Consciousness Speaks - by Sri Ramesh Balsekar

[Vidyasankar]

Leaving aside the question whether Sri Balsekar is a Jnani or not, here are
some comments -

>1. Sri Ramesh greatly emphasizes ?Impersonal Consciousness?, meaning
>whatever is happening is happening in and due to the One-and-Only
>Consciousness and there is no sense of separate, or individual doer  in it.

Yes, there is no separate, individual doer, a point that is brought out very
clearly in all of Shankara's bhashyas. However, what is meant by "in and due
to" Consciousness? The question then is, does this one and only
Consciousness have parts?

>To me this meant, complete non-acknowledgement of EGO and role of EGO;. Sri
>Ramesh also advocates that there is ?ABSOLUTELY NOTHING we have to do or we
>can do? to reach the state of Realisation. God will take care of it.
>Whatever is happening or whatever will happen is within the scheme of
>TOTALITY. To me this means ?Absolute surrender or Bhakti or Devotion?. Can
>Sri Ramesh?s teaching  be called Advaita Vedanta and J~nana marga ???

Why does TOTALITY need a scheme and where does God fit into it? And if one
is already at the stage of having abandoned the EGO, who surrenders?

The true Jnani, who has already abandoned all the EGO is already beyond
surrender. He is beyond all talk of schemes and happenings. THAT is Advaita
Vedanta, not talk of schemes and doings after totally giving up the ego.

>2. Sri Ramesh presents that there is no individual in the scheme of
>TOTALITY. So, there is no ?INDIVIDUAL KARMA? and hence NO individual
>reborn. It is only that another organism is created in Totality, as effects
>of previous Karmas. What is very peculiar about his teaching is that he
>says there is no ?Individual Bundle of Karma?, meaning all the Karmas of
>all the Beings are part of the Totality and when new Organisms are born,
>there is no particular BUNDLE to be reborn, meaning these Karmas get mixed
>up and re-distributed and the new Organism born has no traceable one to one
>identity with past lives. Is this not denial of rebirth which is the basis
>of Vedanta ??

No, this is not denial of rebirth, but is quite close to a Buddhist
perspective on rebirth. If one looks for any older source for this kind of
theory about karma, one will find something like it only in Buddhist texts.
The TOTALITY, as Advaita Vedanta describes it, is beyond ALL karma, not just
the notion of individual karma. The Buddhists, on the other hand, talk of
the skandha (bundle) of karmas that leads to rebirth. Who, or what, mixes up
and redistributes karmas? Why should it happen like that in TOTALITY? If the
answer is, "that is just the way it is," my question is, "how does one know
that that is the way it is?"

Vidyasankar