One, Not Two!

Shankaracharya was once of those staggering geniuses the world too rarely sees. He was not just just a brilliant intellectual but a highly advanced yogi with a living experience of the unity of all reality. He appeared at a time in history when Hinduism was in a slump, having taken some big hits from alternative religions, like Buddhism and Jainism personality, his impeccable logic, and his yogic power.

Shankara as he's known carried the doctrine of Advaita Vedanta throughout the subcontinent. Advaita means nondual, or " not two". Shankara disagreed with the Sankaya masters that reality is dual, that spirit and matter exist separately. To Shankara, spirit-by which he means pure consciousness- is the only reality.

Shankara uses the Vedic name for the one reality, Brahman. Atman, our innermost Self, is identical in essence to Brahman, the divine consciousness, just as a drop of water essentially identical with the ocean. When we achieve moksha, spiritual liberation, we merge into that ocean of consciousness,as a drop of water merges seamlessly into the sea.

There is no way to describe Brahman. It is far beyond human conception. But if we had to use words to give us a hazy idea of the greatness of that vast reality, Shankara would use the words sat, chit, and ananda: being consciousness, and bliss. To him, the highest state of awareness was not the unconscious state the Vaisheshiskas   described. It was a luminous and lucid state full of divine knowledge and blissfulness.

If all that exists is pure being, consciousness,and bliss, why do we have to deal with rent payments, incompetent supervisors, and dead car batteries? Shankara would be the first to acknowledge the practical realities we face in day-to-day life. But from the point of view of the deepest states of meditation, where one actually experiences one's own Atman merging in Brahman, the external world is maya, the superimposition of our own ideas about the world on an unchanging and everperfect underlying reality.

If you see a coiled rope on the road in the dark, you may think it's a snake. Your heart starts pounding, you get sweaty and clammy. For you, at the moment, that's really a poisonous snake. But when you shine a flashlight at it and see it's a rope, your fear disappears instantly and you recognize the fear was groundless from the very beginning. When the flashlight of genuine meditative experience shines in our awareness, we recognize that there is not and never has been anything, anywhere, anytime, but Brahman- pure, perfect divinity.

While Shankara emphasized using the discriminating intellect to contemplate the Inner reality, Ramajuna, like the Mimamsas, emphasized the importance of rituals and religious and social duties. While Shankara promoted a mental approach to the truth, Ramajuna felt devotion was a more appropriate way to approach the Supreme Being.