Getting to Understand Vedanta.

Advaita Vedanta philosophy points towards each and everyone of us being Brahma or the Ultimate Consciousness of Being or God in Divinity, at least this is my understanding. How we get to this God realization is the teaching of Vedanta in essence and this is achieved primarily through, as the Buddha would have it, Right Understanding, Right Consciousness, Right Impulses and Right Perception. To understand vedanta one has to have a good sense of Insight into what is Being who we are is all about. Who am I, or what is this 'I' that we call ourselves everytime we talk about ourselves. This close identification of I to the self has to be looked into with a clear and perfect understanding before we can identify ourselves with our inherent Divinity. We have to have a clear cognition of the inner workings of our mind and consciousness, how we relate to reality as it is, The question of what is reality immediately pops up and demands explanation and clarification, but I am not going to attempt it here as it is in itself a whole chapter that most of humanity is still grappling with. I will settle for the answer that reality is relative to each and everyone of us and in a simplistic way I for now accept that my reality and someone else's can never come to meet on common ground; only perhaps at the deepest level and it will take a whole of diving to get there.

The Atman or to put it its most simplest translation, the soul, is the key to   the Advaita Vedanta; the Atman is that which Is the Supreme Being, the God Head hidden in the form of man or consciousness. Perhaps through the manifestation of an enlightened soul we can find this Divinity in essence and thus it is most rarely that we get to experience God in a lifetime as the enlightened soul is as rare as the manifestation of a Buddha or a Christ in history. The ancient Vedic and various other teachings has allowed us to catch a glimpse of what it is to become an embodiment of an enlightened soul. These souls have evolved to the point of becoming Gods in the eyes of the masses who worshipped them. The evolution of the soul or spirit through time is a primary believe in most Eastern Religions and spiritual transmigration or incarnations plays a pivotal role in understanding the teachings of Vedanta philosophy in order to make it work; a man does not wake up one day and becomes a Christ or a Buddha, they evolve on the spiritual level.

It is said that there are as many Gods as there are sentient beings, only few realize their true nature as such as most exist in ignorance of even who they are as human beings. Most who made it to a high level of understanding more often than not succumbs to becoming trapped in their self aggrandizement, egotistical self serving tendencies causing them to fail in their final moments to attain to the highest level of divinity. Through lack of faith and determination, through self doubt and lack of commitment, most  of us slides back into this cycle of existence in an effort to make right what went wrong in former lives. It takes eons of lifetime to finally attain Buddhahood or become a Deity,  so it is said and the journey began from beginningless time and the path it takes is littered with pitfalls from which one rises and falls in order to get from one level to the next; it is a journey of purification of the soul. Most of humanity is oblivious to such notions as it is beyond their grasp in understanding. Hence to most of us,  life is more or less a matter of survival, making the best of what is and than die.