Finding Vedanta in Hollywood
So many memorable things have happened during our walk through California and into the big city! If you scroll our Facebook, you won’t even find a 10th of the experiences that we’ve had, yet none have been so remarkable as this!
I have never walked into a church, a temple, or any place of worship, and felt so at home. I’ve never felt so called to something, nor have I even resonated so deeply as I did in no more than 30 minutes at the Vedanta Society of Southern California Hollywood Temple!
We were walking the Hollywood hills when a gentleman by the name of Edgar walked by and started talking to us about the area, like where this or that famous person lived, and the history of some of the homes, and… the Vedanta temple around the corner.
He was so surprised that we even knew what Vedanta was that he had to take us there to see it and meet the people!
That’s where we met this beautiful heart, Jeet, and had the opportunity to listen to Swami Medhananda speak! Jeet was likewise surprised that we knew about Vedanta, and if we had to guess, most of you are unfamiliar with it as well!
I’m not entirely sure how I stumbled into the philosophy, but I believe it came as a result of my practice and research into meditation. Now, both the Ashtavakra Gita and Avaduta Gita are among some of my favorite, most impactful texts I’ve found.
Were it not for Vedanta’s philosophy of mind, self, other, and our ultimate reality, we would not be walking as we are; we would certainly not be sharing the message that we are.
I will do my best to sum up the core tenets of Vedanta. Our sense of self, identity, personality, history, preferences, anxieties, and the voice narrating our lives isn’t our fundamental identity.
That’s all ego, a functional construct. Beneath all of it is awareness. We know this because when you meditate, you experience the fact that you are conscious of thoughts, not identical to them.
In most schools of Vedanta, that awareness isn’t seen as personal or separate; it’s the same underlying reality in everyone. We aren’t metaphorically connected; we were literally never separated.
The experiential shift from, “I am this body-mind navigating the world” to “I am the awareness in which these manifestations of differentiation appear” reframes everythinggg… YOU, your fears, judgments, status, all comparisons, otherness, and even suffering.
Do you remember when I referenced non-dualism in our conversation with David, who came to share Christianity with us? These are the views of Vedanta’s non-dualistic philosophy:
Ontologically, it holds that ultimate reality is a single, non-dual consciousness, Brahman, and that the true self, Ātman, is not a part of that reality but identical with it. Multiplicity, individuality, and separation are not ultimately fundamental; they are dependent appearances within that one reality.
Epistemologically, our bondage to ego is not caused by an actual metaphysical split, but by ignorance and a misidentification of the self with our bodies, minds, and all that which appears within the space of awareness. It’s similar to some schools of Buddhism in this regard.
But again, we don’t lack unity; we just misperceive it. Liberation means correcting a cognitive error, eventually recognizing that the witnessing awareness we take to be personal is actually the same undivided ground of being itself.
Before anybody runs too far off with what I’m saying here, I think a couple of clarifications are in order. First, to even identify with any one religion can mean succumbing to the folly of identification and feeding our ego in some ways.
Vedanta has its own philosophical disagreements, such as those between Vishishtadvaita and Dvaita Vedanta. Everything gets complicated when you start to peel back its layers; this isn’t a confession of our secret intent to convert everyone to a particular form of Hinduism.
But second, this isn’t the mental masturbation of other philosophies; this is an experienced reality. In fact, this was the very subject of the program we attended! From the moment we got there, the distinction was made between the empirical reality we cling to in our search for evidence of such things vs the lived reality of experience.
We don’t need evidence for what a mango tastes like; we KNOW. And it doesn’t matter what ways we dissect the mango, or learn the molecular or atomic structure of the mango; only our actual experience of the mango can tell us what it tastes like. And so it is with ultimate reality.
We grow too lost in the illusion of “the doer,” but real peace only comes when we finally recognize that we are not the anxious agent controlling the outcome, but the awareness in which the doing gets done.
Thank you so much to Jeet and the temple for inviting us in for a timely reminder.
