Teachings and Beliefs
Teachings and Beliefs
One can write ad nauseam on the teachings of these three gurus and their predecessors. Thick volumes adorn the bookstands and now are mainly available online. The most important thing is to know what lies at the heart of all these meditative techniques and how they actually end up perverting other religions to prove their point. Vedanta philosophy is based on Upanishadic philosophy and neo-Hindu reinterpretations and draws from the Upanishads, pulling together several important basic elements.
First and foremost is the ultimate essence of all things, encapsulated in the one impersonal absolute or deity called Brahman. The term often used to describe this state is Sat-chit-ananda (absolute existence-knowledge-bliss). The second is the existence of the transcendental Self, atman, as a microcosmic manifestation of Brahman. Atman is the core of each and every individual entity.
But just like a fruit leads to the seed and the seed leads to the invisible essence of the fruit, Vedantists believe the potential for divinity is within oneself, and when you reach that essence of “nothing” out of which first the seed, then the fruit, and finally the tree emerge, the famous affirmation, Tat tvam asi—“Thou art that!”—is discovered. When the self, or atman, attains moksha, or liberation, one has reached the point of “the atman is the Brahman.”
According to Vedantists, there are four paths to liberation; karma yoga (the path of selfless service to work off your karma); bhakti yoga (the path of devotion); jnana yoga (the path of knowledge); and raja yoga (the path of formal meditation). In the early years of the movement, jnana yoga—the path of knowledge—was most popular among the educated followers. Bhakti yoga—the path of devotion or worship—was a popular means for the masses to achieve liberation; the irresistible tendency of the heart toward worship always draws a large following.
Through the adoption of Shakti (the power of consciousness and spiritual evolution that is usually associated with females), worship of female goddesses became quite prolific. One common position among the various exponents of these meditative techniques is stressing the acceptance of different religious faiths. Ramakrishna is seen as a Hindu reformer who syncretized all religions, even supposedly to the extent of becoming a Muslim for a few days. This attempt to accommodate all religions has, among other things, led to the redefinition of Christianity and the theory that Jesus was actually a young aspirant in search of nirvana, a theory very cleverly co-opted by Chopra.
Several years ago I saw a Dennis the Menace cartoon in which Dennis is seen standing beside a lemonade stand that he has set up. In big bold letters a sign reads, “All you can drink for 10 cents.” In the next frame is a bewildered-looking boy holding a glass just a quarter filled with lemonade, and Dennis is saying to him, “I says that’s all you can drink for ten cents, that’s who says it.”
When one realizes the philosophical underpinnings of Deepak Chopra’s writings, one gets the same feeling. So, too, with the maharishis and the swamis who are bent upon making all religions one. Richard Niebuhr once said that in all these religious theories and expressions, what we are really looking for seems to be “a God without wrath who took Man without sin into a kingdom without righteousness through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.” A different way to say the same thing is that we have so deified man and humanized God that we can scarcely tell the difference.
Here, for example, is a statement from Sri Sri Ravi Shankar:
Divinity is unmanifest, but man has an innate desire to perceive the Divine in the manifest creation around him. He creates idols, breathes faith into them and requests the divinity to be present in the idols for a while so that he can worship, express his love and lay with the divine. At the end of his worship he requests Divinity to go back into his heart from where he is manifested. This is in all puja practices. People actually do not worship the idols but instead worship the unmanifested Divinity which has all the Divine qualities. So, the idol worshippers of the East are not the same as those described in the Bible, because they are not just worshipping different gods and different idols, they are worshipping the one divinity in many different forms.10
There are levels of verification and understanding here that quite unwittingly reflect the quantum world. It is said of the subatomic world that if you know what a particle is doing, you don’t know where it is, and if you know where it is, you don’t know what it is doing. That pretty well explains the epistemological hybrid of the Chopra-type argument. If a scientist pins him on his inappropriate use of physics, he switches to medicine. If a medical practitioner questions his claims of medicine, he switches to the Vedas or some mystery story that is unverifiable but supposedly true. So, in effect, regardless of any truth claim, you are not sure what logic he is using to support it, and if you understand the logic, you don’t know what exactly is being claimed.
Chopra’s debate with Mr. Shukla is a classic one. Shukla was clearly trying to pin him down on his jelly-like metaphysics that he refuses to brand Hindu. To settle for a pure term and at the same time use the Vedas to sustain his most rigorous mystical claims requires nothing short of a master with words who can rebaptize anything at will. All one needs to do is read Chopra’s book How to Know God. Such name games can have serious consequences. But however we dissect it, the monistic base of Hindu pantheism is at the core of his teaching.
The New Spirituality, however, as it is practiced in the West, encompasses more than Hinduism. In the next chapter we will look at the other major Eastern influences on this movement.