The Upanishads

 

The world is the wheel of God, turning round And round with all living creatures upon its rim. The world is the river of God, Flowing from him and flowing back to him.

Shankara

 

T eachers and scriptures can stimulate spiritual awareness. But the wise disciple crosses the ocean of ignorance by direct illumination, through the grace of God.

Gain experience directly. Realize God for yourself. Know the Self as the one indivisible Being, and become perfect. Free your mind from all distractions and dwell in the consciousness of the Self.

This is the final declaration of the Vedanta: Brahman is all; [It is] this universe and every creature. To be liberated is to live in the continual awareness of Brahman, the undivided Reality.

Metta Zetty

 

“No amount of effort is needed. No amount of effort will be successful. And yet, through mindful attention to the Background of Awareness inherent within the Present Moment, Awakening will inevitably dawn upon you. In that Instant you will delight in the Reality of who and what you have been all along

Stephen Knapp

The first verse of the Vedanta-sutras states: “athato brahma-jijnasa”, which means, “Now is the time to inquire about the Absolute Truth.” Why is it time? Because we are presently in the human form of life and should utilize it properly since only in the human form do we have the intelligence and facility to be able to understand spiritual reality. 

In animal forms, the living entities cannot understand such things because they do not have the brainpower. So we should not waste this human form of life by pursuing only the animalistic propensities, such as eating, sleeping, mating and defending. Therefore, the Vedanta-sutras begin by stating that now is the time for us to understand the Absolute Truth

Saint Jnaneshwar ~ Shiva-Shakti

It cannot be spoken of or spoken to; by no means may It be comprehended by the intellect.

It is that one pure Consciousness who becomes everything, From the gods above to the earth below.

Objects may be regarded as high or low, But the ocean of Consciousness, ever-pure, Is all that ever is.

Though the shadows on the wall are ever changing, The wall itself remains steady and unmoved. Likewise, the forms of the universe take shape from Consciousness, The eternal, primordial One.

 

from the Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna

Totāpuri was the bearer of a philosophy new to Sri Ramakrishna, the non-dualistic Vedānta philosophy, whose conclusions Totāpuri had experienced in his own life. This ancient Hindu system designates the Ultimate Reality as Brahman, also described as Satchidānanda, Existence-Knowledge-Bliss Absolute. Brahman is the only Real Existence. In It there is no time, no space, no causality, no multiplicity.

But through Māyā, Its inscrutable Power, time, space, and causality are created and the One appears to break into the many. The eternal Spirit appears as a manifold of individuals endowed with form and subject to the conditions of time. The Immortal becomes a victim of birth and death. The Changeless undergoes change. The sinless Pure Soul, hypnotised by Its own Māyā, experiences the joys of heaven and the pains of hell. But these experiences based on the duality of the subject-object relationship are unreal

Even the vision of a Personal God is, ultimately speaking, as illusory as the experience of any other object. Man attains his liberation, therefore, by piercing the veil of Māyā and rediscovering his total identity with Brahman. Knowing himself to be one with the Universal Spirit, he realizes ineffable Peace. Only then does he go beyond the fiction of birth and death; only then does he become immortal. And this is the ultimate goal of all religions – to dehypnotize the soul now hypnotized by its own ignorance.

Dr. Fritjof Capra

 

"As long as we confuse the myraid forms of the Divine lila with reality, without preceiving the unity of Brahman underlying all these forms, we are under the spell of maya...Maya is the illusion of taking these concepts for reality, of confusing the map with the territory."

Rig Veda - 129.6. 7 Hymn of creation

Who truly knows, who can honestly say where.

This universe cam from   And where it will vanish to at the End?   Those godlike wise men who claim they know were born long After the birth of Creation.   Who then could know where our universe really came from?   And whoever knows or does not know where Creation came from,   Only one gazing at its vastness from the very roof of the final Heaven "Only such a one could possibly know, But does even He know? "

By Paul Williams Robert

 

This merging with the Eternal, this inner transformation, this direct experience of Truth – these are the goals of which the Vedic sages speak. They explain the nature of the universe, of life, while admitting that Creation itself is the one unknowable mystery. To the Vedic sages, creation indicated that point before which there was no Creator, the line between indefinable nothingness and something delineated by attributes and function, at least.

 Like the moment before the Big Bang Theory. These concepts preoccupy high wisdom, the Truth far removed from mere religion. Recent research and scholarship make it increasingly possible to believe that the Vedic era was the lost civilization whose legacy the Egyptians and the Indians inherited. 

There must have been one. There are too many similarities between hieroglyphic texts and Vedic ones, these in turn echoed in a somewhat diluted form and a confused fashion by the authors of Babylonian texts and the Old Testament.

THE METAPHYSICAL GODDESS THE DEVI-MAHATMYA

“Through Her we know the Consciousness, Of Brahman without duality, Like a wave of Existence and of Joy. She has entered all beings, within and without Of each of them, and on all She shines Her light!”

Bahvricha Upanishad”It is here, in the Devi-Mahatmya, that the concept of an all-inclusive Goddess is fully elucidated. within a mythical framework of the Goddess’s martial deeds, is the assertion that she is the Ultimate Reality, an idea transmitted by inference rather than in direct terms. Mythically, in order to conquer the asuras (demons) that threatened the very existence of the devas (gods), a supremely powerful goddess was created from the combined anger of the gods.