Hinduism and other Faiths

yes and god is the self and so we must see the self as it is and hence it is known as the path of self realization

 

enlightenment cannot come from someone else, my friend. other than pointing at a door, a guru can serve no other purpose. if you should stumble over a coffee table on the way to the door, you must deal with that on your own. language was created by us, and is limited to our capacity. enlightenment cannot flow through something so imperfect. no one else can look for you.

 

you are right, we can't be proud and we are not independent of God. We need to realize that and be humble.
Also about the forest meditation.... everyone has their own dharma as prescribed by one's nature of actions. Hence, some one goes to become a doctor and he serves God that way, another person may serve God by giving up everything physically and leading a hard life in forest, some one else may do something else.... the end result however is that we all serve God without ahankara and see him everywhere

 

Yes God is the Supreme Self of all, one who realizes this gets freed from the cycle of repeated birth and death.

 

if we are serious on the path, we won't have a coffee table cuz coffee isn't conducive to meditation

 

yes, god is the supreme self but even god must be humble less god becomes lost in the cycle of samsara

 

okay. i agree that you shouldn't look at a guru as someone who holds your hand and leads you down the path. but, my point is that if we all try to be too independent none of us with understand eachother and we'll all become confused and lost. there's nothing wrong with getting help from someone or something outside yourself. in truth, everything comes from that place outside yourself, unless you can give birth to yourself and manifest the entire universe around you. and if you could, you would be god. nothing else is god; everything else came from god.

as prabhupada likes to say, if god is the sun, we are sunrays, who have all the same qualities, but are not the sun itself. we produce light and heat like the sun, but we are small, and we are dependant.

i guess going off to the woods and looking inside yourself is compatible with saying that you have to get enlightenment from god, or through the information that has been passed down from entity to entity but originally came from god, because god is inside everyone's hearts at the same time as being in the spiritual sky and inside and inbetween every atom. i guess that what i'm saying is we shouldn't believe we ourselves are doing anything, have control over anything, can come up with anything on our own. we're all completely dependant. and there is nothing virtuous about trying to find everything out on our own when the information is already there and all we have to do is listen.

 

Prism, here is the logic of advaita: We say God created the world. From what raw material was it created? From God, or from something other than god?
If it was other than God, then who created that and from what? This leads to an infinite regression and is therefore illogical.
That means that God created the world out of God. And therefore, the entire world IS God, since there can be nothing at all other than than God.
So definitely from the standpoint of the individual wrapped up in the body-mind-intellect complex there is a difference between god and self, but when these identifications are dropped, the individual does not exist independent of them, and therefore is totally nullified, what is left is only the one all-pervading Lord, the Self of all beings.
In Ramayana bhagawan asks Valmiki rishi to tell him where to live. Valmiki rishi says, if you can find a place where you are not already present in full measure, go and live there.

Further, the sun and ray concept may sound tmepting, but it contradics the scriptures, wheer the lord is repeatedly described as nishkala, without rays or divisions. And if there were no rays, there would be no sun at all, it would only be a gas cloud. So by that logic, God's existence is dependent on the individuals, just as much as the individuals depend on God for their existence. This is an obvious fallacy with that metaphor.

 

I like the wave and the ocean metephor myself.

 

interesting, stephen hawkins commented that if we manipulated atomic imbalances, we could in another dimension, create another universe... vedically speaking, brahma could be a plumber in another dimension who got bored at his daytime job and made this universe that we live in in his basement

 

Perhaps the universe itself is god. The 'self' is only one aspect of it.

 

I like Bhaskar ultimately believe in the logic of advaita. Which reminds me of a question posed to Ramana,

Q, That is the transcendental state?

A, No. Transcending what, and by whom? You alone exist.

I do not believe there are different aspects of one thing, this just isn't logical and must be an illusion.

 

Heh , we are so imaginative aren't we?

When you say "Universe" , you refer to everything that exists, if that is the case then there is no "parallel universe" , it is all just simply one existence. Hence, one Brahma creates that "universe". There are many brahmas yes, because brahma is also a being in a position which will be lost once his lifetime is over. The position will move to another new brahma.

It is simply a matter of perspective. You say it is advaita, another person says "no the reality is how dvaita describes it" another person says "no the reality is how vishistadvaita describes it" , in fact it is simply a matter of perspective from which we see the truth. There is no contradiction here.

The human mind is limited and fallible, and what you may not perceive to be logical now, becomes completely logical later on.

 

God is the Supreme Self.

 

i think you're too interested in proving me wrong.

we're in impermanent bodies, in an impermanent world, so we cannot conceive something that had no beginning and has no end and is capable of manifesting itself. because we are in this cycle of birth and death and rebirth, it's our job to try to understand the infinite absolute. why are we here? for god's pleasure. so god can know itself. yes, we are god, but we are not ALL of god.

our logic is all messed up; we know barely anything even of the one planet we live on and it's laws. this is obvious; look at how we treat it. so how can we expect the original creater to work under our own tiny understanding? how can we say, if we can't comprehend it, that's not how it is? we can't even comprehend ourselves. very few people even know about their bodies. they don't consciously believe there is blood pulsing through them every second, that their brains send messages to the rest of their bodies every time they want to blink. what about the soul? how many of us are really even aware it exists?

i don't see anything wrong with the sun metaphor. we are the sun's brightness; we are what make the sun what it is, but we originated from the sun itself. we are dependent on eachother, but the sun is the original, and has all the qualities of the trillions of rays in the highest quantity. the sun came before the rays; we know this because you can't seperate a sunray from the sun and create another sun equal to the first. if you try to seperate it, the ray disappears.

anyway, the metaphor is getting kind of stale in my mind now from talking about it so much . i'll write more later, i have to go do something.

 

Self of what though? The universe presumably.

It's pointless to say 'god is this or god is that'. It doesn't take us any closer to real knowledge. 'Supreme self' is just another mental conception.

 

And yet this very metaphor was used by Sri Ramakrishna.

"Reality with attributes, saguna brahman, has been unanimously declared by the Vedas, Puranas, and Tantras to be Mahakali, the primordial energy of awareness. Her Energy is like the rays of the sun. The original sun is attributeless Reality, nirguna brahman, boundless awareness alone. Proceed to the Original through its Radiance. Awaken to non-dual Reality through Mother Kali. She holds the key."

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i don't have time to read all of these new posts right now, but chiefcowpie-i can only presume the comment about the coffee was a joke. i was speaking about obstacles, not coffee. if it was a joke, that was actually pretty funny man. kudos.

 

not true, scientists are now capable of capturing light in a gas cloud and containing it and holding it and then releasing it to mix with other contained light... will try to find the link

btw, i thinks its cool you are a hare krishna and you love krishna and all that stuff but you guys are wackadoos with your science theories... moon is farther away than the sun... etc

a.c. swami for some reason as well considered advaita and bhakti to be mortal enemies which they aren't... he as well in concluding that bhakti was the highest yoga as taught krishna in b.g., that all other yogas weren't necessary... all yoga truths are strung together as pearls on a thread as is a necklace... to separate and qualify one against the other breaks the necklace

 

okay. i believe you . still, the light ray cannot produce another sun equal to the first. but these examples are only useful for helping us mentally conceptualize something that we have no other way of understanding. another example prabhupada uses is that if your mom tells you "this is your father", you have to trust her, it's useless to argue. he's talking about accepting knowledge from a spiritual master; that's the metaphor. of course, we can actually do scientific tests now to figure out who is a biological father. but it's still a good metaphor because it helps you understand.

i personally, with my bare hands, can't capture a ray of light, so even though i don't doubt that it's possible, it doesn't really apply to me. just like i have no idea how to actually go about a paternity test. and if you want to apply the metaphor further, you can say, yes, it's possible to seperate the rays from the sun or find out who your father is scientifically, just like it's possible to love god or achieve liberation through your own means, but there is a quicker path. leave the rays where they are, trust your mother, and practice bhakti yoga learned from an enlightened master.

speaking of which (nice tie-in, eh? ), i'm interested to know, where does prabhupada actually put down other forms of yoga? i wasn't aware that he had ANY enemies. i thought his preference for bhakti yoga was just a matter of what makes sense, what is reccomended for ultimate liberation, what is the highest, the easiest. since it is the age of kali, why should we try to bend ourselves like pretzels and regulate our breathing and calculate the most auspicious time to do everything, just to get to some higher planet and then die again? why go to all that trouble for something that pales in comparison to what we can achieve with a much simpler method?



i haven't heard anything about the moon being farther away than the sun yet. not that i doubt it... there are some things i can't wrap my mind around completely... but some of the far-out things, if you really dig into them, actually do make sense logically. and some of them, y'know, what the hell do we really know for certain? we can't even understand gravity.