A Review Article, Full Text: Religion for a Secular Age: Max Müller, Swami Vivekananda, and Vedanta.

A Review Article, Full Text: Religion for a Secular Age: Max Müller, Swami Vivekananda, and Vedanta. by Thomas J. Green. (2016). Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate. Jean C. MacPhail Also: Jean C. MacPhail/ Sister Gayatriprana. Intrinsic Human Value in Integral Vedanta and Its Potential for Infinite Understanding, Inclusion, and Expansion as Expressed in a Dialog in Five Levels of Consciousness in Chapter 2 of Human Rights, Religious Freedom, and Spirituality: Perspectives from the Dharmic and Indigenous Culture. 2023. Yashwant Pathak and A. Adityanjee, eds. Pune, India: Bhishma Prakashan.  CONTENTS Abstract 4 Introduction: Max Müller and Vivekananda as Bulwarks against Scientistic Materialism 5 The Elements behind Vivekananda’s Apparently Incoherent Position 6 The Impact of the Indian Educational Bill, 1836. 6 Abrahamic Conquest of India and Attempts to Destroy Aryan Culture 7 Differences in Languaging and Presentation 8 The Scope of Vivekananda’s Understanding of the History of Vedanta 9 Turiyatita or Beyond the Fourth as an Integrative Mode That Can Be Applied Globally 11 The Connecting Link: Ramakrishna 11 Theoretical Elements in Vivekananda’s Approach 12 A Comparison of the Proposed Internal Structure of Green’s View of Müller’s Work and That Which Seems to Apply to the Work of Vivekananda 12 Chapter 1 and Level I: Max Müller’s Foundations and Vivekananda’s Spiritual Humanism 14 The Formative Encounters of Müller and Vivekananda in Vedanta 14 Idealism/Romanticism and Pietism/The Brahmo Samaj as Influences on Müller and Vivekananda 16 Evolutionary Theory in the Thought of Müller and Vivekananda 17 Vivekananda Experiences Full Subjective Reality for the First Time 17 Chapter 2 and Level II: Müller’s Science of Religion and Vivekananda’s Yoga as a Science 19 Vivekananda’s Emphasis on Yoga or Self-transformation Vis à Vis Müller 19 The Emergence over Time of Human Experience as the Core of Spirituality 20 Natural Religion and Two Ways of Understanding and Applying It 21 Vivekananda’s Second Samadhi 22 Ramakrishna’s Integrative Inclusion of All Forms of Yoga in Vivekananda’s Training 24 Chapter 3 and Level III: Müller’s Avidya as Ignorance and Vivekananda’s Maya as an Attitude of Mind 27 Advaita’s Denial of the Physical World versus Immanent Monism 27 The Engaged Atman, a Non-proposition in Advaita 30 Innate Structures of Thought That Control Perception and Response 30 The Issue Is: How do We Look at Anything? 32 Vivekananda’s Third Samadhi: The Resolution of Innate Paradox 34 Chapter 4 and Level IV: The Tattwamasi Theory of Ethics and Holovolution 36 Western versus Vedantic Ethical Systems in the Late Nineteenth Century 36 The Search for a Solution, East and West 38 Thou Art That to the Rescue 41 Vivekananda and Tattwamasi 42 The Reconciliation of Impersonal Ethics with Impersonal Metaphysics and Vivekananda’s Holovolution 46 Vivekananda’s Nirvikalpa Samadhi and His Understanding of Holovolution 47 Chapter 5 and Level V: Ramakrishna, Vedanta, and the Essence of Hinduism and Holism/Vijnana 49 The First Difficulty: The Relationship between Sri Ramakrishna’s Teachings and Those of Swami Vivekananda 49 Cross-Cultural Preconceptions That Can Create Most of the Perceived Difficulties 51 Vivekananda’s Fifth Samadhi 53 Matrices of Consciousness: An Attempt to Integrate All Elements of Integral/Vijnana Vedanta 55 The Genesis of Samadhi and Its Various Forms 57 Correspondences between Ramakrishna’s Teaching to Vivekananda and Vivekananda’s to His Students 59 Biases in Both India and the West in Reaching Clarity on Vivekananda 61 Conclusion 64  ABSTRACT Religion for a Secular Age presents the efforts of noted philologist and Orientalist Max Müller (1823-1900) and Swami Vivekananda (1863-1902), Vedantic monk and scholar, to salvage an empiricist, naturalistic, historically sensitive spirituality from the burgeoning of reductionistic materialism sweeping through science in the mid nineteenth century. Müller aimed to instill into religion the importance of personal interior experience that alone can withstand the onslaught of ever-proliferating, scientific theses based on purely external, materialistic assumptions. His mature view was that such interior power is most fully developed in Indian non-dualism (Advaita Vedanta). As Müller selected as the prime living exemplars of Vedanta Vivekananda and his spiritual teacher Ramakrishna (1836-1886), Green undertakes to present the resonances between Müller’s thought and that of Vivekananda, supported by the literature generated by Indian reformers contemporary with Müller. The result is an interesting thesis, but one that cannot explain the obvious deviations of the worldview of Ramakrishna and Vivekananda from traditional Advaita (non-dualism) which, emphasizing the purely transcendental, declared “the world” to be “unreal”, thus creating for humanity a situation as problematical in its own way as the paradigm dominant in the West today that the physical world is the only reality, and all other alternatives are at best “epiphenomena”. Green’s presentation appears to conform to the sequence of consciousness known in Advaita Vedanta as the chatushpad, or four levels of consciousness, from the physical to the purely transcendental. In this way he arrives at a workmanlike insight into the parallels between Müller and Vivekananda. However, as the levels “expand” in sequence towards the transcendental and Vivekananda’s thought becomes visibly non-conformist to traditional Advaita, Green is obliged to introduce as an explanatory model the notion of “immanent monism”. I suggest that the difficulties arise from the lack of inclusion of the actual, subjective experiential data and their meaning behind Vivekananda’s work. In this review article I offer the missing data behind the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda paradigm as presented here, including the evidence for an emerging fifth level of consciousness—turiyatita, literally “beyond the fourth”. This level of consciousness presents a continuum in which the physical and transcendental levels are part of a total picture and can, even must, work together harmoniously for real “non-dualism” to exist in the form of secularized spirituality. I offer a matriceal model that seems to correspond to the structure of this level of consciousness. INTRODUCTION Max Müller and Swami Vivekananda as Bulwarks against Scientistic Materialism Religion for a Secular Age: Max Müller, Swami Vivekananda, and Vedānta by Thomas J. Green, focuses on the issue of religion being separated from cultural contexts, scriptures, and institutions in order to ensure its survival (Green, 13). Specifically, it deals with a mid-nineteenth century cross-cultural attempt to respond to the threat to established religion from the rise of frank, scientistic materialism, as in the work of Ludwig Büchner (beginning 1855) and Karl Vogt (1817-1895). The remainder of the century saw the rapid rise of empirical experimental psychology under Wilhelm Wundt (1879), as well as Darwinian evolutionary theory, beginning in 1859 and promoted by Thomas Huxley (1825-1895), Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919), and Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), based on natural selection and survival of the fittest. The counter-attempt as presented by Green was spearheaded in Europe by Professor F. Max Müller (1823-1900), a reputed leader in comparative philology and Oriental religions at Oxford University (Green, 18), and Swami Vivekananda (1863-1902), a Vedantic monk and charismatic speaker and leader in both India and the West. Green presents both as perceiving that people generally could no longer believe in religion (Green, 2) and as espousing the position that rather than religion itself being swept away by secular logic, religion would remain, but necessarily incorporating the secular imperatives of naturalism, historicism, and empiricism (Green, 14). Both men believed that religion and science could in fact be reconciled (Green, 5). In Müller’s case, the notion was expressed through his development of what he called scientific or comparative religion and in Vivekananda’s in the conviction that the experiential discoveries of Vedanta, the indigenous Indian religion in existence since millennia BCE, could hold their own with those of Western science, although in the inner subjective world as opposed to the resolutely external, physical world studied by the West. Another comparison that sets the scene for the whole presentation of this book is that, despite the similarity of Vivekananda’s goals to Müller’s, his presentations were to Western scholars “unsystematic and often inconsistent”, making him “a challenging figure to interpret” (Green, 8). Green dwells on the fact that educated circles in India at that time were open to the kind of systematism that Western culture took for granted (Green, 8-9) and were therefore quite able to grasp the work of Müller, now recognized as probably the premier Western communicator with India. This latter fact has apparently led to schools of Western thought asserting that Vivekananda had merely absorbed Müller’s ideas and was presenting them in his own mode. This assertion naturally raises the question: was Vivekananda an authentic voice of the Indian tradition? Or, as the West would frame the issue, a voice of especially the non-dual (Advaitic) tradition that so strongly insists on the absolute priority of the inner world over the outer world? This was the system of religious philosophy that had captured Müller’s attention and after him a large number of Western philosophers and progressive religious people, because it offers an aerie within the human soul that the power of rationalism and the scientism built upon it cannot touch. Vivekananda’s presentations, particularly in the West, did indeed emphasize Advaita and its philosophy, but as we progress through this book it becomes more and more clear that he embraced many apparently different and even conflicting points of view and seemed to do so without any sense of discomfort or inconsistency. To a Western audience this would naturally give rise to the sense of a lack of system and inconsistency. For Green, it raises the issue of what he calls immanent monism, a worldview he attributes to the combination of the vision of the contemporary German philosopher Hegel (1770-1831) with Tantra and transmitted to Vivekananda by the Bengali sage Ramakrishna (1836-1886). Green deserves credit for documenting this aspect of Vivekananda’s work and for tentatively suggesting as we go along that Vivekananda was indeed marching to the tune of his own inner drummer, almost certainly installed there by his spiritual teacher Ramakrishna. To his further credit, Green even goes so far as to point to two historically documented epiphanies or samadhis that Vivekananda had experienced during his training with Ramakrishna, implicitly suggesting that these were in some way related to his decidedly non-Western worldview. But as Green’s portfolio is to deal with ideas, not experiences, the meaning of these samadhis is not explored. The purpose of this review article is to explore in each of the four contexts Green presents the corresponding depth experience in Vivekananda’s training and the radical view of consciousness that lay behind it. I shall also demonstrate how Vivekananda filtered the meaning of these experiences and the underlying system of consciousness in different ways to the West and to India, while introducing the possibility of an additional, fifth context with the potential to resolve the counterintuitivities perceived in traversing the previous four. The Elements behind Vivekananda’s Apparently Incoherent Position Green’s difficulties with Vivekananda’s position (Green, 8) are not surprising, given that much of Vivekananda’s agenda is immersed in the millennial experiential culture of India. Bringing to bear on that background Western or Westernized evidence and lines of thought that emerge from the highly conceptual traditions of Europe, including of course the dominant discourse of science, it seems inevitable that Green is often stumped or brings forward interpretations that question Vivekananda’s cogency and coherence. In this section I shall present five elements that almost certainly have direct relevance to this apparent failure to communicate. 1. The Impact of the Indian Education Bill, 1836 Green’s awareness that the educated Indians of Vivekananda’s day were quite familiar with the conceptual notions of the West does not seem to take into account that this familiarity had been superimposed on them by the ruling British Government on the passage of the Indian Education Bill presented by Lord Thomas MacAulay in 1836. This compulsory, draconian system abolished the Indian languages as media of education and was intended to turn educated Indians into “a class of Indian trained in English language and thought, interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and color, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect.” Lord Thomas MacAulay’s Address to the House of Commons, 19.18, July 10, 1833. http://languageinindia.com/april2003/macaulay.html Through these middlemen the whole of India would soon become a willing and intelligent partner with Britain in her ongoing enterprises, including the despoilment of Indian resources. Vivekananda, one of probably the third generation of Indians subjected to this regime, was saturated with the “superiority” of the Western materialistic paradigm, a sense of European history and humanism, and a rock-solid belief in science, attested by his prolonged correspondence with none other than Herbert Spencer and Vivekananda’s own translation into Bengali of Spencer’s book on Education (Prabhananda, 2003). And also an intense awareness of the suffering of the Indians. 2. Abrahamic Conquest of India and Attempts to Destroy Aryan Culture The education bill, an unimaginable experiment in total sublation of a whole culture, was in a way the final step in a historical process that had started in the twelfth century with the Muslim invasion of India. The Muslims brought with them the Abrahamic worldview which contrasted strongly with the native Aryan culture, carried in perhaps its most advanced form as Vedanta. Although this battle was fought out in massive bloodletting and persecution, for our purposes here I present an overview of the radical differences between the ideals of the two cultures. The essence of Abrahamism according to Dorff, 2013, 111: “The limitations of human intelligence and the infinite character of God make it impossible for us to know the nature of God altogether.” Dorff explains that this view results in the sense of a gulf between human and divine that can be bridged only by imagery, including language. The ultimate authority of any image is its ability to evoke experience of God. Finally, the criteria for selecting any image as true and good are: It must be clear, touch us emotionally, existentially and in action, acceptable to the community and therefore supportive of ethics and ethical activity to support and help the world. Above all, any image must not represent the part for the Whole, which is the essence of idolatry (Ibid., 121-122). This contrasts radically with the Indo-European, Aryan or Vedantic view that the core reality of any human being is divinity itself, as embedded in the canonical texts, the Upanishads: “He who has known Brahman [Ultimate Reality] has become Brahman” (Mundaka Up, III.2.9) Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda (CW), Vol. 4 (1972): Reply to the Madras Address, 342. and what is called for is to reveal that deity through consciously and voluntarily undertaken practices validated over millennia and coming with strict criteria of performance and evaluation. This is what is known as self-transformation or yoga—the transcendence of materialism and the human limitations that come with it—which was introduced to the West both theoretically and practically by Vivekananda. Here, “God” is not “out there”, but ineluctably embedded in the human soul, the diametric opposite of the basic Abrahamic position. On this subject of two radically different and opposing cultures Green goes into some detail (Green, 65-68), as it certainly seems an important ingredient in the whole dialog of India and the West. He presents Müller’s view that Aryanism was not a racial issue, but one of language and culture. Green’s assertion that Vivekananda’s quite extensive discussion of this issue was almost certainly influenced by Müller’s analysis might well be true; but his conclusion that Vivekananda regarded the issue as one of racial identity and limitation to India is not correct. In Gayatriprana, 2020, 57-51 Vivekananda’s own words make it clear that for him, too, the issue is not one of race at all, but of cultural values related to a core shared language, at least between North India (Sanskrit) and the countries west of India, including outstandingly ancient Persia, Greece, Rome, and modern Europe, including the Baltic and Slavic cultures. Despite the fact that the Indians were no match militarily for the Muslims, they contrived to keep their deeply experiential religion alive even as the British invasion of India (beginning in the seventeenth century), defeat of the Muslims, and complete takeover of India’s economic resources took place, aided and abetted by a fundamentalist Christianity of imperialist proportions and rabidly against the principles of Vedanta. During this entire time Vedanta had been steadily developing into ever new forms that could be seen as bulwarks against Western dualism and materialism. What emerged from it were Indians with minds well-trained in Western cultural forms, and also still with a grasp on their native spirituality, though by this time deeply tinged with Western presuppositions. Intensely aware of the damage being done to the spirituality of India and the self-respect of young Indian men, Complete Works, Vol.4 (1972): My Master, 158. Vivekananda emerged as the warrior to fight for Vedanta on the world stage. As it happened, the situation itself provided an “ally” from the Western camp: As the Indians were being forced to the wall, the rising power of Western materialist science had begun its frontal assault on the monotheistic religions, closing the doors of the churches, but opening the forward minds of the West to the potential of a spirituality based on the interior structure of the human psyche. 3. Differences in Languaging and Presentation The result of the above in both Müller and Vivekananda was an amazing ability to speak the language of both Asian experience and Western culture and science. In relation to Vivekananda’s alleged inaccessibility, the short ten years of his teaching career took place equally in India and in the West, where he was spectacularly successful in conveying substantive meaning to his audiences, as I see it because of his ability to speak to each in its own mode or “language”. Paying attention as to where and to whom each item was delivered serves to demonstrate the fact that, as he developed any theme, his Indian presentation was more conceptual and the Western one more experiential (MacPhail, 2013, 1008-1012). As this relationship holds good throughout, it seems to be a deliberate feature of his work, indicating that he was intending to turn the West to a more experiential outlook and India to a more analytical and instrumental one. A second issue is that Vivekananda’s work was presented from five different points of view/levels of context at all stages of his work. This article presents as briefly as possible what these were, how they originated, and how they can be integrated with each other, serving to demonstrate, in a coherent sequence, the difference between Classical Advaita Vedanta and the Integral Vedanta of Ramakrishna-Vivekananda. A third issue that creates frequent misunderstanding of Vivekananda’s utterances, especially in public, is that, in any context/level whatever, there is clear evidence over time of a deepening of meaning of the materials. I shall present more on this aspect later, but here I comment that unfortunately in terms of improved understanding, the official Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda (CW) have not yet taken these facts into account in their mode of presentation. A series of nine books published by Swami Brahmavidyananda in Hollywood, U.S.A. presents Vivekananda’s Western work in the format I suggest here. Seven of these were posted until recently on Amazon under the generic title The Western Works of Swami Vivekananda. They may now be out of print. 4. The Scope of Vivekananda’s Understanding of the History of Vedanta. Green attempts all the way through the book to hold Vivekananda’s feet to the fire of Advaita (non-dualistic) Vedanta in compliance with Müller’s conviction, at least at the beginning of his quest, that it was this category of Vedanta that alone would nullify the claim of science to supplant religion. As we shall see, as Müller’s views were forced to change when encountering Ramakrishna and Vivekananda, Green does entertain other views on the subject and comes remarkably close to what was actually going on, but without a full explanation of how these other modes of Vedanta evolved and came up with a form that in essence goes beyond Classical Advaita itself. Without going into detail as to the import of Advaita Vedanta, I present here the classic statement of its overall view, purportedly from Shankaracharya, one of its foremost proponents: Brahma satyam jagan mithya—Brahman [Ultimate experiential Reality] is the only truth, the world is unreal, Vivekachudamani, verse 4. Attributed to Shankaracharya. an uncompromising dictum that emanates from the direct intuitive experience known as nirvikalpa samadhi, which totally sublates: 1. The physical world; 2. Emotion and imagination; and 3. Discerning intellect. These three levels were seen as a developmental series of levels of consciousness in early Vedanta (MacPhail, July 16, 2022), but were considered by Gaudapada (6th Century CE), the primary proponent of Advaita, as mere preliminaries to final, experiential truth (MacPhail, 2015a). They are included by the proponents of what was considered the all-important “fourth” (turiya) level, the “flagship” consciousness in non-dualism (Advaita) in the notion of “four steps” (chatushpad) of the transcendental Atman or inner Self, as in the Mandukya Upanishad, verse 2. However, they were considered “lower”, “earlier” or “dualistic” levels of consciousness, to be ignored and transcended as quickly as possible. Vivekananda states that the European assumption that Vedanta implies only Advaita is incorrect. For him, it includes qualified non-dualism and also dualism (Gayatriprana, 2020, 234-235), the founders of which he regarded as important benefactors of the Indian people. Vivekananda takes this position because he sees the proponents of the philosophically “lesser” levels as more compassionate and accessible to, as well as supportive of, the spiritual growth of the vast majority of Indian people, who were essentially shut out from Classical Advaita Vedanta (Gayatriprana, 2020, 211, 397). In the materialistic West the caste barriers of India did not exist, but the fourfold path to transcendence was inexorable and was all but totally obstructed by the extreme aspects of Abrahamism and the rabid rejection by scientism of the existence, far less the importance, of the subjective human world. There was, therefore, an urgent need to introduce the understanding of the inner structure of consciousness in an unbroken ontological series or continuum. In India, this project had worked itself out naturally in the utterances of the Upanishads, where over millennia, the sequence of the worlds of matter—imagination—deep discernment—non-dual intuition had appeared without polemical overlay until the advent of Gaudapada and Advaita Vedanta. In the Indo-European West a similar model arose in the Common Era with the Greek Plotinus (204-270CE), soon to be eradicated by Christian Abrahamism. Nevertheless, the Abrahamic traditions later produced Islamic Sufism (ca 8th-9th C CE), the Kabbalic sefiroth (its later form in the 12th C CE), and in the Christian tradition The Interior Castle of Teresa of Avila (1577), based on experience but taking, in Abrahamic manner, extensive conceptual and verbal forms. This rising tide in the West was to be summarily obliterated by the widespread oppression of the Jews, the suppression of the Sufis, and the Protestant rejection of the Catholic Church, followed in due course by the surge of materialistic science that took the form of reductionist acceptance of only the physical world as real and a summary “deletion” of even the existence of all other levels of consciousness. In such a historical framework, Müller’s highly principled project can be seen as an attempt to interconnect the two extreme “ends”—non-dualism and physical materialism—of what had at one time been an open and highly explorative paradigm in both India and in the West. In this article I shall present the evidence, both experiential and conceptual, for the Vivekananda model, integrating all possible levels into a continuous sequence, with no superimposed barriers or even a hierarchical imperative. Nor is it a theoretical, academic, or organizational exercise, but something that occurs naturally within any given human being rather than as occurring “outside” in rigidly organized theories or movements. I regard these criteria as offering a more secular and democratic mode of procedure than in most existing religions or academic institutes, empowering anyone who wishes to take advantage of it and do the work required. These criteria perhaps are the backbone of the secular religion of which Green speaks, and of which Walach’s book (2015) might be an attempt at actualizing. However, returning to the issue of Advaita in the West, it may be said that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries non-dualism was much less known, especially experientially, in the West than in India. It therefore had great interest as something new (and also to quite an extent in the Abrahamic traditions, verboten), which may account for a preponderance of Vivekananda’s utterances about it in the West. At the same time, the various methods of self-transcendence traditionally developed in the West, such as care of others, love of the divine and intense discerning intellect, were valuable steps towards transcendence and were to be preserved; while in India, so long immersed in metaphysics, they were to be emphasized in a culture Vivekananda saw as severely lacking in a sense of democracy and social service. From this we conclude that in Vivekananda’s work the West’s understandable interest in transcendence and methods to attain it, as well as India’s crying need for democracy and principled social service came not as “standalones”, but as part of an overall system of ideals, to all of which Vivekananda give value and importance in a closely interrelated way. In view of this pre-existing structure of consciousness (chatushpad) in Vedanta, I propose to utilize it in my presentation in this article. As I hope to demonstrate, including it helps to throw much light on most of the issues raised in Green’s book and also offers insights into how it is developing even as I speak. 5. Turiyatita or Beyond the Fourth as an Integrative Mode That Can Be Applied Globally Here we approach what we might call, not just Vedanta, but a definitely a newly emerging view of it, as seen from the conceptual position. But that this view is not arbitrary nor a product of fantasy, can be predicated on the fact that Ramakrishna transmitted to Vivekananda, not only the realization of the classic fourth level, but also one that goes beyond it—turiyatita—in which Brahman is actually manifest and visible in all levels, all worlds, all possible forms and to be responded to as such. This position was what Vivekananda himself called Practical Vedanta, Ramakrishna’s vijnana. This view “releases” the rigid barrier between Brahman and the world in Classical Vedanta and comes as relief to the people of India, who are now permitted to function on any level whatsoever, including “the world” without losing gravitas and indeed being able to develop intense spirituality even in the most physical of work. For this, of course, it is necessary to work with this conviction and using the methodology prescribed for it. The West was and still is in the direct opposite condition: it is so embedded in materialism, i.e. the acceptance of the physical world as the one and only reality, that its need is to somehow break out from the suffocating concrete overlay and get into the inner world of vastly greater freedom and meaning that can radically transform “the world” as we know it. Müller’s primary focus was that by emphasizing the utterly transcendental nature of the Atman in Advaita, religion would be taken completely out of the range of materialism and therefore able to develop independently. Vivekananda’s agenda to take the West from its obsession with an external and essentially unknowable God, as in the Abrahamic religions, took its focus on dealing with our own minds. Here the onus is upon us to discipline those minds through time-tested methods in order to perceive for ourselves where the areas of interconnection are in the whole spectrum of Reality. This agenda differs from traditional Vedanta in placing the individual human being at the center of the whole effort and in emphasizing the innate power of that individual to work the whole thing out through directed effort combined with truthfulness of purpose and sincerity of execution. The Connecting Link: Ramakrishna The source of Vivekananda’s view of Vedanta was his deep relationship with Ramakrishna, 1836-1886 (MacPhail, 2013). Müller, on the other hand, discovered him through his scholarly investigations. Despite these different approaches, they both saw Ramakrishna as “a modern exemplar of authentic Hinduism, which in their eyes was grounded in the ancient philosophy of the Upanishads or Vedanta” (Green, 141). Specifically, Müller discovered him in the literature of the Brahmo Samaj, an Indian group seeking to protect Hinduism (a development of Vedanta on the demise of Indian Buddhism) from the onslaught of English materialism. Vivekananda started out as a member of the Samaj and an avid supporter of their efforts to modernize the social norms of traditional Hinduism, which was crushing the life of India through the caste system and other archaic usages. His contact with Ramakrishna, like Müller’s, was through the Samaj. They saw in Ramakrishna—a man totally innocent of Western conceptualism and trained to the hilt in the highly experiential transformational systems of both Vedanta and Tantra—a harbinger of the “new religion.” Here “newness” means that he was so totally grounded experientially that he could accept with ease the experiential evidence of all of the Indian and other world religions. Although Müller did not meet Ramakrishna, he conceived such a strong devotion to him as a universalist embodiment of Vedanta (Green, 154), that by 1896 he had resolved to publish an article on him in England. On Vivekananda’s side, after five years of intensive self-transformation under the guidance of Ramakrishna and seven years of further education in native Indian mode, he had arrived in the West in 1893 with his “evangel of the Self [Atman]” (Christine, 1983, 149) and carried all before him with great éclat. Large audiences came to his lectures on spiritual humanism and classes on yoga as a practical science tied into the message of universal spirituality and religion. Thereafter, as a close friend of William James, (Burke, 1896, 51-105) he was received with great cordiality at Harvard University where he began his teachings on maya, the mysterious Vedantic riddle of why we do not see reality properly and continuously scramble up our lives through wrong perception. Almost immediately thereafter, on May 28th, 1896, he met Müller in Oxford (Burke, 1896, 168-172). Müller then went ahead with his publication of his article and set about writing a full book on Ramakrishna—Ramakrishna: His Life and Sayings—which came out in 1898, the first biography of Ramakrishna by a Westerner. Theoretical Elements in Vivekananda’s Approach In his recent book Swami Medhananda (2022) makes the case for Vivekananda’s ability to overarch and resolve some of the major issues in Western philosophy that have so far not reached resolution, including most of the topics in this present book. In the first chapter he brings out how Vivekananda’s understanding was developed by his training from Sri Ramakrishna. There he mentions the samadhis or moments of transcendence that Vivekananda went through, with special emphasis on nirvikalpa samadhi (Level IV in my work) that is associated with non-dual Vedanta, but also two others that preceded it. The inference seems to be that it was these moments of heightened awareness that underly Vivekananda’s ability to so magisterially and effectively address so many of the apparently irresolvable issues ever under discussion in the West. In this present article I demonstrate explicitly how all five of Vivekananda’s samadhis were instrumental in resolving the ever-heightening discrepancy between Vivekananda’s stance and that of his distinguished senior contemporary, Professor Max Muller of Oxford University, whose views were so empathetic in principle to Vivekananda’s, though not factoring in the fifth or integral (vijnana) level that goes beyond the fourth (turiya) to which Western Vedantins have tended to hitch their star. A Comparison of the Proposed Internal Structure of Green’s View of Müller’s Work and That Which Seems to Apply to the Work of Vivekananda The thesis of our book is laid out in five chapters, each one of which focuses on a level of discourse in Müller’s thinking on universal religion. These are, in sequence: Chapter 1: Müller’s humanistic quest for universal religion. Chapter 2: Müller’s science of religion (comparative religion). Chapter 3: Müller’s focus on the Vedantic notion of maya or metaphysical ignorance that for him established “the limitations of the empirical knowledge regarded as the only source of truth by positivist philosophers” (Green, 91). Chapter 4: The emphasis of Müller and his colleague Paul Deussen (1845-1919), the German Sanskritist and Vedantic scholar, on finding an ethical content in Advaita, which by its basic stance that the world is unreal poses an obstacle to the development of a humanistic ethics. Chapter 5: Muller’s credo that “We, as sentient beings, are in constant contact with the infinite, and . . . this contact is the only legitimate basis on which the infinite can and does exist for us. . .. We are concerned with . . . how the finite mind has tried to pierce further and further into the infinite, to gain new aspects of it, and to raise the dark perception of it into more lucid intuitions and more definite names” (Green, 28). It seems clear that each succeeding context contains the one prior to it and also carries the content of the process to deeper and deeper and more and more abstract and inclusive interpretations of the whole process. While this arrangement of contexts in this book may have been purely fortuitous, I was struck by its correspondence to the typical sequence of the various exemplifications of progression of consciousness in the major world’s traditions, and particularly in the Vedantic chatushpad, as well, apparently, as in physical science, where the term invariance principle is invoked (MacPhail, 2017). Turning to the work of Vivekananda, I had already discerned five such levels in my study of Vivekananda’s commentaries on mantras from the canonical texts of Vedanta: the Vedas, Upanishads, and Bhagavad Gita and presented this insight in an organized form in articles in the Indian journal, Vedanta Kesari (Gayatriprana, 1995-1998). I later carried this idea forward into a more advanced level of analysis in my doctoral thesis (MacPhail, 2013), which covers the five years from 1881 to 1886 in which Vivekananda underwent his training with Ramakrishna, i.e. long before Vivekananda’s personal acquaintance with Müller. There I demonstrate how Vivekananda came to grasp the content as well as the context of these levels from cues, both experiential and conceptual, from Ramakrishna, and how he molded up this understanding into his teachings for both India and the West. As will be seen, these five levels are unusual juxtapositions or combinations of Eastern and Western memes, which I shall present here simply as complementarities to Müller’s work, before delving a little deeper in subsequent sections into their genesis in Vivekananda’s mind as well as their significance in his work and the difficulties they raise in Müller’s context as well as the Western mind generally: Spiritual Humanism. This, along with Müller’s humanistic quest for universal religion in Chapter 1: Foundations can be seen as a response to the threat of science and secular morality (Green, 171) that is the main preoccupation of our book. Yoga as a Science. I align this meme with Müller’s Science of Religion as presented in Chapter 2. Maya as an Attitude of Mind can be related to Müller’s focus on the Vedantic notion of maya or metaphysical ignorance discussed in Chapter 3: Müller’s Vedanta in Defence of Religion. Holovolution: An affirmation of the basic Vedantic stance that the core of humanity is the divine itself, as in the Upanishadic mantra tattvamasi: you are That [Ultimate Reality or Brahman]. This apparent basis for Vedantic ethics is worked through by Vivekananda’s resolution of the apparent dichotomy of Western evolution from matter to spirit, and India’s core concept of involution from spirit to matter, filling out the content of Chapter 4: Vedanta and the Religious Foundation of Ethics. Holism: I juxtapose Vivekananda’s direct experience of Ramakrishna’s “operating system” that underlies not only Müller’s concept of universal religion but which Vivekananda himself also lived to the hilt and explicates in his highly integrative and all-inclusive work from 1892-1902. I align this material with Chapter 5: Ramakrishna, Vedanta, and the Essence of Hinduism. These correspondences and the similarity of the sequence may be totally fortuitous, but that it appears to have been part of Müller’s modus operandi and certainly of the presentation of Green, suggests that it has value in understanding the thought of Vivekananda. I shall now look at each of these levels, focusing on Müller’s position and some misunderstandings that seem to be extant about Vivekananda’s position, before introducing what I see as the important experiential explanation of Vivekananda’s point of view as developed during his training with Ramakrishna. Chapter 1 and Level I: Max Müller’s Foundations and Vivekananda’s Spiritual Humanism Chapter 1 of this book sets out to explore the materials supporting the main themes of the book and the intellectual context behind the work of both Müller and Vivekananda. As the first, “materialist”, presentation of this book it naturally deals with the history of physical encounters and worldviews as seen through the filter of physical facts and Western humanistic ideas and categories of thought, which are naturally taken as the norm. The Formative Encounters of Müller and Vivekananda in Vedanta The account of Müller’s gradual development into Vedanta and his magnificent work in bringing the Rig Veda and other ancient texts into contemporary languages makes fascinating reading which prepares us for his highly unusual interest and involvement in Indian culture and its contemporary developments, particularly the Brahmo Samaj. With regard to Müller’s mature convictions, although his background was in Christianity with its echoes of Abrahamism, he believed that we are in constant contact with the Infinite and was interested in how humanity had evolved ideas about it (Green, 28). His belief had arisen from his own experience of the indwelling Christ in his Lutheran practice and also his seeing through the lens of Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834), who promoted the idea that “true religion lies in the individual’s experience of God” (Green, 36). Müller’s approach was to build up a deeply researched and closely worked-out theory of how to take religion completely out of the domain of materialism by focusing on the experience as well as the concept of the Vedantic Atman/Brahman (Ultimate Reality as experienced respectively as the human soul and as cosmic Reality) in the indigenous tradition of India, going back to millennia BCE). Vivekananda also came from a mixed background: his family Hindu pietism and acquired Western-style rationalism, at both school and in the Brahmo Samaj. Green admits to what he finds a paucity of materials on Vivekananda’s early intellectual development and understandably chooses to focus as his primary source on the testimony of Brajendranath Seal, one of Vivekananda’s brilliant classmates at Presidency College. From there we learn what Western ideals and reductionist preconceptions Vivekananda was learning and actively working to digest, as also the notion of an amalgam of “pure monism of Vedanta, the dialectics of the Absolute idea of Hegel, and the Gospel of the Equality, Liberty and Fraternity of the French Revolution” (Green, 21). In terms of Vivekananda’s involvement with the Brahmo Samaj, Green concludes—and with some reason, given Vivekananda’s enduring focus on social issues—that the Samaj was the major influence on Vivekananda’s intellectual approach to Vedanta. Green also places Vivekananda’s interest in and knowledge of non-dualism here, along with an alleged rejection of scripture in favor of spiritual experience as the source of revelation (Green, 41). Unfortunately, as far as their agenda on religion went, Vivekananda himself stated that though he was “a great sympathizer with [the Brahmo Samaj] reforms, the “booby” religion could not hold its own against the old “Vedanta.” CW Vol.7 (1964): Letter to Professor Henry Wright from Chicago, May 24, 1894, 467. This attitude to the Brahmo Samaj stands in stark relief to the innumerable times Vivekananda stated that Ramakrishna’s worldview was the one he represented and the one he felt had the most to offer to humanity. At the age of nineteen Vivekananda had to face the inevitable conflict of the highly conceptual materialistic paradigm with his natural tendencies as a Hindu. After meeting Ramakrishna, illiterate by Western standards, but saturated in the highly experiential Indian traditions, he went through a five-year, rigorous transformational process (MacPhail, 2013) and directly experienced Atman/Brahman in classical Indian mode. In this way, he actually provided the experiential balance of Müller’s core belief. Vivekananda’s later commentaries on the sacred texts of Vedanta demonstrate that it is possible to integrate the conceptual paradigm of the West with the highly experiential paradigm of Vedanta. I introduce this corpus of work in my recent article on Vivekananda’s commentaries on the mahavakyas (MacPhail, 2022) and in his commentaries on Truth is one, the wise call it variously (MacPhail, October-November, 2022); You are That (MacPhail, February, 2023); and I am you (July, 2023). As far as concepts go, Vivekananda was most assuredly committed to a highly humanistic and democratic agenda in India, sweeping away entrenched caste privileges and empowering women and the working classes as well as building up individual self-identity and respect, morale, and the ability to act effectively, something that a world-denying philosophy such as Advaita cannot support. In the West he perceived the overdevelopment of such identity into dangerous ego as evidenced by the activities of capitalist industrialists and others who were rapidly breaking down the bonds of human interdependence that had created the Western juggernaut itself and thereby laying the foundations for ongoing turmoil and aggression. Idealism/Romanticism and Pietism/The Brahmo Samaj as Influences on Müller and Vivekananda Green goes into an interesting disquisition on how Vivekananda’s worldview contrasts with the emerging analyses of the capabilities of the human mind by Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel and Schopenhauer, and their impact on Müller’s thinking (Green, 22-35). All of these are seen as stages in the effort to transcend our “normal”, rational mind in the effort to arrive at final reality, truth, or what the West generally accepts as irrefutable fact. In particular, what seems to have attracted the attention of European savants was the insight of Hegel: The rise of thought beyond the world of sense, its passage from the finite to the infinite, the leap into the supersensible which it takes when it snaps asunder the chain of sense. . . . Say there must be no such passage and you say there is to be no thinking (Green, 25). This statement can be seen as an outright rejection of Kant’s belief that the ding an sich (Reality) is beyond the grasp of the human mind, or alternatively a restatement of the presuppositions of Western mystics who outlined trajectories from human to divine, often against the opposition of the Abrahamic establishment. One can understand the impact such thinking had on a culture groaning under scientism’s vehement restriction of human consciousness. And also the enthusiasm of the Brahmo Samaj on finding Müller, a European who seemed to be embracing the central reality of non-sectarian (pre-Advaita) Vedanta, which I here am correlating with the “unexpurgated” chatushpad. Despite this general enthusiasm about an apparent meeting of East and West in Hegel’s thinking, Müller, on account of his adherence to Advaita could not accept the claim of the German absolute idealists that: There is no distinction between reason and nature; in fact, nature in fact is the extension of mind and mind the highest development of nature (Green, 26). From Vivekananda’s side, perceiving all of the stages of the process as of equal value, the objection to Hegel was: Hegel’s one idea is that the one, the absolute, is only chaos, and that the individualized form is the greater. CW, Vol.3: The Vedanta in All Its Phases, 342-343. For Vivekananda, this was a totally unacceptable position and one he rejoiced had been effectively thrown out of India, though he does not state by what means. Given that the whole thrust of his work was to make known to the world the facts, cogency, and coherency of India’s view of consciousness, he was determined that India’s authentic voice should be heard, and its thinking take place within its own frame of reference untouched by Westernism, especially materialism. Green remarks that Vivekananda was aware of the work of these thinkers and is presented as holding some views that in many ways seem to reflect their content, but the decisive difference in approach with Müller is (Green, 34): While Müller proposed to understand the true nature of religion through a history of human experiences of the infinite, Vivekananda argued that religious truth could best be grasped by following the yogic methods which had produced experiential proof of monism [i.e. non-dualism]. This contrast could be seen as Western conceptual historicism versus Indian experientialism, a contrast that can be said to have characterized the history of the two cultures from time immemorial. Evolutionary Theory in the Thought of Müller and Vivekananda One of the major theories promoting materialist reductionism was the theory of evolution as propounded by Darwin, along with the notion of natural selection which was winning out and was a bulwark of the attack on religions. It was therefore a central issue for both Müller and Vivekananda. Müller never visited India and therefore focused his work exclusively on the need of the West to ground itself in Spirit, while at the same time following Western scientific principles of investigation. In keeping with Western methodology, his approach was to study religious testimony on a historical time scale, thereby bringing out the evidence for the internal changes within the traditions, which in his estimation demonstrated a process of evolution, not primarily in the physical world, but in interior perception and development of understanding (Green, 43-44). Vivekananda spent half of his tragically short working life in the West and the other in India, resulting in an interrelated East-West agenda. Green characterizes Vivekananda’s Western teachings as abstract and compatible with private religion (presumably yoga), while in India he created political forms (Green, 12). With regard to the theory of evolution, Vivekananda’s focus was less on the theory itself, which in principle he accepted, on account of the established view in the schools of yoga that a process of evolution in human consciousness is a given in self-transformation, aided and accelerated by appropriate practice. Noteworthy here is the correct view of Green that this position of Vivekananda on yogic evolution was not compatible with traditional non-dualism, of which a cardinal tenet was that the world is not real and therefore any form of evolution is a non-entity (Green, 45-46). However, although Vivekananda’s acceptance of the Western theory of evolution and his Brahmo-induced involvement in social improvement was somewhat of an apostasy to élitist Hindus, he steadfastly aimed to keep Western materialism out of India, along with the kind of abuses related to the likes of Social Darwinism, eugenics, savage competition (Green, 45), as well as its breakdown of social cohesion (Green, 46). Vivekananda Experiences Full Subjective Reality for the First Time If we accept that at the beginning of his “campaign” Müller was embracing pure non-dualism and we seek to correlate this with the opening stages of Vivekananda’s development, we have to look at experiential fact rather than theory. As I see it, Green himself gives us a clue in his oblique mention (75) of the power of Ramakrishna’s touch on Vivekananda. However, although Green dilates on the Brahmo conviction of the importance of direct experience, he does not supply us with the actual data of Vivekananda’s first major experience with Ramakrishna. Its omission could well be due to the fact that this episode is not found in Vivekananda’s Complete Works, but it is chronicled in common domain in Sri Ramakrishna, the Great Master (Saradananda, 1952), the primary, eyewitness and interpretive biography of Ramakrishna and description of Vivekananda’s transformational process. As with all of the materials utilized in my study, the author of this work was, like Vivekananda, an adept in both Western thought and Indian spiritual practice, highly esteemed in both India and in the West. He was a keen observer of facts with a mind well-balanced between Indian noeticism and Western scientific fact and held in esteem when interacting with the staff and students at Harvard University in 1896. In The Great Master we learn that at one of the first meetings of Ramakrishna and Vivekananda in early 1881, when Vivekananda—saturated with Western materialistic rationalism and disbelief in the validity of the interior world—was vigorously contesting Ramakrishna’s alleged psychic power, a simple touch by Ramakrishna shattered all of the young man’s perception of reality. Houses, sky, grass, river, and all the paraphernalia of the temple garden where they were, melted away completely and Vivekananda’s psyche went beyond all physical or mental forms, revealing to him nondual, formless reality. This was samadhi, the direct experience of Ground Reality within and permeating the universe. As the ascent was so unanticipated and rapid, Vivekananda was thrown into what he perceived as a death experience and was extremely perturbed before disappearing completely as a player into the whole experience (Saradananda, 1952, Chapter IV, 737). That it completely cut across Vivekananda’s conceptual notions and Brahmo agendas is clear from his later statement that: Ramakrishna would hypnotize anyone who came to see him, and in two minutes know all about him. From this I learned to count our consciousness a very small thing (Basu, 1982, Vol.2, 1263). In terms of Vivekananda’s previous agenda, this cataclysmic experience was the first “rending of the veil” of materialism, or a saltation from purely conceptual notions of what is what into the direct experience of What Is, precisely what Müller—following his transcendental predecessors—was aiming for without knowing how to actually do it. It was the shifting into a totally different key of all of Müller’s laboriously and meticulously worked out theses, turning them from beautiful constructs into an actual engagement with the transpersonal realm, thereby performing the precise function they were aiming to accomplish. And in the context of interior evolution, this experience was definitely the first step in what was to be a fivefold “evolutionary” pattern within the psyche of Vivekananda, as presented in MacPhail, 2013. In addition, rather than sublating Vivekananda’s humanistic concerns, as we might expect from Müller’s positions based on Advaita Vedanta, this event grounded them in the context of Spiritual Humanism, the notion that human individuality based on Vivekananda’s conviction of the innate divinity of humanity (Green, 104) is of supreme importance. That worldview highlights the capacity of any individual to self-transform and thereby access direct experience of spirit or the deepest levels of human consciousness, a notion that reductionist science could never conceive of, far less countenance. Nor could its meaning be accessed by a traditional Vedantin who rejects reality to physical matter and human individuality. The full portent of this point of view is reviewed in Gayatriprana, 2015. This insight is, of course, highly counterintuitive, as is the term Spiritual Humanism at first sight. This type of permanent conjunction of apparent opposites is a hallmark result of samadhi, what Vivekananda called the superconscious: “Perfect superconscious . . . which gives us freedom. . .. There is no safeguard until the soul goes beyond nature, and beyond conscious concentration” (Vivekananda, 1896, 117) CW, Vol.1 (1965): Raja-yoga, Chapter 1: Concentration: Its Spiritual Uses, verse 18, 212.. In my thesis I develop the insight that these samadhis are moments of total self-transcendence in which integrations are made that would not be at all possible in the “normal” (conceptual) world, and with them the power to make their content manifest in words and actions. I see this insight as helping to explain why Vivekananda was able to work in both the physical and the spiritual realms without conflict, a situation that is difficult to understand if we restrict ourselves exclusively to the purely conceptual or purely experiential domains. What emerged from his ongoing interactions with Ramakrishna were the viewpoints within the overview of Spiritual Humanism: in India the development of Humanistic Vedanta and in the West of Spiritualized Democracy (MacPhail, 2013, 189-190). Chapter 2 and Level II: Müller’s Science of Religion and Vivekananda’s Yoga as a Science Vivekananda’s Emphasis on Yoga or Self-transformation Vis à Vis Müller With regard to Müller’s influence on Vivekananda, Green asserts (50) that Vivekananda did not carry out a systematic study of religion and that his presentation of the historical development of religions, the essence of religion and its supernatural origins and theory are similar to Müller’s. However, he admits that although Vivekananda read Müller’s books, it is difficult to prove that Vivekananda borrowed from Müller and concludes that Vivekananda’s integration of religion was not passively derivative of Müller’s thought. A somewhat ambivalent assessment, as is true of much of what is said about Vivekananda in this book. The cogency of Green’s remarks may now be explored in the light of Gayatriprana (2020), a compilation of all of Vivekananda’s remarks on the history of Vedanta from its earliest Vedic stages up to the beginning of the twentieth century. In passing, Vivekananda does refer, though often obliquely, to Müller and other Western Orientalists and their theories, which would be in keeping with his respect for their work and his Westernized ability to gladly present some of their seminal ideas. In the same vein, he does not refrain from calling them out when their views simply make no sense in the Indian context. Further, it may be somewhat of a superimposition of Müller’s thought on Vivekananda that Vivekananda was primarily moved by conceptual influences rather than by his own experience. These two positions could be further finessed by saying that Vivekananda saw that India desperately needed contemporary social consciousness and modern institutions to support its people if they were to gain independence from Western imperialism and gain a place in the global community. Such institutions were not to be built on Western presuppositions, but on the principles of indigenous thinking, including Vedanta and the practice of traditional yoga. On the other hand, his mission to the West was to introduce the time-tested methods of self-transformation (yoga) so that the West could find its “soul” without necessarily having to kowtow to outmoded religious forms or rejecting science, its crown jewel. Rather than relying on any conceptual analysis, this bipartite program arose more from Vivekananda’s personal experience, supporting Green’s other suggestion that Vivekananda’s worldview was heavily influenced by his spiritual teacher, Ramakrishna. As we already know, it was at Ramakrishna’s hands that Vivekananda had been thrown into the world of pure subjectivity, a rather terrifying samadhi or saltation from the objective physical world to the totality of what Vivekananda would later call the superconscious, where any recognizable features of our material, rationalistic world—including the categories of exegesis by scholars—cease totally to exist, thereby bypassing any quibbles about established criteria of anything. This experience, occurring in what was to the Advaitins the “lowest” step of the chatushpad, can be said to throw a first monkey wrench into the apotheosis of Advaita and certainly is an illustration in actual life of the kind of process on which all of Vedanta, including Advaita, is built. It therefore supports Müller in the most radical of ways. The Emergence over Time of Human Experience as the Core of Spirituality The next step seems to be the issue of just how is this kind of experience accessed and how do we learn how to validate it? For Müller, it was the quest for “universal religion”, as derived from the study of religions. Although Vivekananda went along with this approach, his own central position was that what was most important was that the experiences on which were built the traditions Müller studied so intently must be re-experienced in contemporary times and repeatedly in order to demonstrate their validity (Green, 51). Vivekananda took his presentation further, making the case for the scope, range, and results of yoga in his statements on raja yoga. He asserted that it was the possession and perfecting over millennia of these techniques that gave Vedanta its edge over all other religions on account of its impersonal and humanistic orientation, its dependence on interior validity independent of external systematization and dogma, its coherent progression of development in a systematic manner, its openness to validation by others, and by the spectacular results it produced. CW, Vol.1, 1965: Raja-Yoga: Introductory, 129-136. This led him to characterize yoga as scientific in the level of human function I have dubbed Yoga as a Science. This is a rather more accurate nomenclature than the religion as a science Green chooses to bestow upon it. Both Müller and Vivekananda upheld the idea of eternal principles informing these projects, a stance that, interpreted from the standpoint of existing religions, opened them up to the criticism of essentialism, or making one worldview or another central to the exclusion or diminution of others. In the West the dominant fear was and still is that Vivekananda was going to import Advaita or at least a primarily experiential religion as the prime principle that trumped all others (Green, 54). In India, Müller’s embrace, at least in his earlier work, of “true Christianity” did not bode well for the followers of the Indo-European religions derived from Vedanta. It is likely that their distaste for this position is based primarily on the Western validation of conceptual structures as of primary importance. From perhaps a more experiential position, both men agreed that priestcraft and all that that brings with it—such as rituals—should be diminished or removed, as they provide what might be considered obstacles or distractions from the real issue: the direct experience by the individual of spiritual reality (Green, 59). Müller rejected the position that experiential religion evolved as language evolved, partially because of the apparent collapse in India of spiritual experience after the period of the Upanishads and later after Buddha (Green, 61). He was deeply disappointed to find in the India of his day rampant ritualism and superstition (Green, 61), with apparently no capability of resisting Western imperialism and its underpinnings of Judeo-Christianity. Vivekananda saw this period, ultimately connected with foreign invasions of one kind or another, as a time of protecting their native traditions from hostile attack. In that context, Vivekananda sees qualified non-dualism and frank dualism, which were strongly related to devotionalism and all of the rituals and so on associated with it, not as an ignominious “descent” down the chatushpad, but as all guaranteeing spiritual liberation and, in their own way, as necessary and valuable for the Indian masses. Nevertheless, it should not take much imagination to see that the British attempt in 1836 at mass deculturation of the Indians, Hindu, and Muslim, could only lead the Indians to batten down the hatches even more, resulting in the dismaying spectacle that Müller so deplored. Natural Religion and Two Ways of Understanding and Applying It Whatever the underlying analysis, both Müller and Vivekananda distance themselves from the innate dualism of Abrahamism, including the notion of revelation from an external source, and focus on what Müller called Natural Religion, which he regarded as a natural outgrowth of the human mind. In such a framework the notion of God is itself a product of the human mind (68), as is the notion of an external providence. For Müller, the Infinite is intuited and revealed in human religious experience, which naturally sees things beyond the senses, pace scientistic belief that there is actually nothing beyond the senses to be revealed. And for Müller, the highest point in this development was nothing short of the views of Shankaracharya, which I take to mean the attainment of the fourth level in samadhi as established by Gaudapada in Advaita Vedanta. Vivekananda’s position here is stated to be that the similarity of the world’s religions indicate that their essence is one. Both he and Müller emphasized that this whole worldview involves an active struggle to transcend the limitations of the sense world, in Müller’s case through the perception of the Infinite by human faculties, and in Vivekananda’s by overcoming human limitations through the force of will (Green, 72). Green places these two approaches in the interesting framework of Max Weber (1864-1920), which delineates two approaches (Green, 72) in science: the conceptual approach, attributed to Plato, and the experimental developed in the Renaissance control of experience. In our study, Müller’s systematic approach is said to conform to concept, and Vivekananda’s to experiment, a comparison that is clearly another way of delineating the nature of the differences in their attitudes across the board. Other contemporary authors of this line of thought are Whitehead’s Process and Reality; Goswami’s classical, reductionist brain and the quantum brain and (1995); and McGilchrist (2009 and 2021), whose clinical documentation of the neurological underpinnings of this phenomenon are all but overwhelming. In my doctoral thesis, before reading that literature, I discerned that Ramakrishna’s teaching of Vivekananda was in both modes, and that Vivekananda carried that twofold mode of teaching forward, using what I termed the conceptual method in India and the experiential in the West. Within the experiential Indian framework that Vivekananda advocates, Green focuses on the discipline known as yoga, the discipline necessary for the development of insightful experiential knowledge. Raja yoga, one such discipline selected here by Green, entails gaining control over the forces of nature and mind, leading to samadhi, in Vivekananda’s words: A state beyond reason which can provide answers to all religious and moral questions and wherein “the yogi will find himself as he is and as he always was, the essence of knowledge, the immortal, the all-pervading” (Green, 74). This is another characterization of the kind of high-water mark of consciousness that is described by Vivekananda not only in Advaitic practice, but also in various forms of yoga. His own first samadhi also opened the door for the subsequent development of yoga within the whole line of experience and thought in Level I, the realm of embodied human experience. At that level what was required was nothing more than a burning intent to grasp what is real within any experience in the physical world and to make it the center of all activities whatsoever. The deep impression is that such a person can penetrate beyond predetermined dogmas, paradigms, or received opinions and see directly to the very core of what he or she is working with. This is Vivekananda’s interpretation of karma yoga or the yoga of work. In bringing forward this kind of material, the Brahmo Samaj had maintained that this kind of experience overshadowed in importance the texts of the Vedantic tradition, which were so overlaid with sectarian commentary as to be all but incomprehensible From this, Green suggests that Vivekananda also rejected scripture, but my own study of his commentaries on the core texts of the Vedas, Upanishads and Bhagavadgita demonstrates that this is not the case. Everything he says can be related to these canonical texts—as seen from the fifth level of consciousness, which was Vivekananda’s unique contribution to Vedanta. Himself stating the problem of traditional commentators (Gayatriprana, 2020, 237-241), Vivekananda follows his own advice and brings to bear on these texts his own massive interior realizations, acquired from his dialogs and interactions with Ramakrishna. Contrary to the impression of Green, Vivekananda does not limit the discovery and teaching of this experiential truth only to Advaita (Green, 77), a position in keeping with the holistic vision of Ramakrishna and also Patanjali, who predated Advaita by about a millennium. Just how this position was arrived at emerges when we look at the facts of what followed Ramakrishna’s second touch on his young acolyte, material that is perhaps the least well known of Vivekananda’s samadhis, but none the less available in common domain in Saradananda, 1952, 769. Vivekananda’s Second Samadhi Now grounded by his first samadhi in Spiritual Humanism, the next step for Vivekananda was to undertake the process of self-transformation through which the inner meaning of Spiritual Humanism was to be explored, not only through time-honored precepts, but also his own direct experience. In so doing, he was not going to experience just one of the many forms of yoga that the Indian tradition had developed, but all four of them, à la Ramakrishna, who was by this time had clearly revealed himself not a one-sided yogi, but an embracer of all forms of yoga as valid. As I demonstrate in my doctoral thesis, Ramakrishna trained Vivekananda, not only in the yoga of work (karma yoga), but also in the other three yogas—bhakti, raja, and jnana— to the point of samadhi and beyond. Before proceeding here, I comment on the rather universal image of Ramakrishna as essentially devotional. This notion is expressed in Green’s book as follows: It is hard to avoid the conclusion that Ramakrishna viewed Advaita as largely inimical to the pursuit of what he saw as the main end of religious practice, namely the ecstatic experience of union with the Divine Mother (Green, 20). These opinions are based on the thinking of Western scholars. From Vivekananda himself we learn: It was given to me to live with a man who was as ardent a dualist, as ardent an Advaitist, as ardent a bhakta, as a jnani. CW, Vol.3, 1970: Vedanta in Its Application to Indian Life, 233-234. And, in connection with his own training from Ramakrishna: He used generally to teach dualism. As a rule, he never taught Adwaitism—but he taught it to me. I had been a dualist before. CW, Vol.7, 1969: On Sri Ramakrishna and His Views, 411-412. This indicates that Ramakrishna was much more versatile than his Western observers realize. The text that is most focused on is the Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, which is a wonderful record of Ramakrishna’s interactions with visitors in the last five years of his life. However, it seems to be generally assumed that this is the one and only text of importance. What is not always borne in mind is that M, the acclaimed recorder of this precious material, was a householder, a family man who came to see Ramakrishna at certain times, mostly during the day. For the most part, the others visiting Ramakrishna at those times were men similar to himself, “Bengali babus” or middleclass gentlemen, whose primary focus was on devotional attitudes to the Hindu deities. These were the people that Vivekananda refers to here. What is known from oral tradition in the Ramakrishna Order Swami Pavitrananda, senior monk of the Order in the nineteen-seventies in New York. is that Ramakrishna’s monastic disciples came to him late at night and to them he spoke quite differently, which would include Vivekananda, who himself tells us that Ramakrishna trained him in Advaita. Ramakrishna was, in short, “all things to all people”, (Bible, 1 Corinthians 9:22), responding directly to the needs of whomever was before him and in need in some way. I myself (MacPhail, 2020b) have drawn attention to the variety of ways Ramakrishna is presented in the primary literature, from the most humanistic and adorable to the pinnacle of Integral Vedanta, “the coming religion”. Inadvertently, I omitted from that study the important biography by Ramachandra Datta (2014) that was the flashpoint for the scurrilous American text Kali’s Child (1995), though reading it failed to support the contentions of the American work. There I suggest that the most complete view of Ramakrishna is that of Swami Vivekananda in the Complete Works. This more comprehensive approach is likely to revolutionize Ramakrishna studies. After about two years after his first samadhi, Vivekananda was an avid believer in non-dualism/Advaita, which by its rejection of reality to anything other than the fourth level, totally disdained any form of yoga other than its own discipline of intense study of the non-dual scriptures and the resultant saltation from “lower reality” into the deep intuition of undivided, non-material reality. During this time Vivekananda mocked Ramakrishna’s apparent delusions about immanent Reality and its action upon the worlds of discerning intellect, imagination/creativity, and the physical world, the “lower three” in the view of Gaudapada. This attitude stood in the way of Vivekananda accepting the notion of an immanent divine that is central to the practices of Buddha, which were utterly despised and attacked by Shankaracharya and regarded by the non-dual Hindu élite of Vivekananda’s day as utterly contemptible. Once again Ramakrishna’s touch changed the young man’s whole being quite radically. While he conceptually retained the non-dual experience as valid in and of itself, the experience also shifted Vivekananda’s mind from exclusively Classical Advaita Vedanta to a direct—and at the time, highly confusing—experience of divine immanence in all possible physical, emotional, or intellectual objects and the yogas that sought to transform the perception of them (Saradananda, 1952, 769). Ramakrishna’s Integrative Inclusion of All Forms of Yoga in Vivekananda’s Training In my thesis (MacPhail, 2013, 420-494) I present how Ramakrishna, taking advantage of this newfound flexibility, introduced Vivekananda to and trained him in the classical four yogas—of work, devotion, discerning intellect, as well as the intuitive faculty central to non-dual experience. With roots going back millennia, these yogas had over time and especially when India was dominated by foreign invaders, been traditionally at war with each other. For Vivekananda, who saw yoga as India’s special contribution to human welfare, this was a tragedy of the first degree, and he sought to find reconciliation between them. There were several issues in the matter: Following the intuition of Gaudapada, the context or substrates of the yogas seemed to form a hierarchy. In the yoga of work the focus is on the physical world; in devotion on the emotions, imagination, and creativity; in the yoga of self-knowledge, discerning intellect on the innermost vision of Reality possible from a human standpoint; and in the yoga of truth or jnana on That which transcends the human or any other discernible context. If subjectivity was what was most valued—and it was, in fact, in India—this was a clear hierarchy, and the yogas had tended to be related to the caste system, still enduring from Neolithic times in India. Work was the lot of laborers, very low in rank, and its karma yoga for the most part not much discussed in the extant Vedantic texts. The devotees who practiced bhakti yoga or devotion were largely merchants and businessmen, important in the Indian economy, but not highly regarded overall. The cultivation of discerning intellect or raja yoga was sought after by the higher castes, noteworthy in the case of Buddha, and was associated with monasticism, which gave it a better overall appearance. Finally, the practice of non-dual knowledge—jnana—as presented by the Shankara Order was restricted largely to the highest caste—brahmins, and at that, unmarried, celibate men. It was inevitable, it seems, that each discipline would develop its own techniques independently of the others and that over time and the inevitable disagreements and clashes that had occurred between these different disciplines, that animosity and exclusion would arise. Attitudes that the foreign rulers could readily utilize in divide and conquer mode. In the course of his own training, Ramakrishna had learned from top teachers in the traditional world the ideas and practices of both Advaita and Tantra. In both he was recognized as an accomplished adept, and certainly a very unusual teacher. He was able to relate in a seamless vision of reality and aspiration for human wholeness two traditions that had been at each other’s throats for centuries. This interrelatedness is what he passed on to Vivekananda, whose Western humanism, sense of social justice, and quite likely knowledge of the hierarchical organization of the human nervous system as envisioned in the Tantric kundalini and the discoveries in Western neurosciences, immediately envisioned the whole process of yoga as related, not to scholastic schools of thought and practice, but as the organization and layout of transformational potential in any conscious being whatsoever: Each soul is potentially divine. The goal is to manifest this divinity within by controlling nature, external and internal. Do this either by work, worship, or psychic control, or philosophy—by one, more, or all of these—and be free. This is the whole of religion. Doctrines, or dogmas, or books, or temples, or forms are but secondary details. CW, Vol.1, 1965: Raja-Yoga, 124. Limitations of space preclude going into detail about these yogas here. In my thesis I study how Vivekananda’s insights about the yogas are directly related to what Vivekananda accessed during his training from Ramakrishna (MacPhail, 2013, Chapters 21-22). In Gayatriprana 2020, xxix I present a table which lays out the primary aspects of these yogas and how they relate to each other in Vivekananda’s thinking. The systematic array of consciousness across the four yogas, themselves arranged in the classical hierarchy of matter-emotions-mind-spirit (I-IV), produces a definite sense of overall coherence, progression of meaning and inbuilt consistency and systematism that may well be the reason that Vivekananda looked on yoga as a perennial form of science of the interior of the human psyche. Although he looked on raja yoga as the most “scientific”, doubtless because it is the yoga that deals with the most analytical function of the psyche, the same pattern can be perceived throughout all of the yogas. What is noteworthy is that Vivekananda saw this whole dynamic as primarily taking place within the individual, not as conflicting bailiwicks of entrenched poohbahs and ultra-orthodox Vedantins. Within that framework, his interest was in encouraging individuals to explore their own potentials and discover and master any and all of the possible levels through the practice of the yoga or yogas appropriate to them. This is surely a fundamental criterion of secularism, as, of course, the total opposite of procedure in Classical Advaita. In addition to the above, at every step of the way in his training from Ramakrishna, Vivekananda received both a conceptual and experiential “take” on the subject. In the domain of yoga as a science the presentation in the West was as a pure science, i.e. one that was being worked up from first principles of matter, and in India as an applied science, in which the perennial findings from the systematic study of yoga were to be applied to the material facts of the everyday world (Ibid., 492-493). In view of Green’s ongoing effort throughout his book to pinpoint Vivekananda’s position vis à vis Advaita and his concern about Vivekananda’s lack of organization, this samadhi is clearly a key piece of evidence to buttress our claim that Vivekananda’s worldview resists any attempt to organize it according to the criteria of either. With regard to Müller’s actual knowledge of the yoga presented by Vivekananda, my study of Vivekananda’s presentation of the yogas in the two years prior to his meeting with Müller clearly demonstrated that though he fully validated the methods of Advaita Vedanta in his Jnana Yoga, he also validated and took very seriously what Advaitins held as the “lesser” or even invalid yoga modes of meditation (raja yoga), devotion (bhakti yoga), and work (karma yoga). To support his presentation Vivekananda emphasized the traditional texts of each: for jnana (intuitive knowledge), the Upanishads, quite OK with Advaita or non-dual Vedanta; for raja (meditation), Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, which are based on the dualistic thinking of Sankhya psychology on which Buddha had built his system. From there we “descend” to bhakti (imagination, devotion, and creativity), buttressed by a translation of Narada’s Bhakti Sutras, again dualistic, based on the philosophy of Ramanuja and Madhwacharya and feeding into the Vaishnava tradition which the non-dualists totally despised. And, finally the second and third chapters of the Bhagavad Gita are invoked as “the texts” of the yoga of work, a “yoga for the underclasses” and, as an interface with the physical world almost never mentioned in the Vedantic tradition since the advent of the Gita itself, though the dualist Madhwacharya demonstrates how compatible his dualistic philosophy is with social concerns and interventions, and of course the Tantrics delved into deeply with very valuable results. This apparent gallimaufry of various philosophical and religious traditions in and of itself is proof that Vivekananda was in no way bound exclusively to Advaita. In his presentations of classical yoga, which were largely in the West, and almost invariably part of his program everywhere he visited (Burke, 1985-1987), A very typical and fully recorded example of this type of presentation is The Ideal of a Universal Religion, delivered in New York on January 12, 1896, CW 2, 1971:375-396. he would always include one lecture on what he called universal religion. In these lectures he would indicate that the variety of yogas existed to meet the needs of all of the different aspects of human makeup—hands, heart, and head, with the all-pervading intuition of jnana an integral part of the whole picture. In this way he “democratized” yoga, by validating all of them and looking at them, not as separate conceptual entities, but as living dynamic realities created to work on the whole person, independently of any school of thought or organization. Certainly, he advocated that it was desirable to practice as many as possible and to integrate them with each other, a position that suggests a fifth yoga: that of integration of all of the others, which Vivekananda presented several times, though not under that rubric. In the Indian context, this was something radically new. In addition, his claim that proper practice and progress in each yoga would lead to non-dual experience within the purview of each level, was the final last straw in his “apostasy” from any previously settled system of organization. I shall later present data that supports this position. What seems to be distracting for Green and Western scholars in general is his support of Classical Advaita, a red herring if one has conceived of him exclusively as a supporter of that system, or that that is the only valid system. This is what seems to have happened in our book and is perhaps behind the Western notions of Vivekananda’s “inconsistency” when his utterances are measured from that standpoint. From another standpoint, we can see Vivekananda’s validation of variety in yoga as another way of expressing Ramakrishna’s embrace of the validity of all religions, in this instance of forms of religious/spiritual practice. In the context of yoga Vivekananda’s insights did run into opposition from Müller, who found it hard to stomach the yogic “powers” that are part of raja yoga or the transformation of our discerning intellect through meditation. The problem seems to have stemmed from the activities of the Theosophical Society which was actively discussing such things and staging “demonstrations” which were found to be fraudulent. Müller’s article and subsequent book on Ramakrishna worked assiduously at keeping up a skeptical stance on this subject, which was necessary at the time because of the massive resistance to such things by the reductionistic, scientistic majority. And, possibly, related to Müller’s own unfamiliarity with such phenomena, despite his encyclopedic knowledge about what had been said about them in the yogic literature. And also of the biographies of Shankaracharya, whose life was in some ways a museum of such events. Overall, given the heavy Western bias in favor of Vivekananda as an Advaitin, there is much to admire and agree with in Green’s conclusion that Vivekananda avoided the extremes of Advaita and Western thought (Green, 83); that raja yoga is a method to accelerate [spiritual] evolution culminating in the production of perfect man (Green, 45); and that such a consummation is attained not through belief, but by intense struggle through human discovery, not divine guidance, to transcend the limitations of the senses (Green, 71). Chapter 3 and Level III: Müller’s Avidya as Ignorance and Vivekananda’s Maya as an Attitude of Mind Advaita’s Denial of the Physical World versus Immanent Monism The title of Chapter 3 is Vedanta in Defence of Religion, which sets out to demonstrate how Müller utilized the traditional memes of Classical Advaita to stave off the onslaught of reductionist science. Working, as before, in the context of the Brahmo Samaj, Green (82) gives us a thumbnail sketch of the struggle within that organization to reach a balance between the Shankara non-dual stance of the organization’s founder, Rammohan Roy (1772-1833) and the later emphasis on personal experience and ethics spearheaded by Debendranath Tagore (1817-1905), the father of Rabindranath. Further developments led to the inclusion of the thought of the German philosopher, Hegel, particularly the notion of evolution of Spirit in world history (Green, 81). Green suggests that this movement “was, perhaps, a more cosmopolitan and rationalistic ancestor of the philosophical tendency in Swadeshi-era Bengal named by Sartori “immanent monism” (Green, 82): Here, instead of achieving union with the absolute through gnosis [jnana, the methodology of Classical Advaita (Green, 21)], the devotee approaches divine truth from within the flux or phenomenal experience and acquires “spiritual self-realization” through practice (karma yoga, the path of action) (Sartori, 2007, 77-93). Sartori argued that the Tantric side of this teaching was typical of Ramakrishna and others, “an idealism grounded in an organicist theory of the national spirit in opposition to rationalistic individualism” (Green, 82) [i.e. Western, which was gaining ground in India]. Here we also see a movement away from the Advaitic salvation for the individual to one that involved work for the uplift and salvation of the whole community. In this line of thought Ramakrishna is characterized as advocating, not the classic Advaitic path of withdrawal from the illusory phenomenal world, but realization of a personal deity, which involves immersion in a world—including this actual physical world identical with that deity. This viewpoint is branded “Tantric monism”, presumably because there is no radical split between the deity and the physical world (which would be dualism). And within that physical world of engagement, I would add to the original suggestion of karma yoga, also the yogas of emotion and intellectual discernment, which to the Advaitic mind are sufficiently “contaminated” with the physical world as to render them irrelevant to the non-dual curriculum. This immanent monism is, of course, an apostasy from Classical Advaita. All of that being said, the documentation of Ramakrishna’s training of Vivekananda in yoga (MacPhail, 2013, 378-599), does include the Classical Advaitic method at the culminating fourth stage of his development, but not as sublating the other yogas. As we have been going along, Green increasingly has perceived Vivekananda’s teachings as deviating from Classical Advaita, and at this juncture suggests that they fit in better with Ramakrishna’s “Tantric monism”. He does draw attention to Vivekananda’s denunciations of the craze for vamachara Tantra especially in Bengal, which permitted sensual license ad lib, in distinction to the other traditions of India. Green opines that Ramakrishna passed on to Vivekananda the Bengali Tantric tradition, including—with great prescience—his acceptance of the goddess Kali as the embodied form of Ultimate Reality. Such “immanent monism” permits Green to refrain, on the whole, from calling Vivekananda a thoroughgoing Advaitin or his position a passive response to Western stimuli (Green, 83). Nevertheless, Green still regards Vivekananda as “non-systematic thinker” (Green, 83), “pulled in different directions”, especially those of Hegel-influenced immanent monism and uncompromising Advaita totally detached from Hegel or Tantra. As we have seen, Vivekananda did not engage with “Hegelianism”, but rather with the direct experience of the contemporary manifestations of the traditional Vedantic chatushpad as evoked for him by Ramakrishna. Like other Western systems of dialectics from Plato and Aristotle onwards, Hegel’s dialectics span a whole ontology of reality, in and through each level of which there is a process of thesis, antithesis and synthesis, which resolves inbuilt contradictions and conflicts and permits the analysis to proceed to the next ontological level. In Western style, all of these systems operate within the mode of pure concept or what McGilchrist calls “the left brain” (McGilchrist, 2009, 2021). What I have demonstrated (MacPhail, 2013, 600-777) is that the interaction between Ramakrishna and Vivekananda takes place in a similar fashion, but one in which the conflicting thesis and antithesis are not simply conceptual structures, but the very faculties of conception and experience themselves, akin to bra and ket aspects of experience in quantum theory (MacPhail, 2018). This whole process, involving several levels of context in which there is freedom to bring out an interior exploration of their meaning suggests the function of what McGilchrist refers to as the “right brain”. Synthesis or resolution of conflict on any level is brought about by a samadhi event, in which the whole process of interaction of concept and experience is transcended. This whole process can be seen as complementary to the conceptual systems of the West, the bringing to the forefront the subjective and experiential processes behind the generation of complex verbal structures the West has always tended to gravitate towards. In Gayatriprana, 2020, xlvi-xlvii Vivekananda’s view can be seen as a case for the validity and importance of the subjective world so thoroughly investigated by the Indian tradition. In the present situation, rather than embrace a Western (Hegelian) structure, as his Brahmo colleagues seemed to be doing, Vivekananda works through and explains and transmits to others the inner experience and meaning of all of these levels and how they impact human life, including the verbal structures that have been generated, especially in the West. This approach is of course quite novel to the West, and therefore confusing, especially as it comes with the full chatushpad without any of the blocks that have been imposed on it, both by Advaita and materialist reductionism. This dynamic, which I basically demonstrate in my thesis, means that “the full chatushpad” embraces the experience of the physical world (jagat) all the way up to and including the experience of Brahman (turiya or nirvikalpa). In so doing it simply ignores the Western dismissal of the interior world and Advaita’s equally peremptory rejection of any touch of the physical as it is perceived in not only the physical world, but also the world of emotion and creativity and even the world of discerning intellect, of which the function is primarily to separate the world from Brahman and open the door to the Fourth. From the standpoint of both India and the West Vivekananda’s was a bold agenda, sweeping away centuries of fixed creed on both side of the aisle. It is not surprising that the insight has arisen that the whole process emanates from another level capable of containing all of this psychic reorganization—what is known as turiyatita (beyond the Fourth) or vijnana (superior knowledge). As an illustration of this process, we find in connection with Green’s attempt to cobble together some facts from Vivekananda’s intellectual development, a comment that Vivekananda’s thought evolved over time, electing in 1894 to bring forward classic Advaita, Vivekananda’s emphasis on classical Advaita was primarily in the West, where the system was more or less unknown and for which there was a crying need. apparently abandoning the strand of immanentism. From Vivekananda’s viewpoint, however, Advaita and immanentism do not pose an either-or dichotomy or exclusion, but rather a both-and-situation, related as different steps on an ever-evolving, non-excluding path of understanding and knowledge. If this analysis is cogent, it is only natural that Vivekananda resists the superimposition of a foreign meme on his own position. Müller’s leanings to non-dualism are attributed to the early influence of German Romanticism and naturphilosophie, which he later faulted as too involved with the material world. He later gravitated towards that in Vedanta that clearly separates the material world and spiritual Reality, because materialism, tied to objectivity, is incapable of knowledge of subjective reality, which is the central fact of Advaita. In order to demonstrate the views of Müller and Vivekananda at this stage Green singles out two cardinal teachings of Advaita, which are brought out by both of them. One is the statement ayam atma brahma (this Self is Brahman: Mandukya Upanishad, 2). The other is that the universe of our experience is the product of ignorance, avidya or maya, which can only be removed by the knowledge that there is nothing else but Brahman, Atman or Self. The Atman is that which is experienced in deep subjectivity, underlies all transient states of consciousness in the human psyche, survives physical death, and is identical with Brahman, utterly transcending all categories of reality as described in materialistic science. Both Müller and Vivekananda stress that the Atman is not to be confused with any aspect of the human psyche or mind, including the ego as understood in the West. In Vedanta such entities are regarded as radical misperceptions, as is matter itself, and the task of the Advaitin is to deconstruct all such objectifying categories in order to arrive at the subjective experience of the Self (Green, 94). For Müller the Atman or Self as experienced subjectively is the root for the idea of human divinity, both as conceived of as the presence of God in the human heart, its shared brotherhood with Christ, and human reasoning and language as the manifestation of divine logos (Green, 92). For Müller, the existence of the Self did not require external, material proof. His whole argument is based on the Advaitic assertion that the Self is identical with Brahman, an assertion that is clearly in a totally different category than any assertion relating to the material world. Vivekananda, taking the direct experience of the subjective world for granted (through yoga), asserts that the soul is beyond the law of causation and, rather than offering an elaborate explanation of the metaphysical problem, simply urges his listeners to deny the reality of matter, an injunction the practical reality of which Green does not address (Green, 94). However, the overall vision of yoga distancing one’s inner commitment to matter can be said to be a primary goal. The Engaged Atman, a Non-proposition in Advaita Based on his vision of the primacy of subjectivity, Vivekananda takes another stance that Green sees as quite unorthodox in Advaita: The Self as an active agent controlling the body/nature, the position that Vivekananda assumes in his raja yoga lectures and Green refers to as an exemplification of immanent monism (Green, 95). Although this position seems to contradict Shankara’s position that the Atman, like Brahman, is ineluctably other than matter or its manifestations, Vivekananda maintains that only through the direct, subjective knowledge of the Self can we conquer the limitations of matter that constitute our slavery to nature. While this could be interpreted as experiential evidence that the Self is prior to matter and has influence over it, Green chooses to resolve the apparent discrepancy by stating that for Vivekananda the world is ultimately unreal, as it was for Shankaracharya. As we shall see, this view is not an accurate assessment of Vivekananda’s thought. Green maintains that materialism per se was not accepted by Vivekananda as primary or as a criterion of ultimate judgement, since our perception of material objects is dependent on the Self (Green, 94). As always in Vedanta, although the Self is a prime mover, it is not accessed directly unless and until we have objectified the worlds of matter and emotion and discerning intellect, and it is only when we experience it directly behind and beyond them that we understand its power and how it can work through us efficiently and productively. Green is finally forced to state that: Vivekananda’s Atman is the immaterial soul which moves the material body and which, once it is acknowledged and recognized in all its power and freedom, can allow the mastery of nature (Green, 96). Innate Structures of Thought That Control Perception and Response The issue of how the world is created by illusion was, according to Green, the tool with which Müller and Vivekananda sought to refute the claimed priority of materialism over all other lines of thought and experience. It accounts for the fact that what is claimed to be one and indivisible is actually perceived as infinitely various and variable, subject to change and limited by time and space. As with his statements about the Atman, Müller’s position is not backed up with much in the way of phenomenology. Rather it rests only on the testimony of Shankara, itself founded on the Upanishads, “rather than derived from unassisted reasoning” (Green, 98). Green points out that Vivekananda more often uses the word maya than avidya (ignorance) to explain the whole process. Maya, for Vivekananda, relates to “name and form” or “time, space and causation”, “denoting innate structures of thought which cause human beings to see diversity where there is only oneness” (Green, 98). Green states that Vivekananda enunciated this trinity as three levels of reality: physical, mental, and spiritual, which not only puts flesh on or concretizes Müller’s blanket term of ignorance, but also gives a kind of “evolutionary” handle on the whole process itself. According to Green (Green, 99) Vivekananda further asserted that within the level of matter, illusory though it is from one standpoint, it is possible to discern a process leading from diversity to oneness, albeit a oneness defined in purely materialistic terms and not synonymous with the ultimate realization of spirit as Spirit. This seems to point to the yoga of work, which though predicated of physical work can lead to spiritual liberation, as per Vivekananda. At the level of discussion here, the issue is that Vivekananda’s willingness to grant any kind of validity to matter is a serious departure from Shankaraite orthodoxy compared to Müller’s more or less orthodox position that to the Vedantist “there is no matter at all.” Vivekananda’s first public comments on maya were given in the West at the Department of Philosophy, Harvard University on March, 1896: The state of manifestation is individuality, and the light in that state is what we call knowledge. To use, therefore, this term knowledge for the light of the absolute is not precise, as the absolute state transcends relative knowledge. Q: Does it include it? A: Yes, in this sense: just as a piece of gold can be changed into all sorts of coins, so with this. The state can be broken up into all sorts of knowledge. It is the state of superconsciousness and includes both consciousness and unconsciousness. Those who attain that state have what we call knowledge. When we want to realize that consciousness of knowledge, we have to go a step lower. Knowledge is a lower state—it is only in maya that we can have knowledge. CW, Vol.5, 1970: A Discussion, 309-310. This reply contains the overall answer to all questions about maya, not only how it obscures true knowledge and how we can hope to rise above it, but also the inference that material knowledge occurs only within the limitations of maya. Not surprisingly, it advocates as the answer to the problem changes of states of consciousness to the stage of transcending all relative knowledge—the topic he had dealt with in his work on yoga, the main purpose of which was indeed this exercise. And in presenting which he had demonstrated that in and through all levels of consciousness—including materialism—it is possible to arrive at transcendence of maya itself. This is the radical vision of the fifth level of consciousness or vijnana: that in and through any and all apparently limited worldviews it is possible through self-transformation to penetrate through to ultimate Reality. In London of late 1896 Vivekananda took up the issue of maya with the crème de la crème of the English social and intellectual world. Not surprisingly, he starts with the basic issue of the confusion created by maya and paints a series of images of the frustration and deception associated with so much of human endeavor. Green chooses to liken this presentation to the pessimistic views of Schopenhauer, but there also seems to be the possibility that Vivekananda was, in short, simply bringing powerful illustrations from common experience to illustrate the subject, before moving on to his solution to the riddle in the third lecture, Maya and Freedom, as a drawing of the notion of divinity from the “outside” more and more into the interior of the human soul itself. Rather wittily, Vivekananda states: Just as in your hymn, “Nearer my God to Thee” the same hymn would be very good to the Vedantin, only he would change a word and make it “Nearer my God to me.” The idea is that the goal is far off, far beyond nature, attracting us all towards it. The goal has to be brought nearer and nearer, without degrading or degenerating it. CW, Vol.2, 1971: Maya and Freedom, 128. Green summarizes this chapter in a quote from a subsequent series on Vedanta in which Vivekananda summed up the whole procedure: This very universe, as we have seen, is the same Impersonal Being read by our intellect. Whatever is reality in the universe is that Impersonal Being, and the forms and conceptions are given to it by our intellects. Whatever is real in this table is that Being, and the table form and all other forms are given by our intellects. CW, Vol.2, 1971: Practical Vedanta III, 338. This is actually a summary of the Advaita point of view that it is we who create what we see, but with the radical difference that for the Advaitin what we see is unreal, while for Vivekananda the “reality” it has for us is what we have to work with and through in order to get to the depth dimension of it—a dimension that is the same, ultimately, for everything. It is a matter of our committing to the work required to get that perspective. The Issue Is: How do We Look at Anything? What seems to stand out here is that these issues are not primarily issues of purely conceptual understanding, but of “where we are at”, i.e. which part of our psyche is engaged with perception and how our intellect interprets what is perceived. What makes something appear as matter, as mind, or as spirit, is how we look at anything. As we already know from Vivekananda’s approach to yoga, it is within our power to consciously and voluntarily develop not only depth perception within any given framework, such as matter, but also to engage with other contexts, such as mind or spirit, and thereby to radically change what we see ourselves as dealing with: the physical world, the emotions, the intellect, our intuitive grasp of the Whole, and even beyond. In so doing, we are not in any way going against our natural abilities. For Vivekananda, the whole range of yogas is available to all of us, and therefore, potentially, the ability to see anything from any level of vision and insight, and to interact with it accordingly. This is a practical application of the chatushpad, not as a theoretical model, but as living reality. And, unlike Gaudapada and the strict Advaitists, there is no block on the interconnection of all of the different levels. For them, anything below the Fourth was maya, but with Vivekananda and his contemporaries the diktat was to accept the material level as real or perish at the hands of modern science and technology. Accordingly, what is advocated is to experience all of these and give reports, as here, to just what “goods” each level delivers. The material world on its own has its rewards but fails to deliver the joys of creativity and imagination, the depth of intellectual discovery, or the profound experience of the intuitive realm. As Vivekananda would say in another connection, “Each is great in its own place”; none has absolute authority over any other, and indeed engaging all four in a well-integrated manner in response to need is the pragmatic way to go. Here again, we see a remarkable demonstration of just how humanistic and democratic the system is and how it removes the kinds of conflict that two-dimensional thinking habitually engages in. Finally, this way of thinking offers the possibility of a vastly expanded grasp of reality, as well as removing the ridiculous and oft-repeated notion of Vivekananda’s inconsistency. Both Müller and Vivekananda saw in the study of Advaita Vedanta the potential to energize and take the contemporary, much-reduced and even obsolete, versions of their own religious traditions to a much more vigorous and flexible position. Green points to Vivekananda’s emphasis on the ethical implications of the identity of the individual soul and the Absolute (Green, 84), a position that openly seems to suggest that there is a no god other than our own, deepest state of being. Such “crypto-atheism” as Green dubs it (Green, 107), is certainly a far cry from the Father in Heaven of most Western traditions, which could well prejudice many against it. On the other hand, for those who work cheek by jowl with the material world—such as research scientists—and somehow penetrate behind it to find a stable Reality, the notion that humanity has within itself the capacity to do so and to push on to still deeper and more expanded levels of consciousness might well be a refreshing incentive to commitment to Vivekananda’s brand of non-dualism. From his side, Müller indicates how he has understood the model of levels in spirituality: It is hardly credible how completely all other religions (i.e. other than Advaita Vedanta) have overlooked these simple facts [i.e. different levels of consciousness and stages of spiritual development], how they have tried to force on the old and the wise the food that was meant for babes, and how they have thereby alienated and lost their best and strongest friends (Green, 108). From the side of Vedanta as presented by Vivekananda, all of the various levels of philosophy and practice were valid and necessary steps along which the aspirant could progress with the assurance of ultimately attaining the final and most inclusive level of them all. As for the application of the chatushpad-based Advaita to the dualistic Abrahamic religions this would clearly be a much harder “sell” than to the Indian religions, but as Green remarks (109), the range of levels that Vivekananda was proposing allowed of the less “rational” aspects of each faith to coexist with Advaita, though in a less rigorous philosophical form and subordinate to the central goal of spiritual development. And, as seems evident, there even was room for the materialist fundamentalists, so tightly wedged behind their barriers against the inner life that they had thrown it out with the bathwater of Christianity in the Renaissance and modern periods. In this way, Müller and Vivekananda worked through the glaring paradoxes of the theory of maya, opening up spaces in which interconnection of matter and spirit could occur, through more flexible philosophical approaches (Müller) and with Vivekananda an acceptance of levels of consciousness hardwired in the human psyche and amenable to the approaches of the yogas to open them up to more and more encompassing reality. Vivekananda’s Third Samadhi: The Resolution of Innate Paradox Having discovered these various concepts and phenomena, the central issue seems to be: how did Vivekananda arrive at a place that offers reality to the physical world, a notion anathema to Classical Advaita? The framework in which this paradox is presented is the very real conflict between Western materialist objectivity and Indian spiritual subjectivity that was rocking humanity’s boat mightily at the time of Ramakrishna and Vivekananda. Once again, I turn to the actual record of the role experience plays in all of this. Firstly, with regard to Ramakrishna, he was a paramahamsa sannyasin in the orthodox Puri Shankara Order, i.e. the highest degree of attainment in the non-dual monastic system. Historically, he was more often in samadhi than not, but at the same time he was wonderfully aware of and dealt with the phenomenal world with finesse. He was also a divya (highest level of practicant) adept in Tantra (Feuerstein, 1998, 119), who was not involved with the vamachara or pashu (bestial) aspects of its practice. CW, Vol.7, 1969: Conversation with Sri Priyanath Sinha, Calcutta, 1899, 277. Notwithstanding, Tantra was considered the total opposite of Vedanta in orthodox Vedantic circles. From that standpoint much of what Ramakrishna said was spoken from bhava mukha (the face of direct experience that can see the balance between even the most radical of opposites) conveying in language what is usually considered utterly beyond language and thus opening out other views and alternatives beyond the frameworks of philosophy and science as we know them. This is not the concoction of some Western brainwave, but sober facts recorded in Sri Ramakrishna the Great Master (Saradananda, 1952, 386-395 and Glossary, 929) and Maharaj, 2018, 18, who equates bhava mukha with vijnana, or the fifth level of consciousness. As we shall see for ourselves from this account, Ramakrishna had in fact arrived at an experiential resolution of the central paradox of maya that the alignment of the systems of Advaita and Tantra would ordinarily represent. In Vivekananda’s third samadhi, which took place around February of 1895, he passed from any obsession about materialism—or, for that matter, non-dualism—into the realm of direct perception of the nature of the Atman, the particular element of Vedanta that underlies all such conceptual constructs. Like the first and second samadhis, this samadhi is not mentioned by Green, no doubt because he did not find it in the pages of Vivekananda’s Complete Works. Again, it is Saradananda who gives us this important information. In this samadhi Vivekananda was compelled, willy-nilly, and under tremendous financial and emotional stress after the death of his prominent father, to surrender to Kali, the black Tantric goddess. Sri Ramakrishna played the role of advisor here, sending the young man to seek help from the goddess in the shrine. But rather than asking for material help, Vivekananda saw behind the anthropomorphic symbol “pure Consciousness, actually living and . . . the living fountainhead of infinite love and beauty” (Saradananda, 1952, 811-812). From these indications, Vivekananda came to see that Kali symbolizes the shakti or power of Brahman or the Atman. Shortly before his death, Vivekananda stated, in connection of the worship of Kali, “Can you fathom the beauty and profundity of the Atman whose external manifestation is so sweet and beautiful?” Then he went on to say, “Kali is Brahman in manifestation.” CW, Vol.7, 1969: Conversation with Sharat Chandra Chakravarty, Belur Math, 1901, 431-432. This realization cements, as it were, Vivekananda’s dedication to not only the physical world, but also to the experience of the most abstract spirit (Gayatriprana, 2003). And would seem to underpin his penchant for thinking of the Atman as active in and through all levels of the physical world. Some time after this experience, Ramakrishna enunciated to Vivekananda a highly sophisticated view of the interrelationship between the two elements that Vivekananda had thus managed to weld together: The reality from which we derive the notion of Brahman is the very reality that evolves the idea of living beings and the universe [the realm of the dynamic goddess] (M., 2000, 734). This statement, on the surface offering an explanation of the equivalence of Brahman and the world, stands out in its assertion that it is our perception of reality that determines this relationship and how it may change the balance between them in various circumstances and over time. As such, these categories are a projection of our psyches in paradox mode, setting up two realities that seem to be in conflict. At the same time, it also offers the possibility of transcending any such opposites and living comfortably with whatever emerges in such a state of consciousness. In terms of the immanent monism that Green repeatedly invokes in his discussion of Ramakrishna’s position and that of Vivekananda, this statement of Ramakrishna can be seen to cover the involvement with the physical world that was such a feature of Vivekananda’s work in India especially, as also the “cult” aspects of his personal approach there and his acceptance of all forms of yoga as valid. What Green seems to find incompatible with immanent monism is the Advaitic notion of Brahman itself. This is illustrated in his remarks about Ramakrishna’s possible interpretation of Advaita philosophy as being “intolerably abstract and philosophical” (Green, 84). Always remembering that in orthodox Advaita Brahman is not primarily a conceptual construct but a name for the deepest possible subjective experience that transcends all possible descriptions of reality, Sri Ramakrishna’s placing of Brahman in the context of his remark “derive our notion of Brahman” is remarkable. In this statement Brahman is a concept we superimpose on reality, along with that of Kali. This superimposition of names and forms on Brahman is a recognized process in Advaita Vedanta, especially “lower”, “imaginary” forms such as the world, and so on. But to suggest, as Ramakrishna appears to do here, that Brahman itself is such a mental construct seems to be a rather radical departure from Vedantic orthodoxy. One can only surmise that his mastery of the gamut of experience acquired in Tantric practice, had somehow carried him past settled nomenclature such as Brahman, and all of the literature and praxis associated with it into a realm beyond even Brahman itself. Of course, Brahman as an experienced reality would always exist, especially in the role of the complementary of Shakti or Kali, but when we look beyond, what we see is Reality or That itself, as yet undefined and not organized into modes of thought, far less Advaitic thought. If this is a cogent line of thought, then the Advaita/Tantra paradox and complementarity is far from the furthest shore of human consciousness. Ramakrishna has resolved the paradox with a veritable paradigm shift which removes old taboos and opens up wider and more far-ranging ways of thinking about things and developing models of context and content that go beyond anything we have contemplated in our human history so far. What necessarily goes along with this new possibility is an increased emphasis on the quality of experience accepted as valid, which in turn would rely on more and more scrupulous use of the methods of yoga, including those which appear along with this whole new dispensation. Like Western science, such praxis and its results would have to find fresh criteria of validity of both performance as well as results and methods of evaluation of both. In order to support such “explorers” of reality, there would be a need of a much more focused culture that can produce and sustain such people, their aspirations, and efforts. What also seems evident is that the whole process would proceed through the whole range from the material world to the “cutting edge”, not erecting artificial barriers, but opening up avenues of exploration in multiple loci of the full range of human consciousness. In this context we get to the very core of Vivekananda’s position of being able to speak with authority on any level whatsoever, as sarvam khalvidam brahma (Chandogya Upanishad, 3.14.1), each and every one is Brahman, animated into specific forms by Shakti through the lens of our own minds. This would seem to be the reality behind the “immanentism” or perhaps “giving of life” to otherwise static conceptual constructs that Green is forced as the book continues to advocate more and more as the explanation of Vivekananda’s position. In the interchange between Ramakrishna and Vivekananda we see what is probably the logical conclusion of this thinking, but now in terms that suggest more contemporary and universal notions such as Reality and Process, yang and yin, and particle and wave in quantum physics. In the quantum context, there is also the postulate of a wavicle from which the particle and wave are thought to emanate and by which they are supported. It seems likely that what Ramakrishna calls the reality from which we derive the notion is an analog of the wavicle, as Brahman itself is now reduced to being one of the players in a complementarity within Reality. In the context of Vivekananda’s own teaching, in India’s project of manifesting spirit, maya is presented as a method of action; and, for the Western imperative of self-transcendence, as an attitude of mind (MacPhail, 2013, 518-519).Working through both from the “wavicle” point of view, could be envisioned as the most effective way to bring about the kinds of positive change that is always required. Chapter 4 and Level IV: The Tattwamasi Theory of Ethics and Holovolution Western versus Vedantic Ethical Systems in the Late Nineteenth Century An important obstacle to building a Western paradigm on Advaita was the issue of ethics. From the Western side, faith-supported ethics was collapsing as materialism increasingly undercut religious authority. Green, 113 et seq. points out that what was taking the place of traditional, faith-based ethics was materialistic, hedonistic Utilitarianism and also Unitarianism, which despite a professed commitment to spiritual values, was altogether rather too abstract and cerebral for the vast mass of people who needed a faith they could lean upon. For Müller and his cohorts, there was a crying need for ethics supported by a powerful new “attractor” that seemingly no longer resided in the Abrahamic worldviews. However, despite Advaita’s growing acceptance in the West, its vehement rejection of the reality or importance of “the world” and all of the elements within it that required attention, raise the question of how were Westerners supposed to cope with the rapidly increasing complexity, might and ingress of science and its multifarious productions? One central loss was any idea of the validity, far less the sacredness of human life that had been the outstanding virtue of Abrahamism. As the machines took over, there was a rapid decline in the living conditions of the working classes and poor, whom Social Darwinism would later categorize into “superior” and “inferior” groups, a “problem” resolved by mass exterminations and horrendous, world-involving wars. These were the “industrial strength” ethical issues that were looming over the West. Could Advaita come to the rescue on this white-hot issue? One issue that is not discussed in Green’s book but which seems relevant, pertains to the actual systems of ethics that were extant in India in the mid to late nineteenth century. As Nicholson points out (2020), Advaita was a movement within the brahmin caste, rigidly excluding any member of the lower castes. Its leaders were mostly South Indian brahmins, who kept the movement moving forward, stunning the world with their perceptive disquisitions on the deepest level of consciousness and the worldview that it created in those who had experienced it. It is not surprising that, seeing oneness and nothing else, their attention was not directed to the issues of how to deal with others, especially people of different castes and ethnic groups, of which India has an astounding number. In proceeding in this way these brahmins were actually fulfilling their dharma or code of conduct which prescribed for them precisely what they were doing—investigating the deepest levels of consciousness accessible to human understanding. This was the privilege they had enjoyed from time immemorial, protected by a caste system that had changed very little from pre-Common Era times and had, during the Western invasions become deeply concretized and rigid. There was a definite downward hierarchy in this system, which held the lower castes and the outcastes or those with no assigned caste, as totally below human concern. Moreover, each caste had its own internal code of ethics, quite different from the others, so that an appeal to a common ethics was not an option. We learn that Müller understood that Shankara, in inculcating Advaita into his monks, relied on the existing brahminical ethical fabric he could assume had been thoroughly assimilated by the young brahmins who came to him for training (Green, 124), and that he expected them to rise totally above it as they progressed in Advaita to the superconscious state known to them as turiya or the fourth level of consciousness. This of course contrasts with the Western view of the importance of ethics and a more or less common ethics for all, an ideal that Vivekananda sought to establish in India on the basis of the Atman (Gayatriprana, 2020, 155) and the content of spiritual humanism in his first samadhi (Gayatriprana, 2015d). Although British modernity had indeed loosened up India’s archaic social system, it nevertheless persisted at the time of Vivekananda, who would comment—for purposes of demonstrating how things were changing—on the proclivity of the brahmin caste to engage in money-making ventures, so utterly forbidden by caste rules. CW, Vol.4, 1972: Modern India, 456-457. Despite whatever “unity” this caste system could offer the Indians, the fact was that it was based on irrevocable rules and regulations that could only cripple Hindu society and prevent it from acquiring the kind of shared values, flexibility and freedom required to escape the tyranny of materialism and the fundamentalist Christianity that came with the “package”. This scenario is not touched on in Green’s book, but it features prominently all through Vivekananda’s account of the history of Vedanta (Gayatriprana, 2020). The net result was that, as far as the Europeans were concerned, the Indians did not have a recognizable system of ethics. They saw their vassals as essentially without morals, weak both physically and ethically (Green, 120). If we factor in this scenario along with the Western Götterdämmerung at the hands of the materialists, it is clear that finding a solution was going to require brand-new principles and a fail-safe paradigm that could withstand the surging waves of conflict from both India and the West and remain unscathed and ready to take its place in a brand new order, as and when the time came to do so. The Search for a Solution, East and West Müller’s analysis of this problem as it appeared in the West, was not to blame materialism for the decline in morality, but rather the failure of the churches to support and promote real inner, spiritual work (Green, 117). The resultant, corrosive hypocrisy of religious groups was readily visible, not only to Müller, but also to Vivekananda. CW, Vol.7, 1969: Letter to Margaret Noble, 7th June, 1896, 498. Green presents Vivekananda’s core view of human ethics as universal oneness (Green, 121). One was an epithet that up till then had appeared in Vedanta in connection with Brahman— “one without a second” (Chhandogya Upanishad 6.2.1). The idea that humanity was itself unitary was not one that had been actively entertained. How could it be, given that there were such radical, divisive categories in India, leading to age-long oppression and deep-seated rivalries, of which Vivekananda himself spoke on many occasions? (Gayatriprana, 2020). Where could Vivekananda have conceived of human unity? Was it only in the pronouncements of the French Revolution and the resultant Western Europe, as attested by Seal, his university classmate? (Green, 21). In India, where was the pre-existent authority for such a position? Always and ever, it would have to come from the storied Vedic and Vedantic tradition. Here I suggest that we need go no further than look at the very manifesto of Advaita, the original nostrum on which they were operating, which was, in full: Brahma satyam jagan mithya, jivo brahmaiva naparah—“Brahman is the only truth, the world is unreal, and there is ultimately no difference between Brahman and the individual self.” Here the statement that the world/human soul is essentially as real as Brahman is rather arresting, raising issues of its place in the overall cosmology of Advaita. How had this insight managed to remain apparently unnoticed for nigh on twelve centuries? One thought that arises is that this insight was how the person who survived nirvikalpa samadhi actually saw things in his Only male brahmins were permitted into this tradition. enlightened state. One has to surmise that this affirmation by such people came before its time and the older, world-denying nostrum had held sway by default. If one is able to accept the full impact of there is ultimately no difference between Brahman and individual self, the conclusion has to be that the solidarity of humanity is based on the fact that what each and every individual has behind him or her is indeed Brahman, or unfathomable Consciousness. It seems likely that the rise of the vision of an “involved” Atman energized by Shakti may have helped to open up the idea of the Self as not only supremely meaningful in and of itself, but also as a main player in human experience. Certainly, for Vivekananda the outlook for the entire contemporary world was: The idea of the Soul is the life-giving thought, the most wonderful. There and there alone is the great thought that is going to revolutionize the world and reconcile the knowledge of the material world with religion. CW, Vol.3, 1970: Vedantism, 131. However, if the objection arises that this Advaitic nostrum is a very late pronouncement of Vedanta, we may look, with Shankara himself, at the pre-existing evidence from the Upanishads. As part of his manifesto Shankara had selected four “great sayings” (mahavakyas) that to him said it all. These became canonical in the Advaitic system. I present them here, not in the order he followed (which was based on the authority rank of the Veda each came from), but on what seems like a familiar phenomenological progression (or “evolution”) from the most concrete, objectified and external you, to the interior subjectively experienced I, and on to the Atman, the transcendental entity proposed to lie beyond both in the realm of human understanding; and finally to Brahman, beyond any and all human expression whatsoever: Tattvamasi: You are That. Chandogya Upanishad, 6.8.7. Ahambrahmasmi: I am Brahman. Brihadaranayaka Upanishad, 1.4.10. Ayamatma brahma: This Self is Brahman. Mandukya Upanishad, 2.-- Prajnanam brahma: Brahman is intelligence. Aitareya Upanishad, 3.1.3. These sayings come from one of the oldest of the major Upanishads (Chhandogya Upanishad) to what is possibly one of the latest (Mandukya Upanishad), and between them cover the gamut of possible “divinities” that we may experience. When we try to place these highly subjective insights into the structure of the human being and their implications for not only the life of the individual, but for how he or she interacts with other entities, we can more readily understand why Ramakrishna and Vivekananda, living on the doorstep of the Western Depression and two World Wars, were not interested in simply falling into line with the Western model, built on the notion of humanity as other than the divine and therefore highly subject to all manner of failings, if not crimes on a global scale. For Vivekananda, the ultimate weapon against Utilitarianism was the experience of the superconscious (Green, 121), on the experience of which the whole Vedantic tradition was predicated and built. He dwells with some frequency on his conception of consciousness in his classes on the yoga of meditation, and defines for us the phenomenology of superconsciousness and how it relates to the other structures of the psyche in Vedanta: Prana is the vital force in every being, and the finest and highest action of prana is thought. This thought, again, as we see, is not all. There is also a sort of thought which we call instinct or unconscious thought, the lowest plane of action. . . . All reflex actions of the body belong to this plane of thought. There is then a still higher plane of thought, the conscious: I reason, I judge, I see the pros and cons of certain things, yet that is not all. We know that reason is limited. . .. Yet at the same time we find facts rush into this circle. Like the coming of comets certain things come into this circle; and it is certain they come from outside this limit, although our reason cannot go beyond. The causes of the phenomena [in]truding themselves in this small limit are outside of this limit. . . . The mind can exist on a still higher plane, the superconscious. When the mind has attained that state, which is called samadhi—perfect concentration, superconsciousness—it goes beyond the limits of reason and comes face to face with facts which no instinct or reason can ever know. All the manipulations of the subtle forces of the body, the different manifestations of prana, if trained, give a push to the mind, and the mind goes up higher and becomes superconscious, and from that plane it acts (Vivekananda, 1896, 17). CW, Vol.1, 1965: Raja-Yoga, Chapter III: Prana, 150. This statement is, in effect, a presentation in contemporary psychological language of the chatushpad, how it is accessed, and how the overall process is in fact an “evolution” of consciousness. Müller agreed with Vivekananda that in the late nineteenth century only such transcendence could salvage existing religion in both India and the West, so severely had reductionistic science and especially the materialistic theory of evolution undermined not only the structures of consciousness that had underlain previous cultures, but also the traditional moral values that had been part and parcel of them [even if more “honored in the breach than in the observance” (Shakespeare: Hamlet, Act I, Scene 4)]. It also appears that Müller himself was convinced across the board that the standpoint of Classical Advaita was ultimately incapable of resolving the problem of ethics on account of its maintenance of the immoveable barrier it had set between the world and Brahman from the very beginning. A student of Kant, he did see some hope in Kant’s perception that beyond the human mind there was a ding an sich (thing in itself) which Müller was prepared to compare to Brahman (Green, 127). He did not, however, have any means to suggest how that could be built upon, either from Advaita or from Kant. For his part, Vivekananda had gone through the mill of Western materialism in his formal education and been taken through depth experience of Vedanta by Ramakrishna. From his superconscious experiences (samadhis) along the way it had become increasingly clear to him that there was a way to pass beyond all of the paradoxes and obstacles that seemed to block any onward path of investigation and to emerge with a radical solution from within the system that would demonstrate a path, not only to the transcendence that the West so eagerly sought, but also to how the Indians could “precipitate out” from what we might call the quantum potential they had built up over millennia in their practices the external forms that best embodied and manifested the meanings of their core beliefs. These included the mahavakyas described above, in a material way and for the benefit of all. Once again, we see Müller refine and articulate a problem and Vivekananda come forward with a methodology to address the issue. Thou Art That to the Rescue Tension was building on both sides of the issue. The West demanded a Vedantic answer to the Abrahamic “Love your neighbor as yourself” (Luke 10.27, referring back to Leviticus in the Old Testament), a central pillar of Abrahamic religion. Although again honored more in the breach than in the observance, this was a central point of inspiration for idealist Europeans, and they sought in vain to find anything that seemed to reflect, far less contain it, in Classical Advaita, of which the stern rejection of anything other than Brahman rendered such sentiments not only impossible but non-existent. The public dénouement on the whole subject occurred in Bombay on the 25th of February, 1893. At the Royal Asiatic Society Paul Deussen, Professor of Philosophy at Kiel University in Germany, delivered a lecture in which he stated that, though the wonderful injunction to love one’s neighbor as oneself was the high point of Christian morality, no reason for doing so had been presented in the Bible, still subject, as he remarked, to “Semitic realism”. Given that loving one’s neighbor as oneself is asking that we involve ourselves in the pain of others that is not our own, the question still remained: why? Then came his answer (Green, 130): [The answer] is in the Veda, is in the great formula tat tvam asi [you are That], which gives us in three words metaphysics and morals all together. You shall love others as yourselves because you are your neighbor, and mere illusion makes you believe that your neighbor is something different from yourselves. In this statement Deussen is pointing to the Atman/Brahman within every human being, or indeed anything else at all, and also to the Advaitic belief that it is we who determine the validity and value of anything by our own way of thinking, what the Advaitins called illusion. Vivekananda, however, accepted all percepts as valid within our own realm of consciousness: as and when we see another as a manifestation of the Atman, we experience the same Atman within ourselves and realize that we are one with what we had previously seen as “other”. To almost any Westerner at that time this formula must have appeared extremely esoteric if not meaningless, but it had the virtue of basing its claim on the experience of one human individual in direct relationship with another, which is, of course, much more pragmatic and humanistic than invoking or denying an external deity in any way. As such, it had the potential to appeal to the large number of people who were disillusioned with theistic religion and were seeking for an alternative. In its reference to “illusion” it also raises indirectly the issue of how to get rid of illusion: yoga or conscious self-transformation, which at that time was by no means a mainstream idea. This message, with all of its apparent freshness, was to become a kind of beach ball for German philosophers. Green informs us that Deussen’s idea had been generated by his teacher Schopenhauer (1788-1860), a philosopher with a huge influence on German philosophy up to the present, who explicitly mentioned tattvamasi as what he saw as a precursor to his own insights. Green then proceeds to Vivekananda’s response, to a large extent through the eyes of the German Indologist, Paul Hacker (1913-1979), who carried a strong portfolio for Christianity and European philosophy (Green, 131 fn). Hacker “disputed the philosophical cogency of Vivekananda’s ethics” and claimed that Vivekananda’s views on tattvamasi were derived from those of Deussen. He based this view on the fact that on meeting Vivekananda in Kiel on September 9, 1896, Deussen presented a copy of his 1893 lecture in Bombay, and on the purported fact that the first recorded mention of tattvamasi in Vivekananda’s work was no earlier than September of 1896. On the evidence Green produces he concludes that it is proven that Vivekananda did not acquire the notion of That as the foundation of ethics from Deussen, but he does raise the issue of how he did indeed do so (Green, 135). Though apparently unknown to both Müller and Green, Ramakrishna himself had given the clue to Vivekananda in 1884 when discussing the practice of a devotional Hindu group of “showing compassion to all beings”. Ramakrishna had remarked: Talk of compassion to beings? Will you—little animals—bestow compassion on beings? You wretch, who are you to bestow it? No, no! Not compassion to jivas [embodied souls], but service to them as Shiva [the disembodied divine]. This remark affected the young Vivekananda profoundly and he said to his friends: Let people do everything they are doing; there is no harm in that. It is sufficient for them, first to be fully convinced that it is God that exists, manifested before them as the universe and all the beings in it. . .. All are He Himself. . .. Can there be an occasion for them to regard themselves as superior to them or to cherish anger and hatred for them, or an arrogant attitude—and yes, even to be kind to them? Thus serving [embodied souls as the divine], their hearts will be purified and they will be convinced in a short time that they are parts of the [divine], the eternally pure, awake, free, and absolute Bliss (Saradananda, 1952, 821-822). Although these statements do not carry the formal mantra tattvamasi, they spell out its meaning and point to the realization of one’s own divinity in compassionate service that is the whole rationale of Integral ethics and Vedanta. More or less encapsulating what Vivekananda had learned in 1884, Green carries his line of thought into the conclusion that it is precisely this immanence that is the motive to work itself (Green, 133). Concluding this thought from an even later presentation, Green presents from the Practical Vedanta that Vivekananda brought out in London of November 1896, a kind of manifesto before returning to India, suggesting that the idea has progressed, perhaps to its final conclusion: If you cannot worship your brother man, the manifested God In the West, Vivekananda usually used the familiar term God rather than Atman or Brahman, to comply with Victorian usage. , how can you worship a God who is unmanifested? … I shall call you religious from the moment that you begin to see God in men and women, and then you will understand what is meant by turning the left cheek to the person who strikes the right (Green, 135). Vivekananda and Tattwamasi On the basis of Ramakrishna’s statement and Vivekananda’s espousal of its content, it seems rather obvious that Vivekananda had the ethical insight of Integral Vedanta instilled into his soul some eight years before Deussen had his epiphany and twelve before meeting him. Historical priority, however, is not of primary importance. What is important is that these contemporaries on two different sides of the East-West cultural divide arrived at a similar insight into a crucial issue of the modern world. Just for the information of readers and to clarify further Vivekananda’s familiarity with the core texts of Vedanta as well as how his teachings developed over time, I shall now take a short excursion into Vivekananda’s relationship with this “opening salvo” of the whole array of Vedantic great sayings. I select these from the database on which I rest all of my work—the compilation I made of Swami Vivekananda’s quotes of and commentaries on the Vedas, Upanishads, and Bhagavadgita. As of this version of this paper, I have uploaded on Academia Vivekananda’s comments on the mahavakyas (great sayings) Truth is One, the wise call it variously (MacPhail, October-November, 2022) ; tattvamasi (MacPhail, February, 2023) ; and the first part on the less well known mantra I am you, (MacPhail, July, 2023) which speaks directly to the issue under discussion here, with greater emotion and determination to make that understanding a norm. In that discussion I include the insights of the Jewish mystic, Martin Buber, who wrote so feelingly about I and You (1922), which seemed to add exciting Abrahamic insights into and exemplifications of Vivekananda’s powerful statements . If time permits, I hope to bring out all of Vivekananda’s commentaries on the outstanding great sayings (mahavakyas) of Vedanta. Back to the contemporary German view of Vivekananda, between 1892-1901, the period when his work was recorded, Vivekananda quoted tattvamasi seventy-two times, and discussed its content without an actual quote seventeen times. The distribution favored the West (57 quotes out of the total of 72). This discrepancy in numbers with India may well be due to the paucity of records in India before 1897. It is, however, true that some major mantras received a substantial majority in either India or the West. The content of the mantra usually indicates why it was used in that way. Western predominance with tattvamasi could well indicate that Vivekananda saw more need for it in the West than in India, where he tends to comment more on its importance conceptually than to its experiential import. In both locations there is evidence of his progression of thought on the mantra. In that setting, and to conserve space, I shall focus here on the statements made in the West. As I discuss in my doctoral thesis (2013, 887-1067), although themes such as this occurred all the way through Vivekananda’s work in both India and in the West, his mode of presentation differed according to the audiences to whom he was speaking. As it happened, he encountered five different types of audience over the ten years of his teaching, again in both India and the West. First came audiences with no familiarity with his form of Vedanta, to whom he spoke in more or less popular, didactic mode. To them he gave out the mantra in a public address reported in a Chicago newspaper on December 23, 1893, (Chaudhuri, 2000, 45)—ten months after Deussen’s report in Bombay. Then came serious students who wished to go deeper and who committed themselves to self-transformation/yoga under his guidance. In February of 1896 he said in a class lecture in New York City, summarizing his teachings of the winter: If one millionth part of the men and women who live in this world would simply sit down and for a few minutes say, “You are all God, O you men and women and O, you animals and living beings; you are all the manifestations of the one, living deity!”—the whole world would be changed in half an hour. . . . The time is coming when these thoughts will be cast abroad over the whole world. . .. They may become the common property of the saint and the sinner, of men and women and children, of the learned and of the ignorant. They will then permeate the atmosphere of the world, and the very air that we breathe will say with every one of its pulsations, “You are That”, and the whole universe with its myriads of suns and moons, through everything that speaks, with one voice will say, “You are That.” CW, Vol.2, 1971: The Real and the Apparent Man, 287-288. At the third stage he encountered and engaged with the intellectuals who had raised such issues as maya. In this area he interacted with the professors and students of philosophy at Harvard University. It seems entirely probable that the issue of ethics and Deussen had been raised with him by his close friend Professor William James, who had known Vivekananda since 1894. Vivekananda was moved to express his views in Boston on March 28, 1896: The Vedanta claims that there has not been one religious inspiration, one manifestation of the divine in humanity, however great, but it has been the expression of that infinite oneness in human nature, and all that we call ethics and morality and doing good to others is also but the manifestation of this oneness. There are moments when we feel that we are one with the universe, and we rush forth to express it, whether we know it or not. This expression of oneness is what we call love and sympathy, and it is the basis of all our ethics and morality. This is summed up in the Vedantic philosophy by the celebrated aphorism, tattwamasi, you are That. CW, Vol.1, 1965: The Spirit and Influence of Vedanta, 389. While we see the same insights as before, they are framed in a more formal context of ethics and morality, about which Vivekananda would speak, but not usually as formally and not explicitly related to tattvamasi. It seems likely that there had indeed been some input from his distinguished academic colleagues on the subject. About six months later Vivekananda met Deussen in Kiel and received from the professor his written thoughts and no doubt a rousing disquisition on his important discovery. He then returned to London and resumed his teaching with his group of highly educated and professional followers. After an intensive course on maya, he moved in November of that year to what he called Practical Vedanta. At this fourth stage of his Western work, he not only tied together all that he had said and done in his work thus far, but also gave them a glimpse into the “attractor” at the core—the direct experience of What Is, Ultimate Reality, Brahman, Turiya, or Atman. It is from that fourth period that the following quotation is taken: In all our actions we have to judge whether it is making for diversity or for oneness. If for diversity, we have to give it up. But if it makes for oneness, we are sure it is good. So with our thoughts—we have to decide whether they make for disintegration, multiplicity, or for oneness, binding soul to soul and bringing one influence to bear. If they do this, we will take them up, and if not, we will throw them off as criminal. The whole idea of ethics is that it does not depend on anything unknowable, it does not teach anything unknown, but in the language of the Upanishad, “The God whom you worship as an unknown God, the same I preach to you.” If this is not preaching a practical God, how else could you preach a practical God? Where is there a more practical God than he whom I see before me—a God omnipresent, in every being, more real that our senses? CW, Vol.2 (1971): Practical Vedanta I, 304-305. These words express his vision of the direct experience and meaning of the mantra in actual, lived reality. However, unlike Classical Vedanta this was not the final word. After a sojourn in India from 1897-1899 Vivekananda returned to the West and remained for over a year. On this occasion he stayed in California, where all manner of New Thought was circulating widely and many people had already taken up serious meditation practice. There his work was focused on much more transcendental issues, especially the issue of how not only is the part in the whole, but the Whole is in the part and can be made visible in an examined and transformed life. As a sample of this phase: As the power of the kundalini rises from one center to another in the spine, it changes the senses and you begin to see this world as another—it is heaven. You cannot talk. Then the kundalini goes down to the lower centers. You are again human until the kundalini reaches the brain, all the centers have been passed, and the whole vision vanishes and you perceive nothing but the one Existence. You are God. All heavens you make out of That, all worlds out of That. That is the one Existence. Nothing else exists. CW, Vol.4 (1972): Meditation, 237. Here Vivekananda speaks of the kundalini, the Tantric version of the chatushpad in that it is based on differentiated levels of consciousness, but without an artificial barrier inserted into it, as in Advaita or reductionist materialism (MacPhail, July 16, 2022). Vivekananda’s main discussion about the kundalini is in his presentation of raja yoga given in New York in 1896, where we get a fairly detailed idea of its structure and function. Here, four years later, the emphasis is on the integration of the overall function of the system, in which like the human nervous system that it mirrors, there is the option at all times to move “up” or “down” according to need. Put into the language of self-illumination, both realization (“up”) and manifestation (“down”) have free play in and of themselves and between each other. And, of course, there is the moment when we realize the culminating truth: You are God. This places the whole process fair and square in the realm of human consciousness and is a rather concrete exemplification of the holism that we see at this stage of Vivekananda’s teaching of holovolution. I have gone into this presentation not simply to demonstrate that tattvamasi was no stranger to Vivekananda—in fact, it and the other mahavakyas that point to human divinity in various ways were the backbone of his whole line of thought. I also have tried to demonstrate in a short compass that his teachings about the meaning of the mantra were adapted to the people to whom he was speaking, and over time present an expansion and deeper scope, culminating in a vast, holistic vision for humanity. In the West his initial presentations gave way to a focus on ethics, the issue that was most besetting the European Advaitists around the mid-point of his work there, and took the form of an explicit view on the subject, then moved that view on in the pattern of thought he was following. This interpretation of Vivekananda’s modus operandi is based on the data and interpretation in my doctoral thesis (MacPhail, 2013) that covers not only ethics but the entire range of human consciousness. In the massive database of my thesis, it was possible to discern that the teachings in the West followed what I call an evolutionary pattern, i.e., from the gross, physical, and outward form of perception to the most interior, transcendental, and on from there to holism, that seamlessly interrelates all into a whole picture. In this present study there are enough items in the West to be able to discern that pattern without too much difficulty. Another striking feature is that for the most part the mode was largely experiential, appealing to the attempt to interiorize their minds and find from within the tremendous energy and inspiration he assured his hearers they would find there. The Indian materials show the mirror-image pattern (involution from the transcendental to the physical), not simply in this mantra, but across all of them. As this dynamic of progression of thought held across all of his work, especially in public, it is advisable always to be clear of the provenance of any of his utterances in place, time, and circumstance. This would help to remove much of the present notion of Vivekananda’s lack of cogency and cohesion as well as personal and cultural misunderstandings. The Reconciliation of Impersonal Ethics with Impersonal Metaphysics and Vivekananda’s Holovolution In his assessment of the whole Hacker-Vivekananda “dialog”, Green opines that at every stage of the way Vivekananda never showed a typical Classical Advaitic approach to the issue of ethics. Rather, he sees him as embracing “an immanentist ontology in which the world is completely suffused and sanctified by the divine presence” (Green, 133). I believe that the evidence I have provided supports that interpretation, at least in a certain mode. As Green points out (Green, 134) Vivekananda’s ethics are not grounded in abstract idealism, but in the vision that God is really present in all things. After deconstructing the German interpretation of Vivekananda’s position, Green does state that it is still unknown how Vivekananda arrived at what he calls the tattvamasi ethic and claimed to have reconciled impersonal metaphysics with impersonal ethics. Green opines that Vivekananda “compromised something of the transcendence of the Absolute where ethics was concerned” (Green, 137), advocating an intense, volitional struggle to find freedom from the bondage of materialistic fundamentalism. For Green, the import of this approach is that it removes the classical barriers between the Absolute and the human subject, opening up (as we have seen) a kind of evolutionary path that was not a part of Classical Vedanta (Green, 138-139). As Green observes (Green, 139) the combination of an idea of process and development combined with the immanent concept of divinity “allows for a more positive view of engagement in the world than would perhaps be possible for a more orthodox Vedantin” (Green, 139). This is an astute observation that resonates with the idea of vijnana or Integral Vedanta or Holism, in which there is a level beyond the Fourth, where there is an engagement from the experience of the Fourth itself with the other levels on the chatushpad that were traditionally downplayed or even rejected as illusions in Classical Vedanta. In this view, all levels, including Classical Advaita play a valid role. This is the fifth level that I shall touch on in the final section of this essay. To conclude, Green’s assessment that Vivekananda developed the tattvamasi ethic on his own terms and not as an uncritical assimilation of Western views (Green, 139) seems quite cogent and rather clear, as I trust my own presentation of the development of Vivekananda’s work over time has indicated. I shall now address Green’s issue of how Vivekananda arrived at the very recondite insight behind his position. Vivekananda’s Nirvikalpa Samadhi and His Understanding of Holovolution. I have already presented the idea that the fourth level of Vivekananda’s thought is related to Holovolution, a concept he gained from his teaching from Ramakrishna immediately after his third samadhi. Thereafter, Vivekananda set his sights on gaining nirvikalpa samadhi, the “gold-standard samadhi” of Advaita Vedanta. To that end he followed the traditional path of studying non-dual texts in depth and discriminating between the real and the unreal with the goal of breaking through, with the power of pure intuition, to the unchanging Reality behind all changes. Near the beginning of May, 1886, Vivekananda totally broke through the veil of maya and in the fourth level of consciousness attained nirvikalpa samadhi. He then knew once and for all who he really was spiritually and saw with total detachment the whole cosmic mechanism as but a play of the elements, coming and going in a holovolutionary pattern, the “evolutionary” (matter to spirit) part of which he described thereafter in his poem The Song of Samadhi CW, Vol.4, 1972. 498. and the involutionary (spirit to matter) part in The Hymn of Creation. CW, Vol.4: 497. Arriving at the pure intuition of the fourth level, he now sees the physical world, the imaginal world, and the causal world representing maya—not as “standalone” levels, but as totally interconnected with each other and presenting a progression along which it is possible to pass effortlessly in the mode of either realization or manifestation. This is the progression that Classical Advaita downplayed or to which it even denied validity. If one can suspend “ordinary” Western judgement here, it is possible to acknowledge that this view offers at least a theoretical solution to many if not most of the issues we have dealt with in this chapter. As to the question how to arrive at such a synthesis? I think that the answer “through intuitive insight” should not be unacceptable, given that so many of the major breakthroughs in materialistic science are due to precisely that. But arriving at such insight is of course the big question. Here I remind readers that the “first” three insights are those which he had experienced internally in Levels I, II, and III in this presentation. These were by no means insignificant in themselves and together they give an indication of the kind of effort and progression involved in interior self-transformation that can conclude with “hitting the jackpot”, at least as far as traditional Vedanta went. This fourth samadhi is mentioned by Green (Green, 20), more from the standpoint of Vivekananda’s attribution of his knowledge about non-dualism to the experience rather than to what Ramakrishna had taught him. Such a statement would be consistent with the general Indic prioritization of experience over dogma. But whatever the assigned significance, the fact that Green mentions this samadhi at all demonstrates at least an openness to the experiential side of Vivekananda, though not a detailed study of the phenomena of and conclusions from these experiences. This type of samadhi is the one that most Westerners, if any, are likely to know about, because many Westerners focus largely on Advaita, where this is the samadhi. A study of the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, the classical text on yoga, however, reveals that there are in fact five classes of samadhi, of which this is the fourth, though not called by the name nirvikalpa. As I discuss in my thesis (MacPhail, 2013, 348-369), the samadhis experienced by Vivekananda conform in their essentials and especially on their outcome, to what we find in the Sutras that span dualism to non-dualism, with an adumbration of a fifth samadhi that was beginning to emerge at the turn of the Common Era. Certainly, at the fourth phase of his teaching Vivekananda stressed particularly the processes of evolution and involution, not as competitors, but as built into the whole cosmic modus operandi. These insights are particularly concentrated in his commentaries on prajnanam brahma (Aitareya Upanishad, 3.1.3): “The Atman is pure Intelligence," CW, Vol.6, 1987: Lessons on Raja-yoga, 128. one of Shankaracharya’s four great Vedantic sayings (MacPhail, to be published). In that context, Vivekananda makes some quite arresting statements: Every evolution presupposes an involution. The modern scientist will tell you that you can only get the amount of energy out of a machine which you have previously put into it. . .. If humans are an evolution of a mollusk, then the perfect human being—the Buddha-person, the Christ-person—was involved in the mollusk. CW, Vol.2,1984: The Real Nature of Man, 74-75. This quote surely makes clear what Vivekananda means by holovolution and also that he could not be further from Advaita—or Western thinking—if he tried. In addition, it provides in a very explicit way his conviction that the pinnacle of human evolution is the perfected soul, an idea to which Green drew attention in connection with raja yoga (Green, 24). But that that perfected soul is implicit in all forms of life is quite an arresting idea and certainly food for sustained thought. It certainly would seem to have profound implications for ecology and the extreme necessity for a deeply respectful attitude, not only to human beings, but to all forms of life. My contention here is that this line of understanding is what lies behind Vivekananda’s penchant to think in terms of an array of change and transformation in any subject whatsoever and also to pay attention to the various stages along the array of that subject, as I have indicated in his quotes on tattvamasi. Within that framework ethics is a definite item of interest, no doubt supported by his awareness of the need for Advaita to present such a system if it were going to catch on in the West. But just how that idea is expressed relates to the stage in the progression of his thought, which in turn relates to his responses to the actual groups of people he was interacting with. As I discuss in my thesis (MacPhail, 2013, 990-1067), it is rather striking how the responses of the five groups of people attracted to him, both in the West and in India, fell into the same pattern of consciousness development as he himself had gone through in his training from Ramakrishna. It is, therefore, possible to discern the same overall pattern of transmission as took place in the interaction of himself as a young man and Ramakrishna. Although this may sound like a rather far-fetched hypothesis, in my own experience reading his work in the proper framework of locality (East or West), topic (related to the level of his hearers), and precise time served to remove from my own mind the confusion and doubt that reading the materials at random had created. It was as if a holographic mass of squiggles suddenly fell into an organized, coherent three-dimensional image when I looked at it with unfocused eyes and slowly moved it further away in my focus of vision. Chapter 5 and Level V: Ramakrishna, Vedanta, and the Essence of Hinduism and Holism/Vijnana In this last chapter, which I have aligned with Holism or Vijnana in Vivekananda’s worldview, Green puts the spotlight on Ramakrishna, the link that connected Vivekananda to Müller. He presents us with a bird’s-eye view of how Vivekananda’s interpretation of Ramakrishna’s meaning seemed to evolve over time and also raises some of the issues that beset the Western mind in response: a) The apparent disconnect between Ramakrishna’s recorded sayings and Vivekananda’s patent agenda. As Green reports: Vivekananda’s interpretation of his guru Ramakrishna was at least the product of very different concerns and ideology from [Ramakrishna’s], with some arguing that Vivekananda’s teachings distort or even contradict those of his master (Green, 141). b) The suspicion that Vivekananda’s thought was directly influenced by Western rather than purely Hindu memes. In Müller’s day the suspicion was that Vivekananda embraced some of the teachings of Theosophy (Green, 163-166). c) A deep distrust of the paranormal elements in some of Vivekananda’s presentations (Green, 163-166). The First Difficulty: The Relationship between Sri Ramakrishna’s Teachings and Those of Swami Vivekananda The skewed perceptions of Vivekananda include what we have studied in Green’s book—Vivekananda is an “Advaita Vedantin” and on the other he is involved in “Western” social work. Ramakrishna, for his part, is pigeon-holed as a loveable pietist (Green, p.111), conforming to mainstream devotional Hindu views, more concerned with the personal yogic development of his followers than with aspirations to social change and secular reforms (Green, 118-119). This is one of the central issues on which both Westerners and Indians build their case that Vivekananda, a social changer par excellence, had an agenda different from Ramakrishna’s. However, if one goes deeper, particularly into Vivekananda’s work, the criticism was not of social service per se but of Indians rushing in to perform it in Western style without—like the West itself—having developed the spiritual maturity to do it as a spiritual practice, as an act of worship of the living, human God, as developed in tattvamasi. In Green, 144, the idea is put forward that the inexpressibility of Ramakrishna’s experience gave license for various interpretations. This is very fair, and of course could account for the fact that Vivekananda’s path of bringing Vedanta to the secular level was quite within the scope of Ramakrishna’s purview. Perhaps another way of saying the same thing is the remark on page 145 that Ramakrishna exemplified the Brahmo idea of unity of religions in an experiential way. This angle sees the situation from the standpoint of a unifying experience that holds all the religious traditions harmoniously, without minimizing or distorting any of them—a designation I would call holistic, integral, or vijnana, coming from a level beyond the Fourth. Such a level draws all “previous” levels, including the Fourth, into a total picture in which each level is valid and important on its own terms. In introducing this encompassing vision, Green (Green, 8) perceives the Gospel of Ramakrishna as a bilingual dialog between Indian philosophy and European logic. From another point of view—existential and equally valid—it is a record of how Ramakrishna adjusted his position to multiple different people and groups, espousing whatever views they held in order to work with them from where they stood. His interlocutors leave, invariably fully satisfied and with fresh insights into their religious views and commitments. In the context of conceptually relating to all forms in and through an internal experience/principle, I would add here Green’s insight into Müller’s work that he tended to see that all religions, including that of Ramakrishna, could be reduced to the same pattern (Green, 54). This somewhat restrictive view is juxtaposed on the same page to the view of Glyn Richards (1994, 112) that Vivekananda’s view of religion was “that religion was one in essence, but diverse in manifestation.” In addition to being a more flexible insight, this view has the merit of echoing the mantra from the Rig Veda 1.164.46, probably thousands of years old, ekam sat vipra bahudha vadanti: That which exists is one; sages call it variously. CW, Vol.8, 1971: Discourses on Jnana-Yoga, 12. As I bring out in MacPhail, 2017 105, this is the Indian version of what is known as the invariance principle in the West. Vivekananda quoted and commented on this mantra extensively in both India and the West, conveying the sense of the insight he had gotten from Ramakrishna on the subject (MacPhail, 2022). On the basis of Vivekananda’s view of his “salvation” by Ramakrishna Green thinks that Vivekananda saw Ramakrishna more as the regenerator of spirituality through direct experience (Green, 149) than as a propounder of any specific faith (Green, 147). These views are, of course, entirely consonant with the ekam sat mantra and the invariance principle, from a grasp of both of which it is possible to deduce the validity and value of any and all sincere and honest traditions. Ramakrishna expressed it in his cordial and understanding reception of adherents of any and all genuine religious traditions, as did Vivekananda. Like Ramakrishna, Vivekananda exhibited in this department, as he had in his yoga presentations, a willingness to embrace the founders and their principles of all the major traditions. In his series of lectures in the Bay Area in 1900, he spoke on Krishna, Buddha, Jesus, and Muhammad, CW, Vol. 1, 1965: Krishna, 437-445. CW, Vol.8, 1971: Buddha’s Message to the World, 92-105. CW, Vol.4, 1972: Christ, the Messenger, 138-153. CW, Vol.1, 1971: Mohammed, 481-484. a clear temporal progression of the phenomenon of avatar or prophet. His fifth lecture in the series might well have been on Ramakrishna but, true to form, Vivekananda spoke of this integral worldview and its implications rather than about Ramakrishna the person from whom he learned it. CW, Vol.8, 1971: Is Vedanta the Future Religion? 122-141. He held up the cardinal principle of this worldview as “worship of the spirit by the spirit”, a Christian injunction (John 4.23-24) that shifts the key of religion to the utmost generality and most encompassing principle imaginable. Within that principle, Vivekananda engaged with Advaita more or less all the way through his training with Ramakrishna, but as we have seen, his succeeding samadhis brought in more and more integral and integrating vision that allowed for the previously unbending non-dual position to be engaged with the physical human world, the imaginal world and the intellectual world, directly seeing all of these relationships as interrelated and interdependent with each other and with the fourth, intuitional level. This enabled him to valorize karma yoga along with nirvikalpa samadhi, etc. Here we are contemplating the kind of mindset that can handle this wide and apparently disparate array without counterintuitivity, a skill developed by actual experience, not on any logical methodology, though this can help to shape the final presentation. The insistence on logical coherence restricted to a materialistic frame of reference is of course characteristic of the Western academy and self-evidently is the obstacle to Western understanding of Integral Vedanta, the core of which is authentic, direct experience of the nature of the psyche’s different levels and how they can be experienced and seen to work, not as a rigid hierarchy, but as a continuum along which one is free to pass in any direction that is needed. This ability is accessed in a process of experiential development, such as Vivekananda went through at the hands of Ramakrishna. Later, in discussing the notions of dualism, qualified non-dualism, and non-dualism—a classical Vedantic hierarchy—he recognized them all as valid, due to the fact that all of them were of primary importance and of use to different types and levels of mind and psyche. It does not mean that one stage sublates the others as is the tendency in conceptual thinking, but that one has access to the whole array to rely on and come to one’s aid at whatever stage one finds oneself, including sudden moves from one position to the other. The “lesser forms” are not lesser in terms of experience, only of conceptual grasp and classification. In conclusion, in assessing Vivekananda’s profile against that of Ramakrishna what seems to be important is if and how Vivekananda utilizes this “operating system” in the various realms of activity he was called upon to engage with, so different from that of Ramakrishna. Ramakrishna was a traditional Indian holy man, remaining quietly in one spot and waiting for the world to come to him. Vivekananda went out over the whole world and spoke to huge numbers of people, East and West, addressing the issues they were grappling with in the teeth of global “meltdown”. In MacPhail, 2013, 990-1067 I demonstrate that Vivekananda recapitulated with his “students” the same internal pattern and modes of thought as he himself had been shepherded through by Ramakrishna. In both situations he brought about tremendous changes of vision and fresh attitudes to the work that needs to be done to face the re-making of humanity as it starts to emerge from its thralldom to, on the one hand exclusive materialism, and on the other the towering injunctions of Classical Advaita Vedanta. These important events of radical change I regard as the Western equivalents of samadhi. Cross-Cultural Preconceptions That Can Create Most of the Perceived Difficulties Before proceeding to Vivekananda’s fifth samadhi and an attempt to formalize the worldview it arose from, I here take up points already raised: The distrust of the Indians of Western influences on their culture, epitomized by the Theosophical Society, and on the entrenched resistance to “supernatural” phenomena in the West. Müller and Vivekananda lived at a time when the Theosophical movement was at its height. Started and led in 1875 by a Russian medium, Madame Blavatsky, the movement purported to bring Indian wisdom to the West. It was in fact an amalgam of Western Perennialism and Indian customs and inspiring myths about “Great Masters” and “esoteric teachings”. It did introduce a form of yoga, possibly the first such Western movement to do so. As it developed worldwide, its claims to the “supernormal” became more and more difficult to support and various fake “appearances” and “miracles” began to be presented. Müller, along with many other Western serious thinkers, was appalled and repudiated the whole movement. It was this situation that moved Müller to title his pamphlet on Ramakrishna A Real Mahatman [great soul] (1896), to distinguish the “real article” from the fake mahatmas of the Theosophists. In India Vivekananda resisted Theosophy, as he felt it was bringing a Western fantasy to India, where the real need was for Indians themselves to revision and rebuild their own authentic tradition. Nivedita, Sister. 1910, 254 and CW, Vol.8: Letter to E. T. Sturdy from New York, April 24, 1895, 335. In regard to the West, he had a cordial relationship with Annie Besant, the leader of the movement after Blavatsky, and in public acknowledged the movement as preaching the divine-in-humanity, along with luminaries like Confucius, Moses, Buddha, Christ, Muhammad, Luther, Calvin, the Sikhs, and Spiritualism. CW, Vol.8, 1971: Jnana and Karma, 229. The more serious difficulty in understanding Ramakrishna in the West was his reported paranormal experiences and behavior. These caused Müller considerable pause, and at times brought out his fears about Theosophical inclinations even in Vivekananda (Green, 162). When Vivekananda had his brother disciples send materials to Müller for his book on Ramakrishna, the professor was quite shocked at the deluge of “paranormal” phenomena they contained. In writing the book he refrained from including most of these and when he did so he attributed it to a “dialogic process” that attributed traditional and mythic properties to the character and behavior of contemporary great people. This was his way of deflecting such information, an implication that Ramakrishna’s disciples were “mystery-mongers” or simply deluded devotees resurrecting ancient myths in their enthusiasm (Burke, 1986, 292-296). In some ways this was rather ironic, given Müller’s public commitment to Vedanta. For all of its Himalayan philosophy and rhetoric that carried so much impact in the West, the whole structure of Vedanta is built on the stages of interior development and how mastering them results in what the modern West regarded as “superhuman” faculties and abilities (MacPhail, 2015c). In this situation, even Advaita Vedanta—the shrine at which Müller and his contemporaries worshipped—was based on a samadhi, the fourth in an “evolutionary” line of samadhis, each of which not only unleashed tremendous energy, but also a revisioning of the methods needed to attain that samadhi, the unusual phenomena that resulted from it; a formidable philosophy supporting the whole phenomenon; a reorganization of social norms to accommodate all of the above, and finally maximizing the chances of reaching the next level on the chatushpad. What was equally ironic is that this whole process was not predicated on the intervention of an extracosmic deity, as in Abrahamism, but largely on the efforts and determination of the subject him or herself. While there are innumerable deities, even in Vedanta, these are usually understood as helps to the central process of self-transformation, ultimately the responsibility of the subject. The basic fact is that spirituality in India was intensely humanistic, unlike the rather fraught dependency in the West on a distant deity whose “decisions” at worst could be just as unfavorable as favorable and human beings were more or less collateral damage. In this chapter I have sought to demonstrate how “paranormal” events (samadhis) were crucial in affecting the insight and decisions of Vivekananda, and in most cases simply cut right through all manner of conceptual speculation and established canards concocted in the West (and also by Westernized Hindus). At the same time, these events also served to harmonize whatever complementarity he was facing and also moved him on in a kind of “saltation” to the next level in the traditional sequence he was being led through. Vivekananda’s Fifth Samadhi At this point I turn to Vivekananda’s fifth samadhi with Ramakrishna, which is included in Green’s book (Green, 164), but simply in the context of Vivekananda’s belief in Ramakrishna’s yogic powers—which again, I emphasize, are supported by Indian tradition, especially when they emanate from a life of systematic discipline and efforts at self-transformation. It took place only months after Vivekananda’s nirvikalpa samadhi, a few days before Ramakrishna’s death. On this occasion Ramakrishna and Vivekananda went into samadhi together. In the course of the samadhi, Ramakrishna transmitted to Vivekananda “everything that I possess . . . With this power you will do a lot of work for the world and then return” (Green, 163-164). Vivekananda adds, “I think it is this power that makes me just go from this work to that work” (Green, 164). This samadhi is extremely important as well as remarkable, because it is so unusual in its actual physical enactment of two people in that state together and also it represents what I have termed in my doctoral thesis a “personality/gene/spiritual transplant” (MacPhail, 2013, 413) of the totality of Ramakrishna’s highly integral view into Vivekananda, who had managed to move from entrenched humanism to holovolution in the space of only five years, and was now capping this achievement by the total transference into his “operating system” of integral/holism, or the total picture that Ramakrishna stood for: Within the Indian tradition the Advaitin was right; so was the yogic meditator, the ecstatic devotee and the work person. As were the followers of all of the other major religions of the world, including the Abrahamic religions. The word that has been utilized for this ability to accept everything as valid, as Brahman itself, is vijnana, knowledge greater than even the intuitive knowledge of Advaita Vedanta, which despite its philosophical grandeur, takes such a narrow view of reality. The meaning and value of vijnana have been supported by Arvind Sharma, the contemporary Canadian scholar of Indian philosophy, who suggests that Ramakrishna’s vijnana was what supervened after his peak experience of non-dualism, when he perceived that the Brahman experienced in pure non-dualism is also the universe and its living beings (Sharma, 1989, 34). More recently, Ayon Maharaj (2018, 19-26) [Swami Medhananda] advocates interpretive principles to guide our understanding about Ramakrishna’s mindset, from which I select those that I have not emphasized thus far (Ibid., 27-45, paraphrased and annotated by myself): Reality is both personal and impersonal, inseparably interconnected (such as Brahman and Kali). There are two levels of Advaitic realization: the world-denying acosmic view of the classic Advaitists, and beyond that view, the world-affirming view of vijnana based on the principle that all this is Brahman [to be seen, experienced, enjoyed and served.] Ramakrishna stated that the vijnani, unlike the non-dual jnani, is capable of “attaining various forms of union with God—on different planes of consciousness, all of which are true.” [These I take to be the classical chatushpad plus the fifth or vijnani level.] Vijnana Vedanta is the formal expression of this experience/frame of mind. “Seeing God with open eyes”, it accepts that the eternal and the temporal are both true and sees that any or all attitudes to Reality are intrinsically true and lead to final realization of Reality itself. [Maharaj comments on how Ramakrishna and Vivekananda especially emphasize compassion and service to all beings without distinction. I would add that all the way through the Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna and Vivekananda’s works, the emphasis is very heavily on the sincerity and honesty of anyone’s physical and spiritual life. This is the sine qua non of understanding this new “liberated” worldview and without borders for all practical purposes: the whole thing depends on the caliber of its adherents and followers.] Vivekananda himself used the term vijnana only once and described it as: Knowledge absolute means not the knowledge we know, not intelligence, not reason, not instinct, but that which when it becomes manifested we call by these names. When that Knowledge Absolute becomes limited we call it intuition, and when it becomes still more limited we call it reason, instinct, etc. That Knowledge Absolute is vijnana. The nearest translation of it is all-knowingness. There is no combination in it. It is the nature of the Soul (Vivekananda, 1907, 83-84). CW, Vol.2, 1971: Sankhya and Vedanta, 459. This gives us a hint of the level Vivekananda operated from, but it is in his commentary on Sarvam khalvidam brahma: All this is verily Brahman (Chhandogya Upanishad, 3.14.1) that we really glimpse what it meant to him. This mantra is one of the oft-quoted in Vivekananda’s work. Here I present the concluding materials of his thoughts on this mantra in the West: May I be born again and again, and suffer thousands of miseries so that I can worship the only God that exists, the only God I believe in—the sum total of all souls. Above all, my God the wicked, my God the miserable, my God the poor of all races, of all species is the special object of my worship. CW, Vol.5, 1970: Letter to Mary Hale, July 9, 1897, 136-137. Then, toward the end of his life, writing to a close Indian friend: From highest Brahman to the yonder worm, And to the very minutest atom, Everywhere is the same God, the All-Love! Friend, offer mind, soul, body at their feet. CW, Vol.4, 1972: To a Friend, 496. In my own work, I opted to name the study as one of Integral Vedanta or turiyatita, the latter name given in Kashmir Shaivism to a level “beyond” the Fourth as far back as probably the beginning of the second millennium of the Common Era (Lakshman Jee, 1988, 83). Pinpointing and documenting at length the innumerable conversations between Ramakrishna and Vivekananda, it is clear that Ramakrishna took Vivekananda through all of the already established levels and overtly introduced him to vijnana, ranging in mood through work, devotion, meditation and pure non-dual self-knowledge and finally integral knowledge. These facts seem to offer an exemplification of vijnana in action: conveying realized truth in far more than one “tongue”, according to the person Ramakrishna was talking to. And with Vivekananda it was the full, “unexpurgated” version, which could be a reason why many—especially those partial to devotion—perceive him as deviating from Ramakrishna’s testimony. Matrices of Consciousness: An Attempt to Integrate All Elements of Integral/ Vijnana Vedanta As I studied this large database, I noted that Ramakrishna did not take Vivekananda along the five quite different levels in a sequential historical pattern, but in an amazing combination of all of them together in an ontological array—no doubt a feature of Ramakrishna’s own holistic consciousness, which is represented in Figure 1. As such, each created a “horizontal” conceptual context or field that was retained throughout the whole process. This was, of course, a major challenge for Vivekananda, espoused as he was at the beginning to materialistic Western thought that has placed an immoveable barrier above materialism (represented here as humanism) itself. And also, of course, the barrier placed by the Advaitists between the contexts of maya (III) and holovolution (IV). What bonded all of these potentially incompatible levels together was a second dynamic that could be traced in the voluminous literature available for this study: a historical process of inducting Vivekananda within the ontological, atemporal, “horizontal” array into the actual historical experience of a gamut of five consecutive states of consciousness, the overall content of which echoes the context of the spectrum of levels. Analysis showed that the content of each state impacted the entire array of levels in sequence: State 1 content appeared in the first cell of each of the levels, State 2 in the second cell, and so on. The overall impact was that the state experiences transected in sequence the array of levels to create a 5x5 matriceal dynamic, introducing into the basic framework of an array of context the experiential content that gives a progression of meaning to the context, culminating within each level in a samadhi that transcends both concept and experience and opens out a space where a radically new combina- tion of context and content is possible. Figure 1: The Five Conceptual Contexts of Ramakrishna’s Transmission to Vivekananda Conceptual Level/ Context Contextual “Fields” throughout Vivekananda’s Training V Holism/Vijnana V IV Holovolution IV III Maya as an Attitude of Mind III II Yoga as a Science II I Spiritual Humanism I Figure 2 gives an idea how I integrated these two major aspects of the study: Figure 2: The Proposed Configuration of Levels and States in the Matrices Conceptual Level/Context Experiential State/Content Appearing over Time 1 2 3 4 5 V Holism/Vijnana V.1 V.2 V.3 V.4 S V.5 IV Holovolution IV.1 IV.2 IV.3 S IV.4 IV.5 III Maya as an Attitude of Mind III.1 III.2 S III.3 III.4 III.5 II Yoga as a Science II.1 S II.2 II.3 II.4 II.5 I Spiritual Humanism S I.1 I.2 I.3 I.4 I.5 This is a matrix of consciousness, showing the “vertical” (atemporal) ontological hierarchy of levels and the “horizontal” (temporal) exegetical progression of states of consciousness. I arrived at this intuitively as this work was done ten to fifteen years prior to the publication of Ken Wilber’s “lattice” (2006) that offers a similar arrangement, but within a much more Western, conceptual context. Nor was I familiar at the time with the materials in Kashmir Shaivism (Lakshman, 1988, 73-85 and MacPhail, 2018, 61) and Sri Aurobindo’s work (Banerji, 2012) that lend themselves to this analysis, far less with the astounding 2x2 and 3x3 “proto-matrices” of consciousness tentatively put forward in the 6th to 7th Century CE by none other than Shankaracharya and Sureshwaracharya (Fort, 1990, 39, 68, fn51), the arch-proponents of the unimportance of stages 1-3, all of them “tainted” by including the physical world to some extent in their purview. Overall, the matrices are bringing together within the same system two closely related elements—concept and experience—apparently different, but actually complementary in the sense of quantum theory (Römer and Walach, 2011). In the context of the interplay of bra (stored experience) and ket (immediate experience), I (MacPhail, 2018) go into more detail about these elements in the construction of the matrices. This conjunction gives us an impression of how all the parts that occur in the construction of the matrix are related to each other concept-wise and also “numerically”, thus giving a sense of the overall interrelatedness of all of the elements in Integral Vedanta. In short, a possible map that could help in sorting out the counterintuitive issues that we are contemplating in this chapter. Bringing all of the elements involved in the Ramakrishna/Vivekananda transmission into a matriceal pattern permits us to trace the stepwise progressions of meaning within each level as also how the context of each level influences the way the content is presented. The degree of “agreement” between level and state at any cell/conjunction determines just how that cell plays a role in the overall development of each level and, indeed, over the entire matrices. In that connection, in this general layout five sequential cells show bolding of the interacting components (I.1, II.2, etc.) This indicates the cells at which samadhi (S) occurred. In effect, it is the conjunction of a conceptual level with the experiential state at the same point in their respective progressions. This is, as far as I know, an as yet unreported phenomenon of great interest. The Genesis of Samadhi and Its Various Forms These samadhis are discussed by Vivekananda in his reading of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, the all-time authority on such matters. In Chapter III, verse 4 we learn of samyama, the state in which a person “can direct the mind to any particular object and fix it there for a long time, separating the object from the internal part.” CW, Vol.1: Raja-Yoga: Patanjali’s Yoga Aphorisms, 271. My italics. This state is in fact the culmination of a three-step process: dharana—holding the mind to a particular object (Ibid, 270); dhyana—an unbroken flow of knowledge in that object meditation (Ibid.); and samadhi—when meditation on all forms is given up and one perceives only the internal sensations, the meaning, unexpressed in any form (Ibid., 270-271). The text goes on to explore several contexts, from physical matter to the most interior awareness and lays out the outcome of samyama in each, i.e. the import of the samadhi at each level. When the object of the exercise is physical, the import of the samadhi will be physical, when mental, mental, and so on. I present these ideas in a very abbreviated form in MacPhail, 2015c. But no matter which level is dealt with, the result of samadhi will be to acquire total control of that level and the manifestation of highly supranormal power within the level itself, including levitations, control of other minds and suchlike, which were no doubt what Müller had qualms about. There is a large anecdotal literature about all of this (including Shankara’s rather spectacular abilities along these lines). Another recent approach related to samadhi lies in contemporary attempts to explain non-local events in the human psyche, which bring forward demonstrable paranormal phenomena (Walach et al., 2009, 277-308). These can be equated qualitatively with what was observed in connection with the various samadhis in the works of Patanjali (MacPhail, 2015c). Just how these pieces of information can be utilized to demonstrate and investigate such phenomena at this time of general disbelief is hard to see. The most striking fact is that subjects in whom to study such phenomena are probably vanishingly rare. These would need to be people with the capabilities and skills and discipline necessary to demonstrate them convincingly. As well as, it goes without saying, investigators who are open to and thoroughly conversant with the whole “program”. In Vedanta, however, these paranormal skills are not considered of importance. Indeed, perhaps it was the prevalence of them in the days of founding Advaita that moved the Advaitins to deconstruct the “lower” levels in the first place. And, on the other side, perhaps it was the superior discipline and concentration of mind that gave us Newton, Planck, Einstein and the quantum physicists, the whole galaxy of Western science including psychology and parapsychology, unfortunately disconnected from this powerful interior science of the mind developed in India before the turn of the Common Era. The philosophy behind this remarkable data sees the final liberation as one of aloneness, realizing that ultimately we are totally other than any external object or process, identified with the reality of ultimate meaning which became Brahman or the Atman in Advaita Vedanta. What Integral Vedanta now offers is that we are dealing with a bipartite reality—the static (Brahman) and the active (Shakti), both of which we ourselves generate in our own heads—and it is up to us to find the point of balance between them in any event whatsoever. The more grounded we are in the Atman, which I suggest is “the wavicle” within us, that which unites the apparently opposite elements we deal with, the more understanding and control we have over our image of ourselves (the bra element or “static” particle) and all that we have to deal with (the ket element or “dynamic” wave). Such balance helps us to auto-adjust to whatever we have to face. As and when the adjustment across the “map” brings together the concept and experience of the exact same order, we experience samadhi, the “bullseye” of the whole process and what holds the matrices together in the first place. In addition to this regular pattern, I draw attention to the fact that every level concludes with the fifth state imbuing it with the deepest dimension of meaning, even if the “distance” between the level and state is great across the spectrum/gamut, e.g. Level I/State 5. In this extreme example, samadhi is the starting event (I.1) and the subsequent four cells denote the ongoing deepening of understanding of the event up to I.5, when the holistic or vijnana element is present. The subject has reached the outer limit of his or her level. At present, traditional Vedanta regards as the culminating point nirvikalpa samadhi (1V.4). Interestingly, Medieval Kashmir Shaivism also works with a 4x4 matrix, but terms IV.4 turiyatita (Lakshman, 1988, 85 and MacPhail, 2018, 61) and defines it as: Absolute fullness of self, full of consciousness and bliss. Found not only in samadhi, but in each and every activity of the world. What is remarkable here is the explicit mention of the world as engaged with the whole process, previously considered purely interior by Vedanta. The interchanges between Ramakrishna and Vivekananda with which I worked definitely include open discussion of vijnana, which is a synonym of turiyatita, and also enough events and statements to trace its meaning right across the matrices. This is a new insight that at present is disputed. Nevertheless, the work of Aurobindo (1872-1950), a junior contemporary of Vivekananda (who was highly influenced by both Ramakrishna and Vivekananda), as presented by Banerji, 2012, provides sufficient independent documentation, albeit largely conceptual, to support the construction of a 5x5 matrix (MacPhail, 2015b). We may say with regard to State 5 that such a person is perfected in his or her area of work of self-transformation in the level with which he or she is engaged. This dynamic holds all the way up; as the more expanded and integrated levels are reached, it takes longer for samadhi to take place within the horizontal dimension and therefore it occurs closer and closer to “perfection”. In Level V, the final cell is V.5, the occurrence of samadhi and also the final “perfection” in that level. I mention this dynamic in connection with Vivekananda’s blanket vision that any sincere, honest, and sustained effort leads to liberation from what used to be known as “human bondage”. The basis of this conviction lies in the whole tradition. When discussing the adverse effects of foreign invasion (pages 7-8), I drew attention to the basic Vedantic conviction that whoever knows Brahman becomes Brahman, perhaps a key mantra in the whole system. On page 20 under a discussion of human experience as the core of spirituality, we see that Vivekananda defended the validity of even “lesser” (dualistic) forms of Vedanta as guaranteeing spiritual liberation. On page 26 there is Vivekananda’s explicit statement that each and every yoga when properly practiced, guarantees freedom to the human soul. Green himself (45) mentions raja-yoga in that connection. In discussing maya on page 31, Vivekananda is interpreted as stating that even within the physical world one can progress from diversity to oneness (“matter” to “spirit”) and thereby attain spiritual liberation. In the light of the matrices, and indeed Vivekananda’s whole presentation of Vedanta, this goal of “perfection” applies to all combination of levels and states, with the difference that the way that perfection is manifested depends on which level or levels the practicant has done the work in. As we have already seen, there are other samadhis besides nirvikalpa (IV and 4), perhaps less “exalted” to the untrained eye, but of crucial importance in Vivekananda’s life. These might be trivial to the Advaitin, but in the steps toward nirvikalpa are of first importance in Integral Vedanta. In my doctoral thesis, 2013, I discuss these different samadhis (348-369), the way they are presented by Patanjali (500-200BCE), the authority on the subject of yoga, and how they translate into the events of Vivekananda’s life. Correspondences between Ramakrishna’s Teaching to Vivekananda and Vivekananda’s to His Students Another distinct feature of my study of the data of the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda transmission is that at every step or “node” in the whole process Ramakrishna offered not only an experiential insight or even moment, but also a closely related conceptual one. That could be putting a name on something, a didactic comment or two, an injunction or explanation. This was so regular and striking that I decided to create two matrices, one conceptual and the other experiential in content. As I was bringing in at every cell comments from Vivekananda at the same stage of his own teaching, I noticed that the conceptual entries were from his Indian work and the experiential ones from the West. This is the basis of my often-repeated statement about twin matrices, one reflecting the needs and concerns of India and the other of the West. They are related to each other in the complementary mode of concept and experience themselves. Finally, in bringing in the materials of Vivekananda’s transmission to his students, both Indian and Western, and comparing them to the same stages of his own development of consciousness, his work, both in India and in the West, was a re-enactment of what he had undergone with Ramakrishna (MacPhail, 2013, 877-1067). There naturally were some modifications to allow of the different circumstances, especially that Vivekananda was working with groups rather than with one subject, but the overall dynamic was the same. Here I give a brief overview of how my findings may relate to the discussion here. First it is apparent that Vivekananda, like Ramakrishna, held up the entire array of ontological levels (contexts) to all of the groups he encountered, no doubt engendering many of the same counterintuitivities he himself had gone through with Ramakrishna. Space here does not permit of a display of the content of this dynamic, but in my discussion of the development of meaning within tattvamasi (43-45), I made a much-abbreviated demonstration of how, over time and the particular groups that came to Vivekananda, There I give an impression of the “level characterization” of each group, defined largely by their attitude to Vivekananda and ability to learn from him. the meaning of the mantra expanded and deepened over time within the spectrum of levels Vivekananda was presenting to them. On page 45 I comment on how remarkable was the way into which these groups fell into place as in a hologram. But as each group presented a different type of person/state of consciousness, within the gamut of the five different states of consciousness Vivekananda had gone through with Ramakrishna, they were all independent of each other, and the form of the matrices is therefore a series of five vertical, non-contiguous columns, as in Figure 3. For our purposes here, this re-enactment of the process on which the matrices are based, necessarily means that within each of these horizontal “progressions” across the five groups inevitably there will be one “samadhi” along any given “horizontal” development. As this mode of study involves groups, the occurrence or non-occurrence of individual samadhi is not a relevant item, but I do demonstrate (MacPhail, 2013, 1004-1008) that at the appropriate conjunctions of each group with the level it corresponds to in the spectrum (N.n), there is a major breakthrough, discovery or initiative undertaken, as suggested on page 51. I take these events as exemplifications within the external world of the interior samadhis that Vivekananda experienced. These findings surprised even me. If they are found to be cogent, this data is probably the most valid demonstration of Vivekananda’s faithfulness to the holistic operating system Ramakrishna had “installed” in him. Working along this line of evidence and thought may go a long way to resolving the present issues of disconnect, frustration, and perhaps even thoughts of Vivekananda’s “apostasy” to Ramakrishna. Figure 3: The Replication of “A Matrix” in Vivekananda’s Groups of Students LEVEL State 1 State 2 State 3 State 4 State 5 I II III IV V Biases in Both India and the West in Reaching Clarity on Vivekananda Traditionally, the modern West has had trouble with the transcendental realm and India with the concrete realm; but if both East and West are to come together it is clear that we need a paradigm that covers the whole range of religious or any other kind of perception, experience, and belief from matter to spirit and back again. In the Indian/Western setting of this discussion, the pre-existing norms of each culture automatically rule each other out. The West was hammering out a materialistic paradigm that was to go on to delete as “epiphenomenal” any and all entities but actual physical matter, thereby not only deleting the normal world of dream, creativity, emotion, but also the capacity to discern intelligently what is likely to be real and true, and to condemn intuitional knowledge to the garbage can. In so doing, it was about to plunge the West into relentless devastation of nature and climate, family values, and essentially to pull the plug on any notion of self-respect or respect for others. In India, the shadow of Advaita hung over the country in the notion that the world is essentially unreal, resulting in a culture that was unable to resist with any force the unending waves of invasion and exploitation that battered India for nearly a millennium. In their own, richly fertile land the Indians were living like slaves and paupers under the Western invaders, deprived of their own tradition of spirituality and self-respect. And, as a final blow, the West in the Indian Education Bill was about to totally denaturalize the Indians and make them foreigners in their own land. At the same time the situation produced other young men like Vivekananda, intelligent, robust, and determined to get to the bottom of their culture’s decline and near demise, if necessary using the very Western methods their minds were saturated with. These young men spoke English fluently, had the capacity to probe evidence coherently and effectively and to see that investigation was recorded precisely and efficiently. All that remained to be done was the overthrow of foreign dominance and the production of a paradigm that would help India rebuild itself on its own ancient principles and presuppositions. But who would “bell the cat” to accomplish this? India’s backbone was nearly broken, and who was there who was really in touch with the deeply buried Indian soul? Although there were great souls like Devendranath Tagore and other highly educated and revered Indian leaders, their English education made it impossible for any of them to command enough influence to rise about the endless altercation and millennial grudges of caste, philosophy, culture, religion, native and imported, and the effects of the relentless divide and rule policies of the English. The answer was, quite simply, Ramakrishna, an uneducated, “madman” from a remote village in West Bengal, who spoke only a few English words, refused to go to any kind of school, and went into samadhi at the drop of a hat. But the Brahmo Samaj and especially the young Western-educated men discovered him and found what they were looking for in his enchanting simplicity, forthrightness, and utter unconcern for anything but the direct experience of India’s own Reality. This was available to all without the intervention of any priesthood, synod, or presbytery. Ramakrishna shone a light that soon percolated through Bengal and over India and was to impinge on the exquisite sensibilities of Max Müller, trained and refined in the workings of the millennial Aryan or Indo-European culture of the inner world, and determined to bring its blessings to the bone-dry soul of the West. Müller and Vivekananda were united in their appreciation of Ramakrishna’s greatness, though they derived different messages from it—not to be unexpected, given that the problems they were dealing with were more or less mirror-images of each other. But from the standpoint of this study, what stands out is the nature of the group of young people who, trained to close observation and critical thinking, committed themselves to the observation and scrupulous recording of the phenomena of Ramakrishna’s day-to-day life and his profoundly transformative effect upon all of them and in particular, for our purposes, the life of Vivekananda. My own doctorate is built entirely on this material and has sufficed to discern the key stages and facts of Vivekananda’s development and how they relate to the traditional Vedantic criteria of transformation of consciousness along the chatushpad—a position most supported by Swami Saradananda, Ramakrishna’s primary biographer (MacPhail, 2013, 613-617). As more and more literature is now appearing that delves systematically into these authentic sources, it seems likely that it will become easier to discern what Vivekananda’s motives and intentions were, why he chose to speak and act as he did and how it was possible for him to offer a menu that was able to include so well both India and the West in a harmonious manner, no matter what distortions may have been superimposed on him by political and other interests other than his own. What I feel has made this possible is the remarkable conjunction at a crucial time of such a powerful exhibition of traditional Vedantic experience and culture in Ramakrishna and the Westernization of an unusually fiery, articulate, and executive soul as Vivekananda. It was a kind of nuclear fusion, the import of which has hardly begun to be objectively explored. This seems to be what Green is trying to encompass in the notion of immanent monism as the primary influence on Vivekananda, which he does attribute to the influence of Ramakrishna (Green, 84, 133). Vivekananda’s samadhis 1 through 4 are all compatible with a direct interconnectedness of matter and spirit, though in different “formats” which indicate on each level a deeper and more universal interconnection between the conceptuality and rationalism we associate with the West and the experientialism and ability to interconnect that we respect in Vedanta. Recently, in putting together a presentation of Vivekananda’s commentary on verse I.2 of the Kaushitaki Upanishad—tvamaham, I am you—I have grappled with the intensely felt and highly challenging content of the mantra, which posits and illustrates the ability to directly experience one’s own identity with what we, at the lower levels of consciousness, call “the other”, whether human, animal, or anything else. The study of this mantra, of which I have only posted the long introduction so far (MacPhail, July 17, 2023), is so challenging that I decided to include in the discussion the views of Martin Buber, a Jewish mystic and a late contemporary of Vivekananda, whose classic I and Thou (1922) is a wealth of exemplifications and illustrations of this mode of consciousness. I have opted to suggest that this mind-expanding material arises from the fifth level of consciousness, illustrating that there in reality the barriers we have taken for granted for so long and used to disregard the innate divinity of all of creation and used to justify all manner of hatred, persecution, wars, are all removed. Here, in addition to these “objective” criteria of the influence of Ramakrishna on Vivekananda I also mention here an intensely subjective poem by Vivekananda himself titled A Song I Sing to Thee, written in Bengali in June of 1894. Here we see Vivekananda relating to Ramakrishna in the purely human mode, then the transformational mode, followed by maya, holovolution and finally holism (though of course not using such terms), expanding more and more into the universe and this world itself, where Ramakrishna is seen in the direct vision of Reality in a flower, washed with dew, raising its face to the sun. CW, Vol.4, 1972: A Song I Sing to Thee, 511. This material may not be accepted as valid in academic discourse at the moment, but it is nevertheless a very strong and undeniably authentic statement of Vivekananda’s bond with Ramakrishna and his work, which totally negates any notion that Vivekananda was operating in anything but the realm of Ramakrishna’s vision of Reality. In the commentary on I am You (MacPhail, 2023 I use the same source to underline the intensity of Vivekananda’s identification with Sri Ramakrishna, which conveys what can only be described as transcendental, and more soberly, an outstanding exemplification of fifth level consciousness. Trying to peg Vivekananda or Ramakrishna to only one standpoint is bound to create counterintuitivity on both sides of the aisle. What does help to sort this out is precisely the definition of the different contexts, worldviews, or levels that can be discerned in both, though certainly more conceptually in Vivekananda. I have not only defined these in my doctoral thesis but also subsequently studied (MacPhail, 2015b) a similar phenomenon in the work of Sri Aurobindo. My personal choice of nomenclature for this state of things is Integral Vedanta, partly in recognition of the aptness of the word to the vision of matter and spirit as fully integrated in the experience of the Ground or Brahman in this way of thinking, and partly as a recognition of the work of Aurobindo, to which his academic followers Indra Sen and Haridas Chaudhuri. gave the name Integral Yoga. Conclusion I would characterize Religion for a Secular Age as an interesting and inspirational presentation of the levels of thought and work of Max Müller. Green’s handling of the inescapable link between Müller and Ramakrishna and Vivekananda is less satisfactory, partially because of a list of Western misconceptions, biases and canards about Ramakrishna and Vivekananda, which Green states quite openly, but without resolving most of them. Some of these could be attributed to the lack of recognizable coherence in the way the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda literature is currently organized, some to the restriction of Western study primarily to the Gospel of Ramakrishna, which for the most part demonstrates only one facet of Ramakrishna, and some to prevailing biases against Indian culture that permeates our Western academy, despite itself. But in this particular book the main issue seems to be that the experiential aspect of the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda phenomenon is not adequately covered. Green laudably includes authentic descriptions of two of Vivekananda’s samadhis (moments of illumination) during his training period, and also the primary experiential biography Sri Ramakrishna the Great Master in his bibliography, but omits an inner examination of their meaning. Three other key samadhis are entirely omitted which would also, if examined, have thrown considerable light on how the “immanent monism” that Green is forced to bring into service as he goes on, finds support in the transmission of Integral Vedanta from Ramakrishna to Vivekananda. In the West we expect teachers to remain within one common frame of reference (usually materialism) so that the logical sequences we are called upon to follow are immediately clear, and Occam’s razor can be wielded without doing any serious damage. But with Ramakrishna and Vivekananda we are dealing with people who moved effortlessly between five levels of consciousness, the phenomena and logic of each of which are quite different from the others, although put together they present what can be seen as a coherent sequence. These materials fall into patterns fully consistent with all of the previous systems brought forward in the Vedantic tradition, albeit in a totally contemporary and quite fresh mode. As I commented at the beginning of this review, I see Green’s own approach as adumbrating at least the thematic structure of the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda paradigm, a fact that has made it possible for Green, despite his oft-repeated canards as to Vivekananda’s lack of cogency and coherence, to conclude for the most part that Vivekananda’s position has a kind of coherence of its own and seems to stand independent of both Müller’s theory and also a more sophisticated version of immanence theory. For me, it has made it possible to write this review. REFERENCES Banerji, Debashish. 2012: Seven Quartets of Becoming: A Transformative Yoga Psychology Based on the Diaries of Sri Aurobindo. New Delhi: Printworld. Basu, Sankari Prasad. 1982. Letters of Sister Nivedita in 2 Vols. Calcutta: Nababharat. Burke, Marie Louise. 1983-1987. Swami Vivekananda in the West: New Discoveries. Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama. Volume 1: 1983. Volume 2: 1984. Volume 3: 1985. Volume 4, 1986. Volume 5: 1987. 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A History of Consciousness in Vedanta: Footprints of the Atman. https://www.academia.edu/83411689/A_HISTORY_OF_CONSCIOUSNESS_IN_VEDANTA_FOOTPRINTS_OF_THE_ATMAN MacPhail, Jean. 2022, October: Truth Is One, The Wise Call It Variously, Part I. https://www.academia.edu/87681065/TRUTH_IS_ONE_THE_WISE_CALL_IT_VARIOUSLY_PART_1_docx MacPhail, Jean. 2022, November: Truth Is One, The Wise Call It Variously, Part II https://www.academia.edu/89861489/EVEKS_ACADEMIA_II MacPhail, Jean. 2023, February. You Are That, Part I. https://www.academia.edu/96771427/YOU_ARE_THAT_THE_SECOND_STEP_ON_THE_EVOLUTIONARY_PATHWAY_PART_I_Chandogya_Upanishad_6_8_7_Tattvamasi_You_Are_That MacPhail, Jean. 2023, February. 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