Quote
from the true charm and power of Vedanta
Answers
and selections
Personally I take as much of the Vedas as agrees with reason. Parts of the Vedas are apparently contradictory. They are not considered as inspired in the western sense of the word, but as the sum total of the knowledge of God omniscience. This knowledge comes out of the beginning of a cycle and manifestation itself and when the cycle ends, it goes down into minute form. When the cycle is projected again that knowledge is mere sophistry. manu says in one place that , that part of the Vedas which agrees wit reasons is the Vedas and nothing else. Many of our philosophers have taken this view.
All the criticism against the
advanta philosophy can be summed up in this that it does not conduce to
sense-enjoyment and we are glad to admit that.
The Vedanta system begins with tremendous pessimism, and ends with real optimism. We deny the sense –optimism but asserts the real optimism of the. Super sensuous. That real happiness is not in the senses but above the senses and it is in every man. The sort of optimism which we see in the world is what will lead to ruin through the senses.
Abnegation has the greatest
importance in our philosophy. Negation implies affirmation of the Real Self. The
Vedanta is pessimistic so far as it negatives the world of the senses, but it
is optimistic in its assertion of the real world.
Of all scriptures of the world it is
the Vedas alone that declare that even the study of the Vedas is secondary. The
real study is that by which we realize the Unchangeable “And that is neither
reading nor believing nor reasoning but super –conscious perception or Samadhi.
Who decides what is bad and what is
good?
By Thomas Easley
From the arrival of our earliest memories, we’ve been schooled on what is good behaviour and what is bad behaviour. And we derive a degree of identity from our own, and the reactions others have, to how we’ve understood and interpreted what is and is not good and bad behaviour.
Evaluating appropriate and inappropriate behaviour is
essential to our ability to better ourselves and the world in which we live.
But who decides what is bad? Who decides what is good? Who decides how bad
someone can be and still be good? How good can someone be and still be bad? How
many bad things have to be done to make someone bad? Who decides?
As we adapt to life’s persistent reinvention, our gods
change with us, and with them what is and is not culturally and morally good, or
bad. Khajuraho and the Kama Sutra speak of a time when pleasure was good, a
source of spiritual nourishment. Now it’s not good. Why? What has changed? And
why don’t we pray to Iris, Zeus, Shango, and his big axe, sacrifice children to
volcano gods, believe evil spirits cause infections and disease?
From era to era, country to country, group to group, who
defines what is good and bad, and the enforcement of the same varies depending
upon which group or individual is in power in any given domain.
In our time, to evaluate good and bad, many people are
holding to established institutions while others are turning to modernism and
social media, making their own rules, their own gods, or believing in no rules,
or no God or gods at all.
Though we learn much from past experience, where we go from
here and how we better ourselves today, is the question we seek to answer, and
it cannot be an answer that favours one body of people over another, not if our
betterment requires balance. If what was derogatory is no longer derogatory. If
what was acceptable is no longer acceptable, yet we disagree on which is which,
it becomes difficult to determine what is and is not good and bad behaviour.
Failing these determinations, how are we to become better people?
We must learn to self-guide our moral outlook regardless of
what others believe is good or bad, and for that, enlightenment is our best
hope.
Enlightenment, because its nature is unattached, even
indifferent, it cannot be bound to material reality, identity, or any measure
of what is good or bad within material reality decided upon by any person or
group. Enlightenment is in the self-awareness of, not the attachment to, that
which defines good and bad.
In the end, it’s not what we believe; it’s how we behave
that constitutes good or bad behaviour. The behaviour we have more control over
when the needs to defend ego’s identity attachments, based on what has been
defined as good or bad, have been minimised by efforts to better ourselves
through being more self-aware in the present, more enlightened.
In the world of enlightenment, there is no difference
between people, only a difference in levels of awareness, of non-attachment, of
seeing through ourselves into a world without us in it. A world we can better
ourselves unhindered by the approval or disapproval of external interpretations
of good and bad.
The point, the goal of betterment, is how to live with each
other, not change each other.
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