“Where shall we go to find God if we cannot see Him in our own hearts and in every living being?”
Welcome to the Vedanta Center of Atlanta
We study Hinduism and Vedanta as taught by Sri Ramakrishna, Sri Sarada Devi, Swami Vivekananda, and Swami Brahmananda. Classes, talks, worship, meditation, fellowship, and special events throughout the year. All are welcome.
Thanks for visiting with us.
There is a lot to look at, listen to, and discover about Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Vedanta and this Center. Yet, if you don’t find what you came for, click here to contact Br. Shankara, our Resident Minister.
This week at your Center
A Few Announcements
The Annual Meeting of the Congregation will be held via Zoom on Sunday, May 16th from 11am-noon. Hear reports from the Trustees about what’s been going on behind the scenes during the past year, help elect the new Board for 2021-2022, and more.
You may want to mark your calendar — the way it looks now, our first face-to-face meeting as a congregation will be on Sunday, July 4th. We should all be fully vaccinated by then.
There will be a Seva Saturday on Sat., June 26th, to shine up your Center for the Fourth.
For both of these activities, only those who have been fully vaccinated and past any waiting periods may attend! Other details to come as we get closer to the dates.
This Sunday's Talk
~ Join us via Zoom ~
This Sunday morning, April 18, from 11am-noon Br. Shankara will speak with us on “What Deserves Your Attention?” Join us on Zoom, and participate in the discussion!
April is a month for study of Jnana Yoga (advaita vedanta). As a jnana yogi, you practice discrimination, reason, detachment, and satyagraha (insistence on Truth). The goal is freedom from limitation (moksha). Our teachers say that all miseries in life are caused by seeing inaccurately. An earnest and persistent jnani may break through this misapprehension (Maya) and see only the Divine Presence everywhere, in everything and everyone.
Swami Vivekananda said: “Come up, O lions, and shake off the delusion that you are sheep; you are souls immortal, spirits free, blest and eternal; ye are not matter, ye are not bodies; matter is your servant, not you the servant of matter. …
“Each (one of you) is only a conduit for the infinite ocean of knowledge and power that lies behind mankind. …”
You are a conduit for an infinite ocean of knowledge and power, and yet: Though you may start each day with clear priorities and a plan of action, often – by the end of that day – you can hardly say where the time went. That day is gone and you’re not much closer to what you planned than you were in the morning.
Must this continue? Why are we so easily distracted, and why does what happens frustrate, confuse, even anger us? Here’s an explanation from Swami Yogeshananda’s article, “A Closer Look Through the Looking-Glass”:
“In a lecture in which he clarifies the … doctrine of Maya, Swami Vivekananda says, ‘I may be dreaming all the time. I am dreaming that I am talking to you and that you are listening to me. No one can prove that it is not a dream. … We are walking in the midst of a dream, half-sleeping, half-waking, passing all our lives in a haze; this is the fate of every one of us… When we dream, the things we see all seem to be connected; during the dream we never think they are incongruous. It is only when we wake that we see the want of connection.
When we wake from this dream of the world and compare it with the Reality, it will be found all incongruous nonsense, a mass of incongruity passing before us, we do not know whence or whither, but we know it will end; and this is called Maya.’”
In Sunday’s talk we’ll look further into Swami Vivekananda’s definition of Maya, and discuss Adi Shankaracharya’s explanation of how we can wake from Maya’s spell.
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Recommended Reading
Click book covers for details about these and other recommended books.
These books are available in our Bookshop, at Vedanta.com, and elsewhere online.
Sri Ramakrishna
“Different people call on [God] by different names: some as Allah, some as God, and others as Krishna, Siva, and Brahman. It is like the water in a lake. Some drink it at one place and call it ‘jal’, others at another place and call it ‘pani’, and still others at a third place and call it ‘water’. The Hindus call it ‘jal’, the Christians ‘water’, and the Moslems ‘pani’. But it is one and the same thing.”
