Outtakes and Fresh Starts Podcast: Recent Episodes
Kenneth Rose
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I recorded this episode a couple of weeks ago while sitting in the middle of a vast courtyard opening out from a cathedral in an old Roman city in western Germany near France and Luxembourg. It was a bright and gently warm Saturday evening. The technical quality is imperfect because I was surrounded by tourists, passersby, and townspeople enjoying the mild weather. There are gaps in the recording when I stopped recording because people began talking near me. The style is informal, unlike my written style, but this approach encourages creative sparks of intuition.
Below is an edited version of this podcast episode. There may be still some imperfections in it, despite multiple readings, but that shows that it was not written by AI!
It’s a luminous evening in Trier, and I’m sitting on a bench while gazing up at the Dom, or the Cathedral of St. Peter, which lies at the heart of this ancient Roman city in western Germany. The townspeople and tourists are passing the evening in the European manner of promenading through the streets, enjoying ice cream, heading to restaurants, or, sitting, like me, taking in the sunlight after a long winter. The massive Romanesque church rising above me evokes a delightful sense of uplift and exaltation, making my seat here a suitable setting for raising ontological and metaphysical issues.
In this essay, I want to write about a number of concepts that are central to the Upaniṣads and Vedānta. I’m not writing as a scholar of the Upaniṣads, an Indologist, or an advocate of a Vedāntic school. Instead, I utilize concepts from the Vedāntic schools to express the contemplative and ontological contemplative vision that I have been articulating in my books. These concepts are old friends, and I have been working with them, meditating upon them, and contemplating their significance since I first began to read the Upaniṣads and the Bhagavad-gītā almost almost sixty years ago. They evoke contemplative, ontological, and mystical intuitions left untapped for me by Latin, Greek, and English terms. The word Brahman has far more resonance for me than the word being, although it is an evocative term in English.
This contemplative ontology is based not on the exegesis of a specific philosophical tradition, either in India or in the West but on my own contemplative experience with these concepts. Not merely guided or shaped by reading the Upaniṣads and the study of Vedānta, it has been evoked by the ontological insights coded into their venerable teachings and narratives. We can subject Vedāntic concepts to conceptual analysis, which is a venerable academic approach. But if we approach them contemplatively with a disciplined and purified consciousness, they can evoke a vision of ultimate reality and its attributes. This is the gift of a contemplative metaphysics and a contemplative ontology, which I broached in my last book, Reviving Intellectual Intuition in Metaphysics (Bloomsbury, 2024) and which I plan to expand in a later book called The Generosity of Being.
A classic Vedāntic definition of Brahman characterizes it as having the three cardinal features, or attributes, of sat, cit, and ānanda. (In more proper Sanskrit that is saccidānanda.) Although it’s a canonical expression in Vedānta, this formula first appears in the Tejobindu Upaniṣad instead of the earlier classical Upaniṣads. In a later essay, I’ll compare it with an older formulation of Brahman as satyam, jñānam, and anantam, which occurs in the classical Taittirīya Upaniṣad. (In the European Scholastic system, these universal attributes of whatever is or exists would be known as transcendentals.) Sat is being itself and indicates the real and the true. As sat, Brahman is the bedrock reality of whatever subsists or exists. As being itself, nothing subsists or exists outside of sat. Sat grounds and guarantees the truth of true statements and genuine experiences. Sat is Brahman, or being, expressing itself in the ontological hierarchy of physical existence, mental and subtle (prāṇic) experience, and the subsistent hypostases of the formal and ideal realm of the intellect.
Cit is usually translated as “consciousness,” but this wan word captures little of the plenitude of experience that occurs in cit. Over the last century and a half starting with Brentano, Western philosophy has asserted that all consciousness is intentional—that every state of consciousness has an intentional object. This conception of consciousness is richer than bare awareness but it introduces an insuperable divide between a mental intention, or representation, and its object, whether internal or external to the mind. On this approach, consciousness is always divided into an intending subject and its mental objects. Consciousness is always about something that a subject intends or points toward mentally. To avoid this necessarily dualistic conception of consciousness, contemporary spiritualities that posit pure, undivided, objectless consciousness as ultimately real replace the word consciousness with awareness. Contrary to Brentano’s intentional consciousness and the rich contents of phenomenological elaborations of consciousness, awareness on this approach is what remains when everything has been eliminated from consciousness except the bare registration of uninflected awareness. But there is far more to consciousness than the mindful registration of events such as my sitting at this table and writing while being surrounded by people.
The third term, ānanda, which usually translates as “bliss,” seems the easiest to translate, although there is far more to ānanda than this overused translation suggests. Ānanda is not just ordinary happiness; it’s complete and unsullied bliss. It is supreme happiness. I’ll have more to say about it later.
As being itself, or absolute reality, Brahman is the fullness of reality. The Sanskrit word for the fullness of being is pūrṇam, which implies that nothing that subsists or exists stands apart from Brahman. That is the sat aspect or Brahman. The aspect of cit suggests that Brahman is not only the real, or the ontological foundation or bedrock, of what subsists and exists, it is also conscious. It’s aware. These nonduality of Brahman implies that wherever there is being, or sat, there is consciousness, or cit. Conversely, wherever there is consciousness, there is being. These are convertible terms. You can’t have the one without the other. The conception of saccidānanda not only suggests this coincidence of transcendental attributes in Brahman, it necessarily implies them as well.
This is an example of a priori metaphysics, which Hume, were he still among us, would cast into the fire. Contrary to Hume, I contend that an a priori metaphysics is what we’re lacking. We’re unable to construct a grounding ontology that unifies the totality of knowledge, being, and existence without recourse to an a priori approach in metaphysics. An a priori metaphysics is not merely grounded in conceptual analysis, nor is it merely a logical operation. Instead, it charts, designates, and symbolizes the fundamental structure of being. Because being precedes and undergirds everything else, an a priori analysis of the concept of being deduces the necessary undergirding structure of whatever subsists ontologically and exists physically as their realizations. This view implies that logic is ontology and that ontology is logic, a view famously associated with Hegel. In a priori metaphysical thinking that has not been stunted by Kantian transcendentalism or by the linguistic turn, the analysis of an ontologically grounding concept like being is also an analysis of a way that being presents itself. Because being as such precedes, or grounds, whatever subsists or exists, it’s impossible to do ontology except as an a priori exercise of the intutive intellect. Ontology and metaphysics are not inductive sciences. They are not empirical. They uncover and articulate the categories that ground experience and that make empirical research possible.
Now, to return to ānanda, Brahman’s third cardinal and transcendental attribute. As such ānanda is also convertible with being and consciousness. So, wherever there’s being, there’s not only consciousness, or awareness, there’s also bliss. Conversely, wherever there’s bliss, there’s also consciousness and being. Looked at from the standpoint of ānanda, it’s logical and not at all controversial to hold that, as in the case of sat and cit, wherever there’s bliss, there’s also consciousness and being. But here we hit a sticking point. One might object at this point that an a priori metaphysics that depends upon the analysis of the concept of being, or Brahman, as being constituted of saccidānanda, fails for two reasons. First, the claim that where there is being, there is consciousness fails because we’re not conscious when we sleep. Second, the claim that where there is being, there is bliss fails because no one is always blissful. We live in a world where there is much woe, suffering and misery existing alongside much beauty, truth, and goodness. There’s too much suffering and pain in the world for anyone to countenance an a priori claim that where there is being, there is also bliss. If I were approaching the meaning of saccidānanda from the standpoint of an empirical, or scientific, metaphysics, this would be the place where I would have to abandon that project.
There are a number of ways of dealing with these objections. Buddhists claim over against Advaita Vedānta that consciousness is, like everything else, anitya, or impermanent. It comes and goes. When we fall into deep sleep, consciousness disappears. Some consciousness remains while we’re dreaming, but in deep sleep, we’re completely unconscious. The traditional retort of Advaita Vedānta is that when we wake up, we yawn, and happily exclaim, “I slept well and didn’t know anything” (sukham aham asvāpsam, na kiñcit avedisam). We wouldn’t be able to say that we slept well if consciousness were not present in deep sleep, which allows us to report later that we slept well.
In the past I was not persuaded by this argument. It seemed like a weak and specious dodge. But I am more persuaded now than I used to be because of deeper meditative experience over the years. The claim that when you’re asleep, you’re not conscious relies on a shallow sense of what constitutes consciousness. This claim identifies consciousness too closely with waking consciousness. As a contemplative metaphysician, it’s clear to me now that we can distinguish between the waking consciousness that disappears when we fall asleep and a deeper awareness, a kind of deep, brooding general perception, which persists in the state of deep sleep. Through a sensibility shaped by contemplative practice and meditation, we learn to distinguish between ordinary waking consciousness, which I am experiencing right now while looking at the church in front of me, and a broader background awareness that doesn’t flicker out under any circumstances.
I haven’t gotten to the place where I can say that my consciousness doesn’t flicker out in the middle of the night. But meditatively honed intuition suggests that the reason I can say that I slept well when I wake up is that I was aware throughout the night of being at rest from the tumult and turmoil of everyday consciousness and the chaotic imagery of dream consciousness. When we begin to perceive this deeper background awareness, we’re moving into the deeper ranges of consciousness, which are not dependent upon sensations or the mind. To help make sense of the claim that because being is consciousness, there is never any break in or loss of consciousness, we might recall the different levels of consciousness enumerated in Vedānta. Vedānta classically distinguishes between waking consciousness, consciousness while dreaming, and the deeper, more difficult to thematize, consciousness that persists in deep, dreamless sleep. Vedānta also speaks of a fourth stage of consciousness, which is consciousness itself, or awareness alone and which is not mediated by the body, the mind, or prāṇa. It’s pure, absolute, unadorned, universal awareness, or consciousness. On this model, it’s clear that neither waking consciousness nor dreaming sleep is the deepest and most profound level of consciousness.
If we to restrict our attention to our physical existence, sensations, and ordinary mental awareness alone, then most of us go dark for a few hours every night. But when sleep is situated within the larger context of multiple levels of consciousness, it’s reasonable to hold that an unblinking awareness, which is being itself, infuses the other levels of consciousness. (In a later podcast, I’ll take up the question of why there are limitations like these levels of consciousness in pure consciousness in the first place.)
Recently, I sat in the waning light of dusk in the stairwell of an old stone house alongside the Mosel River, which runs through Trier. Like many houses in Europe, it was built with stones in order to last, not for a few decades, but for hundreds of years. If you were to come back here in two hundred years, you might find this building still standing. The windows might be different but the structure itself and the steps would remain. As I reflected on these venerable old stones, I felt a palpable sense of a deep, brooding awareness coming through them. It was an ancient awareness, one with the red sandstone cliffs that tower over the river. Now, when I gaze upon the bricks in the cathedral towering over me, I feel the same sense of a deep, brooding consciousness. It’s significantly different from human consciousness, but it’s consciousness, nonetheless.
While sitting meditatively in the stairwell, I noticed that ivy was growing along its stone walls. Contemplating it, I gained intuitive access to the consciousness of this wonderful plant. It was quite different from the consciousness emanating from the stones. It was more vibrant, although more transient. This ivy plant will exist for a minuscule amount of time in comparison with the stones. Odd as may sound to a some readers, this sensitivity to other forms of consciousness can be cultivated through meditation and other types of disciplined spiritual practice. I am reminded of Michael Pollan’s books, where he writes convincingly about the consciousness of plants, an idea that is becoming more widely accepted in scientific circles.
A skeptical response to this intutive approach to understanding consciousness is that it’s merely anecdotal, grounded as it is in my own personal experience. The critic might say, “Your meditative communing with stones and ivy is is merely a product of your vivid imagination?” I agree that it’s anecdotal, but, more importantly, it’s also the fruit of the meditative cultivation of the imagination over the decades. The imagination is a portal, or doorway, into insights granting knowledge and experience of the independent reality and character of being. The imagination, when attuned to being itself and to metaphysical and spiritual realities, allows us to commune with being and to consciously resume our innate identity with being. We resume this natural identity with being by becoming sensitive to the imagery that being evokes in us when we meditate, read or write poetry, brood over an artwork, or contemplate a field strewn with colorful flowers. We need to recover an understanding of the imagination as ontological, as metaphysical. This is not a new idea for poets, novelists, artists, and mystics. In our ontologically impoverished era in which there’s been a revolt against traditional philosophical and spiritual wisdom over the last few centuries, it may seem like a stretch—like metaphysical fiction. But it’s not, and the test for its truth is the cultivation of the imagination as a channel for metaphysical and mystical insight.
A more serious objection to the a priori claim that Brahman is always attended by the three fundamental attributes of reality, consciousness, and bliss is the fact of suffering. That’s a difficult challenge. To address it, it’ll help to go recall the a priori claim that wherever there’s being, there’s always a consciousness. Similarly to the claim that consciousness is present in deep sleep, I hold that Brahman is always blissful because, as infinite, it can only be blissful. Brahman knows neither fear nor suffering because it has no divisions, no opposing other, no struggles, no lack, and no wants. As a consequence, being as such is always blissful. That’s not typical of human beings under ordinary circumstances, but when we meditate or engage in deeper forms of prayer, we often experience spiritual bliss, or ānanda. Because the essence of spirituality and deep spiritual experience is unitive consciousness, whether with God, the Divine, or ultimate reality, it’s characterized by freedom from suffering and a sense of ease, oneness with the whole, and joy. Unitive consciousness, which is identity with what’s ultimately most real, is essentially characterized by the bliss of infinite, unending happiness. When we attend to divine or universal consciousness, we become calm and happy. For eminent saints and illumined sages in the world’s spiritual religions and philosophies, no physical or mental impediment obscures their deep and profound sense of being situated in the blissfulness of the divine. That’s a high standard, but it is the lure and the promise of spirituality. Salvation or enlightenment in religious traditions is associated with profound joy and peace. In all major religious traditions, the ultimate conception of the Divine, of ultimate reality, is always associated with profound joy and bliss. It’s always portrayed as the ultimate goal of life, and life’s greatest gift is to experience the peace of divine happiness.
People who respond to this line of reasoning by professing unfamiliarity with bliss that is not produced by the senses might probe the difficult situations they have passed through in search of moments where they may have experienced, if only briefly, a radiant intuition of hope that all will somehow turn out well. (Considering a person’s lifestyle and background, this intuition may or may not be clearly apparent, or it may not appear at all.) If we reflect on the difficult circumstances through which we have passed, we often realize that we have gained transformative insights through them. This discovery should inspire a sense of elation and gratitude for the fruits gained in these difficult experiences. Bliss is at the heart of being, even if we don’t experience it all the time.
There are many difficult situations in life, and it would be unkind and uncharitable to suggest that they point to bliss or hope. I won’t presume to make that claim for anyone, but we shouldn’t overlook narratives that witness to the profound peace and bliss that may bloom in the most difficult of circumstances. (In a later podcast, I’ll suggest that the bliss of being is not always apparent to us is because of conditions that we and nature create. They mask being and obscure the blissfulness of our innate Self, or ātman.)
Another indicator that being is essentially bliss is that the quest for bliss, for supreme happiness, motivates much of our activity. This ancient insight is traceable to the Platonists and has its counterpart in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad. There, an illumined spiritual guide teaches that whatever we cherish as a source of happiness is actually a veiled quest for the supreme and undimmed happiness of ānanda, which is a central attribute of our true Self, the soul or ātman. We intuitively seek bliss in whatever we do, even when our actions are misguided. Although the moments of joy in each life may be few or many, we seek it in our countless activities. Whether through sports, care for others, aesthetic appreciation, or hobbies and avocations, we seek the joy that an a priori metaphysics of being tells us is our innate nature and birthright. Even destructive behavior can be seen as a negative and counterproductive attempt at accessing our blissful selves. Indeed, the most foolish acts can be seen as misdirected quests for happiness. (If our life offers little bliss, whether spiritual or physical, we may settle for a simple lack of pain and suffering. No one wants to suffer—unless, as with some medieval saints—they see it a faster path to undivided eternal bliss.)
The Taittirīya Upaniṣad offers a sublime thought experiment in the form of a hierarchy of bliss. If we take the bliss enjoyed by a healthy young emperor as the baseline, we can increase the degree of bliss that is enjoyable by successive multiples of one hundred of the bliss of the young monarch. This continues until we reach the almost infinite degree of bliss reserved for the highest deities in the traditional Hindu pantheon. (The Upaniṣad points out that even this greatest degree of bliss does not equal the bliss attained by the devoted student of sacred writings.) This suggests that there are lesser and greater degrees of bliss, which can be attributed to where and how we seek bliss. Compared to inner spiritual bliss, bliss derived through the senses is genuine but of low wattage. It’s like sucking on an orange, which gives momentary pleasure but soon becomes a tasteless husk. Too often our quest for bliss is like this, as we feverishly seek more bliss from limited vessels.
An a priori metaphysics of Brahman holds that bliss, as much as consciousness, is our nature, although it can be obscured. But spiritual disciplines can reawaken our awareness of the bliss that is an essential aspect of our deepest and most authentic selfhood. If we contemplate being, either directly or under the form of a divinity that resonates with us, we will reawaken to spiritual bliss. It will then become increasingly accessible by turning our attention within. Spiritual practice is a portal into ānanda, which continually expands as we enjoy it contemplatively, and our highest happiness is to become absorbed in currents of transcendental bliss.
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The question of why there is something rather than nothing is familiar in metaphysics. First asked by Leibniz, it was made more famous by Heidegger. More fundamental than the question of why there are beings rather than nothing is, in my view, the question of why there is being in the first place. Related is the question of why there are qualities, or qualia. So far, science hasn’t provided us with an answer to this latter question. As for being itself, it remains invisible to disciplines focused on beings rather than being. They measure the causes and effects of qualities, but why there are qualities and from where qualities come rank among the most intractable metaphysical questions. They rank with the question of why there is being in the first place and not just beings. Not only must we distinguish between beings and being, we must also inquire into what allows being to be? These questions will appear meaningless to some readers, but others will find them engrossing issues that appeal to the essence of ontology, metaphysics, and philosophy in their truest sense.
Over the years, my ontological reflections have been formed fundamentally by the Vedāntic teachings in the Upaniṣads. Reflecting on these Hindu books has provided me with my clearest insights into being. My early upbringing in a traditional pre-Vatican II Catholic milieu in New York influenced me unconsciously as I imbibed aspects of Thomistic and Aristotelian philosophy. These were not communicated directly by my teachers or the parish priests but were implicit in the formation that I received in that traditional Catholic setting. My first conscious interaction with metaphysics came through reading, first as a teenager and then more seriously as I grew older, the Upaniṣads. The insights they afforded me were fortified through the practice of jñāna-yoga and bhakti-yoga, which draw upon Vedānta and the Upaniṣads.
My intellectual awakening to the question of being happened while reading Étienne Gilson’s Being and Some Philosophers. I spent many months in the 1980s poring over this book and meditating over virtually every sentence. It took a couple of years before I sensed that I had grasped the import of Gilson’s critical views of essentialism. It took more years of rereading and reflection to comprehend the significance of the Thomist existentialism that he defended in the last chapters of the book. But understanding does not equal agreement, for the more I understood Gilson’s views, the less I agreed with him. That’s because I am congenitally a Platonist and not an Aristotelian. Those two words code contrary approaches to metaphysics. My early predilection for the Upaniṣads already predicts my penchant for a Platonic rather than an Aristotelian metaphysics. Despite my appreciation of Aristotelian defenses of universals against austere, deflationary ontologies, I see universals as subsisting whether or not there’s a physical world. Universals—along with qualia—don’t require instantiation in the physical universe because they subsist independently of it. On this central ontological issue, I depart from Aristotle and move decisively toward Plato, whom I find to be much closer than Aristotle to the the spirit of the Upaniṣads.
This is the background for the issue that I want to talk about today. This isn’t the question of why there are beings, which is a mysterious issue, but rather the question of why there is being in the first place. To have any chance of answering that question, we first have to suggest an answer the question, “What is being?” Heidegger famously raised this question in Being and Time, but in an unsatisfactory way in my view. By temporalizing being, he reduced being to the status of a being. But being can’t be a being. It can’t be a something like numbers, essences, substances, or human beings because it is the ground of these various types of entities. Were it possible for being to become a being, a something, it would stand on the same level with other beings, or somethings, and would fall—which is impossible—from its status as being itself. A fundamental ontological truth is that being can’t be anything other than itself. This insight authorized Heidegger’s ontological difference and evoked Gilson’s relentless analysis of virtually every metaphysical school that he was familiar with as ultimately reducing being to beings. (In Advaita Vedānta this is the error of failing to perceive the difference between saguṇa-brahman and nirguṇa-brahman, which transforms Brahman into something less than itself.)
Despite diversionary moves arising in deflationary, positivist, analytic, and scientific variants of metaphysics, the most fundamental questions in ontology and metaphysics are what being is and, crucially, why there is being. The clue that hints at answers to these questions is suggested by considering qualities, qualia. It’s a delightful spring morning at the Yoga Vidya ashram in northern Germany where I have been on retreat for the last four months. I am outside standing in the fresh spring grass gazing at a stand of flowering trees. When I consider the greenness of the leaves and the grass, I am not looking for a biological answer but rather for the source of the greenness of the leaves and the grass—for greenness itself. What is green? What is it to be green? Where does green come from? How is it that there’s a quality of greenness that suffuses these leaves, the grass on which I’m standing, the green shirt that I’m wearing, and the green lawn chair standing at my side. What is this quality of greenness?
Related questions concern the other qualities that we experience in life. We might ask, “What is a virtue?” “What is goodness?” “What is honesty?” and “Where do virtues come from ontologically?” We can ask after the source of other qualities such as the devotion of religious people, the integrity of a reliable person, the feeling of friendship, the feeling of connectedness, the feeling of wanting to do something for others. We might ask after the source of melody, rhythm, language, cognition, and obligation. Besides these vexing issues concerning the source of qualities are questions about numbers and universals. When we analyze everyday experience, we see that it is pervaded with an ensemble of ethical, aesthetic, scientific, mathematical, and metaphysical qualities. None of these qualities can be excised from our experience through a monotonic physicalist understanding of life. We can’t easily and plausibly explain them away. Physicalist attempts to reduce them to something else inevitably fails. How do you reduce a virtue to a physical process? It’s just not possible. Attempts to explain away qualities as referring to or reliant on physical processes will fail for anyone with a classical formation, whether Hindu, Buddhist, Islamic, Catholic, or Orthodox Christian because they fail to come to terms with the fundamental, existential, phenomenological, and ontological reality of qualities, which pervade our existence and make our lives meaningful.
Inquiring into their source and persistently asking why they exist leads me into deep meditative reveries in which I become quiet and still. These reveries kindle philosophical, metaphysical, and ontological insight at their highest pitch. Philosophy at this contemplative level is not the analysis of words and arguments. It’s not a reductive program dissolving all phenomena into physical processes. These contemplations lead to the contemplation of being itself, or Brahman in Sanskrit.
As I am using the term being, it is equivalent to the most fundamental standpoint, which is the ground from which everything else emerges. The word itself is not as important as being’s status as that which is always prior to whatever is or exists. When the word being is reduced to a mere abstraction, we can drop it and speak instead of whatever it is that is prior to this reduced concept of being. In Platonic metaphysics, which is not as much studied or as widely known as Aristotelian metaphysics, being is not the ultimate reality but is a product of the interaction of the One, or the Good, and the Dyad. Being on this view is subordinate to these hierarchically superior aspects of reality. Both Plato and Plotinus refer to the most superior or most prior dimension of reality as that which is “beyond being,” or hyperousios (ὑπερούσιος) in Greek. This is not a mere terminological distinction but a contemplative gesture toward the hyperousios, toward that which goes beyond being—or, in Sanskrit, nirguṇa (qualityless) Brahman. As a contemplative move, it’s like trying to view the back of your head with your eyes. It’s bending the mind back to its ground to see that from which it emerges. The insights kindled by this contemplative gesture yield an intimate familiarity with being as such rather than conceptual schemes and verbal doctrines.
As we become inwardly still in contemplative reverie, the mind perceives its ontological ground through noēsis, which is its highest capability. This is the intuitive seeing, or cognition, of the intellect, understood in its pre-modern sense of nous in Greek, or buddhi in Sanskrit. The intuitive intellect perceives being as a continuous movement of deferral whereby whatever we say about being recoils back upon us. The Taittirīya Upaniṣad characterizes Brahman—or being—as that “from which words along with the mind return without attaining it” (yato vāco nivartante aprāpya manasā saha, यतो वाचो निवर्तन्ते अप्राप्य मनसा सह, 2.4.1, 2.9.1). This is not a counsel of despair or frustration but a contemplative guideline. In the falling back of language and the mind from being, we catch sidelong glances of what being is.
These sidelong glances of being show it as continuously evading capture within categories, ideas, or language as they approach it. The twinned moves of approach and evasion comprise the fundamental creative act at the level of the mind, language, and nature. This refined contemplative move, which approaches being even as it is deflected by being, generates language and the categories and essential ideas of ontology and metaphysics. These, in turn, endow matter with structure and meaning in a hierarchy of forms rising from the subatomic level through physics, chemistry, and biology to the entire physical universe.
The contemplative move of approaching being while being deflected by being is the way that being shows itself, even if obliquely. Because being has priority over beings, it’s always prior to every attempt to say what it is. Approaching being, the Always Prior, through language, thought, and contemplation leads to their deferral. The priority of being over beings implies its unbounded openness, freedom, and generosity, which allows every potential within it to become actual. By posing virtually no check or impediment on what may emerge, being as the Always Prior sponsors the perennial movement of approach and deflection that is generative of the realm of experience.
In answering the question about the source of the qualities and ideal forms that permeate experience, I move beyond Plato, Heidegger, and Gilson to the Upaniṣads and its teaching of pūrṇam, or the fullness and perfection, of Brahman. Brahman is neither formless nor differentiated in its ownmost priority. Brahman—or sat—is the totality, the fullness, of being. On one hand, being is infinitely divided into the qualities, ideal forms, and entities that make up our experience, while, on the other hand, it is undivided and uncut fullness. Brahman is, in the language of the Thomistic tradition, supereminent. It is the supereminent expression of every quality and formal idea that we encounter. To bring Thomism into dialogue with the Upaniṣads, we might say that being, or Brahman, is nondual supereminence. As supereminent fullness, or pūrṇam, being is the never-defective and Always-Prior realization of each quality as undivided from every other quality. This fullness is the ground, or source, of the qualities and ideal forms that both divide and unify experience into trees, grass, birds, numbers, universals, and virtues such as goodness and integrity.
The qualitative nonduality of Brahman, of being, animated the poets who first chanted the hymns of the Vedas and who confided to their students the mystical teachings of the Upaniṣads. When, like them, we turn from being and study our experience as individual beings, we know being as differentiated fullness, differentiated pūrṇam. When we turn towards being itself, towards Brahman, we enter a contemplative arc that leads us from differentiated fullness into the contemplative vision of perfect being in its undivided, supereminent perfection. So, on this lovely spring morning in northern Germany, this is my attempt to address the question of why there is something rather than nothing.
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In this episode, I offer a short, off-the-cuff summary of the central theme of the ontology that I have developing to support my project of reviving intellectual intuition. Intellectual intuition is the main concern of my latest book, Reviving Intellectual Intuition: Contemplative Philosophies and Being (Bloomsbury, 2025). The fullest flowering of intellectual intuition happens when it’s directed upon Being itself. In this supreme contemplative act, what Heidegger mournfully named “the forgetfulness of Being” (Seinsvergessenheit) is overcome in a vision of Being as unlimited and infinitely endowed with potentials incessantly actualizing themselves. Being imposes virtually no limitations on or obstructions to whatever may arise from its infinite capacity. This is what I call “the generosity of Being,” which is also the title of a book that I am writing and plan on publishing after my current book project. The only limitation on what may arise is due to the character of Being itself as nondual and singular (advaita). Because Being is unbreakable, nothing negative and destructive can ultimately thrive. This impulse toward ontological oneness expresses itself on the human level as caring, concern, compassion, justice, and love. Although apparently weaker than their opposites, these attributes of Being cannot be vanquished because the indivisible oneness of Being is inviolable.
Here is an edited transcript of the podcast
The podcast is casual in tone, given that I hopped off my bike near a flowering field to record it. For a deeper dive, see my book on this topic—mentioned above and available through the Amazon link below.
It’s a lovely spring morning here in northern Germany where I’m spending a few months at the Yoga Vidya ashram. It’s the kind of morning when you can’t stay inside, especially after so many weeks of gray and rainy weather. The beauty of a morning like this—the quietness, the coolness of the air, and the sound of chirping birds knowing that spring is here—makes up for all of those other days. It’s really a great morning to be outside, and it’s a shame to spend even a moment inside. I’m on my bike riding around in the hills around the ashram and admiring the beautiful farmland, the blooming flowers, and the golden fields of early spring plantings coming to maturity.
Over the years, my most inspired moments often come when I’m outside. When I’m inside, I feel an enclosure wrapping around me like being in a city, a subway, or inside a car or plane for too many hours. Once I get outside and see the blossoms on the trees and the flowers that are poking up in the spring morning, I start to feel inspired. Many of the poems I’ve written in the last years came to me as inspirations while I was out walking.
As I set out this morning on my bike, I thought about the affairs of the world right now and wondered why the values that many of us as spiritual people live by are only weakly reflected in the external world. Then I stopped to contemplate a vast field filled with the golden blossoms of Brassica napus, a common sight in Germany this time of year. I have watched this spring’s crop grow from small seedlings to plants as high as my chest over the last few weeks. Then a crow cawed and winged happily over the field. This reminded me of the central theme of my last book, Reviving Intellectual Intuition: Contemplative Philosophies and Being (Bloomsbury, 2025). In that book, I try to revive the conscious use of intellectual intuition for contemporary philosophy. It’s mostly unsung or denied, although it’s a cognitive faculty that we use constantly without realizing that we’re doing so. In contemporary Western philosophy, intellectual intuition can sound mysterious, even weird, but that speaks to the poverty and the impoverishment of such philosophies. Nourished for too long on desiccated physicalist ontologies, such philosophizing is unable to reflect on the cognitive instrument—intellectual intuition—without which we cannot know anything.
When I speak about intuition in this context, I’m not merely referring to its everyday meanings of gut feelings and hunches. They’re part of intuition, of course, but, at a higher level, intuition is the cognitive tool through which we recognize a claim as true, valid, or correct. If I see that an argument is valid, it’s because intellectual intuition verifies that the conclusion logically follows from its premises. This is a common instance of intellectual intuition. When I sense the beauty of a field of golden blossoms and become illumined by its magnificence, my mind becomes still in admiration and awe. This is a higher exercise of intellectual intuition. In this inner stillness, I sense that the field and the sky spring from an ontological ground that eludes every attempt of the mind and language to capture it in a neat definition. This is the ultimate expression of intellectual intuition.
In contemporary usage the word intellectual is often negatively contrasted as mere conceptualizing with words like spiritual or feeling. But the way I’m using intellectual goes back to the Latin intellectus, which is a translation of the Greek noēsis. These terms capture more fully what’s meant by intellectual intuition as an immediate apprehension of truth and Being, attended by a sense of sureness, certainty, and a sense of rightness.
Alluded to but untreated at length in my last book is the claim that Being is generous, which is the theme of a book that I am now writing called The Generosity of Being. Naming Being as generous is a poetic metaphor warranted by the intellectual intuition that Being places no limits on the arising of phenomena. The generosity of Being is its non-obstructiveness, which places no roadblocks in the path of the actualization of the infinite array of potentials that is contained in Being’s fullness. As a verbal doctrine, the generosity of Being may appear dry and abstract, but the mystical contemplation of Being as Being overcomes what Heidegger eloquently but melancholically named the “forgetfulness of being” (Seinsvergessenheit).
This forgetfulness pervades most of our everyday activity when people go about their business thinking about their cars, their relationships, their bank accounts, their pensions, their vacations, or, on a more existential level, how they’re going to make ends meet. This everyday thinking, so far removed from the intellectual intuition of being, is an innocent instance of the forgetfulness of being. Almost as innocent and also indicative of the forgetfulness of being is the acceptance without critical scrutiny of the constructed realms of artificial intelligence and technology that we’re all now completely encaged in. We get entangled in them when we fail to reflect on the character of Being as Being on which they are projected as if on a cinema screen. (I am, necessarily, using my phone to record this talk, using AI to generate a transcript, and using Substack to post it.)
Less innocent and more banal is the forgetfulness of Being of people who believe that AI agents are conscious and now suggest that we may have to accord them legal rights as persons. It’s ironic that in a philosophical worldview that often denies consciousness to animals and deflates or denies our consciousness as human beings, there’s a sudden yearning to accord consciousness to AI agents. It’s like freezing your body for a thousand years in the hopes of attaining physical immortality. This banal outlook is a pure expression of Heidegger’s forgetfulness of being.
The forgetfulness of being begins when the word being becomes a word without conceptual depth, lacking poetic energy and failing to grant us ontological zest. Metaphysical zest can only come when we begin consciously to evoke intellectual intuition, which, we all possess but rarely consciously use, as remarked long ago by Plotinus. The intellectual intuition of being is generally developed through meditation, the appreciation of nature, philosophical reflection on Being as Being, the practice of mystical theology in the Christian tradition, yogic meditation, Buddhist meditation, and other meditative practices. These exercises stimulate and awaken our awareness of the mystical capacity of intellectual intuition.
Reflection on the ontological ground that allows a field of blossoming plants to explode in exuberant enthusiasm from Being suggests an answer to why there there’s so much negativity in the world. Because Being contains within itself infinite possibilities, it doesn’t exert forceful refusal over what can emerge from itself. That is the essence of freedom, which is the ontological ground of our own freedom. Whatever is potential in Being can become actual. Because Being doesn’t place ontological roadblocks on what may arise, it’s non-obstructive. This non-obstructiveness is the generosity of Being.
Beautiful realities such as this spring morning emerge from Being, as do other less beautiful events, which raises the question of why Being doesn’t put the brakes on the emergence of negative events and things. To answer, I hold that there is one limit, or brake, on ontological generosity, which is a function of the unbreakable oneness (advaita) of Being. There aren’t two Beings. The oneness of Being explains why we often sense a drive towards harmony and unity. Expressions of the ontological principle of oneness on the human level include compassion, concern, care, and love. When we take care over our relationships and over the world, the nonduality of Being manifests itself directly through our actions. This expression of the oneness of Being in our actions is called dharma in Sanskrit. This ontologically grounded impulse toward nonduality evokes integrity in how we behave in our work and in our care for our families, our friends, and the wider communities of which we’re a part. Because, like Being, we’re free, we can also act against this integrative oneness, against dharma, But there’s a limit on how far we can go. While we can destroy the small worlds of which we’re a part, we can’t destroy the larger universe or Being itself, which always tends, despite all of the diversity it spawns, towards harmony, unification, and oneness.
That’s why Krishna says in the Bhagavad Gita that whenever adharma, or disorder, becomes too intense, he incarnates himself (4.7–8). Stated in general terms, this suggests that when disruption and disharmony become overwhelming, countervailing forces arise to balance them. When it seems that the quest for harmony and goodness is lost, Being’s countervailing attributes of goodness and unity emerge unbowed to rectify the situation, and the oneness of Being reasserts the unbreakable character of Being.
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In this podcast episode, I speak off the cuff and informally. It would take a few days to write an article on this topic and longer to refine it for an academic journal. But in my Substack posts and podcasts, I want to speak more freely than possible when speaking in a course on mysticism at a university. It’s more fun this way and allows me more freedom of thought and expression, albeit somewhat imprecisely at times. In this edited transcript of my talk, I have attempted to straighten out some of the tangents and imprecision of a spontaneous talk but without refining away its directness and spontaneity.
Well, it’s afternoon now at the ashram and it’s a lovely sunny day in early April, which in northern Europe is a month when there can be sunshine and rain and occasionally even snow. So if you hear some sounds in the background, it’s because there are people playing with the frisbee and everyone’s really delighting and having some sun after a very long winter. I want to continue talking about the topic of Advaita Vedānta and religious experience. This is a significant issue for me, and I think for many others as well. I want to make some comparisons to clarify what I’m trying to uncover in these informal talks.
As a person who taught comparative religion for many years at the university level and who has written books on this topic and researched in this field, I would assert that comparative religion is a liberative technique in the history of human consciousness. It’s not in fashion currently in academic religious studies, although academic religious studies, as opposed to theology, was largely shaped in its origins one hundred to two hundred years ago by the comparative religionists who discovered commonalities between different religious traditions. Back then, the comparative religionists weren’t clearly distinguished from the comparative theologians, and they often had an ulterior motive in looking for comparisons. They were motivated by theological concerns. But soon there came a new stream of scholars in this field who began to distinguish between comparative theology and comparative religion. The early significant figures in the field undertook a quest to discover commonalities between religious traditions, religious doctrines, and religious experiences in order to demonstrate the underlying unity of human consciousness across different cultural divides.
One of the significant liberative insights that comes through the practice and the study of comparative religion is that religions change, doctrines change, and descriptions of experience change. Religious authorities, religious institutions, religious customs, and religious practices are diverse around the globe. Nevertheless, religions express a set of fundamental ideas, experiences, and teachings. This discovery unveils the spiritually liberative potential of comparative religion when considered as more than just an academic field. When we take a comprehensive and non-exclusivist approach to spirituality, it’s natural to become a comparative religionist. If one has fluency in more than one religious tradition, it’s natural and inevitable that one begins to see the similarities between them. If you study German and English, you can’t help but notice similarities. If you study Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, you also can’t help but notice similarities. It’s harder to discern similarities across different language families, but even there, the quest can be continued to find similarities.
There are scholars and academics who see the search for commonalities as a type of essentializing that does violence to the particularities of different traditions. No doubt a facile comparative approach can generate ahistorical essential concepts that are out of touch with the realities that they express. But generalization is essential to thought. Every concept is itself a generalization. Whenever we use the word dog or tree, we are already engaged in generalizations because all concepts are generalizations. So we inevitably use essentializing concepts. We use them constantly in everyday speech.
These reflections about comparatives studies are meant as prologue to an intriguing comparison that occurred to me earlier today when I was thinking about the last post that I recorded on Advaita Vedānta and mystical experience.
In that podcast, I spoke about four different kinds of Advaita Vedānta that I have detected. (There are others besides the four that I mentioned. Recent scholarly studies of Advaita Vedānta deal comprehensively with traditional forms of Advaita Vedānta in India and the newer, highly erudite expressions of non-mystical Advaita Vedānta. But they don’t venture into discussing more popular forms of Advaita Vedānta, such as Neo-Advaita.) These four varieties of Advaita Vedānta can be illuminated by drawing upon a parallel from Catholic mystical theology.
Catholic mystical theology is a subject that’s long fascinated me, and not for merely scholarly reasons. This fascination began in my personal spiritual quest, which was deeply shaped in my early years by an encounter with devotional Hinduism. After that, there was a deep encounter with evangelical Christianity. The bridge between those two worlds was the writings of Thomas Merton, who opened my mind to a wider spirituality. In learning to engage his writings, I was inevitably led towards other Catholic mystical theologians and the so-called manualists. The most significant of the manualists for me is a French mystical theologian of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Jesuit Augustin Poulain. His manual of mystical theology, The Graces of Interior Prayer, remains to this day a valuable source of knowledge about mystical experience and the ways in which it has been articulated or schematized in the Catholic mystical tradition. A decade ago, I wrote Yoga, Meditation and Mysticism, a book in which I delved deeply into Poulain’s taxonomy, or mystical map, which he structured on the basis of Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross’s mystical writings. The detailed contemplative maps devised by the manualists in the Catholic tradition, a school of thought that extends from the 1700s to the early part of the twentieth century provide significant data for a comparative study of mysticism. After Vatican II, the manualist tradition seems to have slipped out of view in mainstream Catholicism, but among traditionalist Catholics and students of comparative mysticism, Poulain’s manual is still highly regarded.
In Poulain’s highly articulated map of the spiritual life, there are two fundamental distinctions that have to be kept in mind. The first is the distinction between ascetical theology and mystical theology; the second is between acquired contemplation and infused contemplation. For those of you who are more familiar with Hinduism or Buddhism, this will likely be obscure language, but to put the shoe on the other foot, someone coming from the world of Catholic mystical theology would likely find the terminology that is used in Hinduism and Buddhism as equally obscure. The obscurity does evaporate, though, with familiarity. (On a side note I’ve noticed that here in the ashram in Germany where I have spent the last four months, most people are oriented towards Hinduism and to a lesser extent Buddhism. When I teach courses comparing the stages of samādhi in the Yogasūtra, the jhānas in the Buddhist Visuddhimagga, and the degrees of mystical contemplation in the Catholic mystical tradition, some ashramites react to my sudden breaking into what sounds like very traditional Catholic language as if I were speaking a language that they have never before encountered. Or perhaps they have, but their experiences with it have not been positive. It takes a little bit of getting people acclimated to these concepts before they feel at ease with them.)
To say a few words about these two pairs of distinguishing terms, I’ll start with the fundamental division in Catholic mystical theology between ascetical theology and mystical theology. This fundamental division gave rise to two separate bodies of theological analysis in the Catholic mystical tradition. Ascetical theology is concerned, above all, with the penitential disciplinary practices that prepare one to go more deeply into the spiritual life. Mystical theology, on the other hand, is concerned with states of contemplative wisdom that are infused into the soul by God as an act of grace. The word mystical in the Catholic mystical tradition is thus a technical term with a precise meaning. Mystical contemplation is prayer that is infused into the soul by God through the Holy Spirit. It’s a gracious gift that cannot be procured by any activity on the part of the recipient. At best, one can only prepare oneself for the possible reception of mystical grace. In the Catholic mystical tradition, mystical theology is concerned with the graces that come gratuitously, or freely, from God, while ascetical theology is concerned with the practices of purification that dispose us and our awareness to the subtle state of consciousness that comes as close as one can come to mystical contemplation without actually producing the states of infused mystical prayer.
On paper this sounds quite complex, and in early Christian mystical settings, these distinctions were not set out so clearly as they were later by Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, and manualists such as Poulain, Adolphe Tanquerey, Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, and Giovanni Scaramelli. But from a phenomenological perspective this distinction is experienced as the difference between laborious ascetical prayer, which Teresa famously likened to drawing water from a well to water a garden, and the more easeful stages of mystical, contemplative prayer that she likened to using a water wheel to irrigate the garden or letting it be watered by a nearby river or rainfall.
There are multiple stages in ascetical theology, and prior to the stage where one moves from ascetical prayer to mystical prayer, potential contemplatives must purify themselves by weaning themselves from any practice or activity that clouds their consciousness. (Some readers will notice that my interpretation of Catholic mystical theology is shaped by Hindu and Buddhist spiritualities, which is a consequence of my having practiced these three traditions in light of each other for over fifty years.) As one changes one’s behavior so that one no longer engages in practices that are harmful to one’s spiritual awareness and to the rights and values of others, there comes a calmness in one’s soul, in one’s mind, that disposes one to the practice of less formal and mechanical styles of prayer. This is the level of spirituality we find in The Imitation of Christ.
In the second stage of the ascetical way, one moves beyond rote recitation of fixed verbal prayers to engage in meditation in the older sense of that word as devout reflection on the teachings and complex visualizations that have been described in detail in numerous traditional Catholic spiritual guidebooks. In mentally laborious type of discursive prayer, one might visualize various scenes from the Bible and from the Christian story of salvation in order to impress them upon one’s heart. As one meditatively reflects on these themes, one attains a sense of their meaning on a spiritual rather than a merely intellectual level. This is the level of spirituality found in the spiritual exercises of the Jesuits. This kind of prayer is called “mental prayer” to distinguish it from the recitation of fixed verbal prayers. In mental prayer one might brood over these visual and doctrinal mediations while on pilgrimage or when praying the Stations of the Cross set up on a rural hillside or in a traditional church.
As mental prayer deepens, it becomes more subtle, and the need for imagery and doctrinal rumination slowly fades. This is the crucial and often fraught moment when one moves from laborious mental prayer to what’s called “affective mental prayer,” or, more simply, “affective prayer.” In affective mental prayer, devotional sentiments intensify while theological reflections subside. Affective prayer culminates in the Prayer of Simplicity (which is also known as the Prayer of Simple Regard or the Prayer of the Heart). This is the last stage of prayer within the domain of ascetical theology.
As portrayed by Teresa and John, the transition from laborious mental prayer to the interiorly simpler stage of affective mental prayer can be an awkward and tense phase in the spiritual life of Catholic monastics and religious. They themselves or their confessors and spiritual directors may not understand the difference between mental prayer and affective prayer. They may also worry that moving into silent, quiet prayer in which the doctrines and images of the Christian faith are no longer central may lead to heresy or unfaithfulness.
Toward the end of one’s abidance in this degree of silent ascetical prayer in which most thoughts have subsided and in which the soul is deeply calm, there sometimes dawns a moment in which one becomes aware of the infusion of a gentle Presence. It’s like the first hint of spring after a long, hard winter. Teresa called it the Prayer of Quiet. The dividing line between the the ascetical Prayer of Simplicity and the mystical Prayer of Quiet is quite subtle. It is distinguished by a sense that one has been gently gripped by a Presence that one could not in any way produce on one’s own. That’s the precise dividing point between ascetical theology and mystical theology. The Prayer of Quiet is thus first stage of mystical, or contemplative, prayer.
The term contemplative, like mystical, has a precise meaning in the Catholic mystical tradition. (These two terms are taken as synonyms by Poulain and other manualists.) Contemplative prayer refers to those stages or states of prayer that are infused without any effort on our part in the soul by God through the Holy Spirit. It is a gracious gift that cannot be produced by ascetical activity. Mystical prayer thus differs from ascetical prayer in that, unlike ascetical prayer, we are unable to generate contemplative states through our own efforts.
The second distinction that I mentioned earlier is a difference between two kinds of contemplation. Numerous controversies arose as Catholic mystical theologians delved more deeply into the differences between ascetical and mystical prayer. The mystical theologians were theologians after all. Not all of them were deeply experiential mystics, but they were students of the mystical condition. So a new distinction arose after John of the Cross, which is the distinction between “acquired contemplation” and “infused contemplation.” Now, in a way, this is a misuse of the word contemplation because, strictly speaking, contemplation is a gracious gift. There’s no way that we can acquire it on our own. Why, then, did these mystical theologians devise the notion of acquired contemplation when contemplation, strictly speaking, can’t be acquired but only be received? There’s a long history behind that move, and I can’t go into it now—but perhaps in another episode.
Mystical experiences infused by grace are subtle states of spiritual exuberance, insight, joy and delight. In John of the Cross’s cataphatic writings such as The Living Flame of Love, which are quite different from the apophatic The Dark Night of the Soul and The Ascent of Mount Carmel, he describes these subtle mystical states of the soul with richly inspiring poetic exuberance. Because John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila explored these mystical states with subtle experiential insight and described them with facility and eloquence, they have been named doctors of mystical theology and prayer in the Catholic Church. Nevertheless, many subsequent Catholic mystical theologians have held that the sublime contemplative states they described and evoked are not necessary for salvation and sanctification because they are not the ordinary experiences of faithful and devout Catholic Christians. Consequently, these stages of mystical union came to be understood as extra graces, gratuitous graces, which are not necessary for salvation but are given freely to extraordinary souls or to souls who are in need of deeper consolation.
In the generations following John of the Cross, there were ardent spiritual practitioners who didn’t have mystical experiences in the strict sense of that term. They were able to experience the stillness and the quietness of the Prayer of Simplicity, and they yearned for those deep mystical experiences described by Teresa and John, but they didn’t receive them because they come unbidden; they don’t come through our asking for them. They come of their own accord. So, instead of accepting the fact that they just weren’t being graced with them, these devout meditators began to assert that what we now call the Prayer of Simplicity is equivalent to the mystical Prayer of Quiet. They claimed, rather desperately it seems, that the stillness of mind, of soul, that we acquire through ascetical practice is equivalent to the mystical states of the illumined contemplatives. They gave expression to poetic exuberance, but, in the end, according to the later ascetical writers, inner stillness in the presence of God without poetic exuberance amounts to mystical contemplation.
Those who were faithful to the traditional distinction were compelled to acknowledge this innovation, so they developed a new conceptuality that repeats on a more refined level the old division between ascetical and mystical theology. They spoke now of the difference between “acquired contemplation” and “infused contemplation.” Essentially acquired contemplation is a new name for the Prayer of Simplicity, which is the subtlest level of self-generated prayer, while the term infused contemplation now refers to John of the Cross and Teresa’s mystical states of unitive contemplation that lead ultimately to the Spiritual Marriage and the Transforming Union. The purpose of this new distinction was to keep alive the difference between ascetical prayer and mystical prayer. It repeats the older division but at a subtler level.
This discussion is a prelude to the point that I want to make as a comparativist. It can be illuminating to apply the paradigm of ascetical theology and mystical theology and acquired contemplation and infused contemplation to the four variants of Advaita Vedānta that I spoke about in my last post. The Advaita Vedānta of the Pañcadaśī may not be true to Śaṅkara’s intention as understood by some academic scholars of the Advaita Vedānta, but it is clearly a variety of Advaita Vedānta that is supported by the traditional Śaṅkāracāryas in India. As in other writings which, correctly or not, are attributed to Śaṅkara, samādhi as described in Patañjali’s Yogasūtra is synthesized with jñāna that arises through correct understanding of the Upaniṣads. In this variant of Advaita Vedānta the four concepts that underlie fundamental distinctions in mystical theology are also present, although in diverging philosophical and cultural garb. The various stages of samādhi described in the Yogasūtra are equivalent to the degrees of mystical contemplation as described by Poulain. Traditional forms of Advaita Vedānta like that expounded in the Pañcadaśī and the globally prevalent forms of Advaita Vedānta associated with Swami Sivananda and his disciples and also with Swami Vivekananda are thus similar to the full-bodied mystical path as outlined by the Catholic manualists. There is an ascetical preparation for mystical knowledge in the Yogasūtra and in the Upaniṣadic sādhana of śrāvaṇa, manana, and nididhyāsana. This implies that there is an ascetical preparation for mystical wisdom. There’s an asceticism, a tapasya, that must be undergone along with the yamas and the niyamas. These are cultivated alongside samādhi, which the commentator on the Yogasūtra identifies with yoga itself. Samādhi is divided by Patañjali into a hierarchy of increasingly subtle mystical experiences known as the varieties of saṃprajñāta-samādhi. This is allied with the devout reading of the Upaniṣads and the hearing of them from a teacher of the mahāvākyas, such as tattvamasi and so on, which can ignite through their simple hearing and devout repetition direct insight into one’s true nature as formless consciousness. (In traditional interpretations of the Yogasūtra, saṃprajñāta-samādhi is sublated by asaṃprajñāta-samādhi. Given my own philosophical and intuitive mystical knowledge, I would contend that saṃprajñāta-samādhi has an ultimately positive status as revelatory of the nature of ultimate reality, being, or Brahman. This will be a point of contention with many Advaita Vedāntins, so I don’t expect many of them to readily accept that idea. Others, though, may delight in it.)
In contrast, Neo-Advaita holds to a position reminiscent of Quietism, which long roiled the Catholic Church. What happened to the Quietists was unconscionable and indefensible, but Quietism still raises an intriguing, ticklish, and enduring theological and mystical issue. One way of viewing the Quietists is to see that to varying degrees they taught that what we now call acquired contemplation is the whole of contemplation. More radically, some Quietists claimed that there’s no need to prepare oneself at all for contemplation. All that’s needed is utter passiveness in the face of the Divine—thus the label Quietism. Contemplation is an acquired state attained by making oneself passive before the Divine—that’s the totality of the spiritual life on this approach. Despite the persecutions of various Quietists such as Miguel de Molinos, Jeanne Guyon, and François Fénelon, this spirituality of radical passivity was affirmed later by Jean-Pierre de Caussade, and it forms a part of traditional Catholic spirituality.
Viewed comparatively, Neo-Advaita similarly teaches the rejection of ascetical preliminaries to enlightenment. “Call off the search,” a leading Neo-Advaita teacher exclaimed, and argued that you don’t have to do anything at all to become enlightened because you are already enlightened. There’s nothing to be done. There’s also a denial of the significance of samādhi-type experiences, which would extend to the denial of the mystical unitive experiences of John of the Cross and Teresa. They are a distraction and a detour that has no relevance for the spiritual life. Comparatively speaking, Neo-Advaita arrives at the position that the only thing that’s required is the passivity of acquired contemplation in which you recognize yourself as enlightened and go on with life as you live it. This is equivalent to the radical surrender of some of the Quietists, although in different language. Both schools of spirituality attract the same criticism from their foes that they no longer engage traditional spiritual practices and teachings. The Quietists were often condemned as heretics and severely persecuted. (In the radical rejection of traditional practices and teachings in favor of pure passivity before the Divine, we see another intriguing comparative parallel, this time with the Lutheran stress on faith instead of works and Reformed theologies.)
We turn now to newer variants of Advaita Vedānta, both Indian and Western, which are becoming prominent today. These schools don’t deny ascetical practices. Unlike Neo-Advaita, they would accept ascetical theology, but, like Neo-Advaita and unlike other traditional forms of Advaita Vedānta, they would reject mystical theology insofar as it is concerned with extraordinary states of unitive consciousness, of blissful experiences with subtle entities, God, the Trinity, angels, and saints. They require an ascetical preparation that allows one to correctly understand the statements of the Upaniṣads but hold that verbal understanding unattended by mystical experiences is the content of enlightenment. This is similar to the acquired contemplation of the meditators who came after John of the Cross. They engaged in severe ascetical practices, but they weren’t graced with mystical experiences, so they argued that mystical experiences either don’t exist or that they are identical with a passive state of consciousness before God.
The point of this comparison is not to draw exact parallels between these traditions or to imply that the teachings of these traditions are the same. The point is to recognize that the underlying process of spiritual awakening and mystical illumination is identical across human cultures—a reality underscored by neuroscientific studies of mystics, contemplatives and yogis from diverse traditions. This is a liberative discovery because it suggests that the contours of the spiritual life are universal and that no matter where we begin in our journey, no matter what language we use, and no matter the culture that shapes us, recognizing the landmarks of the mystical journey assures us we are on the path to liberative contemplative knowledge.
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Prompted by a recent discussion with an advocate of a school of contemporary Advaita Vedānta that discounts mystical experience, I explore the positive and indispensable role that mystical experience plays in awakening to enlightenment.
(Revised August 6, 2026)
You can follow along with the transcript on the audio or you can read the slightly edited version of the transcript here:
I’ve been staying for the last few months at an ashram in Germany. It’s a traditional place where the Hindu deities are honored in daily pujas and ceremonies. It’s possible to engage in spiritual practice from five in the morning until ten at night. There are aratis, satsangs, yoga classes, and traditional teachers of Vedanta from India. Globally known yoga teachers and Ayurveda physicians are also in attendance here. So it’s an extraordinary opportunity to be here and to revive and deepen my spiritual life. I’ve been writing, reading, and doing my seva here at the ashram. I’ve also been deeply meditating, practicing yoga, and experiencing a reunion with the Self. That’s exactly what one expects from time spent in an ashram, and that’s the experience that I’ve been having here.
I was listening yesterday to a teacher of Advaita Vedanta from India, who said something that set me to thinking about the different varieties of Advaita Vedanta that we can choose from currently. To put this quite simply, we might say that there is the traditional Advaita Vedanta that goes back to Shankara and is still taught and preserved in the ashrams, or maths, that Shankara founded in India. It’s an ancient and authentic tradition, though it’s unlikely that someone like me could study Advaita Vedanta in it. It would have been better to have been born into the Hindu tradition to be able to access this tradition in terms of language, background, and culture.
There’s a second kind of Advaita Vedanta that has been popularized across the globe over the last century and a quarter by swamis such as Swami Vivekananda who began teaching in the West. They articulated a Vedanta that’s generally known as Integral Yoga, a concept introduced by Swami Sivananda but traceable to Swami Vivekananda. Integral Yoga integrates the four classical yogas that are often mentioned in connection with Hinduism. These include Karma Yoga, which is the yoga of seva, of work, of activity, of offering the fruits of your actions to your favored deity, to your ishta-devata. Second, is what are commonly known as Raja Yoga and Hatha Yoga. They are distinguishable and not quite the same. We can call them the yoga of the subtle body and the yoga of the physical body. Next is Bhakti Yoga, which is the yoga of devotion and of love for the Divine. It speaks directly to our hearts as well as to our minds.
Finally, there’s Jnana Yoga, which is the yoga of wisdom, the yoga of knowledge. As presented currently among those practicing the Integral Yoga of the Sivananda traditions, which were inspired on this point by Swami Vivekananda, Jnana Yoga is an experiential practice. You can know that you are Brahman either through direct insight, or jnana, or through the practice of samadhi. On the direct path you say to yourself, ahaṃ brahmasmi, or, in English, “I am pure consciousness.” Then you remain still. In that stillness, there may be a twinkle, a sensation, an awareness, or an insight of the truth that there is only a singular consciousness of nondual, formless, and blissful Brahman—which is also atman, or the Self. To attain this insight, this spark of jnana, or to bolster it, you practice dhyana and samadhi as prescribed in the Yoga Sutra.
A third variant of Advaita Vedanta comprises the recent movements mostly among nontraditional adherents of Advaita Vedanta known as Neo-Advaita. As with traditional Advaita Vedanta, Neo-Advaita teaches that there’s nothing to attain because we are already the Self that we’re looking for. To put that in the memorable saying of a recent Neo-Advaita teacher, we can simply call off the search. There’s nothing to search for because we’re already found! We are the Self that we’ve been looking for. There’s nothing else to do. And everything else is merely a distraction from just being what we already are, which is pure, eternal, formless, infinite consciousness.
There’s a fourth kind of Advaita Vedanta, which is now becoming more influential, and there are many varieties and streams that enter into this view. It’s gaining ground among academic researchers on Advaita Vedanta, popular Advaita teachers opposed to Neo-Advaita, and in some Hindu ashrams—although it seem to have less standing among the most traditional Advaita Vedantists in the maths founded by Shankara. What unites the different streams of this recent variant of Advaita Vedanta is the downplaying of the practice and experience of samadhi as taught in the Yoga Sutra. One variant of this approach adds the claim that enlightenment, or moksha, is attained only through hearing and reflecting on famous sayings in the Upanishads such as “You are That” and “I am Brahman.” Another variant of this type of Advaita Vedanta holds that enlightenment comes only through an ongoing dialectical process of first affirming (adhyaropa) that Brahman is x, where x is any feature of experienced reality that you choose, and then subsequently denying (apavada) that Brahman possesses that attribute. Like Neo-Advaita, these schools retain the profound Advaita Vedantic teaching that we’re already enlightened. Since there is only pure consciousness, it’s not possible to be anything other than pure consciousness. But they also pose a challenge to Neo-Advaita by claiming that there is in fact one—and only one—practice that conduces to enlightenment: we recognize the truth of our natural enlightenment only by hearing and reflecting on Upanishadic statements such as “I am Brahman” or “You are That.” That suffices for us to throw off the shackles of illusion. Cultivating samadhi and attending to mystical experience are not avenues to moksha. Indeed, they may become impediments if we see them as more than preparatory practices
Because the emerging schools of this fourth variety of Advaita Vedanta hold that virtually all of the other schools of Advaita Vedanta since Shankara and his disciple Sureshvara have fallen away from the correct path, we might name this approach “Revisionist Advaita Vedanta.” Because this carries a negative connotation, perhaps something like “Repristinated Advaita Vedanta” is preferable. It captures the intention of these movements to return to what they see as the pristine teachings of Shankara and Sureshvara.
The arguments separating these divergent schools of Advaita Vedanta are subtle but also interminable, and they can also become a distraction from practice. In my own practice, I am drawn more to the teachings of Swami Vivekananda, Swami Sivananda, and Sri Ramana Maharshi than to the other schools of Advaita Vedanta, which has influenced me for multiple decades. The beginning of nondual insight, or jnana, occurred for me early in my spiritual practice over fifty years ago when my first guru asserted that “you are not this body.” That claim stunned me when I first heard it, because I thought, if I’m not this body, what then am I? That led to the classic practice of atma-vichara, or self-inquiry, which is the inquiry or the investigation of one’s experience to see what in that experience is actually the truth. If you really grapple with the statement that you are not this body, it can lead—as it led in my case—to an almost furious search to find out who who I am if I’m not my body.
It’s an extraordinary claim for physicalists and materialists. It would be laughable to them at the outset, but even they might be challenged by it if they started to grapple with that teaching. If I’m not my body, who or what am I? Am I my mind? But the mind constantly changes, and what is a mind in any case? I can touch my body but how do I touch my mind? How do I define a boundary around my mind? I can define the boundary around my body, at least from a common sense standpoint. But how do I define, grapple with, or rope in my mind? These actions are impossible because the mind isn’t a physical object. It’s subtle and it eludes any sort of definition. I can’t really find my mind.
There is a classic story in Zen Buddhism about a disciple who comes to a Zen teacher and asks for their mind to be pacified. The Zen teacher replies, “show me your mind, and I’ll pacify it.” There’s no way you can act upon that instruction. I’m not sure what it would even mean to say that I’m my mind rather than my physical body, although I do know that the mind can be both blissful and terrifying. Everything we experience, we experience only through the mind. That’s an old insight, and it’s not something that you have to go to India to discover. Simple reflection upon experience shows that we don’t have a direct encounter with the objects that we perceive except through our minds. This is an idea that was also discovered by idealist philosophers in the West.
So, if I’m not my body and I’m not my mind, what’s left? Well, if we are familiar with the Hatha Yoga teachings and the tāntrika teachings of Hinduism, then we know that we also have a subtle body, which is the prana body. We can perceive it through Hatha Yoga techniques and through deep meditation when we become aware of the subtle body. But that body also is changing, and it’s not something that I can physically define the way I can define my physical body. It’s not always present in our awareness because we’re not always having deep, profound awakenings of Kundalini or the chakras. These are extraordinarily valuable experiences when we do have them because these experiences of the subtle realms reveal to us the presence of the devas in our completely flattened age in which physicalism and scientism have deprived us of our spiritual birthright and spiritual confidence. These experiences give us the knowledge that there are subtler and higher worlds than this one. They also grant us confidence to believe that we’re not merely trapped in the physical world as randomly evolved entities whose death spells the complete and absolute end of any form of experience.
That’s why spiritual experiences are extremely valuable. They end, of course, and this is the point that one often hears from from the latter two kinds of Advaita Vedantists, both the Neo-Advaita Vedantists and and the Repristinated Advaita Vedantists. The latter teachers, unlike Neo-Advaita teachers, do accept spiritual experience but hold that it plays a merely purificatory role. Yet, even among these teachers, as with the Neo-Advaita teachers, there’s often a mocking of mystical experiences, a satirizing of them and of the people who have these experiences, who are sometimes depicted as somewhat sad and deluded because they supposedly think that these experiences are enlightenment itself.
This argument holds that experiences can’t be enlightenment because, like all other experiences, they end. Like the pleasure of a good meal, the happy events of a family celebration, or the excitement of a vacation, they all end in the humdrum reality once again of everyday life. So, because enlightenment experiences also end, they shouldn’t be pursued, the argument is made, and, it continues, they’re to be seen ultimately as distractions. Some of these teachers mock or satirize the people who engage in these practices, even though they themselves may have engaged in them and had profound experiences in the past. We might say that apart from those enlightenment experiences and practices, they may not have gotten to the point where they actually are. So, a point that needs to be made here is that while it’s true that enlightenment experiences end, what they are an experience of does not end. That’s a point that needs to be made forcefully: the experiences end, but what they point to doesn’t end.
It’s like when you’re traveling, and you see a sign that says that your destination is ten miles or a hundred miles ahead, you know you’re on the right path. It’s the same with enlightenment experiences. These experiences of ultimate reality have the characteristics of human experience because we process them through our physical body, our subtle body, our mind, and the intellect. Because we have these bodies, we experience enlightenment as embodied entities. (That’s not to claim that we’re ultimately these bodies.) I’m experiencing the sky that I’m looking up at right now. If I close my eyes, my experience of the sky disappears, although the sky hasn’t disappeared. Similarly, there’s an intimate link between ultimate reality and the experiences we have that point to it.
This is an important point—a balancing point. Hinduism is not just a religion of a few schools of Advaita Vedanta. It’s a wide-ranging tradition that incorporates virtually every type of human spirituality and accords respect to these different kinds of human spirituality. But whenever exclusivists claim to have the singular truth, that’s a denial of the comprehensive reality that reveals itself to us through countless spiritual paths. The deepest insight that I’ve derived from Hinduism, from the Sanatana Dharma, is the realization that ultimate reality is so vast, so infinite, so formless, that it gives rise to an infinite number of forms and spiritual paths. “The wise poets with their words represent the Sun, which is but one, in many ways,” affirms the Rig Veda (10.114.5). It’s through these forms that being expresses itself. I’m looking at a bird flying through the sky right now, which is as deeply connected to being as I am. In fact, there is only one being. We’re all that being, that bird, this grass, that sky, this field, that cow, myself, and the people meditating over in the ashram. We are all just forms expressing the formless. The formless infinite in its infinitude not only excludes everything because of its formlessness, it includes everything because it is the ground of form, the instigator of form. There is thus a balance between the positive and the negative aspects of Brahman. Brahman, ultimate reality, is ultimately without form because it cannot be contained in any form. As the formless ground, however, it inspires the free expression and the free play of countless forms.
Someone might say, “Well, that sounds wonderful, Ken! Great words and thoughts. But it’s not enlightenment.” Some teachers of these contemporary schools of Advaita maintain an anti-experiential stance. They speak about enlightenment as a form of jnana, but then they downplay the kinds of insights that I’ve just expressed. They often downplay the experiences of bliss and of unitive consciousness and of delight that attend these enlightenment experiences.
So what kind of sadhana, what kind of practice would I suggest over against this kind of criticism? I’m going to push against the claim that enlightenment is not evoked by anything that we can do. This is a subtle point, because in the traditional Advaita Vedanta path, there is a sadhana. There is a practice where you do something. What you do first is that you listen to the teaching, which is called shravana. You hear it from someone who’s awakened, who’s illumined, or you read an enlightenment scripture. There are countless enlightenment scriptures in Hinduism, Buddhism, and other religious traditions. You hear the teaching with an open mind, but then you do something else: you reflect upon it; you think deeply about it; you run it through your mind. Now you’re doing something called manana. You ask the teaching questions, and it answers you. You get responses if you’re deeply intent upon the teaching, and your doubts are slowly cleared. Then, when your mind becomes still, just like any other meditator or yogi, you engage in deep meditation on the teaching. This third thing that you do is called nididhyasana. According to the Upanishads and to traditional Advaita Vedanta, this threefold practice leads to the realization of Brahman.
In the course of this deeply informed meditation practice, we see that there is only one reality and that we are all it. There is only pure consciousness. We are not merely these bodies. These bodies are just momentary expressions like the budding leaves on that tree I’m looking at right now in early April in northern Germany. Our bodies, our minds, my sense of myself as Ken Rose are just momentary expressions of the formless consciousness that irradiates and embraces all of this. We are not these bodies. There is only consciousness. Everything is an expression of consciousness. If we sit with this teaching, we will start to experience the radiance of being, of enlightenment. That’s an experience. This insight itself is an experience.
If there were no experiences of our true nature as consciousness, if Brahman were just an eternal, formless, objectless knowing, then that knowing wouldn’t be reflected to itself. As a consciousness utterly lacking an object, it would remain completely unknown to itself. This raises a perennial criticism of Advaita Vedanta in all of its expressions: if there’s only nondual Brahman without an object, how does experience—even as an illusion—arise? How does a second something, real or imaginary, arise in pure nonduality? There has never been a satisfactory answer to those epistemological and ontological questions in Advaita Vedanta. Its final answer is that this is an unanswerable question and that maya and its origin are inexpressible. End of discussion.
As a philosopher, when you come to a point like this in an argument, you’ve come to a dead end. To simply repeat your view now is to persist in maintaining the dead end of a failed argument. That’s why it’s important to understand why the tāntrika revolution was so important in India eighteen hundred years ago. The rise of the different tāntrika philosophies was a response to this negationist dead end. The basic tāntrika idea is that the unlimited being, Brahman, is also aware of itself, and in its awareness of itself, we arise as it mirrors itself through the creation of all of the forms of the world and of experience. This is the genius of the tāntrika approach. We encounter it in the devotional movements of Vaishnavism in which we are expressions of and loving servitors of ultimate reality. This is the divine loving itself through itself, through us, that is. It’s also expressed in the notion of vimarsha in Kashmiri Shaivism, where the ultimate reality, Shiva, reflects itself through Shakti. It’s the unity, the oneness, of Shiva and Shakti as well as their difference. In the oneness of the devotee and the one to whom we’re devoted as well as in the play of the devotee’s difference from the divine, we come to a place of perfection, of completion, in which ultimate reality, Brahman, Being God, the Divine, finds itself delightfully within our experience of it, which is its own experience of itself. This experience of itself is not diminished through the forms that arise, nor is it depleted by them, but it is this eternal play of consciousness that gives rise not only to liberation but to this world of forms. It gives rise not only to the insight that we’re only consciousness but also to the bliss and the delight and the bhakti of spiritual experience.
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In this episode, I offer an overview of the mystical path as I conceive it, beginning with what I call Beginner’s Bliss. This is a phase at the beginning of the awakened life where we may experience periods of spiritual happiness and ecstasy, known as “sensible consolation” in Catholic mystical theology.
Following Beginner’s Bliss is the Night of the Senses, which the first great experience of purgation. The beginning of this stage is marked by a sudden cessation of sensible consolations. The spiritual well runs dry, so to speak, leading the practitioner into the crucible of radical surrender to the divine. However, this transition eventually gives way to what St. Teresa of Avila called the Prayer of Quiet. Metaphorically, we can liken this subtle second awakening in the spiritual life to the first crocuses of spring poking through the winter snow.
Here is an edited transcript of the video:
Welcome to episode three in this series on my Substack, Burning Toward Transcendence. The title of this episode is “Fifteen Steps on the Spiritual Path.” For some people that sounds too formulaic, too rigid. The idea that there are multiple stages or steps on the spiritual path seems too abstract. They point out that the spiritual life is an individual and intimate experience, which can’t be reduced to a formula. Worse than reducing it to a formula, they continue, is to live it in accordance with a formula. When the spiritual life is practiced with dedication and seriousness, it grants us a personal sense of unity or oneness with a higher spiritual reality. This unique experience can’t be reduced to a formula. By outlining fifteen stages on the spiritual path, I don’t intend to force the spiritual life to fit within the contours of a conceptual scheme. If we get lost while driving, we can look at Google Maps to see where we are. But we wouldn’t think that the map is the road. The road’s outside, beyond the vehicle and the navigation system. We have to actually travel the road; the map can’t make the journey for us. A map is useful for orientation. It tells us where we are and how to get to our destination. It’s the same with spiritual maps. They’re useful for suggesting the steps on the itinerary that leads to divine union.
We have so much spiritual information today that it’s easy to get confused or overwhelmed by the jumble of available spiritual teachings in multiple printed and digital sources. Everyone who has anything to say about the spiritual life has a YouTube channel or a Substack. And I’m one of them. To this mass of information and advice, we now have to include the potential that AI has for becoming a spiritual teacher along with everything else that its does for us. (After I’m done with this video, I’m going to ask Claude and Gemini a few questions to see what kind of gurus they would make!) With all of these resources at our disposal in an era lacking strong institutional structures offering meaningful spiritual guidance, we can easily lose our way. We may not even find the way. That’s why I want to talk about my experience with stages and steps on the spiritual path.
As a helpful reminder, here is the list of the fifteen steps or stages. The titles evoke what for me were meaningful turning points in my own spiritual journey:
Fifteen Stages on the Spiritual Path
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Unawareness: Living in “the Real World.”
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Awakening: Seeing the Path.
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Renunciation: Stepping onto the Way.
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Rapture: Beginner’s Bliss.
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Spiritual Presumption: The Drug of Spiritual Pride.
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Sensory Purgation: A Well Run Dry.
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Spiritual Standstill: Was it Only a Dream?
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Radical Surrender: No Conditions.
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Mystical Illumination: An Awakening Presence.
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Mystical Effectiveness: Spirit without Boundaries.
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Mystical Carelessness: Drifting Away.
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Mystical Purgation: The Death of the Sacred.
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Mystical Death: The Fire of Nothingness.
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Mystical Awakening: The Fragrance of Nonduality.
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Mystical Union: Remaining in the Presence.
The first stage, of unawareness, or living in “the Real World” is, as I pointed out in the last episode, not a stage on the path. Stage two is awakening, or seeing the path. Stage three is renunciation, or stepping onto the way. Number four is rapture, or beginner’s bliss. Number five is spiritual presumption, which is the drug of spiritual pride. Number six is, to use a more technical term coming out of the Catholic mystical tradition, sensory purgation, which I compare to a well that has gone dry. The seventh stage is spiritual standstill. This is the moment in the spiritual life when we suspect that it was an illusion, that it was fake, or that we had spiritual or emotional indigestion. Now we wonder if spiritual awakening was just a dream? Then comes the eighth stage, the step of radical surrender. This is a second major turning point in the life of a spiritual practitioner. Radical surrender occurs when we stop placing limits on the divine, God, truth, or Being. Instead of continuing to create the Divine in our own image or to use it to our advantage, we arrive at the first stage of spiritual maturity where we let what is ultimately most real be what it is and we conform ourselves to it rather than trying to conform it to ourselves.
Stage nine is mystical illumination, when we become aware of a subtle inner presence. Stage ten is mystical effectiveness. Spiritually advanced mystics are often highly effective people. They’re not only people who run away and sit in a cave somewhere. At the eleventh stage, we experience mystical carelessness, or drifting away from the spiritual life. This is a difficult moment later on in the spiritual life when we become too accustomed to our status as illumined persons, and we become eligible for a new season of purgation. The twelfth stage is mystical purgation, also known as the Night of the Spirit in Catholic mystical theology. I name this major turning point in the spiritual “the death of the sacred.” This is a serious, even dangerous, moment in the spiritual life. “Mystical death” and “the fire of nothingness” sound extreme, and this degree of the spiritual life is known only to the most generous and courageous mystical seekers. Stage fourteen is mystical awakening. Well, haven’t we already had an awakening if we’re on the path? But this is an awakening at a much deeper level, where we detect the fragrance of nonduality. Nonduality is a word that’s become more popular, and not just in alternative spiritual circles or among those who practice the nonduality of Advaita Vedanta. It has begun to infiltrate other religious and spiritual traditions, particularly some versions of progressive or mystical Christian theology. Stage fifteen is mystical union, or remaining in the presence.
That’s a quick overview of the fifteen stages, which I will now go through step by step, stage by stage. I want to give a general sense of the movement, of the flow, along the path. On the slide in the video, I code the fifteen stages with three colors. The first stage is coded in black, which signifies that it’s not actually a step on the path. I use purple and blue to indicate that the stages of the spiritual life can be reduced to two phases, which repeat continually like the seasons. Purple indicates seasons of purgation, purification, or cleansing. Blue refers to illumination. There is a continual interplay between the purificatory stages in the spiritual life and the illuminative stages. In the illuminative stages, coded here in blue, we gain a deeper sense, experience, knowledge, or insight into the fundamental spiritual reality of life. The purple stages refer to phases when we are bereft of illuminative experiences and insights. The purpose of these purgative stages is to prevent us from becoming addicted to pleasant spiritual sensations and experiences (or more problematically, of turning them into commodities or products that we can monetize).
One cause of the return of purgation is subtle spiritual pride. This develops in people who have gained a reputation for being spiritual and who become subtly attached to this reputation, relish it secretly, and revel in thinking of themselves as spiritual guides, as illumined persons whose words are nectar to others who want to go deeper into the spiritual life. When we’re proficient in our work of profession, we also feel a sense of confidence, perhaps pride, so I don’t want to reject having pride and confidence in what we do. In the spiritual life, though, this can lead to presumption, carelessness, and the sad, unfortunate downfalls that we sometimes see among spiritual teachers and spiritual leaders. If we become aware that we are succumbing to spiritual pride, trusting in our own powers, and taking for granted our spiritual reputation, we should examine ourselves in light of the examples set by the most eminent saints. Then we should gently undertake the penitential work of gently and judiciously pruning this baggage from our souls.
In the last few minutes of this talk, I want evoke a sense of how these fifteen stages might unfold. We first enter the path to divine union because of trauma, a sudden awakening, or in response to an intuition that we need to deepen what we’ve doing more by feel. At the beginning of the spiritual life, we’re often graced with extraordinary experiences, profound feelings of gratitude, deep insights, intutive understanding of scriptures and philosophical writings, and clarity about spiritual teachings that once were opaque to us. We may find ourselves able to speak ecstatically about our newfound path, and we may feel the need to convince everybody we know of its truth. If we had been intellectually unengaged before our awakening, we may now eagerly study ancient texts, read philosophy, and learn ancient languages so as to appreciate more deeply the religious tradition or spiritual path to which we have been awakened. Like beginner’s luck, this is beginner’s bliss, although it usually doesn’t last. This is a special grace and one to be cherished, but a common error at this point is that we may assume that we’ve arrived to the end of the spiritual path. We may suspect that we’ve become sages, gurus, and saints, and that only the slightest gauzy curtain of insubstantial unknowing separates us from ultimate enlightenment. Looking back at yourself ten or fifteen years later, you might find your beginner’s self to be amusing—if you’ve overcome it and haven’t succumbed to the beginner’s failings. But beginner’s bliss can also make some people spiritually arrogant who insist on the final truth of their own way and to become disrespectful of other people’s spiritual paths.
These failings need to be unlearned if we are to progress and not fall back into our old pre-awakening self. The way of unlearning is through sensory purgation, which is a term from the tradition descending from St. John of the Cross. I characterize this stage as being like a well that has gone dry. We suddenly find ourselves bereft of the consolations of beginner’s luck, or as they’re called in the Catholic tradition, “sensible consolations.” Vanished are the ecstatic sensations in the body that led us to sing or dance or jump for joy. Vanished also is the illumination of the mind, heart, and soul that led us to believe that we’re sages and prophets who have seen the truths of the ages. They vanish, sometimes in a flash, and we find ourselves wondering if our awakening had only been a dream, a fluke.
Sensory purgation is the first significant transition in the spiritual life after awakening. It moves us to ask ourselves why we’re on the spiritual path. What’s our purpose on this path? It’s a time for decisions. If we conclude that stepping onto the path was a wrong turn, we might go back to the life we were living before awakening. But someone who’s deeply committed to spiritual growth will find that going back is not an option. You realize that you can’t go back to being the way you were before. You can’t go back to that empty lifestyle. You might say to yourself, “I don’t know what happened to my spiritual illumination. It’s no longer there, but I can’t go back.”
This is the crucible in which we’re tested in sensory purgation. On its negative side, we see that we can’t go back and we can’t go forward. If we don’t go back, we’ve passed the test. On the positive side, by waiting in the stillness, silence, emptiness, and dryness of sensory purgation, we arrive at the second significant moment of surrender in the spiritual life. The first surrender was when we realized that we were on a wrong path and we turned to the divine, to God, to a higher reality. Many people, sadly, don’t progress beyond that point. The second surrender occurs when we relinquish our preconceptions about the divine and the spiritual life, disavow greed for spiritual attainments, and agree inwardly to continue to live for the Divine without conditioning it on special moments of insight and illumination. We stop placing conditions upon the divine when we surrender to the humbling realization that ultimate reality is not the same as our small ego-shaped reality.
To be true to the second surrender in this night of sensory purgation, the Night of the Senses, we must yield ourselves to be conformed to the Divine. This is a passive rather than an active process. I can’t forge forward in this night by praying more, contemplating more, or going on a pilgrimage. Paradoxically, to go forward I must give up overreliance on religious activity and spiritual practices because, in the dryness of this night, I find myself unable to perform the simplest religious acts and spiritual practices.
At some point in this season of dryness, of darkness, the fragrance of the divine life, a subtle sense of eternal and joyous life, permeates the soul. Rather than exciting our physical senses and making our body tremble and shake, this spiritual aroma suffuses the soul with an indescribably delicate and priceless perfume. It’s subtler than the aroma of lilacs and magnolias wafting over a field at the end of a long winter. This subtle second awakening, named the Prayer of Quiet by St. Teresa of Avila, intimates to us inwardly that we’re rooted in the divine ground of life.
It’s February where I am right now in Germany. Just today, when I was out walking, I saw crocuses poking through snow—a sure and beloved sign of spring. Crocuses pushing through snow is a physical metaphor for Teresa’s Prayer of Quiet, which arrives after the winter of purgation in which we’ve surrendered ego-shaped claims on the Divine, on God, and on the spiritual life. Resting in the stillness and darkness of sensory purgation suits the day on which I am speaking these words, which in the Catholic liturgical calendar is the first Sunday in Lent. Stripped of our spiritual goods in an inner Lent of purgation but remaining in a mood of surrender and non-grasping, we will soon reawaken—like the first flowers of the approaching spring—to a brighter season of spiritual illumination.
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In this video, I map my fifteen stages on the spiritual path on the three classic mystical phases of Purification, Illumination, and Union. I then reduce these three phases to the two phases of Purgation and Illumination.
Before exploring each of the fifteen stages, which are posted below, I point out in the video that the first stage is not actually a stage on the spiritual path. It’s the standpoint of people who either don’t know about the spiritual path or who reject it as an illusion. After rejecting the belief that the so-called real world of frenetic activity is the actual real world, I indicate the three main ways that people transition from the stage of Unawareness to the stage of Awakening, which is the second stage in my itinerary.
You’ll have to tune in to find out what these three ways are and how they relate to the two types of souls described by philosopher and psychologist William James.
Note: The image above was generated by Notebook LLM. AI didn’t write this lecture but—as at a magazine’s art department—it produced a helpful illustration based on my ideas.
Here is a updated and edited version of the transcript:
I was playing with some AI tools last night, and I see that AI agent could produce this video for me. I could maybe look 40 years younger, have a different voice, and have all the content generated for me based upon my files, YouTube videos, university lectures, and the books I’ve written. They could generate something quite plausible, but I’m not going to do that. I’m just going to sit here and talk to the camera. I just want to talk to you the way I would if you were taking a course from me, or if we were sitting together in an ashram, a university or a monastery talking about the spiritual life.
So, let’s take a look again at the fifteen stages of the spiritual spiritual path that I mentioned yesterday.
Fifteen Stages on the Spiritual Path
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Unawareness: Living in “the Real World.”
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Awakening: Seeing the Path.
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Renunciation: Stepping onto the Way.
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Rapture: Beginner’s Bliss.
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Spiritual Presumption: The Drug of Spiritual Pride.
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Sensory Purgation: A Well Run Dry.
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Spiritual Standstill: Was it Only a Dream?
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Radical Surrender: No Conditions.
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Mystical Illumination: An Awakening Presence.
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Mystical Effectiveness: Spirit without Boundaries.
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Mystical Carelessness: Drifting Away.
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Mystical Purgation: The Death of the Sacred.
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Mystical Death: The Fire of Nothingness.
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Mystical Awakening: The Fragrance of Nonduality.
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Mystical Union: Remaining in the Presence.
With its fifteen stages, this appears to be a quite complicated map. We can simplify it by uncovering its underlying logic in light of the three stages of the spiritual path in traditional Catholic mystical theology and Neoplatonism that I mentioned last time. These include the stage of katharsis, or purgatio in Latin, which means “purification,” or “cleansing.” The second stage is illumination, or illuminatio in Latin and ellampsis in Greek. If you hear the English word lamp in ellampsis, that’s because lamp goes back to a Latin word lampas, which was taken directly from the Greek lampas (λαμπάς). The third stage is union, unio in Latin and henōsis in Greek, Henōsis carries the meaning of “unification.” The Greek word for the Supreme Ultimate Nondual Reality is to hen, or “the One. So henōsis means becoming one with what is ultimately Real. For even greater simplicity, I reduced these three stages to the two stages of purification and illumination. On this simpler approach, union can be seen as the perfection of illumination, which arises through purification. Purification is the process through which we move to final the final perfection of purification as union from everyday absorption in the so-called Real World, which many people take as ultimate reality. Attaining to union, or the standpoint of perfect enlightenment, occurs through intermittent periods of purification followed by seasons of illumination. The interplay of these two seasons of the spiritual life constitutes the rhythm of the spiritual life. In this and the next session, I want to run through the fifteen stages and relate them to the two phases of purification and illumination.
The first stage in this itinerary is named, “Unawareness,” or living in so-called Real World. Actually this isn’t a stage in the spiritual life; it’s just ordinary life lived without orientation to spiritual values or truths. Excluding this first stage as a spiritual standpoint, we can say that there are only fourteen stages on the spiritual path. But even if it’s not a step on the spiritual path, it’s still an important stage because it’s the standpoint of many people who grew up without spiritual formation. So, for many people, it’s the jumping-off point into the spiritual life.
I have lived in Germany for the last six years, and I’ve spent a lot time here over the almost three decades. Back in my early days here when I was starting to learn German, I often watched German TV movies to learn the language. These movies were pretty generic, with simple, predictable plots. Whenever they wanted to show that somebody was living a meaningful and authentic life and wasn’t passive and just letting life happen to them, they showed them as moving around quickly, traveling to this and that country, starting or ending relationships, having emotional outbursts, trying something adventurous like paragliding somewhere in South America. Their lives was full of incessant movement and action. For a lot of people, that’s their idea of being really alive and living in the real world as an external place providing constant stimulation. The more stimulations we have, and the more we’re able to creatively interact with them, to profit from them, and perhaps to monetize them, the more we’re living a real life in the real world. That’s the world that most of us have been educated to live in. That’s the world we’re supposed to take most seriously.
But the point of the spiritual life is that that’s just not true. That world is an illusion. It’s not that the world itself is a total illusion because we can also unfold spiritually in the world and unfold as human beings. The world allows us to experience life’s deeper realities through literature, art, religion, philosophy, relationships with others, and selfless service. The world itself is not māyā in the popular sense of its being a pure and pointless illusion like faces that we might trace in passing clouds. What is māyā, what is illusion, is when we think that the actual real world is the contrived world of hectic activity in which we’re trying to profit and monetize our experiences to the full and to get through the so-called bucket list before we pass from the scene.
Another false real world recently gripping much of humanity is AI-generated. Because of some projects I am working on, I was recently invited to participate in an intensive seven-day AI seminar to learn how to create AI agents to create videos, books, articles, answer emails, and run the tedious side of a business. The promise of AI is that it will free us from unglamorous work and free up a whole week out of each month. We can use the newly available freed-up time to go on exotic vacations, learn a new language, or, finally, hang glide on the Mediterranean coast. AI will allow us to live fuller lives while still being extremely productive! But we know how that works. For most people, if they have a regular job and if they can produce the same amount of work in four days that they used to do in five, well, that just means they’re going to start having an extra day of work squeezed into their usual work week. So instead of saving us time, AI is speeding everything up. We’re frenetically entering prompts into our AI agents and doubling the amount of illusion in our lives than was there before AI burst in us in late 2022.
In accord with the mystical traditions of the world, I want to affirm neither of these scenarios depicts the real world. The real world, the true world, is within, and the external world that many take as the real world is actually a mere shadow of a higher and subtler dimension of reality. Perhaps hints of the radiance of that higher reality will shine through the words in this presentation as you encounter them meditatively.
Unawareness, or living in the illusory real world, only becomes a station on the spiritual path when we first realize that we have to step away from that glittering mirage of false reality. Realizing that we have to step away from unconscious submersion on the artificial real worlds in which we have imprisoned ourselves is the first step on the spiritual path. This raises the question of how or why we would take this step. Because we have to see the spiritual path before we can step onto it, I call the second stage of my itinerary, “Awakening: Seeing the Path.” In order to awaken to the spiritual life, we have first discover that there’s a path that we can enter. This is probably the most difficult stage or transition point in whole itinerary because for many people, stepping out onto the path doesn’t occur unless one of two very different kinds of events occur.
The first event is probably the most common. This is when some difficulty comes into our lives. Every life has difficulties, and we cannot escape from them. But perhaps something happens in your life that brings you to an inner breaking point, to hitting bottom, to the recognition that things are just not going the way you thought they should go. And you feel at a loss as to what to do next. Based on how they were raised some people might think of praying. Or if they don’t have familiarity with prayer, they might release an existential cry from the heart for help or guidance. It might be more mute and inarticulate than that. It might be a sense that I’ve come to a dead end in my life, and I need a new pathway. I need an opening.
This is probably the most common way that people enter the spiritual path who haven’t been aware beforehand of having their own spiritual insights or inclinations. These existential crises are a doorway onto the spiritual path for many people because it reveals a deep truth about life that can never be effaced or erased by literary criticism, critical theory, social theory, physicalism, or science. The the truth is that if we cry out from the depths of our being for help and guidance, something happens. There’s always an answer. And the deepest spiritual truth in our human existence is that we can access divine wisdom and divine consciousness in an inarticulate way without knowing what we’re doing just by opening ourselves up, often through difficulties, to a higher perspective on our life.
In the Christian tradition, this moment of sudden change or transformation is known as conversion, or, in Greek, metanoia. In Hinduism’s Bhagavad-gītā, Krishna says that one of the reasons people turn to him is because of difficulties in their lives. That people find aid and guidance in these moments of crisis is the greatest evidence of the reality of the spiritual life. More than that, it’s the greatest evidence and proof that there is a God, a higher spiritual reality, and a spiritual underpinning to our lives, which we can tap into through prayer and meditation.
Besides this more usual way of stepping onto the spiritual path from the stage of unawareness there is a second way, one that is less common but far more more dramatic: the experience of a sudden awakening. In the New Testament, Saul had a life-altering encounter with a blinding light and the voice of Jesus on the road to Damascus that transformed him into the Apostle Paul. The history of religions is filled with stories of obscure people who were tending their fields, or shepherding their flocks, or who disappeared in a river or a forest where they had an encounter with a divine presence. They emerged from these encounters as prophets, sages, yogis, and teachers of new revelations. Their sudden awakening revealed to them that there’s a higher reality than the physical world and that there’s a different path than that of mere restless activity and money-making.
The third way of awakening is more natural and harmonious, and usually goes unnoticed. This is the experience of people who were raised in a stable home grounded in a gentle religious tradition, where they were taught spiritual truths in a physically, mentally, and spiritually wholesome environment. Their spirituality is an unforced and spontaneous aspect of their activities as parents, spouses, employees, or business owners. They’re spontaneously spiritual, and they see everything in their lives as undergirded by God, Truth, Reality, Ishvara, or whatever name they give to ultimate spiritual reality. This third way is the least dramatic way of being on the spiritual path, but it might be the most common, especially in eras that were more well-ordered and regulated than our current era. These eras were regulated by stable but not harshly authoritarian institutions in which children were able to imbibe the basic teachings of religion along with a broad education in the humanities and the sciences.
This third division reminds me of the distinction between two kinds of souls drawn by William James well over a hundred years ago. William James doesn’t need an introduction to academic audiences in the English speaking world. His academic reputation was built on his textbooks on psychology and his philosophical writings. But he’s probably most remembered today for his classic book on mysticism, The Varieties of Religious Experience. This is a classic text in the study of mysticism, which is still valuable today. I think that it’s more valuable than many of the later critical responses that debunk his approach. I say that as a person who has written an academic book about mysticism and who has taught university courses and lectured about about mysticism for many years. I may be wrong, but that’s my judgment, and I still find it useful to begin any study of mysticism by calling upon James.
In the Varieties, James draws a vivid distinction what he calls the Healthy-Minded Soul and the Sick Soul. Immediately upon hearing about these different kinds of souls, people want to know what differentiates a sick soul from a healthy soul. Not only that, but almost immediately people might ask themselves, “Which one am I?” The history of religion is filled with stories of sick souls, people tormented by their upbringing, addictions, trauma, or difficult life circumstances, who through these difficult circumstances found their way to a startling spiritual awakening, which set their difficult lives right.
The sick souls get most of the attention in accounts of the religious life, but James also described the healthy souls. These well-rounded human beings are capable without much conscious effort of integrating a serviceable and workable spirituality into their lives. In my own life, I started out as a sick soul. But after many decades of spiritual practice, of trying to be a good human being, of dedicated work in my vocation, of learning through processes of purification to rectify my failings and my character flaws, and of attempting to live in a more humane, spiritual and ethical way, I have become a healthy soul. One of the great benefits of the spiritual path is that even if we start out as sick souls, we can become healthy souls. For people who have been healthy souls from the start, understanding the tumult that the sick souls go through might shake them out the complacency, narcissism, and self-satisfaction they may have left unpruned in their well-adjusted souls. These failings can unconsciously dull the spiritual insight that comes in great abundance to sick souls when they overcome the maladies that impel them from the false real world to awakening to the reality of the spiritual life.
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The Mystical Quest
Episode 1: Introduction to The Mystical Quest
In this video, I introduce a new video series called "The Mystical Quest." Here I will talk about mystical itineraries, or spiritual roadmaps, in mystical Catholicism, Hinduism, and Buddhism. I have long studied and practiced these traditions, and I delight in talking about them. There is nothing visually innovative about this video. I didn't consult Notebook, Claude, Gemini, or ChatGPT--I just started talking into the camera the way I would in a seminar room at a university or in meeting room in an ashram or monastery! I look forward to sharing my insights with as we journey together on the mystical quest!
Here is my own itinerary.
As an assignment, see if you can map these fifteen stages on the classical Three Ways of Mysticism: purgatio, illuminatio, and unio.
Fifteen Stages on the Spiritual Path
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Unawareness: Living in “the Real World.”
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Awakening: Seeing the Path.
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Renunciation: Stepping onto the Way.
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Rapture: Beginner’s Bliss.
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Spiritual Presumption: The Drug of Spiritual Pride.
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Sensory Purgation: A Well Run Dry.
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Spiritual Standstill: Was it Only a Dream?
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Radical Surrender: No Conditions.
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Mystical Illumination: An Awakening Presence.
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Mystical Effectiveness: Spirit without Boundaries.
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Mystical Carelessness: Drifting Away.
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Mystical Purgation: The Death of the Sacred.
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Mystical Death: The Fire of Nothingness.
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Mystical Awakening: The Fragrance of Nonduality.
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Mystical Union: Remaining in the Presence.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit kenrose51.substack.com
Recently copies of my latest book from Bloomsbury arrived at an ashram in northern Germany where I am engaged in intensive sādhana and research on yoga traditions in this country.
I have just reread the book and am happy to say that it was so well proofread that I found virtually no typos in the book.
Because this is an academic book—a monograph, as such books are named—it is expensive. (The price was set by the publisher, not by me!) Samples are available at all of the major online booksellers. It’s available in hardcover and various ebook and PDF formats:
Here is the book’s Amazon link
And Google Books
And the Bloomsbury website
And at Google Play
So far 55 academic libraries have added it to their collections globally, as shown on WorldCat. Perhaps one is close to you and you have borrowing privileges? Or perhaps you would like to ask your library to order it?
Here is the publisher’s overview of Reviving Intellectual Intuition:
Calling for a revival of intellectual intuition in metaphysics long after its banning by Kant, Kenneth Rose overcomes the forgetfulness of being through contemplative ontology. Rose argues for the reinstatement of intellectual intuition in metaphysics long after its banning by Kant. His claim is not merely the conclusion of a thought-experiment or of an exercise in conceptual analysis. It is the result of the contemplative recognition of being with a meditatively concentrated intellect: nous in Greek and buddhi in Sanskrit. Recognizing intellectual intuition as a long-neglected faculty of philosophical insight, Rose shows how it can result in an immediate, intuitive discerning of being. He discusses how being parcels itself out into the intellectual forms providing the underlying nonphysical arrangement of the physical and mental worlds. By reviving the use of intellectual intuition in metaphysics, Rose draws upon historical sources across multiple Asian and Anglo-European philosophical schools. This is a work of contemplative constructive philosophy that breaks down divisions between science, philosophy, and religion and between diverse cultures and divergent worldviews.
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Thanks for reading Outtakes and Fresh Starts!
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Hi, this is Ken Rose from Outtakes and Fresh Starts on Substack. This week’s episode includes the introduction and two extracts from a book that I am working on called Burning Toward Transcendence. This is a collection of entries from my journals focusing on spiritual insights and meditation experiences.
(To be continued.)
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Translations are the author’s unless otherwise indicated.
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Hi, this is Ken Rose from Outtakes and Fresh Starts on Substack. This week’s podcast is an excerpt from chapter two of The Neural Mystic, a book that I am writing based on courses that I have taught at the college level and on Embodied Philosophy, anonline yoga and alternative spirituality platform.
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The information presented in this post is the author’s opinion and does not constitute any health or medical advice. The content of this post is for informational purposes only and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any condition or disease. Please seek advice from your healthcare provider for your personal health concerns.
Notes for This Podcast (See the post on Substack for the context of the footnotes):
1 Chris Walsh, “Mindfulness Training,” www.cwalsh.com.au; Carolyn Schatz, “Mindfulness meditation improves connections in the brain,” Harvard Health Blog, April 8, 2011; Michael D. Mrazek, Michael S. Franklin, Dawa Tarchin Phillips, Benjamin Baird, and Jonathan W Schooler, “Mindfulness Training Improves Working Memory Capacity and GRE Performance While Reducing Mind Wandering,” Psychological Science, Mar 28, 2013 DOI: 10.1177/0956797612459659; Kimberly Sarah Tay, “Effects of Breathing Practice in Vinyasa Yoga on Heart Rate Variability in University Students,” University of Arizona BA Thesis, 2015, http://hdl.handle.net/10150/579419; Yi-Yuan Tang, Qilin Lu, Hongbo Feng, Rongxiang Tang and Michael I. Posner, “Short-term meditation increases blood flow in anterior cingulate cortex and insula,” Frontiers in Psychology June 2015 (212), doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00212; A. Nesvold, M. W. Fagerland, S. Davanger, et al., “Increased heart rate variability during nondirective meditation,” European Journal of Preventive Cardiology 19(4) (2012): 773-780, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21693507/.
2 Chiesa, A. and A. Serretti. 2010. “A Systematic Review of Neurobiological and Clinical Features of Mindfulness Meditations,” Psychological Medicine 40.8: 1239-52, doi: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0033291709991747, and https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/systematic-review-neurobiological-clinical/docview/577669987/se-2?accountid=10100.
Some caveats: Some of the authors of these studies point out that it’s unclear whether these outcomes are due to meditation or other factors. They also note that the studies are weakened by inadequate methodologies. For a comprehensive metastudy of research on meditation, see Richard Davidson and Daniel Goleman, Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body (also published as The Science of Meditation: How to Change Your Brain, Mind and Body).
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit kenrose51.substack.com
Hi, this is Ken Rose from Outtakes and Fresh Starts on Substack. This week’s podcast is an excerpt from chapter one of The Neural Mystic, a book that I am writing based on courses that I have taught at the college level and on Embodied Philosophy, anonline yoga and alternative spirituality platform.
If you liked this post, consider sharing it.
If you haven’t already subscribed, you can here:
More of my writing in written and spoken form is available on Amazon
The information presented in this post is the author’s opinion and does not constitute any health or medical advice. The content of this post is for informational purposes only and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any condition or disease. Please seek advice from your healthcare provider for your personal health concerns.
A Suggested Reading for Chapter 1 of The Neural Mystic
As background to this chapter, I would suggest reading a classic and still influential book by William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (New York, 1902). Particularly relevant for our topic are Lectures I, XVI, and XVII. This book is in the public domain, and is widely available. Here is a link to the original print edition: https://archive.org/details/varietiesofrelig00jameuoft).References for This Podcast
Notes for This Podcast
See the post on Substack for the context of the footnotes:
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Matthew A. Killingsworth and Daniel T. Gilbert, “A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind,” Science 330, no 6006 (November 12, 2010): 932, http://science.sciencemag.org/content/330/6006/932.
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Judson A. Brewer, Patrick D. Worhunsky, Jeremy R. Gray, Yi-Yuan Tang, Jochen Weber, Hedy Kober, “Meditation experience is associated with differences in default mode network activity and connectivity,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108 no. 50 (December 2011): 20254-0259, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1112029108.
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Tracy Brandmeyer and Arnaud Delorme, “Reduced mind wandering in experienced meditators and associated EEG correlates,” Experimental Brain Research 236 (September 2018): 2519–2528, https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-016-4811-5.
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Jonathan Smallwood and Jonathan W. Schooler, “The Science of Mind Wandering: Empirically Navigating the Stream of Consciousness,” Annual Review of Psychology 66 (2015): 487–518, https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-010814-015331.
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Michael S. Franklin, Michael D. Mrazek, Craig L. Anderson, Jonathan Smallwood, Alan Kingstone, and Jonathan W. Schooler, “The Silver Lining of a Mind in the Clouds: Interesting Musings are Associated with Positive Mood while Mind-Wandering,” Frontiers in Psychology 4 (8/27/2013), http://0-dx.doi.org.read.cnu.edu/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00583.
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Shaghayegh Konjedi and Reza Maleeh, “A Closer Look at the Relationship Between the Default Network, Mind Wandering, Negative Mood, and Depression,” Cognitive, Affective & Behavioral Neuroscience 17:4 (August 2017): 697-711, https://doi.org/10.3758/s13415-017-0506-z.
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In Sanskrit: yogaś citta-vṛtti-nirodhaḥ (Yoga-Sūtra 1.2).
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Hi Outtakes and Fresh Starts Subscribers,
As the summer draws to a close, I would like to take a short break from posting in order to allow time for rest and for new inspirations to arise.
I’ll be back soon.
Be well,
Ken Rose
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Hi, this is Ken Rose from Outtakes and Fresh Starts on Substack. This episode, “Saints on the Horizon,” is adapted from my online course, Wisdom from World Religions, which wasfunded by a grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation.
Visit the free online course, Wisdom from World Religions, which wasfunded by a grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation.
An audio version of this course and of my course on mystics, sages, yogis, and saints is available from Learn 25
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Image: Approaching India by Air, July 2, 2012 (Kenneth Rose)
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Hi, this is Ken Rose from Outtakes and Fresh Starts on Substack. This episode, “Revelatory Bursts of Higher Insight,” has been adapted from Fragments of Contemplation, where I share insights from my contemplative and meditative practice.
Image: Rishikesh, India, March 27, 2007 (Kenneth Rose)
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Hi, this is Ken Rose from Outtakes and Fresh Starts on Substack. This is chapter three from a spiritual novel, The Cave of the Saints, which I wrote and self-published in the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic. The first two chapters are also available on Outtakes and Fresh Starts.
Chapter 3: The Buddha and the Flame of Golden Light
Image: The Parinibbāna of the Buddha in Gal Vihara, Polonnaruwa, Sri Lanka (Beate Rose, 1998).
If you liked this post, consider sharing it
If you like this post, consider liking it and sharing it.
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The rest of The Cave of the Saints and more of my writing is available on Amazon
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The text of this podcast is available here
Hi, this is Ken Rose from Outtakes and Fresh Starts on Substack. The following selections are from a book that I am working on called Burning Toward Transcendence. This is a collection of entries from my journals focusing on spiritual insights and meditation experiences recorded over the last four decades. The inspiration for this project was a reference in Thomas Merton’s Contemplative Prayer to Cassian’s “fiery prayer” or “ardent prayer” (oratio ignita) in his Conferences (9.15, 25).
Image: Rainbow over Tarforst, Trier, Germany, June 7, 2022
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Excerpted from The Cave of the Saints: A Spiritual Novel (Available on Amazon)
Image: Puri, Odisha, India, February 1987 (Kenneth Rose)
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Excerpted from The Cave of the Saints: A Spiritual Novel (Available on Amazon)
Image: Along the Blue Ridge Parkway, June 15, 2019 (Kenneth Rose)
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This post is the second chapter from The Light of the Self: A Memoir of a Spiritual Awakening. In the first chapter, I described an unexpected spiritual awakening in early 1970 that sent me on a long path of spiritual discovery leading through the Hare Krishna Movement, various forms of Christianity, different schools of Buddhism, and the Advaita Vedantic nondualism of Sri Ramana Maharshi. In this chapter, I recall my first days at New Vrindaban, a rural ashram established in the early years of the Hare Krishna Movement (ISKCON) in the US.
Back to Godhead (Chapter 2)
I was awakened before dawn by the sound of softly chiming karatalas and the hushed chanting of Hare Krishna devotees in the living room of the farmhouse, which had been converted into a temple for Radha and Krishna. I dressed quickly without light in a bedroom above the temple room. Outside, the moonless sky was ablaze with stars. Only the chanting of the worshippers broke the silence while the birds still slept in the invisible trees. The sudden brightness of the temple room was blinding when I entered, but a devotee pointed to a line in a book of chants, and my tongue stumbled over the unfamiliar syllables:
kiba shankha baje ghanta baje baje karatala.
I didn’t know what the words meant, but by chanting them I felt less of an outsider. As we danced before the burnished images of Radha and Krishna, we prayed that transcendent light from the deities would dispel the darkness of our hearts. Then I sensed the light of Krishna washing over my consciousness, sending a wave of bliss through me. It darted from a hidden depth and rose as a joyous song through my body and mind to the transcendent planet of Krishna. I sensed that this delightful feeling was a gift of God, and to experience more of it, I believed that I would be willing to sacrifice everything. I was caught up in a holy mood of aspiration and surrender, and, inexperienced as I was in the spiritual life, I thought that these sensations would last forever and that I had now attained a permanent condition of enlightenment.
As the earth slowly brightened outside the windows, the bliss faded, and I started worrying about the rigors of ashram life. Could I get used to getting up at four o’clock in the morning? Could I live without eating meat? Was I up to chopping down trees, hauling rocks, laying brick, digging ditches, and stringing fences? And if I weren’t, would I have to go back to Brooklyn? Thinking of Brooklyn made me homesick, and I wondered what crazy impulse had lured me to this alien religious commune. Icy fingers of anxiety spread through my stomach, and panicky thoughts about getting on a bus back to New York cancelled the blissful feelings that I had been enjoying. Then a calming inner voice spoke clearly: “Stay here a few weeks—you can always go back to Brooklyn. If you go back now, it’ll be as if you had never left. But if you stay awhile, you’ll gain.” I surrendered to the voice, and my anxiety subsided.
After breakfast, I went out to the barn where a shapeup was in progress. A devotee in overalls who was giving work assignments for the day sent me up to the top of the ridge to help Phil, another recent arrival at the ashram, lay a foundation for a cabin. We worked quietly until the middle of the morning, when Phil dropped his trowel and said that he could use a beer. He pointed to a shack on the ridge across the hollow. “That’s a bar,” he said. “Should be open right about now.” A pickup raised a cloud of dust as it passed the saloon, and I was tempted when Phil suggested we hike over and drink a couple. Laying cinder blocks had made me thirsty. But a tugging in my chest reminded me that I had come to New Vrindaban to be a devotee of Krishna and that I wouldn’t have needed to leave Brooklyn to drink a beer. I told Phil that I would pass, and we worked again in silence.
The sun was high and hot when a gong echoed through the hollow announcing the main meal of the day. We dropped our tools and walked the dusty trail to the farmhouse. Devotees were already eating in the shade of a willow tree when we got to the serving line. A mother offered a wailing baby pieces of laddu, an Indian sweet, and a ragged collie begged for samosas, a spicy vegetable pastry. I sat down beneath the tree after being served, but I hesitated to eat the unfamiliar food, which was quite different from the Sunday-feast meals at the Hare Krishna temple in lower Manhattan: a stack of chapatis, tortilla-like circles of unleavened whole-wheat bread, a mound of yellow rice, and a bowl of dal, a pungent brown soup with floating bits of lightly fried chilies. Taking Phil as my guide, I spread rice on a chapati, rolled it like a burrito, and dunked it into the dal. I took a bite and gagged. Phil laughed at my delicacy and went up to the serving line and brought back a bowl of dal without the chilies, which I gratefully but sheepishly ate.
After eating, I chose a nap over memorizing Sanskrit scriptures in the temple. When the gong summoned us to work a half-hour later, I struggled to stand, but I was weighed down by an undigested lump of rice and chapatis, which sat like a rock in my stomach. Disoriented by sudden awakening, I struggled to remember where I was. Then it hit me: I was at New Vrindaban, and a pile of cement blocks was waiting to be carried up the side of the ridge.
Hours later, when the sun dropped behind the ridge, Phil and I stopped working and walked to the bottom of the hollow, where we bathed with other devotees in a sparkling pond. The cool water washed away the memory of work, and I felt happy. After bathing, a devotee helped me to apply clay markings to twelve sacred spots on my body and showed me how to tie a dhoti around my waist. With our bodies now sanctified as sacred space, we climbed the darkening ridge to the temple and went inside and waited expectantly for the curtains hiding the deities to open for evening worship.
A bell rang and the curtains opened. We fell to the floor at the first glance of Radha and Krishna and paid obeisance to them and to our guru Prabhupada, the Indian swami who had brought the gospel of Krishna to America a few years before, when he was in his late sixties. We stood up and looked admiringly at the divine couple, dressed now for sleep in miniature but colorful pajamas. The gleaming bronze statues with their tiny, intense eyes smiled out at us from behind thick garlands of wildflowers, and we began to dance before them. Krishna, a deity celebrated by Hindus for his playfulness as a child and his heroic deeds as an adult, graced us now with a saving glance. A shock of pleasure went through me, sending a tingling through my body and a smile of delight across my face. I knew inwardly without a doubt that there is no God greater and more beautiful than the blue flutist who tends the cows of Vrindaban while maintaining countless universes with only a spark of his power. A flame of bhakti, or divine love, blazed within me, and I offered myself repeatedly without reserve to the deity who had captured my soul.
An abrupt change in the rhythm of the mridanga, a traditional South Indian drum,signaled the end of the ceremony. We dropped to the floor and shouted a litany of praises in Sanskrit to the chain of gurus stretching from Prabhupada back to the sixteenth century Bengali saint Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu and founder of the Krishna-consciousness movement; further back to Lord Brahma, the creator of the universe; and back, finally, to the supreme lord, Krishna himself. As I lay swimming in sweat on the sagging floor, I shook in the afterglow of the ecstasy that had swept over me. It was for this feeling that I had left home—and for this I was willing to forsake everything.
After a discussion of a scriptural passage, we gathered around a large kettle of hot, sweet milk and a tray of papadums, or fried, paper-thin wafers made from black gram flour. The temple took on the feeling of home as we ate our bedtime snack. The altar upon which the deities stood was now hidden behind folding doors. While we chatted, a priest sang a Sanskrit lullaby to the deities. After drinking our milk, we unrolled our sleeping bags and lay down. We were quiet now, and someone turned out the light. The quiet and coolness of the mountain night, pleasingly different from sticky summer nights in Brooklyn, soothed and caressed me. It took only a minute for me to fall into a deep sleep.
Days passed, and I milked cows, split wood, hauled rocks from streambeds, weeded gardens, and strung barbed-wire fences through forests and around pastures. I overcame my fear of horses and drove a team and wagon up and down the waterlogged road, carrying passengers and supplies. Krishna became the center of my life as I meditated constantly on his qualities and sacred acts as described in the Vaishnava, or Vishnu-centered, scriptures of Hinduism, which describe the feats of Vishnu, Krishna, and Rama, and their female partners. I frequently felt the sweetness of Krishna’s love rewarding my enthusiastic attempts to serve him. Bliss in golden waves flowed from my mind and heart through my purified body. My mind became still and empty of fear. The knot of thoughts that had tormented me before my spiritual awakening in Brooklyn a few months earlier vanished like a morning mist burned away by the rising sun. In the peaceful garden that my soul had become, I stood entranced by the grace of Krishna’s love. Krishna had banished the passions and terrors of unredeemed existence, and I began to forget that they had ever ruled me.
(To be continued)
Excerpted from The Light of the Self: A Memoir of a Spiritual Awakening (Available on Amazon)
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Image: New Vrindaban, West Virginia, c. 1970 (unknown photographer)
Notice—Recordings of Earlier Posts Now Available
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