The Vedanta Path to Higher Consciousness: A Key to Interreligious Dialogue
By: Sandi Fults
“As religion is a life to be lived, not a theory to be accepted or a belief to be adhered to, it allows scope and validity to varied approaches to the Divine. There may be different revelations of the Divine but they are all forms of the Supreme. If we surround our souls with a shell, national pride, racial superiority, frozen articles of faith and empty presumption of castes and classes, we stifle and suppress the breath of the spirit. The Upanishads are clear that the flame is the same even though the types of fuel used may vary.”(1)
Human history is marked by people who have questioned humanity’s place and role in the cosmos. Philosophers and theologians have developed countless theories and systems to probe the meaning of existence and the cosmos in which we exist. Such is the stuff of religion. Yet, for all of the religions’ penetrating explorations, one of the primary causes of human conflict and suffering has been the clash of religious systems. This fact points to the ambivalence of religion. In fact, for all of the religions’ heavenly ideals, history is grounded in their gritty exclusivist struggles for dominance over one another.
The Vedanta (AKA Hindu) tradition offers a fundamental reason for the strife among religious traditions. Human beings suffer a sense of separation and isolation from reality. Maya, the human state of illusion, distracts people from the true point of life—to return to Brahman—God, the Nameless Source of all. Vedanta’s tolerance for other religions is rooted in its ancient sacred teachings. It can be argued that religious intolerance is but one of the myriad illusions that are maya. Once the seeker attains God-consciousness, she sheds her gross attachment to distinctions and struggles for power, experiences unity with God and all creation and gains compassion and tolerance for others.
In this fractured world, religions must confront and attempt to resolve their destructive differences that are rooted in exclusivist doctrines. The term (and misnomer), Hinduism is a complex and multi-textured umbrella that covers seemingly countless Indian religious and secular expressions. For the purposes of this article, I will use the word Vedanta rather than Hinduism. Voices rise from antiquity to the present that are signatures of the many articles of Vedanta faith. Yet, all recognize that they are treading many paths to one goal. For S. Radhakrishnan, spiritual life is
“communion with the Supreme. It is a life of realization, . . . an inner intuitive vision of God, when man achieves absolute freedom and escapes from the blind servitude to ordinary experience.”(2)
Vedanta’s spiritual journey to moksha engages one’s entire being and culminates in an integrated and unifying experience of reality. Regardless of the god or goddess that a Vedanta follower honors, Shiva or Krishna, or one of the many faces of Brahman, all are rooted in ancient Vedic revelation and subsequent scholarly inquiry into the Vedas, which resulted in the Upanishads. Taken as a whole, Vedic and Upanishadic traditions reveal a search for unity beyond the immediate superficial diversity.
The path toward discovery of the unifying center of the Self is punctuated by reunion into a state of nonduality (advaita). In the state of maya, the individual relies on the mind’s capacity for reason to provide information about the environment. Therefore, one perceives reality as dualistic, essentially a subject-object distinction. To the perceiver, there is “I” and there are everyone and everything else—all distinct parts. Rational thought is lord supreme and the whole toward which all these parts, including the perceiver, point is never conceived. The individual trapped in maya operates from a false sense of isolation from everything. But there is hope.
“As a metal disk (mirror), tarnished by dust, shines bright again after it has been cleaned, so is the one incarnate person satisfied and free from grief, after he has seen the real nature of the self.”(3)
In a restored condition of awareness, one experiences Truth in bliss—saccidananda–Being, Consciousness, Bliss. This is ultimate knowledge and is experienced, not theorized. Further, the world is not now lost in some vague and mindless soup. Ultimately, the varieties of world experience are real. Now, however, enlightened consciousness experiences Truth. All reality has its being in the One and, so, the seeker reunites with everything.
“It happened after some days, perhaps as the fruit of an intense and sustained meditation, that a vision appeared to this ardently devoted Man. In this vision it was manifested that . . . the variety of religions . . . could reach a certain peaceful concord. And it is through this concord that a lasting peace in religion may be attained and established by convenient and truthful means.”(4)
It is incumbent on people of faith to discover their innate capacity to regard the world with tolerance and compassion. Interreligious dialogue is a process in which members from different religions approach one another in an open and honest attempt to discover the differences and similarities between them and move beyond toward comprehension of that which can be alien and threatening. For their part, theologians of all religious persuasions strive to analyze the problems and possibilities of interreligious dialogue.
For Interreligious dialogue to achieve its potential, I submit the following: First, religions in their creedal and doctrinal forms represent constructs that are primarily harvested from rational consciousness. Secondly, a theological analysis of doctrines produces its own rational construct. This means that holistic, intuitive processes and their results are largely subjugated by rational domination. Thirdly, a balance between rational and intuitive consciousness is key to successful interreligious dialogue. Distinctions among religions exist and so do unifying precepts and goals. One’s own religion is a religion-in-process as are all the other religions. All seek the same ultimate Truth/Reality/God . . .
1. Radhakrishnan, S., Indian Religions (New Delhi: Orient Paperbacks, 1979) 23-24.
2. Indian Religions, 20.
3. Indian Religions,61.
4. Panikkar, Raimundo. The Interreligious Dialogue (New York: Paulist Press, 1978)) xi.
Sandi Fults has a Master’s degree in Systematic Theology from St. Mary’s University in San Antonio, Texas. She also attended the graduate Middle Eastern Studies program at the University of Texas at Austin. Her area of specialization is Interreligious Dialogue and the world’s religions, with emphasis on the South Asian Hindu and Buddhist religious traditions. She is convinced that interreligious dialogue is a way to peace.