theseekingspirit

I recently attended a talk by Swami Sarvapriyananda in Sydney titled "Oneness in a Divided World." He covered a remarkable amount of ground — consciousness studies, neuroscience, references to philosophers like Karl Popper and David Chalmers — before finally arriving at the Advaita Vedantic view of oneness. It was a fascinating talk, and it left me thinking about the parallels between Advaita Vedānta and Yoga, and how each tradition arrives at its own view of oneness. Every contemplative tradition, it turns out, eventually arrives at the same question: who is doing the looking? Advaita Vedānta and Yoga both begin here, in the space between the seer and everything that is seen. But they arrive at different destinations — and understanding exactly where and why they part ways turns out to matter more for practice than for philosophy. The Advaita Vedantic Vision of Oneness Advaita Vedānta's method for approaching this question is called dṛg-dṛśya-viveka — discriminatio...