Sunday, May 5, 2013

Is your world “out there” — at your fingertips, so to speak — a material reality grasped and correctly interpreted by your senses? Or is it your invention — a projection you have learned to construct, based on sense stimulation and other information?

For thousands of years, yogis have taught that the second explanation is the truth. In the last century, manyneuroscientists found reasons to agree. More recently, some quantum physicists assert that our being arises from consciousness. They believe that our continuity of experience (sense of self) is a conditioned response — a learned behavior, a choice among possibilities.

Implications for us as spiritual seekers are enormous: What we have learned, we can unlearn. We can, with effort, replace the construct we have today with a more accurate experience of reality. We can move, as Swami Vivekananda put it, from lesser truth to the highest truth.

Brother Shankara explores and compares the yogic and scientific explanations for self-awareness, and reviews what Sri Ramakrishna and Vivekananda taught about how you can realize the Truth, your True Original Nature, or God.