[Advaita-l] Is morality necessary for liberation?

Sujal Upadhyay sujal.u at gmail.com
Tue Jan 28 09:47:23 CST 2014


Namaste,

While living in vyavahArika satya i.e. day-2-day affairs, we have to abide
to general and smriti laws. While meditating, we try to transcend duality
by practising abheda bhakti. If, by power of meditation, you are able to
separate yourself as witness and still able in interact, then such a person
will not commit any crime.

Advaita does not give license to go crazy :)

We try to find doSa darshana (fault finding) in samsAra and try to see the
temporary nature of this world and it's objects. By doing this, we practice
vairAgya with the help of viveka. We do not reject anything, we neglect it
i.e. stay neutral. No one is perfect, so there are lapse here-n-there.
Until you do not reach the 'other shore', it's 'work in progress'. So
seeing unexpected behoviour does not mean that someone is not making an
effort the advaita way. It may be a lapse on his part, but soon, his viveka
buddhi will make him realize and he will again 'be back on track'. Advaita
does not say, - do not make any effort to remove illusion or mAyA.

Also in case of Jivan mukta, as VidyAraNa SvAm in PancadaSI says, for Jivan
mukta, he realizes that this world is mithyA. But this does not mean that
the world vanishes. It is present, but Jivan mukta knows that it is not
real. Or he may realize that 'everything else is Brahman'.

Hari OM

OM

Sujal Upadhyay

"To disconnect from the self and to become Aware of anything else is
nothing but unhappiness" - Bhagawan Ramana Maharshi

He who has faith has all
He who lacks faith, lacks all
It is the faith int he name of lord that works wonders
FAITH IS LIFE, DOUBT IS DEATH - Sri Ramakrishna


On Tue, Jan 28, 2014 at 9:03 PM, Vidyasankar Sundaresan <
svidyasankar at hotmail.com> wrote:

>
> > In most religions, especially creator-centered religions, morality is
> most important. Even if faith in god is stressed, it still requires the
> believer to be moral, or else god won't be pleased. This is the logic,
> basically. Suffice it to say that for theistic religions, morality is
> perhaps as important as faith.
> >
>  But this is not necessarily a universal morality, only that which the
> opinion leaders in
> that theistic religion think of as morality. This is a problem with all
> the theistic religions.
> > But advaita is unique in that God is all there is - everything else is a
> mere appearance. So morality cannot get you out of this samsara any more
> than morality can get you out of a dream. Only knowledge between real and
> unreal can. So morality, as far as I can see, has utilitarian value - the
> same value that 'dream water' has for a dreamer. But does it have any
> salvific value at all?
> > In theory, you are correct. Non-duality puts aside the duality of moral
> and immoral as well. In practice, there is a clear acknowledgement of
> things other than jnAna,
>

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