It really struck me one year at Swami Dayananda Saraswati’s place when he said “Vedanta is not a matter of blind faith or unverifiable belief, but a matter of understanding.” It hit me then why his teachings sat so well with me. The primary message is listen, inquire, question, discuss and if you disagree speak up and explore or decide it is not for you. Never a matter of ‘take my word for it’ or ‘I believe this is the way it is.’ Devotion or Bhakti too comes from understanding, or Jnana, there is no separation.
[The image is of Shankara, a teacher who developed the lineage and method and approach to Vedanta that has inspired many and been carried through the ages in ashrams and people like Swami Dayananda Saraswati. I will include more of Shankara's teachings over time.]
So much of how we create ‘other,’ or a sense of ‘other’ is through our preferences, likes, dislikes and beliefs. We see separation, separateness when we perceive a belief that is different than our own, often without really verifying nor seeking to understand the difference. Underlying most differences are shared values, perhaps articulated differently. The human mind has a tendency to cling to a story, often in spite of evidence or logical arguments to the contrary.
Daniel Kahneman has been working on applying psychology to behavior and economic decisions, behavioral economics. Through various studies they came to what they call the “Illusion of Validity”.
It’s a problem that afflicts us all, says Kahneman, who won the 2002 Nobel Prize in economics for his work on this subject. From stockbrokers to baseball scouts, people have a huge amount of confidence in their own judgment, even in the face of evidence that their judgment is wrong.
But that mistake is just one of many cognitive errors identified by Kahneman and his frequent collaborator, psychologist Amos Tversky. For more than a decade, the two worked together cataloging the ways the human mind systematically misjudges the world around it.
[In the studies] Kahneman was surprised by the pure visceral power of his own certainty. He eventually coined a phrase for it: “illusion of validity.” ~ Using Psychology to Save Yourself (NPR Story).
The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali start with the same premise:
Sutra I.2 “Yogah citta vritti nirodha”
In How Yoga Works there is a beautiful twist on the Yoga Sutra I.2:
Yogah citta vrtti nirodha –
Common translation:
Yoga is the stilling, or quieting, of movements, or fluctuations, of the mind.How Yoga Works:
Yoga is learning to stop
How the mind
Turns things around.”
~ Yoga Sutra I.2, How Yoga Works, page 109
See blog book review on How Yoga Works
So we do with each other, our own perceptions about ourselves and our perception of the very world and creation of which we are a part. So we do with notions of God and sin and those who believe differently, thereby perpetuating erroneous sense of other through belief – not observation and deduction. So we do with perceptions of Earth, Nature and ideas of whether She is alive or not, and we can and cannot control or manipulate.
Vedanta is taught in a method to clear the fog of belief and unfold understanding through questioning, inquiry, dialog and daily retraining of the mind. Many modern methods, like Marshal Rosenberg’s Non-Violent Communication books or “Compassionate Communication” are based on similar principles and reveal daily practices to catch mechanical illusory thinking and shift towards conscious perception, subject to proof and disproof.
Knowledge, or Jnana, and truth or Satya is that which is no longer subject to correction nor can it be disproved. Since the core problem is perception, is cognitive, solving through action or doing will not work. Correction must come through cognitive solutions, or knowing.
Beyond Belief: A Matter of Knowing
In teaching Swami Dayananda Saraswati asks: “If I ask you if I have a grandfather, you say yes. Is it a matter of belief?” We accept as a material fact that for a human to exist there had to be a grandfather, it is not a matter of belief, of faith. If I show you a watch, is it a matter of belief that there is or was a watchmaker? We accept there has to be a maker.
So it is with the world and universe, whether we attribute the making to the Big Bang or Divinity, we must recognize a source. Vedanta then goes through many well developed explorations in the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita revealing how that maker must in essence be Awareness, or Consciousness, called Brahman, to imply its limitless aspect, beyond name and form or time and space. To go further we would have to anchor our conversation in the verses, the teachings, the method, the practices and the etymology and meaning of words like Brahman and Isvara and Purnam, or fullness, or the Whole. And so we come to understanding, beyond belief. We must shed much of what we unknowingly cling to, we must question, not believe.
If we seek to understand, we would never feel threatened by the beliefs of another, nor would we seek to convince someone of an unverifiable belief. The need to convert or kill heathens dissolves, replaced by empathy and interdependence. Other disappears when we understand Wholeness. The NPR story mentioned above takes the Illusion of Validity into policy and programs, daily life.
I do 6 week courses on the Gita to explore these principles and teachings and bring them down to earth inout our daily choices, relationships, actions. Yoga is Whole Person Wellness Coaching, we will explore this further. We can do online discussions in the forum here, or telephone or webinar based teachings. Let me know if you have an interest, or disagree, do feel free to comment.
yogaNexus by Karl Erb is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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