from the Self. This discrimination certainly ensures abiding peace and inexplicable bliss (i.e. liberation).

The last verse says it all. It says that enlightenment is ‘the knowledge of non-dual Reality.’ It says that this knowledge comes through the ‘discrimination of the elements from the Self.’ You can obviously not make a discrimination if your mind is dead. Anyway, I hope this is helpful.

James Swartz