Hello and welcome to this episode of the Oxford Public Philosophy podcast.
My name is Amy Katumbi, and in this episode, along with Alan Watts,
I'll be interviewing the scholar and monk Swami made in India on the topic of the relationship between spirituality and scholarship.
So we will formally introduced me shortly and hear a little about his life and his journey to academia and ordination.
Let me say a little about the ground that we will cover.
While there are many fascinating technical aspects of Indian philosophy regarding such topics as metaphysics and epistemology,
some of which we will cover in other episodes.
This episode will not focus on them, since so many people's first experience of Indian philosophy is in the context of yoga and meditation class.
It is taught not for historical interest alone, but for personal devotion and transformation.
This episode will focus on Indian philosophy, the lived experience,
in particular the relationship between studying Indian philosophy as an academic discipline and practising it as a spiritual path.
In the course of our discussion, we cover swamis work on three of India's crucial hermeneutics, epistemic values, spiritual experiences,
the value of systematic scholarship in religious life, and the differences between traditional South Asian and contemporary styles of scholarship.
Throughout the discussion, Swami continually points with reference to his own experience as a scholar practitioner to the possibility
of combining academic and personal interest in Indian philosophy in a way that enriches both.
Thanks for listening, and I hope you have fun here. Examine me then on this thoughts.
OK, sir, thank you. Thank you, everyone, for joining this podcast. This is another in the South Asia series, the MVP Philosophy podcast.
So my name is and I got it by adds I have just finished my master's in the study of religion.
Focussing on aspects of Hindu philosophy and hosting this podcast with me is Dylan Watts, who is doing an undergrad in physics of Philosophy.
And today we'll be interviewing Swaminathan and the WHO so kindly joined us, so amazing, and there is an ordained monk of the Christian Wood,
and he's currently a senior research fellow in philosophy at the Wollman Krishna Institute of Moral and Spiritual Education in My School.
He received his doctorate from UC Berkeley, focussing on German aesthetic philosophy as also studied Oxfords and Humboldt University in Berlin.
And in his academic work, the moment he specialises in pedantic philosophical traditions,
of cross-cultural philosophy of religion and Indian scriptural hermeneutics.
So yeah, we kind of asked Swami here to do a discussion where, well, the philosophy podcast,
I'm going to focus on issues in the content of Indian philosophy and issues and how to teach it in an academic setting.
We saw him be kind of cool to talk about. Doing any philosophy is a lived experience, and especially how it relates to spirituality,
which is a reason a lot of people sort of get into Indian thinking.
So yeah, rather than focussing on the content, kind of like issues of actually living,
living Indian philosophy and seeing it as a kind of personal practise.
So yeah, with that in mind, I thought we'd sort of begin and ask you for me.
You know, we want to have a little bit about how you got interested in Indian philosophy as an academic pursuit and obviously you entertaining monks.
So it's a personal spiritual practise. So, yeah, how did your journey into Indian philosophy start in those two aspects?
Yeah, thanks. So I was born and raised in Boston, in a suburb in Boston, Lexington, Massachusetts, and raised in a culturally in the family.
We can call it so distinguished culturally, and there was an from call it, either philosophical or spiritual Hinduism.
I don't know how you were his friends, but what what I understand my cultural Hinduism is.
My parents would kind of drag me to pujas like three or four times a year on special occasions, and we bow down to idols, basically.
That's how I always feel like if I translate it myself back in that time,
that's how I thought about it because I was very sceptical as a kid and I felt like the whole thing was pointless.
And my parents never explained to me the significance of anything that was happening.
So I just saw, like would seem to me to be weird, meaningless rituals, you know, for showing this.
There's a God who a sense of the she's the goddess of learning.
And so once a year, it a worship of us with the where my parents would tell me to bring some of my textbooks, which would place at her feet.
And then so it all just seemed like superstitious to me and turned me off, basically.
And in at home, my mother would do puja twice a day every day without fail, and she she had.
She still does it. So she's been doing it for, like, I think, 60 years or so now,
but I looked upon it as just a kind of a quaint thing that she would do because she's gullible or something.
So anyway, that's what I mean. But culturally there was that it didn't actually like SEEP into my kind of consciousness in that, and I I wouldn't.
I didn't. I wouldn't have identified myself as Hindu. But that was why that's important as background,
just because it's important that when I actually came this spiritual and monastic life, it was really not through.
I don't think I mean, looking back on my life that it's through how I was raised, exactly, but it really came from within, I would say.
So what happened was, you know, I had I went to Berkeley as an undergraduate and in my dream undergraduate,
I spent a year at Walden College, Oxford, my third year. So that was 2000 and 2001.
And I remember, you know, debate with friends of one of my friends there.
And modelling was, I think he was at New College.
But anyway, he he was he was Christian.
So he had a lot of debates about kind of religion, Christianity, how do you know God exists so deeply interested in religion, but as an agnostic?
So that was my kind of teenage period, and I studied different world religions.
I was very rationalistic in my approach, so I didn't assume that Hinduism was right because I was raised into it.
You know, I said, Well, let me be the mother in Buddhism. Let me stay in the public with Peter.
Let me tell you the Bible. And then, you know, ask myself, you know, which one do I like?
Why do any of them seem rational to me? Which one? So it was.
I took a very philosophical slant, rationalistic approach in the beginning, but at the same time,
more on a kind of on a personal level or an existential level if you want to use that word.
I just through experience. I just had this feeling that a life lived in pursuit of what we would call a normal worldly pursuits,
whether that's wealth or fame for whatever pleasure would not be a life worth living.
And again, that that, you know, I had that conviction as an agnostic, but after a few years in college and then in grad school and I studied more.
And at this point, I wasn't really I mean, I read the book of a given translation. I didn't know I hadn't.
I didn't. I hadn't learnt Sanskrit yet at that time. I learnt Sanskrit only during my Ph.D.
But so I did the translation and I was I was still an agnostic, so I didn't really believe in God at that time.
I wasn't made the as I always felt that agnosticism was a more rational position than it is.
And so I was an agnostic.
But when I read the book of Geeta, what appealed to me most was not the stuff that popped the about devotion and those kind of things.
But it's the idea of finding or reaching a transcendental peace through renunciation of worldly were the kind of pleasures that we.
Resonated with me so that I would say I would call that my first kind of spiritual urge, maybe at the age of like 19 or 20.
And from that time, I already kind of thought to myself, You know what?
I want to be a monk, even though I still I mean,
it is weird because I hadn't read a word of the teachings or known anything about Sri Lanka's noticing a big conundrum.
But it just seemed to come from within. And then after a few more years, I started that kind of spiritual conviction,
coalesced into something a little bit more concrete, and I would one could characterise it as we don't think in a certain sense.
So I started getting the sense that and this is not a realisation I don't want to claim that I've had.
I had any kind of spiritual life. It's not that it's just a kind of intuition or conviction.
That's all I want to call.
I have the conviction that I'm neither the body nor the mind, but that I am an eternal soul separate from the body mind complex,
and that all suffering stems from this false identification with the body, with the mind.
I realised later that that's a kind of Vedanta conviction. So I had that kind of inchoate conviction.
At the same time, I start delving more deeply into the Hindu scriptures.
So I read a lot of it the more carefully.
I learnt Sanskrit in the last two years of my people programme to Berkeley and and I also started reading the works of Sony, Vikander and Sharon.
And that's where I started getting, you know, one of the things that really I mean,
this is I gave a presentation for copy a few months ago on Sri Lanka's From the Harmony religions.
But you know, as I said, when I first started thinking about religion, one of the main difficulties for me is that diff-,
you know, different people are raised in radically different cultural circumstances in different countries.
Some people are born into fundamentalist Christianity. Some people into Islam is like an Islamic kind of family.
Others Hinduism within Hinduism, they're all sorts of six. Others are born into a Hindu family.
And then the question is for a rationalist is how do I know which one to accept, if any of them?
And then there's just another logical or at least a reasonable assumption, which is that if one of these religions right,
the other ones must be wrong because they seem to be making a lot of the claims that they're making.
These different religions are making seemed to be conflicting, right?
So either Christ is is the one and only son of God or the Hindus are right that there are multiple incarnations or Buddhism is right,
that you know that there's no God at all or on a different version of Buddhism that you know,
we can be agnostic and not worry about whether there's a god at all. But, you know, so if religion is true, which religion should I accept?
That's kind of it. Now, when I started studying the life, indigenous language, natural culture comes along, first of all.
Dylan, you mentioned this in an email earlier because you've looked at Bruce's life.
But you mentioned that Trump said during his summing up period. During this period of spiritual practise, unlike many other states, he or mystics,
he practised many different religious traditions, and within Hinduism, he practised Vishnu ism.
He practised shocked ism. He practised unavoidably.
But then he also practised Christianity, also practised Islam, and through all those different spiritual practises,
he realised different aspects and forms of what he took to be one in the same divine reality.
And on that basis, he taught in monologue.
The original teaching is going on in the bottom to the divine.
Reality is infinite and the paths to God are infinite.
And that was, I mean, the first time that somebody on the basis of his or her own direct experience was giving me a solution to this.
That kind of rationalistic predicament, a problem that I was facing for a long time, which is how can multiple religions be true at the same time?
And the answer I got. I mean, it took me a while to kind of work out philosophically in in a rigorous way.
What's your own business teachings about to with regard to the number of lives?
But now I would put it this way it's somewhat technical language. The key is that it's not that all religions are true,
but that all religions are so vividly effective that they're all effective in leading to salvation,
even if not all the doctrines of all the religions are true. And even if you know, let's say that Hinduism is right about reincarnation.
If Hinduism is right about reincarnation, then Orthodox Christianity and Islam and Judaism are wrong about any country,
but about reincarnation because they don't believe in it and so on and so forth, right?
So religions can be wrong about certain doctrines, but but still be very effective in leading to salvation and.
The way the Trump system put this, he used these simple analogies.
He says everybody thinks his own watch is correct, but in fact, no watch tells exactly the right time.
So and then he says so just in the same way,
every every religious practitioner thinks that their religion is 100 percent correct and everybody else is wrong.
In fact, every religion has some errors.
But then, he added, Trump the ads that those errors in the different religions don't detract in a substantial way from their celebrated efficacy.
So that really, that was like the piece of this of the kind of religious puzzle that I found very,
very compelling intellectually and also spiritually sorry.
So I mean, this is a kind of long winded. So, all right. So now we're on the DVD.
I read the nine volumes and the complete works of one week vacant on the late stage.
Trump is the teachings. And then.
And as you mentioned in your introduction, I actually I wasn't studying formally academically Indian philosophy at the time.
I was studying German philosophy and especially German aesthetics,
and I spent a year as a Fulbright scholar in Berlin and Humboldt Revisited, studying content, handling and going on.
And at the same time, I studied Sanskrit for two years, and then I started getting interested in Indian philosophy and part of the reason
I kind of moved away from Western philosophy and toward Indian philosophy.
I don't want to say that it was moving away is probably not as nuanced as it could be because I still am very interested in Western philosophy,
and a lot of the work I'm doing is cross-cultural. So it's not, you know, it or one of the terms that a lot of school is using as global philosophy.
So that's what I like to think of myself as doing. I mean, they do global philosophy, but one of the things that attracted me to Indian philosophy,
which made me decide to kind of devote my energies to that in particular,
is that I did feel that in a lot of Western philosophers, I felt that in a lot of cases,
there's a divorce of theory and practise and is in some cases it's reasonable.
And in other cases, I thought it was not as reasonable. Like, for instance, with Chopin.
However, if you studied show manilla's idea in the world, as is willing representation,
he's always talking about the need to renounce the will and practise enunciation and be celibate.
And then when you study his life, it just seems very different. And then there is the question of, well, what kind of you know,
on what basis is he speaking with such authority about these things if he himself is not practising what he's preaching?
And so that's one of the things that kind of drew me to Indian philosophy and to becoming a monk.
So in any case, in 2009, I got my Ph.D. and then I was.
I received initiation into the Rutgers tradition from a very senior monk who was a direct disciple of what on Christmas direct to say.
So his name is Tom Swan, and he's my guru. He was at the time, the head of our Hollywood centre.
And it sounds weird that, you know, I started a monastic life in Hollywood.
And he actually tried to try to persuade me to join as a monk in Hollywood.
They I said, I said, I can't do this. I can't be a monk in Hollywood. I'm so it's there's too much cognitive dissonance, you know?
So, so I said I got to move to India to be a monk. I just said again, it's not like I had some kind of a great love of India.
I I had come to India for every and every other year of my life, starting from each to just with my parents.
And I would visit relatives in India, different parts of India. But I never really, you know, liked it in any deep way.
But from around my late teenage years,
at the same time that I started having strong spiritual convictions and a certain idea that I wanted to become a monk,
I just for some reason I had this feeling that I needed to start installing the next wave in India.
I can't explain why. So a lot of this is sort of some rational kind of intuition, whatever it is.
So I told them that I told my guru that after going through my initiation,
initiation just means he gave me a mantra and taught me a certain meditation practise, which I would have to do.
And then I told them, You know, thank you for your blessings, but I'm going to go to India and I also want to go on a six month pilgrimage.
So I I bought a one way ticket to India, and in 2009 I flew out to India.
And yeah, the first thing I did was I travelled throughout India by train mostly and just kind of backpacking and staying in different.
Ashram was outside the Ramakrishna tradition.
Also, just like I stayed for one week in a place called Copula in Motherboard's Telecard, which is a yoga.
It's a kind of yoga ashram. And so I just could be. I was.
You can call it spiritual shopping, but just getting on with getting a sense of the spiritual heritage of the country.
At the same time, I hadn't committed yet to join to becoming a monk.
Within the wrong Christian tradition, I committed myself to their ideals, but I still wasn't.
I didn't know anything about the order, about the tradition,
so I wanted to get kind of a sense on the ground of what was happening in India from a spiritual standpoint.
And then, yeah, after visiting different ashram was it just felt right to me to join.
We were going to the university, which is a which is a new year. It was unique new university at the time.
There's a 2010 right on the same campus as the global headquarters of the Christian Order.
So it's really great because I would get the best of both worlds because if I could do my academic
work at the university while also having the main global monastery five minutes away of our order.
So it was really a blessing.
And it was only then after I joined as an assistant professor at Vivekananda University, as a bishop, as a group, which I did.
That's when I decided, you know, I'm going to turn my B.S. thesis into my first book.
It would be on German aesthetics, and I published that 2013.
And then from then on, I'm going to just focus my academic energies on Indian philosophy and global philosophy and philosophy of religion.
And yeah, you asked about the reasons why. So I sort of started giving an answer to that.
But also, I would say it's this is more of a common academic from an academic perspective.
But when I was studying German philosophy, there was a glut of scholars working in my area.
So, you know, I was working on Hegel and. There's, you know, there are like 50 books a year published on these philosophers and countless articles.
And then I found, you know, when I started dabbling into academic study of Indian philosophy, I mean,
it's like I suddenly became like a big fish in a small pond, and I felt like there's a lot more scope for meaningful contributions.
And then, like everything I do was like, No, it hadn't been done before, just like just because it's such a decent field.
I mean, the kind of stuff I was doing. So, you know, one of my first articles was analysing the meaning of one word in one sutra of potentially
serious injuries in the world was similarly bipolar centred living in philosophy.
And you know, there's almost no scholarship on this issue. And then the next article I wrote last season was giving a comparison of the
sceptical methods of Trisha was not quite evident in the nutrition and health.
And again, nobody had written. So like everything I would do was, you know, nobody had really done this before.
So there's something really exciting about working in the field of Indian philosophy.
And I mean, this is a person apart from, you know, the inherent interest of the content, but just it's much harder to make an impact.
I would say in a field like true philosophy. Yeah, thank you for that.
That's yeah, fascinating. It seems like it's interesting because for you,
it's like your academic interests and your spiritual interests would have seemed to happen at the same time.
You know, like that whole question of religious pluralism, which is something that,
like I've struggled with quite deeply when growing up in a religious family and being sceptical early on like like you are.
And that question of pluralism of like,
how can I like my family born into this really particular Shia sect of Islam have like the one like true access to the truth.
It's just seemed impossible. And so, yeah, for you,
there's like a way in which understanding that kind of systematic theological question
and doing it through an academic setting where you were able to systematise true,
I'm a Christian, it helps you kind of gain a spiritual foundation.
So they were kind of happening together because it's interesting, you know, like how you're someone who is a monk as well as an academic.
And yeah, I guess my question is like, did you ever feel a tension between the two?
You felt like you wanted to commit to either one actually fully or you just wanted to be a monk, which is an academic?
Yeah, that's a good. I mean, in my first semester of my P.S. programmes, it was 2003.
I was in Berkeley. And actually when I had first come to Berkeley,
I had a kind of I hadn't decided just yet that I wanted to be a monk and still had this idea
vaguely that I would finish my first year and become an academic somewhere in the U.S.,
whatever within one semester, that all changed. And it's it's I don't know, it's hard to pinpoint exactly what made me change my mind.
But literally, I just remember, like suddenly within one semester telling my friends at Berkeley, I'm going to finish my BDM.
No work really hard, and then I'm going to become a monk in India. It was really funny.
They all thought I was joking, and then I told my my thesis advisor, Charles you.
And he also laughed and like, I was pretty good student. So they account that, well, you're on the fast track to getting a good academic job.
You're already publishing as a grad student. Yeah, but I'm going to be a monk as soon as they get it.
Yeah. And one thing I'll mention another thing.
You know, one of my good friends when I was in the beauty programme,
she was a practising poet and also a scholar of poetry, so she was her busy Typekit was on poetry also.
But we have these conversations.
One of the things you told me, which really troubled me at the time, she said, You know, I never do academic work on the poets I know like she.
She just biography bifurcating her own mind. She had this kind of academic academic persona,
and she and she wouldn't let herself or she wouldn't risk subjecting her beloved poets to academic scrutiny.
And I always thought that, like what? I mean, why this schizophrenia like, you know, that don't always turn me off?
But she would have cordoned off the academics from what she's most passionate about.
And for me, I mean, as you said, there's always been a more organic relationship.
So from the very beginning of my academic life, I had, I mean, the only reason I do academic work is out of a sense of urgency.
That's that was that's always been very, very important to me.
It's never been like, I, you know, there's there's a phrase something is merely academic,
but I've never understood academics in that way that something is of only academic interest.
Academics, for me, is it is a vital existential interest.
So that's why friends is what my my father is more of a traditional Indian and especially Bengali.
They value intellectual activity. So from a young age, you can prosecute push me in the sciences, my mom's of molecular biologist.
So he made me enrol as an undergrad at Berkeley, as a computer science major.
Within one year, I just realised that I'm not interested in computer science.
And so I switched to English literature philosophy precisely because of my intuition was whatever I did my academic work in.
It needs to be something I'm deeply passionate about that I'm invested in. So that stayed with me.
I think that's really important. And also remember, I met a disillusioned English graduate student who was spending a year over a few years in Oxford.
And he loved it because I was in this library and I was like bright eyed, bushy tailed as a third year undergraduate.
And I was like, really excited about reading literary criticism. And he just looked at me like, you know, it's you're at a nice period right now,
but eventually you're going to just start getting disgusted with academic scholarship. And I said, why what they did?
It becomes, you know, so but it still hasn't left the amazing things.
And you know,
I think it depends on your attitude toward your work and the way you think about what scholarship is and the nature of the academic pursuit.
But for instance, whenever I read a scholarly book or article on on whatever topic I'm interested in, I like to think of what I'm doing,
that kind of academic engagement as just having a sophisticated conversation with a very smart person.
That's the way I've always thought about reading scholarship and doing scholarship.
It's this kind of global intellectual marketplace or kind of arena for thoughtful discussion.
Yeah, no, that's that's fascinating, I think. Yeah, this is a really interesting perspective, I think like myself and then I talked about this,
so I'm sure he can talk about it like we've sort of felt a degree of that schizophrenia that you're talking about,
between academic knowledge, it's rich knowledge. I think for me,
coming into like my interest in Indian philosophy started with this like reading this kind of like spiritual sort of self-help genre of literature,
reading books on practical Buddhism and getting interested that way.
And then like that driving my passion and then coming to university and then studying in this different format.
And you know, there are like there's just a kind of felt difference that I've that I've experienced.
Like when people talk about meditation, say, like in an academic setting, people are concerned with questions of, you know,
like the epistemic value of it's like describing it in a very particular way and like how
it functions in a kind of social setting in the way that the religion is structured.
But like when you when you do the practise actually as a practise,
when you physically do the practise and when you like, read from that small spiritual perspective,
it seems like when people talk about meditation and when you actually practise it,
there's a way in which you intuitive knowledge makes certain things obvious to you, like it seems.
You know, the truth claims that a sort of you can test academically, like become really obvious and when you experience it first hand.
So there's a way in which the knowledge of it seems like I'm coming to knowledge of medicine to practise in in different ways.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, no, I mean, that makes sense. But all I would say is there is a place for that spiritual approach within academia.
I mean, that's that's always been my conviction. And it's I mean, all the work I'm doing is sometimes is polemical.
Like, I recently published an article on Sri Otamendi's hermeneutics,
where part of what I'm defending is we ought to be those unique approach to the Vedic scriptures.
And what's unique about it is that I see him as combining the virtues of both the traditional Indian approach.
So what I mean by that is if you look at traditional commentaries on punishment over get so by some criteria over Ramanujan,
there's on the one hand, they each have an axe to grind in a sense because they're exponents of a particular philosophical school.
And they're they've set out to prove that all the all of the scriptures support only their philosophy and not other people's philosophies.
So on the one hand, they have a kind of strong agenda and that colours the way that they interpret the scriptures.
But at the same time, they all universally believe in the spiritual value and power of the Scriptures.
So they believe that through this study of the scriptures alone, can you actually achieve enlightenment?
You can attain knowledge of the ultimate reality.
So I think you're not, even though it takes the what's really valuable in the traditional Indian approach, which is this belief,
this conviction in the spiritual power of the scriptures and combines it with modern theological slash historical methods, which is which are typical.
That's the kind of stuff that you're talking about a mirror of what you're finding
in Oxford and other workplace institutions when they talk about meditation,
whatever. But I don't see it as an either or. And part of the reason why I think I mean that's so exciting is because he combines his two approaches.
And I and what I'm doing as a scholar is trying to prove that that synthetic approach is actually academically respectable.
And I'm not alone. So I have to build on the work of other scholars.
We will argue this, you know, decades ago, like Francis Mooney, who is a very prominent professor of Hinduism at the Harvard Divinity School.
I draw a line in his work in that same article that I wrote. I'm sure we do. And he's one of the first to argue this is that he's saying, you know,
one of the things that most modern scholars are ignoring when they talk about the
corporations in public either is the transformative potential of those texts.
So you see how as an academic, you can make those kinds of arguments.
You can you can make the argument on academic terms like it's a kind of internal critique within the field.
So I would I would be reluctant to say that there's a kind of academic approach to spiritual topics.
And then there's this spiritual approach to practitioners approach.
I think that there is eminently ample scope for the scholar practitioners own perspective within academia.
And in fact, just in the past decade or two, the voice of a scholar practitioner within Hindu studies,
religious studies has become much more prominent. So friends, you talk about meditation, I think just last year.
I don't know if you've done interviews with Rita Shaw or not at the Graduate Theological Union in California,
and presumably Porter showed them a bill. The more you know, these are true scholars at the Graduate Theological Union.
They just came out with an entire edited volume on, I think it's called something like a meditation in contemplative studies or something like that.
And they got scholars from around the world to contribute and reassure us,
a very prominent scholar practitioner, she's she's an actual guru in the shot, the tradition, and she does.
She has a daily meditation practise, and she's involved me in some of the probing,
some clever projects involving scholar practitioner kind of scholarship.
So I think that there's a new trend actually,
that is moving in the direction of taking seriously scholars who have also practised whatever they're talking about.
And just to give you another example. Jerome Gilman is a very prominent philosopher religion.
He published a book in 1987 called Experience of God in the Rationality of Theistic will be published by Cornell University Press and in the preface.
To that, in a very, very he's a hardcore analytic philosopher.
In the preface, he starts by saying, in my own modest way, might this entire book is a defence of the epistemic value mystical experience?
But I got a glimpse of that through my own personal experiences. And he just says, applicable, you know, without really any.
But he says, Look, I'm not. I'm not comparing myself to any saints out there,
but I'm going to be honest and forthright to tell you that it's because I had these kind of spiritual experiences that I'm even writing this book.
So what you're talking, I really think that you can combine the methods, and I think that's the most promising approach within academia.
So I was going to ask how you see like philosophy telling in, it seems.
I mean, like in when it looks at, you know, what you would in your paper,
when you're looking auburn nose approach to sort of van hermeneutics not going to thing.
It seems a lot easier to sort of take a risk to when you like looking at analysing something tax or studying them.
It seems you just all take a respectful approach where you can combine, you know,
you sort of practise and sort of respect reverence for the tax whilst trying to sort of analyse them historically.
But with philosophy like, I mean, Auburn doesn't you wouldn't have considered himself a philosopher or or like, what?
What he did his philosophy. And it seems like it's sort of the part of me felt like drawn more towards looking at like historical analysis.
We're just looking at texts rather than like the idea of actual speculative philosophy of
like trying to arrive at truth when it's a matter of like when was attacked written here,
its authors were, you know, sort of cultural background of the Typekit seems to be easier and a more like detached white
sort of discuss those things and come some sort of conclusion about them when it comes to like,
I don't know, like more more speculative philosophy of trying to like actually arrive certain truths.
It seems like that's like more.
There's more of a tension between that and sort of, you know, your in practise or being within a particular tradition in that kind of thing.
I was wondering if you see any difference between you? I.
Well, OK, I'm not entirely sure I follow everything you say here, but if I understand you correctly,
I mean one example that there's a philosopher who passed away a few decades ago,
his name with Ninian Smart, and he wrote about a lot of the mystical experience in the entertainment value, which was.
One of the things he said was, I like this analogy. I discussed this in my book Infinite Palestinian Reality.
He says, Look, there's entire self-healing philosophy called the classroom perception.
It's a it's it's it's the study of the epistemology of perception. Right?
Ordinary sense perception. And what he says is, look, when philosophers talk philosophically about perception, what is the natural perception?
Epistemology, your perception? One of the key data key piece of data is their own perceptions are right because we all procedural people were cited.
We see things and that's absolutely relevant when we because we, you know,
it's it's important to understand the phenomenology of perception when we start
discussing philosophically what the epistemic structure of perception is and then,
he says. So it's really funny that when we come to the epistemology mystical experience that suddenly philosophers think that it's not useful at all.
And it may be a hindrance to have spiritual experience yourself today, he says.
No. I mean, if you if you just think it's it's very reasonable to think that people who actually have firsthand experience of
what a spiritual experience is or in a better epistemic position to talk about them at a philosophical level.
But I don't know whether that's and that response that attended to what you're right about.
So maybe you can reform in the question if I missed what you were saying? Yeah, sure.
It was more just like, you know, or vendome himself would never have sort of sat down and done philosophy in the sense of like,
well, I mean, look, look, I mean, even that. I mean, look, he he I don't think he ever called himself a philosopher,
but I think the part of the reason is because he had, let's say, a narrow understanding of what philosophy is.
You know, I think he understood philosophy as intellectual speculation, and that's not what he was doing.
I mean, you know, because he's he's everything he's writing was coming from the standpoint of realisation.
He said that himself. But if you just expand the notion of philosophy, which I think is absolutely essential,
especially when you talk about Indian philosophers and I consider him to be a foremost Indian philosopher, right philosophy.
You can't define philosophy in such a rationalistic sense.
And once you've redefined philosophy in a more capacious way as just kind of, I don't know if I can give you a nice, neat definition now,
but but allowing for non rationalistic epistemic sources as valid ones for, you know,
doing philosophical work, then I think he's I'm there's I see no reason not to call him a philosopher.
The life divine, if you read it study. I mean, it's one of the more it's it's a very profound, deep and abstruse philosophical text.
I mean, as abstruse and as sophisticated as Hagel's phenomenology of spirit who are science of logic, that's where you want Stephen Phillips.
He's a prominent yoga scholar, but actually his he did his work at Harvard many decades ago.
It's like early 80s, late 70s, and it's because it is was unfiltered,
though it is one of the I think it was the first book written in English on the plus Yeshua. And he was, you know, his dissertation wiser was Robert.
So. Yes, I was Jones that I say I would say that a shrug of a thaw would not be of Wall Street flaws for only if we have a narrow,
more western understanding of what philosophy is. But if we have that Western understanding, I think, you know,
do the PRESA critics count as philosophers and as Plato count as a philosopher because he was kind of boring, put dinosaurs, you know?
So I think what is philosophy itself needs to be asked before we start deciding who is a philosopher and who is?
And I was just going to say, I think that approach that of making the definition of philosophy more capacious as a solution
to this problem of feeling this schizophrenia is going to be the most appropriate one like this.
I think, you know, in my understanding, this like sense of philosophy is this kind of dry academic discipline and then spirits like on the other side,
it comes out of like a particular historical development that the modern academy is part of.
So, yeah, instead of sort of choosing a side trying to break that dynamic, and I think that's one like,
really cool thing to studying it in philosophy can do because it comes out of a tradition that has had spirituality,
like that's much more like linked to philosophy, and it's based on different assumptions.
It can sort of disclose the way that our philosophical presuppositions are like particular, historically particular in a way that we don't see.
Yeah, that's right. And I would say that, you know, for some of our most ancient ancient scriptures, like the one, he had an inhibition ocean.
One of the most famous mantras in the book when he showed is, you know,
it's it's telling us that how should we realise the how do we realise the true nature?
And this is sort of your month of unity outside of your heart?
There are three main practises you first listen to the scriptural teachings, you know, the nature of the all.
And then amongst them, you're so shown as the first which is listening and then monologue reflection.
That's intellectual reflection. But it's understood from a very early time in Indian history as a spiritual practise.
So an Indian intellectual question is a spiritual practise. It's an essential component of some of the most spiritual practise.
And then the third practise so strong as the first, which is listening to the scriptural teachings.
Second is monotone, which is intellectual reflection on the spiritual teachings.
Thinking about it from different perspectives. Questioning, challenging what about this or how do I know this?
Or how can you prove this? How do I know God exists, whatever it is?
And then the third stage is the middle class in which it's complicated exactly how you translate it and how you understand it.
But one, I think one way of thinking about it is internalisation.
So after you hear the scriptural teachings, after you reflect intellectually on them, try to assimilate them into your life,
try to kind of reflect those intellectual teachings at the level of praxis and in your daily life.
So intellectual reflection from a very early point in history was part and parcel of spiritual practise.
Yeah, I think that's like it's an interesting way of putting the audio speech,
but it's like I've heard it said in that in that way before this idea of internalisation,
especially when looking at some of the Buddhist material I've been looking at this year, it seems it seems that way.
But it's interesting to me like, I think that. You know, there's a way in which perhaps.
That way of looking at it might make it seem so.
I guess for me, like the stories of like I'm coming to an intellectual conclusion and then I'm internalising that.
So there's a way in which,
like the intellectual conclusion is kind of primordial where was like epithet like meditative experience might make me want to say that what
happens first is that I gain a spiritual understanding and then I kind of put it into my mind and put it into like a systematic philosophical way.
So do you see like in your own kind of spiritual life,
that it works that way that like you gain the kind of intellectual knowledge that you
understand it on a rational basis and then you internalise it to your spiritual experience?
Or is there a way in which the the epistemic direction kind of want to other way in a sense?
Yeah, that's good. That's a nice question. I mean, I think it varies from person to person.
I'm not lucky enough or I wasn't lucky enough to have had enlightenment before embarking on my fantastic experience of that.
That's ideal. If you could just, you know, you get enlightenment, then you, you know, give up everything, you know.
So for me, I mean, the way that you know, part of the reason I was so attracted to the tradition of the Romans to making the
tradition is that one of the first things I read of so many victims was Raja Yoga,
and it's one that I do when you mention it anymore.
And in the very beginning, and it's important to keep in mind that when Vivekananda is writing these things, he didn't.
Actually, I think he may have just dictated the word, but in any case,
he was addressing a Western audience, and he knew this is the late 19th century.
You know, U.S. and Europe, where people were very, very sceptical of religion.
This is post Darwin, right? And what he was trying to prove to this sceptical,
critically minded Western audience is that religion is just as much of a science as physics or chemistry or mathematics.
And the way he was trying to do that is, I think, very compelling.
And what he said was, look in the sciences, you start with their goddesses and then you test that hypothesis through an experiment.
And then if the experiment supports that causes you promote the hypothesis into the status
of a theory you would read that's going to go to the science works in a crude way. And he says, Well, look, how does religion work?
You start with a hypothesis. Call it faith, whatever you want.
But it's a, you know, the sages tell us that you are not the body.
You are not the mind, but you are the eternal optimist. Let's take this as a kind of working spiritual hypothesis.
I don't have any realisation of that. I can understand intellectually and I can also intellectually.
I can convince myself that there's nothing overtly, logically incoherent about it.
So I can say it's possible it's within the realm of possibility. And then there's this idea of what this gets really complicated.
And I've written like a lot like I've written books on this issue of the epistemic.
Why should we why should we take seriously the testimony of mystics in different traditions?
So that's a complicated issue.
But let's just let's take for granted now that, you know, when a Ramakrishnan or Vivekananda or a Jesus or a Sufi mystic tells us,
I have realised God, and you can too if you follow these practises.
Let's just take for granted that it's reasonable to take what they're saying seriously.
That doesn't mean believe them not to be gullible.
But the idea is to provisionally accept what they're seeing as possibly true and then acting on that assumption and then testing it out.
So that's what we've begun to emphasise again and again that religious life
is about testing hypotheses and deepening that initial faith or conviction,
ultimately to the point of realising the truth of that faith. Right. So faith should ultimately mature into realisation.
That's the Hindu approach. You should never risk content with a dogmatic belief in, you know, a certain creed.
That would be, you know, that would be short circuiting your spiritual life.
But it's I think it's it's it's a it's a very reasonable starting point for probably the vast majority
of spiritual practitioners who don't have the luxury of starting with the spiritual experience.
There's a middle ground.
I think there are some people who start with a kind of inchoate spiritual conviction, which, you know, through sustained spiritual practise,
combined with intellectual reflection in other things, other disciplines that that inchoate conviction gets crystallised in stronger and deeper.
And then ideally, that would mature into spiritual realisation. But I do.
I do get the sense that, you know, if you're not fooling you, it's very easy to deceive yourself in spiritual life.
There's always a danger is that I've seen so many people. I don't want to look at how can I judge one of what other people have attained in origin?
I just get the sense, especially as amongst you hear a lot of people who have who are leading very ordinary lives,
who claim to have talked to God and this and that.
And I just get the sense that in 90s that often it's sentimental, it's sentimentalism, it's emotionalism.
It's mistaking some kind of sort of ephemeral, sort of ecstatic feeling for something.
Spiritual, so, yeah,
spiritual life is not nearly as romantic as many people make it out to be you
or me or the way I even thought it was when I first started my monastic life.
You know, a lot of it, there's a joke within our order,
and I think it's true of most religious organisations, which requires a life like a lifelong commitment.
What they say is, you know, when you first joined the order, you think that you're going to do, you know,
spiritual practise for about six months and then you're going to Somalia and everything will be great.
That's just not the way it works.
You come down to Earth pretty quickly after you try the order and you realise there's a day to day struggle involved that you know,
no amount of unless you do it, you or you, unless you then jump into the water and you're not going to learn how to swim.
Spiritual life it's not all fun and games is difficult, and it's a struggle. Yeah, I remember reading in Thomas Merton.
He was like a Catholic monk. Yeah, I read his autobiography. It's beautiful.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Fantastic story. I remember him. Yeah, yeah, fantastic.
It's so well-written. But I remember him saying in that book that when he eventually joins Get Somebody,
which is his TRAPPIST monastery, that when he's seeing new people come in,
the people who are, like, really like, overly devoted and think that they're going to live some crazy,
beautiful life, those are the people who will end up leaving.
But it's the people who come in with this sense of like, this is just another place to be,
which is a kind of seeing it as like a vocation in a practical sense.
Those are the people who end up saying, yes, you got to be in it for the long haul.
There's a certain mentality that requires, you know,
the Sanskrit word that using the guitar is gritty and it means something like perseverance and a kind of steadfastness showrunners.
To give the example, he said he would contrast a kind of an occasional farmer like somebody who's just kind of trying out farming,
even though that's known as kind of lifelong.
He wasn't born into a kind of farming tradition, and he says that's the kind of person who they'll start farming in,
you know, one season when there's a lot of green rainfall and everything is perfect.
They're very happy in, you know, the next year when suddenly there's a kind of drought,
the moment that things go badly for them, they just stop farming altogether.
They abandon their their farming career and they go into some other field occupation.
And he says, if you contrast that with the person who was born into, you know, a tradition of farmers, you know, from many generations ago.
And he says that person, no matter how many years of severe drought and, you know,
all sorts of adversities and setbacks, [INAUDIBLE] never abandon his tree.
[INAUDIBLE] [INAUDIBLE] continue to be a farmer for the rest of his life.
And he says the true Sondergaard, the true spiritual aspect is the one who is committed to it for a lifetime.
It's not. You should never come to spiritual life or I don't want to say never,
but it's it's it's always more promising to come to spiritual life from a standpoint
of a kind of not not from a standpoint of like some kind of passing emotion,
but of something deeper in a more mature and comments, I think.
And I guess, like rational conviction can be a way of having that very divinity.
Yes, exactly. Yeah. Yeah, because in times where your spiritual practise isn't bearing fruit and you like getting
doubts from that and having that rational conviction and very sincere spiritual aspirin,
we'll go through a dark night of the soul and or many dark nights of the soul.
And in time there in times like those that you know you.
It's it's one of the things I did when I first joined was even before I joined the order,
I started memorising the cloak of a guitar verse by verse there 700 Sanskrit slogans.
And yeah, so within the first two years of my journey, I memorised the whole thing.
And that's a great resource, you know, like in moments of weakness you just recite to yourself these Sanskrit slogans, which are relevant, right?
And there are some beautiful look in there which just instantly bring the mind up more, you know?
These days, I'm taking to classical music, and it's a very powerful way to bring the mind up.
So I listen to some, you know, sacred music, a bond, for instance.
He's one of my favourites or one of my favourite contemporary composer is unrepaired.
If you've heard of him, he's an Estonian composer. He is magnificent.
And you just listen to a few minutes, five minutes or 10 minutes of this music and it just brings a minor.
Yeah, and that's a really cool Segway into like another thing that we wanted to ask you.
So, yeah, it's really interesting that you've memorised these slogans of the Bhagavad
Gita and that you can use them as this kind of resource to bring your mind up,
as you say. And it's interesting because Jill and I have both studied Sanskrit and sort of informal settings to,
you know, a small degree and both, like, really enjoyed it.
And you know,
and I've been lucky enough to have a little bit of a taste of experience of what it's like to study Sanskrit in a traditional South Asian setting.
And the one one thing that we both experience and we've talked about is the way in
which the declining sense Chris feels so different to writing philosophical essays.
You know, in the way that Sanskrit is, you know,
in learning it and the way that it involves a lot of memorisation and especially in like traditional
South Asian settings where Sanskrit is taught mainly synchronisation is a huge emphasis on memorisation.
Just rote learning, you know, as you have done slow kids from these texts.
That that has a very different quality to the kind of intellectual stimulation that you need to write an essay where your
mind is making connexions between those thoughts and then you you're proliferating and trying to gain a load of information,
condenser in mind is kind of going whatever the place for in memorisation, there's a way in which you're repeatedly returning to the same thing.
And there's a, you know,
it feels a lot more sort of like yogic practise where you're just like taking the mind of the body through a certain set and movements.
And there's a way in which that feels sort of calming and mindful, whereas like, sometimes I'll be right writing an essay I'll have,
like all of my tabs, open in like 10 books next to me and I'll come out of it and I'll feel like I just ran a marathon or something.
You know, your mind is just all over the place. So, yeah, I wonder how you felt that difference in how you sort of relate that to yourself again?
I mean, I I feel like we were having this dilating where you're presenting what seemed to be either
alternatives and I shoot back with the both and kind of answer to this case do psychedelics.
Yeah. So it's good. This is fun. So, you know, when I when I when I memorise a guide, though, this is back in 2010 or nine,
my practise was I will not memorise a single verse until I know the meaning of every word.
And so what you're talking about, this kind of the intellectual stimulation that was part of the memorising.
And in fact, I found that it's much easier to memorise a verse when you know the spiritual meaning of the verse.
And so and I literally I was like, I've run experiments when I was like, not,
I would not learn the meaning of the verse and I would try to memorise it.
It would take me longer, sometimes twice the amount of time it might take me 10 minutes or 15 minutes to memorise a verse once.
But when I understand the meaning of every word that I memorise it in my own, mainly taking two to four minutes, you know?
So again, I would say, and I always I mean, I never memorised anything just for the sake of memorising or for showing off or,
you know, just for the sake of mechanical, the kind of, I don't know, some kind of like to call my mind through repetition.
That's that was not the idea. The idea was these verses are good verses replete with spiritual power and with deep spiritual content, right?
And so memorising for me was, from the very beginning, a way of helping me to internalise the spiritual content of the teachings.
And it's really true. I mean, when you memorise a little verse and then sometimes in my meditation,
like a version of this come up or some kind of mantra from from a scripture,
and there's a way that you can when the mind becomes calm where you can,
you're in a better position to assimilate the meaning of the end of that verse.
And in fact, one of the direct disciples of Swami Austria-Hungary's and his name is Ludhiana.
He was a very yogic kind of spiritual aspirin. And when somebody asked him about the How do you how do you study, how do you read the book of Geeta?
His answer was, Here's what I do.
I read one verse of the guitar and then until I realised what that verse is telling me in my direct experience, I don't read the next verse.
So that's a pretty extreme thing. But but she was a great soul and, you know, he actually was enlightened.
But so he literally said, that's the that's the right way.
That's an ideal way to read the tweet that you read one verse you keep, you know,
reflecting on it tried and true life to the point where you actually realise what that person is teaching.
Then you move on to the next verse and memorisation is a help in that process.
That's what I would say. So memorising memorisation to me is a way of it's a form of meeting Yasir.
If we're talking about that threefold scheme, right?
Shovlin, I'm one of the individuals and I'm hearing the scriptural teachings and reflecting on them intellectually and then internalising,
Oh, we might we might be inclined to put memorising in the morning.
I would say it straddles Moderna and the DSM in that it's actually a very
strong it's a very powerful way of helping it internalise spiritual teachings.
How do you find that studying? I mean, you know, doing say this sort of the job in philosophy you've been doing.
Whereas like it feels a lot easier to sort of the reason why you would sort of devote so much attention and sort of energy to, you know,
memorising the Geeta was because it's such a like, weighty thing and you have that respect towards it, as you know, like to me, sounds.
If it was hard that when you said you read things more of that genre to then go back and study something else,
which maybe you don't have the same sort of reverence or respect for,
and it feels like you're sort of wasting intellectual energy on when something you don't really care about as much like you do.
Yeah, I mean, yeah, but I guess one thing I would I mean, this is going back to that, you know, the antidote about that friend of mine at Berkeley,
why would you ever put yourself in a situation where you're reading things that don't excite you intellectually?
You know, like the whole reason I read in academics and studied Demandes De was so that I could.
Work on the stuff I love. You know, another I just mentioned that I don't know when I started my piece of programming within like one or two years,
even the programme I remember,
I was hanging out with some of my peers who were in the same department, and a lot of them were written with anxiety about like institutional slash.
Academic anxiety is what associate professor think of me. Will I ever get a job?
Oh man, I can't publish anything and like and I just looked at them.
I was like, You know why you made me so miserable, you know?
And then I say, I said, You know how I look? I look, I see my Ph.D. programme here as a six year paid vacation.
That's what I told them, and they were deeply offended by that. But I didn't mean it as a in an offensive way.
What I said, you know, like, you should be having fun in the stuff you should.
You're studying that you're studying and then you're working on that,
you're reading and then you're writing about you should feel deeply invested and passionate about it.
And if you're not, then I think you probably choosing the wrong topic.
I mean, I mean, I don't want to say that, you know, there may be times when you're in a class, for instance, where you know, not everything.
Maybe like ten percent of the material or 50 percent is not that exciting for you, but you know what I mean?
So if you're asking me about that kind of thing, well, fine. But I mean, I still think it's useful to be exposed to different perspectives.
So what is it about that material that doesn't sound you even that's a learning experience in a way, right?
Oh, you know, so that's why I was trying to explain earlier about why I moved away from a strict focus on Western philosophy,
German philosophy to Indian philosophy as part of the reason was because of that perceived split between theory and practise.
But so, yeah, it's part of the things that I found.
One of the things I found frustrating was philosophy, but you can't know that unless you study it and you know,
frustration itself and even boredom can be a source of it can be an intellectually fertile source in my mind.
I really look at another thing I'll say is one thing about my personality is a sort of combated by nature and polemical by nature.
And during my Ph.D. programme from the outset, Amir was talking earlier about how in an academic setting,
often when you study texts, the approach is more theological.
Historical, cultural and cultural studies write that kind of approach.
I, from the beginning, I hated that approach. And so all of my academic papers, the first publications I came out with as a graduate student,
what I still do and write my latest article, actually, you know, so many years after my body entree ought to be the same thing,
which is these texts have a power to move us in ways that are purely physiological slash historical scholarship just misses altogether.
But I always made that part of my academic work, and I, you know,
even though that was deeply unfashionable, you know, in one of his books called Long Time Me Meditations.
But I would always I was always kind of the eccentric and kind of the renegade from an economic standpoint.
I would espouse old fashioned standpoints like within the field of literary criticism.
I was a staunch advocate of the phenomenon of a kind of phenomenological approach, which was supposed to have been dead in the 50s, in the 1950s.
But no, I thought that was a much better approach than the historical slash cultural studies approach.
And I do. I see myself as doing the same thing within the field of religious studies and philosophy of religion,
which is arguing from an academic standpoint for the importance of the scholar practitioners perspective,
respect for more traditional approaches that give more weight to the spiritual, meditative sides of things.
But I always made that part of my academic agenda.
We could put it that way. So you need a little courage to do that because you're like, Look, and also,
for instance, the there's an overwhelming emphasis on on one coming forward in history.
I get that sense, at least if I were a student at Oxford and I didn't like that approach, I would argue with my professors.
I would get in arguments. I would I would risk getting BS or CS from them.
But in the end, my professors at Berkeley respected me for arguing against them and for, you know, following my own back.
And I think I think the problem is when you capitulate to academic fashion, you lose your soul at that very moment.
You know, when you when you start worrying too much about like, you know, if I eat well, if I, if I,
if I defend this on unfashionable academic position, will I be able to get a job at the end of this if you start going in that direction?
You gone off the rails and that's the that's a recipe for an academic midlife crisis.
Mm hmm. So you have to take risks. I mean, that's important.
That's the thing I want to tell you is if you if you, you know, I've always believed in this ideal of doing academic work on what you love,
you're going to have to encounter a lot of opposition resistance criticism on name-calling.
And I just kind of like, Boy, with all that and I actually fed off that kind of energy, but not everybody has the stomach for that.
It's just a beautiful thing about academia is that you've given that space in a way to do that.
And I mean Oxford's. You know, for all its traditionalism and its particular fashions, it focuses,
I mean, my experience has been that I've been able to really say what I want and,
you know, to so scholars who at the top of their fields and really be taken seriously at sort of my young age,
which is, yeah, which is really fantastic. I do. I do sometimes feel that like.
Even if I want to say what like opinion that I have, which is sort of more about the power of these texts and movies, as you say,
in the spiritual value of them, like sometimes my opinion kind of gets lost in all of the questions that are being asked of me,
you know, and it's like a way in which the institution and the questions that he's asking and like the scholarship that you're reading kind of like,
I feel like I'm being pushed to answer questions in a particular way, in a way that doesn't sort of have.
I don't know sometimes like I can read poetry, it can be neat, sure, and it's a way in which like that white saying,
like in the style of their writing, the kind of that that feeling comes across, that passion comes across, but like writing academic articles.
You know, I lose that. But what would put one? Well, I mean, this is no you know, the way to put you on the couch a little bit.
But like, what is it about the writing in the papers that he feels writing because it's a case of case thing.
And yeah, it is. Yeah, so it's like on.
I mean, it's partly the questions and the kind of topics that we focus on the fact that they are more sort of philological.
Yeah. Sorry. Let me interrupt you for a second there. I mean, the way you frame the question was interesting, which is that, you know,
sometimes I like the way I like the questions that are said to me, but something like that.
You brought up this idea that, you know, the kinds of questions they asked me to answer.
And what I would say is, if you're not satisfied with the kind of questions that they're asking you, you frame your own questions.
That's part of what I'm saying about that risk that you have to take in the kind of courage that's necessary to to follow your passions.
You can argue with them and say, I think you're asking the wrong questions.
And I think that's part of the thing is that what happens is when one approach in an academic field becomes a dominant one,
people start taking for granted what the right question to ask for.
And I think really deep academics are the ones who actually who actually are able to question those fundamental questions.
You know, are those the right questions there to ask, you know?
So for instance, in the case of like, if we're if we're doing an academic study of the open issues or the right question to ask,
you know, what was the truth after the coopetition composed by one or two authors?
OK, that's what do got. What century was it composed in another question?
You know what I mean? You know, but there's another entirely different set of questions that can be asked about, you know, like, Oh, you know,
what was the spiritual value of these scriptures or what have those values been for spiritual practitioners in the course of the past three millennia,
for instance? And I think that's part of the part of what you can do as an academic is to reframe the kinds of questions that are being asked.
Yeah. So go ahead. So continue, though I'm not sure if that answered the question. No, no, that doesn't.
Yeah, no, it's it's a very hopeful way of looking at it. Yeah, I think and you know, I'm sort of being somewhat sort of negative because this is an.
You know, concerns that I guess I've had,
but I've also had really great experiences of being able to like white answers to questions that I think are quite important.
And, you know,
the dissertation I just wrote like make a point about the nature of Indian philosophy and certainly oddity that I felt quite passionate about.
So, yeah, no, that that capacities is definitely there.
And the other thing I just mentioned is, you know, you're still a student, right?
I mean, the more you write and once you start publishing things, the easier part of it is just the nuts and bolts of writing.
A paper is very demanding.
Intellectually, it's taxing and people just because, you know, preparing for a training for a marathon is painful from every Olympics is painful.
But you know, the more you train for a marathon, for instance, the better you get in, the more effortless it becomes.
But I think that's true of academic writing, too, is that the more you do it, the better you'll get at it.
And the more you're able to do, the less exhausting mentally and the less stressful the kind of the mechanics of writing the paper becomes.
And the more you can just kind of be, you know, treated as kind of just like, oh,
just a really nice way of delving deeply into something you're passionate about.
Yeah, because I wonder if you sort of see like a particular problem with this, with this topic in particular, that sometimes it feels like, you know,
you're kind of debasing the sacred in some way by trying to bring it into a sort of didactic or
combative atmosphere that you often get in academia that when you talking specifically about,
you know, you know, things like the opening shots or just generally, you know, spiritual life and practise of whether, you know,
there's a yes or some sort of way in which you sort of yeah, like debasing things that you hold sacred would have value by bringing them.
Yeah, no. That's a good that's an interesting question. I mean, what I would say is, look, I mean, combat intellectual combat,
intellectual debate is built into the Indian spiritual tradition, you know, I mean,
there's a whole if you study traditional commentaries on Indian scriptures, there's a whole there's this format,
which is, you know, the commentator will first give the pull of a buckshot position, which is the opponent's view.
Well, look, this is one way of interpreting this scriptural verse. But here are the reasons why that's wrong.
And here's the second, though, which is the Sanskrit term for this is the true interpretation, right?
So and then, you know, there's a whole tradition of a Buddhist getting into a debate with a few months ago.
Or even not then. And they just go ahead and they're like, No, you're wrong for these reasons.
But the beauty of anyhow, if you study the idea that the guys who today they discuss the terms of debate and
I really like this because it says that in the beginning of a debate of a debate,
the first thing that the two parties have to do,
the two opponents have to do is competently explain the opponent's perspective view to the satisfaction of the opponent.
That's a really wonderful way to it.
That's a requirement that's a prerequisite for starting from getting a debate off the ground is if I'm debating with you in here about this,
no, with anything,
I have to first tell you to your satisfaction what your Buddhist position is and then you have to do the same with might be the other position.
And only after about satisfied do we then start embarking on this debate.
And then there's a kind of a more legendary kind of aspect of this, which is that they claim some people claim that in the old times in India,
the loser of the debate would would would have to convert to the opponents standpoint, even if that's not true or that was only true some of the time.
I like the spirit of that, which is the idea that it's through free spirit kind of intellectual enquiry.
The aim is always truth. And if you're if you were convinced by another personal position,
you have the courage to give up what you initially believed in and to accept a different position.
So all of this, I think this is this what you're calling combat.
I think that that has a very respectable role in spiritual practise as long as you remove the ego from it.
I mean, I think that, you know, the word combat itself may have negative connotations, but you know, if you're doing it in the spirit of enquiry,
there's another thing that's mentioned in Chinese philosophy,
which is there are different kinds of debate and a discussion, three kinds we don't know.
Oh, oh, Volga is there is the third one.
And then the third is not coming.
So. So we don't know is one where your own your only aim is to destroy the other person's standpoint, but you don't have to.
You don't have a standpoint of your own. Jumbo is the second one.
The second one is juggling where you're trying to prove your own standpoint basic and correct something like that.
And the third standpoint is called boredom, and that's the ideal right, which is the ideal debate, which is you're both aiming at the truth.
So if what you're calling combat has the name of truth, the writing and truth, and I think it has a very important role to play in spiritualism.
Did you feel like like at arriving at what you called truth through intellectual discourse,
you sort of you end up with a position which you know, will never itself actually be, you know,
whoever wins the debate hasn't actually taken a definitive and actually arrived at truth because it's just an intellectual standpoint, you know,
and like I remember an infomercial every years, I think it's, you know,
shaver one point size, you know, some people for advice to some people fight fighter.
But you know, in truth, not know me because I'm beyond striking on Jan. 18.
You know, it's the idea that the like sort of we have all of these various sort of intellectual positions.
And then when we, you know, if you have to convert, do you have a beat to you in a debate?
You know, it's sort of the end sort of feeding into the notion that somehow this sort of we're arriving at the
sort of truth or incorrect standpoint when really it's just one of many intellectual standpoints.
Yeah. But I guess I wouldn't go to the extreme of just, you know, embracing some kind of realm like radical relativism and say that,
you know, whatever intellectual stamina you adopt is equally fine.
And I don't I think that there's a middle ground to be had and you can acknowledge that, you know,
every intellectual view is going to have some limitations and that the aim is you should just stop at the intellectual level.
But that can still be a very important and arguably indispensable foundation for your spiritual practise.
I think that's why, in the Buddhist scheme of spiritual practises, the ashtanga model.
Right? The first step in the eight steps is some yoga risky the right view.
You should have a clear and accurate picture of reality, even if it's intellectual as a starting point,
as a basis for then moving on to these different spiritual practises,
ethical practises culminating in spiritual realisation, nirvana right through meditation and whatever.
So I don't see them as conflicting. I see. But I think I think it's telling that not just in Buddhism, but in many spiritual paths.
A clear intellectual framework, call it a framework, is indispensable in making progress in spiritual life.
You just think about how you just had a practical level. I'm in a tradition that is centred around Sri Lanka's.
One of the questions that arises for anybody in that tradition is Who is your uncle?
Now, what does he stand for and what is he? What was he?
And there are different answers to the question, you know, and it depends on your intellectual framework.
So if you're a traditional, I'd like to remind them your answer is he, he and everyone else in this world are a figment of my imagination.
I mean, that's a little subjective. But more. They're only temporary.
They're they're only they only have empirical reality. But when I realised the truth that Bronwyn,
there would be neither Ramakrishna nor Solomon Anandiben Bonamia nor Dylan nor this laptop nor this table, but just the non-deliverable.
So that's like, that's one way to legal framework. That's one way of, you know, going about your spiritual practise.
And then there's if you if you adopt a different intellectual framework,
you get a very different answer to the same question who was your own Krishna and how does it factor
into my spiritual life and what kind of and what kind of spiritual practise should I be doing?
Should I be engaging in right? So it's on the basis of an intellectual framework that you can then build your spiritual life,
I think, and then deepen that intellectual conviction into something spiritual.
I mean, that would be the ideal. Don't stop. Don't stop at the intellectual, but you can start at the intellectual.
Yeah. No, I think the speeches and kind of feeds into another question I want to ask you.
We're going to continue this dialectic. I think of us like looking for attention that you say that there is it.
But I think it's good. I think I think, yeah, it's hopeful the perspective that you're giving.
But. Yes, so this idea is why, I mean, so what one place of you know, I've been talking about the tensions,
about the one place that I felt the reconciliation is at times and studying these philosophical systems.
I kind of got strong feelings when I was studying a little bit of like termist philosophy, a bit of a yamaka.
And I've been over Gupta's Kashmiri activism when she when you can kind of get
to a place where you feel like you are a sort of intellectual understanding,
has a kind of spiritual quality that like in contemplating like these theological issues and like the simplicity of gods and you know,
his the way he's necessarily being or the emptiness of all things and the yarmulke.
There's a way in which you kind of like you can come up from your book, look at the world, and it has a slightly different quality.
So there's a way in which I feel like systematic understanding of of these theological issues can can be spiritually enriching.
But at the same time? I think what?
Like, you know, it's interesting in your order, because you're amongst the Ramakrishna and Ramakrishna had a lot of spiritual practises,
as we've talked about, but like he was a big bug that he a big part of his practise was devotion to the mother.
And I feel like some of these like theological speculation.
There's a kind of particular spiritual quality that you get when you when you're engaging with them.
But for that, like specific bucked up, I feel like devotion as your spiritual path.
It seems like perhaps like that contemplation maybe isn't as useful because part of it involves a
kind of job when you are worrying about exactly who God is and you know these theological questions,
then. It seems like your energy is being pushed in a different direction than simply just
accepting God in a sort of more naive way and focussing your energy on devotion.
You know, so I wonder how you sort of you see the relationship between this kind of theological form of spirituality and
and like bhakti as a tradition which is often seen as like it's conceived of as the spiritual path for people.
You know, it's like the lower for people who don't have that kind of intellectual pursuit, you know?
Yeah, I think that's a mistake. I think that's a real it's a shame that that's the stereotype,
which I think you're right that that is a stereotype, but I think it's misleading, if not wrong.
They're extremely sophisticated. But the philosophies in the Indian tradition, you know, granted as we stand right the way down to volumes,
you don't like the way that the certain is that the way that we do Vedanta.
These are just some examples. Kashmiri shape ism. So they can be extremely sophisticated.
And the other thing I would say is, you know, the example of rock is is interesting, right?
Because he just had this spontaneous sense that he was a child of the divine mother.
Right? But that itself is a theological stance. I mean, because that's a theological conception of God as a mother.
Right? Oh, so it's not that she didn't. He was theologically sophisticated.
I would say that he had a kind of theological intuition of the nature of Gollum from the beginning of his practise and then through the practise,
he just deepened that theological conviction into a spiritual realisation.
But I think when you're thinking about more as maybe people who are not sure about what the nature of God is,
maybe that's kind of normal you were thinking about.
And what's interesting is that you study the gospel should understand so many different people would come to him from different standpoints.
And so sometimes white Vishnu would come to him.
And then what he would tend to tell Weisner was is it's great that you worship Krishna, but never think that God never limit God.
Did Gristmill always remember that God has also incarnated as rama and as Jesus and always remember that?
Do you mean you don't each other? That's the Bengali.
For that divine reality we just need to go to without attributes is also so mono with attributes that divine reality,
which is personal, is also impersonal. That divine reality, which is formless, also takes innumerable forms.
And when an object of adultery comes from Russia, he would say,
It's wonderful that you think of Brumbaugh as non-fuel and impersonal, but never limited the divine reality to that impersonal realm.
Always remember that that reality, which indeed Guru has also to give the same thing.
So that's a theological stance. But you see how that beautifully enriches your spiritual practise.
It also makes you a very much more liberal spiritual practitioner. I mean, the root of all religious conflict, violence, murder,
all the stuff that's happening in the world that's been happening for centuries is that people don't have that attitude.
There's religious fanaticism, right? Which is that I'm right. My religion is right.
Therefore, everyone else is wrong. It's wrong to sing. No, you're right.
But that doesn't make other people's religions wrong.
And you need a you need to have a theological framework to explain how different religions can be valid at the same
time that you're already entering into theological territory the moment you accept the validity of multiple religions.
Right. So I think I think in a sense, a sort many integration is that I think theology is inescapable.
You're either a kind of unconscious theologian or you're a conscious dude. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
So, yeah, I guess, like one like maybe final thing we could talk about, which would be fun,
is thinking a little bit about like kind of practical ways of integrating spirituality and academic lives.
I thought, like, if you're willing to share,
we could ask you a bit about how you sort of personally find that balance between spiritual practise and academia.
Maybe a little bit about your daily routine and how you do those things together. So, yeah.
Oh OK. Oh, I wish I had a copy of like a picture of.
So basically, there's an art order Swami Vikram himself sketched out this kind of picture.
I don't know if either of you is familiar with it. You could play fine if you just type in like Ramakrishna mission logo or something.
But anyway, it basically there's like a cobra and then inside that then circle you circular cobra.
There is a motion with a wee bit ocean. So are you seeing it?
Sort of is there a way that we can show and maybe even add that when you edit this or whatever?
OK, cool. And I can send it to you later. Like if yeah, it's like this, OK?
So basically, if you got an address off and then he explained it himself.
And I mean, there's a quotation of him explaining it.
But I'll just some paraphrase what he said was, look, the ideal of our order is to synthesise, to harmonise to the best of our ability,
every single monk in the waters trying to do this, to harmonise the four yogis in our daily spiritual practise.
What are the four yogis? Georgia Yoga, which is the yoga of concentration meditation symbolised by that Cobra sermon garden yoga,
the yoga of egoless works, which is important, which is represented by the way the ocean dynamism.
Right? Then in that same diagram, there's a Lotus which represents about the book The Yoga, The Yoga, Devotion,
Devotion to the personal god, prayer worship, you know, jump repetition of a mantra of the name of God.
And then there is a sun in the background of that image, which represents Guyana knowledge,
and that corresponds to Guyana yoga, the yoga of knowledge, which is the path of, you know, through intellectual discrimination, reflections,
dust and dispassion you know, toward since pleasures, your team the single.
So anyway, so what's only beginning and said is the idea.
Spiritual aspect is the one who instead of just kind of exclusively practising one of these for you unless you can and each one of those,
you guys can take you to the highest goal. So he doesn't deny that.
But he says you'll be a more balanced spiritual aspirant and you'll make the most progress
spiritually if you're able to combine the different yogis in your daily practise.
And so when you ask me about, well, what's the relationship between my academic work and my spiritual practise,
I would actually say that that the question needs to be formulated a bit differently
because my academics has always been one aspect of my spiritual practise.
It's a form of spiritual practise, and it's always been. It's always been since I've become a bucket list.
I mean, when I was a student, it was much more egoistic.
We can say, Oh yeah, I just didn't have the spiritual framework to to to to conceptualise the academic work I was doing in a spiritual way.
But I got I developed, and after I was introduced to my tradition by therapist, we began this tradition.
But since then, since I became a monk, whatever I do and there are little ways to do it in their stages and progress in
kind of deepening that the feeling that your academic work is actually is crucial,
but it's not done overnight. You don't you don't start from the beginning thinking that, you know, with every breath I take, you know,
if I'm working on a point of honour on a paper or a book, you know, I'm not always thinking that I'm doing this for God, that there's no ego involved.
That's not the way it works. Spiritual life isn't that easy. So it's a gradual thing, right?
So the way I've seen it work in my case is that, you know,
when I transition from being just a normal position with egos to games and whatever and sort of,
you know, just trying to prove I'm right more than anything else and a lot of it.
And then when I became a monk where I realised, Well, you know, all all spiritual practise is meant to eradicate ego,
that's a very simple way of explaining what is the aim of spiritual practise, whether it's in Buddhism or Christianity or any other tradition.
It's the elimination of ego, right? And so, well, what does academic work mean?
If you do it as spiritual practise, you have to take the ego out of the academic work.
That's the that's the practise. That's what makes academic work spiritual practise.
And as I said, that's not done overnight.
So what happens is when I first, for instance, transition into my monastic life in 2010, just after my Ph.D. on the same person, right?
And so it was a struggle.
And so when I started writing articles on the yoga syndrome, it's not like I was very yogic all the time in been writing that article I go through.
But there are moments and the whole purpose of the spiritual practise that you try to remind yourself again and again.
And some ways that that sum helps in doing that, I think, are simple things.
It's as mentioned, the guitar.
There's a verse in Chapter nine in the need that when Krishna says yet Colucci young bourgeoisie, yet puberty, the desire.
Yet the Pacific onto that Woolloongabba model, Bernard Krishna says, Whatever you do, whatever you eat,
whatever you offer, you offer to me, whatever you, you know, whatever austerity you practise, do it as an offering to me.
Do it for me. That's a very practical teaching because so what we're taught, you know, end of issues is what do you do in the beginning?
Before you start your work, do a little like recite a mantra and off and say what I'm about to embark on.
I'm doing it for you. And then at the end of the academic work, you offer what you've just done that day again, to God, if you're a theorist or,
you know, there are other ways of approaching you, but I'm just telling you from our standpoint, for instance.
Oh, and just to give you an example from our tradition, there was a very famous playwright named Guinevere Rush, who was an ardent devotee of Shalom.
And he also had a lot of bad worldly habits, so he would frequent prostitutes.
He was an alcoholic. And the moment he met you on Krishna, his life just got, you know, it turned around.
But at the same time, he didn't just like, drop all his bad and bad habits overnight.
And so sometimes what actually comes along was the drunk,
just [INAUDIBLE] drunk and sometimes even abusing and drunk, and we just take everything in stride.
And then after he became sober again, he would feel really bad about how we behave and the children just laugh it off.
And then his coach asked him one day said, Well, you know, isn't this you drinking alcohol bad for me spiritually?
Should I quit? And the Shropshire, he was very practical, too.
And he knew that he could just like, go cold turkey. You know, you could just quit.
So what he told him was eventually, you know, you can, you know, you should work toward that.
But for the time being, before you take a sip of that hard liquor, whatever he was drinking off of that bottle did that to my mother.
That's what he told them. Before you drink off the drink to the divine mother, then drink.
And it's really interesting. He started doing that and just without it, without trying to quit, you know?
But just that small act of offering that that liquor to the divine mother
before you start drinking made him feel guilty about drinking because you know,
what are you want to give to somebody again?
But just imagine giving give a gift to someone you want to make sure it's something worthy of giving, right?
And so you're giving something to God. You don't want to give the worst stuff to God.
You want to give the best of the good. And so just on almost imperceptibly, his whole life got transformed in that way.
So similarly, what I'd say about academic work is, you know, you start from a place of ego.
Everybody does. That's the whole purpose of spiritual practise. You start very egotistical and in the course of your spiritual practise,
you know you're making progress if you feel or if other people feel that you're becoming humbler.
I mean, that's the best test of spiritual progress.
And in your academic work, you can ask yourself, you can compare what you were as an academic five years ago to what you are now, what you are now,
and you can ask yourself, Do I freak out and do I get as upset now from a rejection from a journal as I did five years ago or 10 years ago?
If the answer is yes, then you're not making as much progress as maybe you could be.
And if your answer is a yes or no, just reversed anyway. But the point is,
if you feel that you are a little less upset when a journal is rejecting your paper or you're a little more
generous in a conference when you're in a debate with somebody who has a different standpoint from yours,
you can know for sure that you're making future progress even in your academic work, and that you know you are able,
at least to a certain extent, to do your academic work as a former spiritual practise.
Yeah, that's beautiful. And like. That idea was.
I just just coming back to the intention,
so that ultimately the reason that you do the things that you do isn't out of the sense of like super ego sacrifice,
but it kind of comes spontaneously.
You know that to me, I think is really powerful because when you if you, if you like, try and discipline yourself and say,
like, I'm just not going to do it, then there's a kind of contortion in your being and you feel like part of you.
Part of you still wants to do the thing.
But if you could come out of this intense, yeah, yeah, you know, then you just want to give up drinking because you'd rather live a spiritual life.
And then it's really like, Yeah, I mean, exactly is now you would you would say this.
He would say, you know, a lot of people come to me and complain about lust in anger this and that, he says.
He says, Look, you know, you can't just tell us to go away and to go away.
And something we lust works because there's too deeply rooted.
He says if you can't get rid of lust, drink that lust toward God and say, Oh God, you know, I desire you alone, right?
I think that's along the lines of you. Talk about it in the English word sometimes is sublimation.
So if you're able to direct your egoistic energies in a spiritual direction or channel them in a more spiritual direction,
that becomes a source of energy. I mean, it becomes it becomes a source of dynamism within your spiritual life, you know?
Otherwise, if you just kind of like just try to kind of just like ignore what's going on in you, from it, from, you know,
you know, what's happening at the level of ego or suppress or repress what's happening at the level where you go.
There's bound to be some reaction eventually. Or your spiritual life will be doomed, like you only last for a few days and then you end up,
you know, these are the people that Thomas Merton might have been talking about.
You know, if you're spiritual practises to kind of like if it's too like sort of aggressive and kind of more repression,
more in suppression oriented rather than sublimation oriented, I think that it's a recipe for disaster.
Yeah, thank you so much. Yeah, it's do you have any of the things that you'd like to talk about?
No, nothing off my head for now. Yeah, I think, well, one thing I mean,
you did mention the email and I did want to get to it because I like the and the questions you raised in the email.
Do you didn't you were interested in what are what are some of the differences in daily spiritual practise between people in the Aurobindo tradition,
the tradition is shrouded in and those in my tradition.
I think that's a good question, and it's one that interests me personally because I'm one of the few people in the world.
I think actually who is who, who, who sees reality, even though as in the same spiritual, any additional person and some vegan.
And so like, I absolutely study and revere the works of church.
I mean, the and I try to, you know, incorporate what he talks about into my spiritual practise as I do shamanism
and we become so interested in what's going on on their site in Pondicherry,
right? That's where the shroud of emotion is located. And what's one thing I find interesting is that, first of all, what's important,
one of the key differences is that it's not about tradition, not having the tradition.
Sure, there was not a formal Sunosi, but he also wasn't a householder in that sense.
He was married before he became a yogi. But then he oh, you know, it's not even clear whether you ever consummated his marriage.
I mean, it seems like he was he was he meeting Roman schedule for his entire life?
But in any case, as soon as you turn to spiritual life, he was, you know,
he practised chastity and he insisted to every single follower of his path on the need for celibacy and chastity.
And that struck a lot of people. It's really funny.
If you read his letters on yoga, there's a whole four volume letters on yoga, which is really it's like trying other beat.
That is what is most accessible, because if you read it like divine or sonically, the English is like insane.
It's like, Keep reading this, you know, like hardcore Victorian, you know, very reading.
Abstruse difficult, but let I know there's people. These are these devotees followers of tradition or asking him very,
very mundane questions about day to day struggles in their spiritual practise, you know?
Yeah. And it's the only time he's actually got concrete advice within the last.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. But it's great. So I, you know, just literally just before we started this, I was reading his letters and yoga.
It's just very, very practical on a day-to-day level.
So one of the things that some of the things that were come up getting in is some, some followers of Oceania would write to him and say,
Well, look, you yourself said that so jazz is not the way to go, that we should, you know, try to demonise, divide life here on Earth.
So what's wrong with sex? And you know, why can't we demonise sex?
And he's like, No, there's a wrong way of thinking, right?
So the interesting thing about the of it, the tradition is that on the one hand, it's not a business decision.
On the other hand, it insists on chastity as just the absence of like without any compromise.
It's just as insistent on chastity as our men, as tradition is, but without coenozoic and OK.
So that's one key difference. And the other, I think I see only difference is that in our tradition.
I mentioned that when I was initiated by we saw another in Hollywood.
What that really meant was he gave me a month in which he was given by one of the
direct disciples of Sri Lanka's Now and the direct disciple was given that mantra by,
I think, presumably Sharon himself or the holy mother of the wife of Sharon Krishna.
So the point is this is a tradition of mothers with spiritual power.
And the main one of the main practises in our order is Montre Jumbo, which is make a repetition of that mantra.
And that does not seem to be that does not seem to play a prominent role at all in the
of in the tradition tradition that never initiated disciples into any kind of mantra.
There doesn't seem to be any kind of mantra jump by tradition or any kind of month of it handed down from one guru to the disciple.
So there's those kind of differences.
One thing I do get the sense that o tratamento his philosophies pitched very high, and even the spiritual practise that he talks about are very high.
And that's very difficult to figure out what a father of four other men should do on a day to day basis.
It can be. You can be intimidating. And I think that's partly why he got all these letters like kind of panicking about like,
well, you know, I'm not, you know, I haven't been able to attain the Superman yet. Like, what do I do?
You know, I'm still, you know, there's this girl who I think is cute like me.
Can I pursue that? And like these the kinds of questions that he was facing and he was like, No, you know,
it's really funny that kind of disconnect that you find sometimes between his very
high spiritual ideals and the kind of struggles that his followers were facing.
That's true of our water, too. I'm not saying that in a bad way. I mean, we have similar kinds of things.
But one thing I would say about the way that we read or order or emphasise is no matter how spiritually dry you feel,
how bored you are with your spiritual practise, you must sit twice a day and do the bare minimum at the very least, even if it's like pulling teeth.
So again, it's like that hereditary former natural person was talking about.
It's, you know, there will always be periods of dryness where you just feel bored,
but don't give up and you just keep, you know, persist and rely on God and pray to God.
If you're a theist and you know there are other ways of doing it, if you're a non theist within our order.
But the point is you stick with it and you can be problems.
So going down, if you wanted to just follow up on answers, how about how many rounds do you have to do each day with the Roman Christian order?
So we only set a minimum. That's a point in. Our guru tells us what the minimum is.
And each guru is different, actually. We have different gurus.
There are a few who are authorised to give initiation into the mantra, and it's private, so the montage is not told about anyone else.
And even the disposition practises aren't told, but different gurus will tell you so.
The bare minimum is 108, the number is holy, and so the absolute minimum is 108 repetitions of mantra.
But some voters will say 108 is even not enough, and you should do like maybe sometimes they'll say like, like three rounds of 108.
Maybe that's like usually that's going to be a minimum. And then you do as much as monks.
You're supposed to kind of do that as much as you can.
And what's really important is you don't just do the job on while you're sitting down in the shrine or in your, you know, in your meditation chamber.
The idea of an ideal is what's called Eyjafjallajokull in Sanskrit,
which means the mantra kind of bubbles out from within unconsciously or spontaneously, even without your consciously repeating it in your own mind.
That's a kind of achievement. That's not something you can do.
But it's it's a kind of steam to be achieved so that even in the midst of your academic work, or if you're if you have a family and you know,
even in the midst of raising your children or going to work or whatever that there is this constant mantra going on in your heart,
which which is the presence of God, right? Or that divine reality or the soul.
So long as you as you deepen your spiritual practise, you're able to you.
You'll find that that what you feel in the beginning of your spiritual life as a kind of separation between your,
your secular life or your worldly life and your spiritual life, that bearing is just breaking down.
And then you eventually come to a point where one of my favourite Stevens and three other big movies all life is yoga.
It's his epigraph to the synthesis of yoga, and it's a very profound statement.
But it's also a kind of he's seeing that from a standpoint of realisation,
but the idea that literally everything you do can and should be yoga, it should be a form of spiritual practise.
That's also what that's the gist of the verse that I told you from the guitar.
Whatever you do is just go to what you're this nasty whatever you eat, whatever you do should be done in a spiritual way.
And that literally, when you're jogging or whether you're arguing with someone, you can spiritually, literally everything you do.
Yeah, I guess that's true, but maybe it's a sort of. No, I really I think that's a beautiful ideal.
But I guess when Dylan and I were talking earlier, I guess, sort of playing devil's advocate to that point.
It seems that there's some things you can do that are more conducive to.
To this kind of mind that you're trying to cultivate and you'll go to being an investment banker, yes, or you know.
Yes. So that's why I became a woman. Correct. That's the short answer is.
So the point is. But look, go back to the example I've given. You showed the boys the drunk.
You know, the guy who was wrong because of told is, you know, offer your alcohol to the divine mother.
And let's take it from there. What happened? She gave up his alcohol. And so in the same way as you deepen your spiritual practise,
you may find you will find that some things you do in your daily life are more conducive to your spiritual life and other things are less conducive.
Give up the things that are less conducive. That's called renunciation.
And I think, look, I mean, in this age of new age spirituality,
the one thing that new age spiritual teachers tend to either not emphasise at all or completely ignore is renunciation.
But it's the it's it's an absolute essential thing in spiritual life.
You cannot make spiritual progress without enunciation. It sounds like a very forbidding word, and you don't have to be a monk to pronounce.
But you know, wherever you are as a non monastic or as one as whatever it is, you need to renounce what the ego wants.
Ultimately, because the aim is to elimination of ego, right? It's just logical.
So the things that are gratifying, the ego are the things that alter that you'll eventually want or you'll feel the need to renounce.
It doesn't happen overnight.
So for instance, just to give you another example in our order, we don't strongly emphasise control of food of the tongue so much.
And there's actually spiritual wisdom in that, in my opinion.
I mean, it took me some time to understand, but like so other orders, I'm not going to name names,
but there are other marching orders in the institution, which it seems like one of the main spiritual practises is a very, very strict vegetarianism.
And, you know, they're like constantly thinking of always running in there knowing one of onion and garlic.
No order. We're much more lax about food, but very, very strict about the renunciation of two things lust in green money and sex.
The sex, both because you have to. You have to have trust.
You have to have priorities in your spiritual life and you have to be realistic as a saw figure, as a spiritual aspect.
And you know, now I've been monk for a little over 11 years. What I found is you can't pronounce everything overnight.
All the things that need to be pronounced. So it's a kind of, you know, it's not even a journey of one lifetime.
It's a journey of many, like from a Hindu standpoint, because it's reincarnation or even Buddha standpoint.
So what you realise is when you analyse yourself, you know, one of the most important things is spiritual practise just on a daily basis.
And just almost it should be very it should be a very important part of a spiritual practise self-reflection.
It's called vagina, where out of each other to reflect on what's going on in your mind.
What's happening was not happening. And as you do that, you'll find that some things you'll find that some things are easier to pronounce than others.
And what you should do is whatever you, whatever your tradition tells you, is the most important things to renounce.
You focus on those first. And don't worry so much about the more minor things.
So, for instance, look like there are some books about order who you know they may have some grief for particular types of food,
if from the very beginning of their spiritual life, they need there, they set out to just say, OK, I'm going to not eat that food at all.
What ends up happening is sometimes not all kids,
but some cases they there's a kind of mental depression that might ensue because you're depriving yourself more touches, you know what I mean?
Like, we're we're all human, right? So it's I think the better approach is you can indulge that being less serious, egoistic things, right?
I that you can you can indulge in the less damaging ego who has the gratification, let's say, in the beginning.
But focus focus your priorities on renouncing the really fundamental things.
What goes on in your tradition? In our tradition, as I said, it's lust and greed. And then what will happen is as you progress in spiritual life,
you're going to find naturally that you're going to find less and less attachment to food, for instance.
And then just, you know, so for instance, after 10 or 12 years or 20 years, a lot of monks, in our tradition,
will just lose interest in certain kinds of food and then they'll just spontaneously renounce them.
And that's always a safer way to bring over announcing than what we what Amir was talking about
earlier when this kind of like violent or forceful kind of just like stopping on a dime like,
I won't do this anymore. Often that doesn't work well, you know?
Oh, that was a long way of answering the question. I think, yeah, each case is different.
So you have to kind of analyse your own mind and then figure out like, what are my strengths and what are my weaknesses in it as a spiritual aspect?
What are my ego not connotes? I mean, like where?
What are the real things? And then what are you? What are the main source of ego for me?
One of the things I should be most aware of, if it's if it's academic work, then let me be most, it doesn't mean you should give up your.
But as I said, be especially focussed on trying to spiritualised that academic, what do you say to me?
But if it's a very gross thing, like if you're getting drunk all the time, you may want to ask yourself, Well,
maybe I shouldn't be drinking alcohol, or maybe I should only do it once a week or, you know, or have one beer or whatever it is.
I mean, there are different ways of doing it. But that's something you have to ask yourself.
And one thing that's that's difficult in spiritual life, but which is very, very important is just be honest with yourself.
It's very easy to deceive yourself and justify all sorts of behaviour and say, Oh, no, no, yeah, no, even that thing I'm doing x y z.
That's part of my spiritual life. Or I am doing that in a spiritual way. It's all too easy to do that.
That's part of what QAnon, even though, is pushing back against in those letters that he was writing to his disciples.
Because the disciples, of course he's saying, Yeah, but I'm doing X, Y and Z in a spiritual way, saying, No, that's your ego talking and your ego is.
This is fooling yourself into thinking that what you're doing is spiritual, but it's actually not.
It's just a it's a disguise form of ego. It's a way of gratifying the ego.
But having a spiritual cake at the same time you don't like, it's that's one of the most dangerous things in spiritual life.
Is calling something spiritual is actually just egotistical. Yeah, a really, really interesting perspective.
And I think for me, you know, like like bringing it back to sort of academic life.
I think taking that approach has been really useful.
I think there's been times where I'm like, sit down my computer, I'm like, I'm not going to get distracted at all today, and I'm just going to work.
And you know,
you set this really high ideal for yourself and you just come crashing down and you end up getting more distracted than you would have if you said,
Okay, well, what? For two hours and then you break it up and everybody's square.
Yes, one trick. I always tell students this.
I found this actually, when I was a student at Berkeley, I found that those students who like, while they're trying to figure like work on the thesis,
the dissertation, those who said, I'm going to set aside, you know, two weeks where I just spent all day writing my dissertation,
they end up getting a lot less work done because they end up psyching themselves out in the way
or they going to stress to anxious then those who say it's not about two weeks or one week,
but every day I'm going to sit and do a minimum of one and a half hours of work on my thesis.
Without fail, those people make more progress. I read my own, you know, I'm fairly prolific as as an academic, and I published pretty regularly.
I publish, I don't know, like five to seven articles a year and I come home with a book every few years.
But you'll be.
You might be surprised at how little academic and how much time I spend on a daily basis on magazine research maximum of about two hours.
But it's concentrated only to have a day. Well, that's yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Two. Maximum three. But yeah, yeah, because what I find is when you saved yourself two hours, I make it.
I try to make it count where you're I'm very focussed and you can better concentrate because
research requires concentration in a certain kind of mental intensity which wears out the brain.
And so this whole idea of I'm going to spend eight hours on a thesis.
I mean, that's bound to backfire if you're doing it properly because it's very, very difficult work, intellectually demanding and taxing work.
Yeah. And that's that's really helpful for me to think that you can be as prolific as you are and only work that much, you know?
And yeah, it makes me sad and indispensable to definitely relax.
You know, I like the idea of relaxing into your academic work. It shouldn't be a source of stress or anxiety.
You can do it in a way that's almost meditative. I mean, that comes with time.
I mean, yeah, it's something I feel like some weeks.
I am like more in that kind of mode. But then I think for me,
it's when like deadlines come on and there's something to do in a week's time that
like the kind of spirituality that kind of spiritual approach sort of breaks down.
And I end up spending like, you know, another thing I'll tell you, though,
is I do find that there are two kinds of temperaments in academic life starting as a student.
But also I see amongst academics there are two ways that academics thrive or don't drive.
You know, one way is the kind of person who always like is always the always just barely meet their deadlines or always ask for extensions.
And then there's the other type of submit their assignments before the deadline.
And I'm not saying one is better than the other, but I've always been the latter type, which is even as a student, I almost always.
I mean, sometimes I ask for students, but rarely.
And even now, like I would, you know, whatever the submission deadline is for an article or for a book manuscript,
I usually submit it ahead of that time. And I found that that makes it a lot of us stressful, but there's a different type of person.
I'm not going to think most people, I think what happens is there's another Typekit person I remember at Berkeley.
There are a few of my friends were like this they there's a they feed off a certain anxious energy.
When there's a there's a deadline looming and until they feel the urgency of that deadline,
they don't feel motivated enough to actually get to work on it. I've never understood that exactly, but I do think that is a different kind.
Know academic energy that I don't know what really follow, whether there's a kind of middle ground also to be had.
But I the way the reason why I said like I like I like to like even my academic work is a kind of source of relaxation, in a sense,
is because I never like I always said I love in such a way that I'll never feel rushed because the moment you rush yourself,
I think the quality will suffer. Not always.
As a my, the quality for me suffers because I'm not, I'm not the type of person.
I think there is another type of person who actually can churn out really quality work against a very close deadline.
But it's not the way I work. It is just too stressful for me. Like, I just don't.
So I always negotiate deadlines such that I don't have to panic about them.
Yeah, I know. And it's I'm very jealous. If you offered, I definitely full of the more chaotic side that needs the deadlines, OK?
But do you find that? My question to you then is do you find that the quality of the work suffers?
And I actually do like it's funny because I feel like I am someone who needs a deadline to motivate me.
But I do feel like in the couple of days before when the anxiety is coming, like,
I'm not able to think clearly, I'm able to sort of motivate myself to sit at my laptop again.
But like, my thoughts are less creative. I think because there's this kind of stress is pushing against that creativity.
I think I think for me, it's just the fact that I can sit and do a lot of work when there isn't a deadline.
I just it's hard to motivate myself to make take that work and actually write something concrete like that if there is an effect you don't want.
Here's here's another very practical piece of advice which may or may not be to you.
But one thing I do for myself is I have a concrete goal every day in my life.
I just don't like I'll tell myself today, I just want to publish this one little piece of this work I'm doing on this article,
for instance, like, I'm right now, I'm working on an article and three out of those criticisms of the video.
And I just said, Well, what part of that like work do I want to accomplish to be, you know,
in the moment I finish, then whether it takes me one hour or two hours, I just stop.
And even if I don't finish in two hours, I stop anyway. Just because I don't like, I don't I won't overload my brain, you know?
So if you said you're kind of little micro goals on a day to day basis rather than have these, it gives intimidating.
If you just say, Oh my God, I have to write a 20 page research paper, and it's due in two months, and I haven't even started the research for it.
Like, that's much more intimidating than if you break it up into like more manageable day to day, week to week kind of.
You set yourself different milestones, you know what I mean?
Yeah, the task becomes, I think, more manageable when you do that, and that's just what I mean.
Now, yeah, and I try and do that, and it does work to an extent for me.
Yeah, just my last thesis was a bit of a chaotic process and the question was, well, you know,
you learn through that, you learn through all of those, you know, the chaos and you'll end, you get better.
As you as I said, I mean, you just finish your maths. As I said, you just finished your master's, right?
But if you're going through your body, you'll get better at it.
Because one other thing I did do, by the way, is as a physician in the U.S., at least it's an integrated master's body programme,
and we had two years of coursework where we have Ruby juggling three to four seminars every semester.
And for each seminar, we'd have to churn out a 25 page research paper.
And it's difficult, right? So what I told myself as a student was, I'm going to do all the papers,
but I'm going to invest my energies most in one of the papers and try to submit it to a journal, not for the sake of publishing,
but for the sake of getting quality feedback from smart people who don't know who I am and
who don't know I'm a grad student because the beauty of don't like peer review is that, you know, when you submitted a journal, they're not.
They don't know who you are. You don't know who they are and they think you're a scholar.
They'll believe they'll give you the benefit of the doubt, you know? And so I did that, and because I did that,
it was really good practise and I found I was able to publish at least one paper per semester and I end up publishing two in one semester.
So I got fine particles out of those first two years without freaking out because some students,
I think, got paralysed by trying to make every one of their seminar papers perfect.
And I think you're going to make yourself crazy if you do that.
So as I said, it doesn't mean half arsed the other ones, but you know, but don't like, you know, like you can really invest in one of them.
Don't feel guilty if you spend your more passionate about one of the papers in with the others.
I think that's just realistic, because not only can you think of a scholar who writes for papers at the same time,
maybe there are some, but I know that times I write one or maximum two papers at a time.
But Happiness Student is expected to write for papers in it and anybody who has an estimated three or four.
That's not realistic, right, so so I'll distribute your energies in a wise way.
That's what I'm really doing. Yeah, yeah.
Then you can move on to the next one and then, you know, you produce better work at the end.
Exactly. Yeah, yeah. And thank you so much for chatting with us and especially on this topic,
which is great to speak to an academic, but one is sort of more kind of personal.
It was a lot of fun. So thank you so much, you.