Shankara’s Curiously Bhaktic Statement

Dear Ram,

So I spend my days between dental appointments getting exercise by walking round and round the local stupa in a way so reminiscent of Arunachala. And all the while I am blessed by wonderful visions, knowledge and insights, as the sun pours down like silver, on the final leg now of this journey of lifetimes.  I am reminded of Shankacharyia’s curiously bhaktic statement in his Siva Manas Puja stotram:

“You are my Self; Parvati is my reason. My five pranas are Your attendants, my body is Your house, and all the pleasures of my senses are objects to use for Your worship. My sleep is Your state of samadhi. Wherever I walk I am walking around You, everything I say is in praise of You, everything I do is in devotion to You.” 

What say you about his and other non-dual mahatma’s like Ramana’s dualistic bhakti?

Ram: Thanks for the update; it’s been a while since we spoke.  Martin said he just spent a week with you in Katmandu and it prompted me to write.  I’m happy to hear that you’re enjoying yourself.  The pagoda pic generated a twinge of envy but I’m done with the Asian subcontinent sad to say.  Father time finally caught up.  Here’s a satsang on the topic from my commentary on the Narada Bhakti Sutras. 

“A dualistic devotee, who enjoys both emotional joy through worship of Isvara in a personal form and intellectual joy in the knowledge of Isvara in all forms, may resist the idea of liberation because it brings about non-dual devotion, which seems to imply the loss of the experiential joy associated with dualistic devotion.  

Dualistic devotees who are hostile to non-duality often justify their devotion with the following statement: “Why would I want to be God when I can experience God?”  Aside from the fact that God can’t be experienced as an object, you are non-different from God already because God’s self and your self are non-different.  God can’t create, maintain and destroy an obviously intelligently designed UNIverse and you can’t generate karma and experience its results unless you share the same essence: ever-full unborn existence shining as consciousness.   

The moment you think, “I am,” you acknowledge that you are God.  To even doubt that you exist or that you are conscious, you have to exist and be conscious.  Furthermore, nothing needs to be done to make God or you exist or to maintain existence.  God is. You are.  Eliminate what is non-essential and you end up with issness, existence shining as consciousness.  Shankara’s most famous statement “jivo brahmaiva na parah” means that the individual and God are non-different. 

If you argue that this statement is not true, you need only look to the preceding four words “brahma satyam jagan mithya” which means that unborn ever-full existence shining as consciousness is real and the world is apparently real, meaning as good as non-existent, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding.  At the same time, thanks to Maya/Isvara, you – existence shining as non-dual awareness – appear as an existent experiencing entity that transacts with existent objects. The existence in the experiencing entity, the experienced objects and you are non-different.  So whether you know it or not, you are experiencing God whenever you experience objects – which is always.  The idea that you have to surrender your identity as God or your ego or that you need to forgo the experience of God to become God is illogical.  Fear of the loss of individuality is caused by Maya, beautiful intelligent ignorance.  It is capable of seemingly turning God into a seemingly separate human being.  Since God is not remote there is only one way to taste what you are already tasting: surrender your ignorance of differences, which you will do if you understand Vedanta. 

The clever argument that duality is superior to non-duality doesn’t hold water.  Dualists fatuously argue: “Do you want to be sugar or do you want to taste sugar? If you become sugar then you cannot taste it, therefore you should want to be different from it so you can enjoy it.”  But the non-dualist says, “The desire to taste sugar is natural, but how can you taste it without becoming one with it? 

What is experientially true of jiva’s experience of objects is also true of Isvara.  You can only experience God if God becomes one with you during the “non-dual” experience.  If you become one with God you cease to exist.  But you can’t experience God as an object unless you both exist.  You can’t recall experiences without knowledge of them and you can’t gain knowledge of them unless you are consciousness.  The absence of “you” during your epiphany was only the absence of a conceptual you cooked up by ignorance, which returns once the experience of absence ends.  As Shankara says in Atma Bodh, it is like pouring water into water, merging light with light.  Did anything actually change? 

Yes, epiphanies are blissful, but they have the misfortune of being finite.  When you taste sugar, you don’t cease to exist; only the taster momentarily ceases to exist.  If you don’t exist you can’t taste anything.  When you “taste the bliss of the self,” you are only removing a barrier that apparently separates you from yourself, not gaining something you don’t enjoy always.  Non-duality is not the opposite of duality.

They are in different orders of you, unborn ever-complete existence shining as consciousness. Ignorance is the creative conscious “part” of you that generates the appearance of differences but doesn’t experience differences.  So let go of the hungry experiencer and embrace Isvara, which is only possible when Isvara knowledge destroys the notion that duality is real.  Non-dual devotion is the love of a self-realized devotee toward God, which has been discovered to be the devotee’s essential nature.  If God is everywhere, everything and always present, there can be no separation between the devotee and God. 

Non-dual devotion is self love in which the self is Isvara itself.  Self love is never illogical even from an individual’s point of view, because whether you know it or not everyone already loves his or her self because all our actions are intended to please ourselves. Nobody intentionally sets out to make his or her self miserable.  Even suicides love themselves; they only want to please the self because they perversely think it is too good to suffer, which turns out to be true once they realize what it is.  It is unborn bliss.  Even self-hatred is self love because, for whatever reason, it pleases you to think of yourself as a miserable, incompetent person.  I once told a friend, whose whole personality was centered around a deep sense of self-loathing, to get off his lazy ass, do his karma yoga and accept the truth which was revealed in his many epiphanies.  He said, “Well, my life may be shit, Jim, but it’s warm and it’s mine.”

If something has different parts, from one standpoint it can be the subject and from a different standpoint it can be an object.  If I touch one hand with the other, I am touching myself with myself.  The self has a higher nature – pure, original, partless consciousness – and a reflected, lower, empirical nature that is manufactured by Maya solely out of its original nature.   In that limitless empirical nature countless entities, including humans, exist.  Therefore, I can love my body/mind/sense complex as myself because it is not separate from me.  At the same time, I enjoy freedom because I exist in an order of the reality that is free of my equipment and the world.  Isvara talks about Its higher and lower “selves” in the Bhagavad Gita (4.6)

“Though I am birthless and deathless and the Lord of

all beings, I take birth again and again through my own

Maya and then, after some time, I return to my original

transcendental nature.”

“I love myself ” means I love my higher nature…whole and complete existence shining as awareness, the knowing principle…which includes my lower nature by default. So non-dual devotion is not only possible, but every self-actualized person enjoys it.

Non-dual awareness has been supporting the cosmic manifestation, which appears as a duality, forever.  If non-dual awareness is opposed to the dualistic universe, the universe cannot exist.  The relationship between them is a both/and, not an either/or.  Furthermore, something can’t “bang” out of nothing.  And one fine day the universe, which we know is going to die, isn’t going to dissolve into nothing if it was something when it was present.

It was consciousness before it banged.  It is consciousnesss now and it will be consciousness when it unbangs.  The fact that the universe was created and is sustained is evidence that awareness supports rather than opposes it.  Thus non-duality exists in spite of duality.  All self-actualized devotees have non-dual wisdom and still experience the dualistic cosmic manifestation.  

Raw grains and nuts become tastier when roasted.  The fire of non-dual wisdom roasts and toasts dualistic devotion, making it tastier.  Dualistic devotion culminates in non-dual devotion.  When a non-dual devotee worships Isvara, it is a celebration of a mutually successful relationship. The devotee appreciates the wonderful fact that Isvara has provided the scripture and the guru, and Isvara appreciates the devotee who has successfully walked to the top of the devotional staircase: karma yoga, upasana yoga, sravana, manana and nididhyasana.  It is freedom for the jiva and freedom from the jiva. 

Both revel in their freedom. Two non-demanding free beings enjoying each other is the best kind of relationship.  Isvara is weary of the demands and complaints of unevolved devotees.  Any relationship that involves consistent demands disintegrates.  As demands increase, the partners withdraw, dissatisfaction and conflict ensues and the relationship breaks down.  The mathematics of demanding relationships is that when two halves join together for completeness, each half divides the other resulting in one-fourth of a relationship.  Expectations are the essence of dualistic devotion, whereas non-dual devotion is expectation-free.

Non-dual devotion makes dualistic devotion safer.  Duality, secular or sacred, is the basis of samsara whose most salient characteristics are fear and desire. The Upanishads repeatedly declare that the cause of misery is duality expressing as separation between two people, one’s self and the world or between one’s self and God.  

To purify the heart, dualistic devotion must be purified in the fire of self-knowledge.  A non-dual teacher, Madhusudana Saraswati, wrote many wonderful hymns in praise of Krishna, along with a classical non-dual text called Advaita Siddhi, which sufficiently resolves all logical objections raised by dualists.  He says that if you mix non-dual and dualistic devotion, the result is more enjoyable than one or the other.  Someone who understands that duality exists but is not real can intentionally create duality simply for the pleasure of indulging in various forms of devotional worship.  With this understanding, the play of duality is even more joyful than non-duality. That is why all Vedic mahatmas enjoyed writing hymns of praise, in addition to technical Vedantic  literature.  Shankaracharya himself wrote hymns of praise to all the deities, testifying to the fact that non-duality makes duality more enjoyable.”

So Shankara’s “curiously bhaktic statement” isn’t curious at all because there is no difference between God and conscious beings. 

Love,

Ram