Veda Vyasa: The Cosmic Storyteller

Veda Vyasa: The Cosmic Storyteller

[00:45] Vyasa – A Teller of Sequence

Welcome to my podcast, the Vedic Worldview. I’m Thom Knoles. I’d like to shed some light on the Vedic master, a great Maharishi who lived some 5,000 years ago, if we go by the tales that are told in India and the records that are kept in the academies of learning, the maths of India; Vyasa.

Vyasa is one of the sounds that is my namesake Vyasa. My name in India is Shri 1008 Mahamandaleshwar Maharishi Vyasanand Giri Maharaj. That’s a big mouthful. You can just think of me as Thom or Guruji.

And Vyasanand, the bliss of Vyasa. The word Vyasa first. Vyasa is a word that stands for the display of the sequential elaboration of things. So cascades, there’s one indivisible whole unmanifest Unified Field, and then it begins to move in the direction of manifestation. So then a Vyasa is supposed to be someone who can describe that sequential elaboration.

How is it that the Oneness has embedded in it a variety of layers of preparedness for coming into manifestation, out of the unmanifest, into the manifest?

And so then there’s the Is-ness, Brahmani. There’s the Is-ness. The Am-ness, which is Amritam, and then there’s the I-ness, Ahaṃkar, and then there is the My-ness, which is Parameshwar, that is all inside of the unmanifest, and then it breaks its symmetry, and then begins manifesting. Being, becoming. And so then the layers of what comes next, what appears out of The Absolute first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and then all of the relationships between the forms and the phenomena. Forms, phenomena and relationships between them, that’s everything there is.

A Vyasa is supposed to describe this, and the word Vyasa then means, sometimes it’s translated as a divider, but actually more a teller of sequence, a teller of sequence. And there is a Vyasa for every epoch, for every era.

[03:59] The Many Names of Vyasa

The Vyasa of 5,000 years ago lived in India. He was the son of a great woman rishi, who was considered to be half celestial being. Her name was Satyavati, and his father was Parashara.

Parashara was one of the great masters of our tradition. When one learns Vedic Meditation one experiences the teacher performing for a few minutes, a ceremony of gratitude, naming sequentially all the masters from the very beginnings, even back into the unmanifest through time historically, who passed it along to whom.

And the first many of these were families, mothers and fathers, and their children. It was only in much later years that the tradition evolved into reclusive orders of monks, who, then there was a master amongst the monks and they passed the knowledge to their own, not-genetically-related student, who then became the master and passed it along like that. But the first many iterations of our tradition of Vedic masters were families.

Bala Satyavati and her son with Parashara. Parashara and Satyavati came together and produced a young lad who had very dark skin. His skin was so dark that it had a kind of bluish tinge to it. And so they gave him that name. The name, which we’ve heard in other stories also applies here. Different person, same name; Krishna. Krishna.

The word Krishna, in Sanskrit, it means indigo. Sometimes it’s just translated as black. It’s not black. It’s bluish black. Indigo, Krishna, super blue, Krishna, and because of the look of him.

And then where he was born. He was born on an island in the Yamuna River. What does an island do? The river moves forward and the island divides it into two streams that then meet again. This is very significant, expressive of the nature of things.

Anyway, oneness dividing, returning to oneness. That’s what an island does. An island in Sanskrit is a dwipa. And if you want to say someone who was born on an island, you say, Dwaipaiyana. Dwaipayana. Krishna Dwaipayana, who then later became known as Vyasa.

He also has a couple of other names attributed to him. When he decided to go up into the Himalayas and went to high elevation, four and a half thousand meters up, above sea level, there was one particular tree, called a badari tree. A badari tree is one of the sacred trees of India, and he sat under that badari tree, very similar to the bodhi tree story of Lord Buddha, but a different species of tree. The badari tree.

And so then he became known as Badarayana, the one who sits under the badari tree. And today that, remains of that ancient tree are said still to be there. You know, trees can live thousands of years. Their root system and then their twisted branches and all that lying low across the ground at high elevation.

Like in North America we have the bristle cone pine, some particular examples of which are more than 3,500 years in age, so it’s not that far-fetched that the tree that’s still there in this place is the badari tree under which Badarayana sat. And so then the location or village that grew up around there took on the name Badarinath, Badarinath.

Badarinath is one of the headquarters of my tradition. My tradition is referred to as Shankaracharya. We’ll get later to what that means. Shankaracharya tradition. One of the headquarters of it is a particular academy of learning that is in the Badarinath arena, called Jyotir Math, the Academy of Light, Jyotir.

And so Badarinath, Jyotir Math, Badarayana, badari trees, sometimes we see Badarayana being the name given to Vyasa. And one more name just to really make it all complete; Veda Vyasa.

[09:59] Sanskrit – Correlating Name and Form

So Krishna Dwaipayana Vyasa became known for not cognizing the Vedas. His name is not attributed as a rishi or an original seer of those Vedic impulses. Those were other people like his father Parashara, or his grandfather Shakti, or his father Vashishta, and many, many others, women and men who were rishis.

Rishi is the neuter form. A specific male rishi is a rishi, and a specific female rishi is a rishika, and rishis cognize the vibration of Being becoming. There’s a… when the symmetry breaks and the intentionality of evolution is imbued into the process of manifestation, there’s an intentionality for evolution. We’ll talk about that more in a minute.

It makes a sound. Intention causes a sound, and if you hear that sound in your consciousness, in a sufficiently high consciousness state, it also has form: Nama rupa sahitam bhavati eva.

In Sanskrit this means; Nama means where we get our English word name. The sound of a thing, the name. Nama rupa, rupa means form. Nama rupa sahitam. Sahitam, infinitely correlated, together, sahitam. Bhavati, the verb for being, to be, bhavati. Eva, indeed name and form are infinitely correlated indeed.

And so then rishya ya mantra drishtarah. A rishi is she or he who is able to see the sounds. And this is why we refer to these people as rishi or seers. They can detect the sound of Being becoming, and they can detect the blueprint of what’s going on in the evolutionary process. And it’s not a once upon a time thing.

What is it that is continuously issuing forth out of the unmanifest? Someone who can detect that is a rishi. Someone who’s great at detecting that is a maharishi. So Maharishi Vyasa.

Vyasa became known as Veda Vyasa because he would hear the singing. Rishis will take the sounds and turn them into onomatopoeia. You know what onomatopoeia is? You remember from high school?

Boom, splash, crack, slap, whatever. There’s 6,000 words approximately in English that are onomatopoetic, meaning they embody in the sound and are expressive in their sound of the action or the thing that they’re describing. Boom, one of my favorites.

It wouldn’t matter what language you spoke, if you saw a flash of lightning and then heard a thunder clap and you said to 30 people around you, each of whom had a separate language to the others, and nobody understood any of their colleague’s language, they could all look at each other and go, “Boom,” and everybody would agree, “Boom.” It just happens to be an English word too. Maybe a word like that in their language.

And so when we have a Rishi who sees the sounds, who can see the sounds bubbling up out of the unmanifest, can detect that and then can imitate that in language, that language then becomes classic Vedic Sanskrit. Sanskrit.

[14:25] Recognizing Patterns in the Veda

So Sanskrit is an imitation of the language of Nature, and Vyasa was a master of hearing those sounds expressed by all the rishis. And he saw that there was a contiguous mass of Vedic knowledge that was emerging, unauthored about Veda.

We say that it is apaurasheya. Apaurasheya is spelled A-P-A-U-R-A-S-H-E-Y-A. Apaurasheya. It means not authored by anybody. There’s no author. There’s somebody who hears it and expresses it, but they’re not the author of it. Veda is unauthored. It is the sound of the intention of Nature itself.

And so then having heard these expressions coming from the mouths and the singing, because Veda is put into song, into different meters. For example, the first sound of Rig Veda, the encyclopedic Veda, is Agnimile purohitam yajnasya devam rtvijam hotaram.

When it is sung in the Rig Veda meter, it sounds like, Agnimile purohitam yajnasya devam rtvijam hotaram ratnadhatamam. When it sung in the Sama Veda meter, then it’s elongated. Agniiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii. That’s just the first word, and it goes on like that.

And so, he would hear these sounds being sung by the various families whose rishi members were cognizing the Veda, and he realized because he had that consciousness where when you are in that inner quiet state and you hear those sounds, then what happens is because name and form are infinitely correlated, the forms all appear and you can see the forms that are being described in the sound, in the onomatopoetic sounds. And this contiguous mass of knowledge he began to recognize had patterns in it.

There was encyclopedic knowledge. Rig. Rig means encyclopedic, meaning broad spectrum. Broad-spectrum knowledge on a vastness of what things exist? What are the relationships between the things? Forms, phenomena, relationships, Rig.

And then he noticed that there were certain sounds that caused unification, drew the mind back into the Unity Field. There were certain sounds that were descriptive of how, for example, a human body functions. Ayurveda. Ayurveda actually is the word Ayush and then Veda. Ayush means relevant longevity. Relevance is an important thing here.

How relevant is it for some old codger to keep on being alive? You know, people say, “I want to be 130, I want to be 150.” Well, that’s fine. Are you going to be annoying 130, 150? Are you going to be actually a contributor to the group effort of evolution? Otherwise, you know, we’d rather see you only live to be 30.

So relevant, longevity, Ayush. Ayush, and then Veda. There’s a rule in Sanskrit. You can’t make the Sh sound and follow it with a V sound. And so that Sh has to turn into Ru, Ayur-Veda. Ayurveda is actually Ayushveda, but we can’t say Ayushveda. It would be like saying, “a apple” or “an clock” or something. It violates a flow rule in Sanskrit, Ayurveda.

And so these cognitions that he was hearing, and he saw that there were groups of bodies of relevant knowledge that was issuing forth from these different sounds and he began to divide them into groups.

[19:20] The Upavedas

And so Veda, which is one, was categorized and made into sections of knowledge. Rig Veda, encyclopedic. Sama Veda, Unity Consciousness developing. Yajur Veda all about performances that could bring about desirable cascades in the laws of Nature, yagyas. Atharva Veda, the miscellany Veda, everything else that isn’t touched by the first three.

And then each one of these Vedas, Rig Veda has a subordinate Veda. Upaveda. The Upaveda, subordinate Veda of Rig Veda is Ayush, Ayurveda. And the subordinate Veda of Sama Veda, the sound-oriented Unity Consciousness Veda is Gandharva Veda. Gandharva Veda means musicality, dancing and singing Veda.

And then next comes Yajur Veda. Yajur Veda has a subordinate Veda known as Dhanush Vidya. Dhanur Veda means the knowledge of, you take a flat thing like this, you break its symmetry and bend it, and then to keep it bent, you tie a string from this side to this side. A bow.

You turn it this way, it’s the instrument of archery. And so, though it references a bow, it’s expressive of what happens when consciousness is experienced in its flat, transcendent state, and then you curve it into individual awareness embodying it. That’s the bow. And then when you can maintain this perpetually, the string is tied between the two ends, you have a perpetually-curved, infinite flat plane that’s perpetually curved.

This is a cosmic bow, and this is a description of a state of consciousness. Dhanurveda. Dhanurveda has in it supreme political science, and it also contains what to do in case the diplomacy doesn’t work. How to bring the lack of diplomacy to an end quickly with a minimum of fuss.

And then finally, Atharvaveda has a subordinate Veda, Sthapathya Veda. S-T-H-A, Stha, Patya, P-A-T-Y-A. Sthapatya Veda, architecture, how to shape space. See, this room that I’m in right now? The space was here for 4 billion years, but once upon a time, there were bushes here. Another time there was just wind here. Another time, there may have been boulders here. Another time there may have been some dinosaurs running past or whatever.

So what’s here now? Well, the same space, but we’ve built walls and a ceiling and all of this around here, and it has shaped the space. What happens? What effect does it have when you shape space? It creates a change in the consciousness field.

So different shapes of space that cause different kinds of consciousness experiences, this is architecture at its highest level. So architecture, Sthapatya Veda, and so on and so on. Each one of the upavedas has a vedanga, the limbs of the Veda. And it also has a subordinate vedanga, an upanga.

And so like that we can see Veda one, branched into four with four upavedas, with the vedangas and the upangas and all that. All of this was the work of Vyasa. Veda Vyasa. Veda Vyasa, also known as Badarayana, also known as Krishna Dwaipayana Vyasa.

[23:27] Mahabharata – The Epic of Great India

So Vyasa this character. What an amazing character. And then he played a pivotal role in the history of the royal family of India , 5,000 years ago. And he wrote a book called Maha, which means great, Bharata. Bharata is the proper name for the subcontinent, which today we call India. 

India is a colonial name given by the British to Bharatvarsha, the land of Bharat, and there’s a move in India right now to change the name of the country back from its colonial name to its original Vedic Sanskrit name, Bharata. Sometimes that final A is elided, so it would be Bharat. 

And in fact, when there was a major meeting of governors and governance in India last year, on all the letterheads and everything that were welcoming the leaders of the different countries, it didn’t say India, it said Bharat. And that was a hint that india is about to change its name to Bharat, back to Bharat.

So Mahabharata, Great India. Mahabharata, and Mahabharata is an epic. If you took all the Sanskrit and translated it into English with, you know, what we call Roman characters, those are the characters we use for reading and writing English. The Roman that comes from the Latin. We don’t realize we’re writing in Roman characters, but that’s what we’re doing actually when we write English words.

If you translate all of the Sanskrit of the Mahabharata into English, it’s about from there to there in 12 volumes. A story. A story that begins and has sequential elaboration in it of all the goings on of the Royal Families of India, by way of showing you elevational theater.

[25:54] The Play and Display of Elevational Theater

Vyasa was a master of the play and display of elevational theater. What does elevational theater mean?

There’s a status quo, and the status quo is going along. If you want to tell the story this way, you describe the status quo, and then some disruptive event occurs, and the status quo takes a dip. So there’s a loss of the status quo, and then down in the dumps of this loss comes the climb out of the status quo, the elevation to which I refer in elevational theater, yielding a new status quo, a new plateau, which will also have a decline, which will also have a rise, which will also have a decline and so on.

And so status quo, fall, rise, new status quo higher than the previous one, fall, rise, new status quo higher than the previous one, fall, rise, fall, rise. Like that.

Vyasa was a master at giving you a sufficient story size that you could take content and you could contextualize it. And this is what rishi is supposed to do. They hear your content and you know, you’re all, “I just can’t believe it. I tried to make the tea, and the tea leaves were the wrong ones, and now my whole day is ruined, so I didn’t get my tea,” and so on and so forth.

And a rishi is someone who can hear your content and create greater context for it. We also refer to this as perspective, but a rishi’s capacity for contextualizing content is unbounded. Cosmic perspective could be gained if that’s what’s necessary.

So, if we have someone who’s willing to listen to how we can relativize the unhappiness over the tea and put it in the context of a day or the context of a week or the context of a year, this is the relativising of content, giving it relativity.

And so when we have the capacity for cosmic perspective, we have the capacity for infinite contextualization of any content. And what happens when you do that is you see patterns, status quo, disruption, rise, status quo, disruption, rise.

But if you do a Fourier analysis, remember that from mathematics in school? A Fourier analysis means you take a jagged line and you map it and plot it, and you turn it into a curve. The curve of elevational theater always is upward. It’s an upward curve, but it doesn’t go in a curve. Status quo, fall, rise, status quo, fall, rise.

[29:08] Breaking the Fourth Wall

So Vyasa not only wrote these, what turns out to be 12 volumes of the history of an epoch of India, in which he personally played a role. Not only was he the author of the story, he was in the story himself because his mother, Satyavati, was a princess who later then became a queen, and she had sons, and Vyasa was the half brother of those sons and the sons died, and their wives couldn’t bear children and desperately wanted to.

And so arrangements were made for the half brother of the two dead sons to service the wives of his deceased brothers, all with mutual consent, and they produced two families. And those two families had rivalry between themselves about who was going to rule the Kingdom of India. And many, many children were born, and then eventually a war occurs, and then what was the beginnings of the war? What was the cause of it?

We introduce into the story the cosmic character known as Lord Krishna, a separate Krishna, different Krishna, Lord Krishna, and then the interplay that Vyasa himself had in it, because he was the grandfather and great-grandfather of many of the characters in the story. And in one particular place in the story, he’s kind of mischievous, where some bad grandsons of his were about to do a really dirty trick and kind of scam their way into greatness.

Always a lousy strategy to scam your way into greatness. But they were about to do this thing, and Vyasa appears in the story, he’s the author, we have to remember, he appears in the story and goes, “Hold on, hold on. This is my story.” 

You know, he breaks the fourth wall and he’s talking to the readers and like, “Excuse me, reader, just pause for a minute. These guys are about to do this thing. I don’t like the way this story is going and I’m not going to let them do the thing.” And he has a stern talk, a serious talk with his grandsons and says, “No, no, not in my story. You can’t do that thing. So, get back into your place and go and do something else and cook up another idea.”

“Okay, we’ll unpause the fourth wall breakage and start the story again.” Vyasa does this two or three times in the Mahabharata. Appears, talk to the reader, talks to the characters in the story, and changes the story format, and this is also expressive of something.

[32:00] Fabulous Stories Delivering Lessons to Live By

This isn’t just like an interesting fairytale story. This is mythos, M-Y-T-H-O-S.

Mythos has relationship to the English word matrix, which also has a relationship to matris, the narrow neck of an hourglass, which is the birth canal, matris, mother. That which takes this amorphous, brings it into compactification, and then allows it to go and widen out again.

Mythos. That’s what mythos is. You take all the experiences of life, you condense them into a fabulous story. Fabulous. A fable. What’s a fable? Something that has a moral to it. A fabe-ulous, fabulous story that then has applicability to anyone’s life. So you read Mahabharata and you find this remarkable thing.

You can relate to all the characters including the so-called villains, because those characters resonate with various elements of your own inner makeup. How many of you have ever had a thought, even just for a sec, be honest, “I think I’ll scam my way to greatness here.” Everybody’s had that thought, so when we hear somebody doing that and beginning to carry that out, we can even relate to the so-called baddies in the story.

And the heroes of the story provide us with heroics to which we can aspire and with which we can relate and resonate, and the baddies in the story remind us of our own weakest moments and show us how we can come out of that.

And elevational theater. It may look like there’s a fall, but that means that’s the thing that comes before a rise. And there’s a rise but that’s the thing that comes before a new plateau, a new status quo. There’s going to be another fall, another disruption. This is how evolution works.

So Vyasa shows us what, in today’s terms, in assembly theory of physics or in natural selection theory in biology, you cannot have stayed forward progress without disruption. Disruption causes adaptive forms and adaptive functions to emerge and those adaptive forms and adaptive functions take the evolutionary story angular to where it had been going, and cause new styles of progressive change.

Greater and greater sophistication, greater and greater complexity integrated is sophistication. And so sophistication emerges from disruption. The forward evolutionary thrust is inexorable, but occasionally it requires disruption to cause it to become more adaptive, more relevant. Vyasa shows us all this.

[35:25] A Comprehensive Body of Work

And he doesn’t stop with the Mahabharata, this great cracking tale, which you can pick up. If you want to read it, you can get the small version, which is a mere 1600 pages. That’s the abridged version of it by my contemporary, Ramesh Menon. R-A-M-E-S-H, Ramesh, first name. Menon, M-E-N-O-N, Menon. 

He is the greatest translator of Sanskrit alive in the world today. Translating into English, he’s a master of English. He’s a master of Sanskrit, and he’s translated the Mahabharata, both the abridged version, a mere 1600 pages and the 12 volume version, which will take you a year to read if you read lots of pages every day.

And so, Vyasa also wrote another 17 what are called puranas. Mahabharata is a purana and there are another 17 of them.

A purana is a tale of the specifics of how evolution has these patterns. Creation operator, something new is innovated. Something’s invented. Something’s created.

Maintenance operator. That is maintained, which continues to bring evolution forward. If it continues to be doing its job, it hasn’t reached its used by date yet, whatever that form or function or relationship is.

And then destruction. Destruction means the disintegrating of that which no longer is relevant though once upon a time was relevant. Something that was once upon a time relevant loses its relevance, it can no longer contribute to forward movement, to progressive change, and so it has to disintegrate.

And so creation, maintenance, destruction, there’s a pattern here. A cycle out of destruction comes new creation, the rise of the phoenix out of the ashes. And so on, and so on and so on. All those motifs that we’re familiar with.

And in his 18 puranas, Mahabharata being only one of them, he shows you how the different embodiments of consciousness, Vishnu, Shiva, Mother Divine, Ganesh, and so on, all of these embodiments of creative intelligence, their play and display in elevational theater. 18 Puranas came out of Veda Vyasa, but he didn’t stop there.

By the way, for those of you who are students of, or fans of the famous Bhagavad Gita, the Song of God, Bhagavad Gita, one of the ancient texts. It happens to be the very tiny middle chapters, just about 15 minutes of verses. You can read it all in 15 minutes if you just read the Sanskrit and not any commentary of the Mahabharata. This massive multi-volume 12 volume thing, the very central chapters of the middle of the story is the Bhagavad Gita. Bhagavad Gita.

So, of course, Bhagavad Gita also written by Vyasa. 18 puranas, also written by Vyasa. But he didn’t stop there. He wanted to show you what was the end. The anta, in Sanskrit. End is anta. It’s where we get our English word, end. The anta, the final conclusion. The end conclusion. Vedic knowledge, the anta has a little a on the end, but it’s elided somewhat. Anta. And then Veda-anta. Vedanta.

[39:43] Vedanta – The Final Conclusion

Vedanta is the final conclusion of the Veda. If we could summarize the whole thing into a few ideas, what would those ideas be? That’s Vedanta.

Forget about all the stories and the elevational theater and all that. What’s it ultimately saying? Let’s really jump to the end of the story and become conclusive and constrain ourselves to a conclusion. And Vedanta, if we had to put it in one sentence, is, “There’s only one indivisible whole conscious thing and you are it.”

Because if there’s only one, there’s no possibility for anything other than you being it, otherwise, it’s not one, it’s two. There is somebody, I hear this all the time, “I was going down to Erewhon to pick up some overpriced vegetables and things , but , though I thought I was going there, The Universe had other ideas.”

Well, this is very cute. The Universe, you know, The Universe. The Universe is our way of saying, “the non me.” That, whatever it is, intelligence, amorphous mass. We may not like using the word God because people are trying to shy away from religious language these days. “No, I’m not religious, I’m spiritual. You know, I believe in karma. You know, I always put some coins in the karma cup at the coffee shop. I believe in good karma and bad karma and I’m spiritual.”

You know, this kind of language. And a lot of this has to do with there being “The Universe.” The, that article, “The.” The thing that makes everything separate,

“The Universe and me. There’s me and then there’s the non-me thing, The Universe and the non-me thing is comprehensive and intelligent and vast and really knows what it’s up to. And then there is the non-universe, which is me. I am the non-universe and I have ideas, but The Universe has other ideas, and so I’m learning how to listen to The Universe.”

Vyasa says, “Baloney. None of that is true nonsense. You are That. Tat Tvam Asi. Tat Tvam Asi. You are the one indivisible whole consciousness field. To what extent have you realized it? And if you have realized it, to what extent have you actualized it, made it actual?”

And so he wrote another book, the Vedanta Sutras. A sutra as an aphorism. A concise statement of truth. Also sometimes known as the Sutras of Brahman. Brahman means Totality. And when we reverse those, we make Brahman the adjective, it becomes Brahma Sutras. Brahma Sutras, also known as Vedanta Sutras, also known as Vyasa Vedanta Sutras.

[43:10] An Invitation to Explore Vyasa’s Story with Thom

Next month, in July, I’m holding a course on this. Vyasa Vedanta. We’re going to dive into the final conclusion of Veda. Learn how, not just to realize it, but to actualize it.

And if you’re interested in taking my course, look online, thomknoles.com and sign up. There’s a lot of prerequisites before you can take the course. The gate’s fairly narrow because I don’t want to have to answer beginner questions, basically. So , we’re going to start with very advanced material that presumes that you know a lot and for that there’s prerequisite work that has to be completed. You can find out all about that online.

So Veda Vyasa. Krishna Dwaipayana Vyasa. Krishna Dwaipayana Vyasa. Veda Vyasa. Badarayana. Same. All the same person. Badarayana.

And modern scholars who are a little bit too smarty pants for my book, many of whom have never even been to India, T hey’ll say, “Oh, Badarayana, well that was a character who lived in 800 AD and there’s a lot of things attributed to him, but then there’s Vyasa and Vyasa is actually a title.”

That’s correct by the way. There’s a Vyasa of every spiritual age, and they tried to turn these into different people and all of that. This is just due to limited research. There are many people who were named Badarayana because he was a great person. Just like there are many people named George. There are many people named Sam. There are many people named Persephone and so on and so forth. You know, Philomena. You can find dozens of them. 

And so if there was some particularly illustrious Badarayana who happened to be around 800 AD, everybody thinks that was the guy that everybody was referring to as Badarayana.

But I also go by the name, Vyasa. Vyasanand Giri is my spiritual name. Maharishi Vyasanand Giri. And so there’s no doubt going to be some smarty pants scholar in the future, who will look back and say, “And he lived between 1948 and 2048. That was Vyasa.”

[45:49] The Connotative – The Proper View of Ancient Texts

So, this whole attempt to either, Western scholars trying to take charge of Indian knowledge, it’s always been odious to me. You really want to find out about Indian knowledge, go and live there. Go and go to the academies of learning and see where it’s carved into the walls. The days and the dates and who was born when and who was the master of whom and all of that. Rather than reading Max Müller.

Max Müller, by the way, was a Nazi Sanskritist who did his best to translate, Sanskrit into German and had his own commentaries about things. And he kind of broke the ice in a way, but he had angular knowledge about it that, or angular interpretation about it that I, most of which I don’t agree with.

So, for example, Müller will translate the word ga as come, when ga also means go. The same word in Sanskrit, G-A, ga, contextualized you can either look at it and see, does it mean go or does it mean come? And frequently when it says come, like come together, he interprets it as go together. And that’s a nice little kind of play on things, you know, come together, go together. But, he gets things wrong.

So proper learning of the language and proper understanding of it, and the contextualizing of it, and getting an idea of what’s it is expressive of, and then very important, stepping out of the field of literalism.

Literalism, denotative knowledge. You know, the trying to look at this and say, “Is it historically accurate? According to what we know in Western history, is it historically accurate?” That’s not important. What’s important is, what’s the story trying to tell you? Can you get into the subtext of it? The connotative value. The connotative value. Not literalism. Not literalism. The implicit, not the explicit.

The implicit is what mythos is all about. Legendary, not factual historicity. My teacher, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, said on numerous occasions that literalism is the parent of fundamentalism, which gives rise to the destruction of knowledge, meaning you’re literal about everything.

So then, the proper view of ancient texts is to take them in the connotative, to take them in the implicit, to take them in the figurative. Literalism is not the name of the game.

So, this gives us a little snapshot of one of my heroes, Maharishi Vyasanand. Vyasa Vyasa, my namesake, Vyasa. Maharishi Vyasa. Vyasa, Veda Vyasa, Krishna Dwaipayana Vyasa, also known as Badarayana, a great hero, and the author of roughly two thirds of all Vedic knowledge that we can find in writing leads back to this one particular author.

An absolutely fabulous study. He himself is a study that is very worthwhile. If you really want to know the author, read the books. If you read the books, and Ramesh Menon, my contemporary, has translated dozens of titles from the Sanskrit into English for your enjoyment. I highly recommend that you hop online and pick up some books by Ramesh Menon. He’s just the very best at getting the spirit of the story across, and with great accuracy in his translations and transliterations.

[50:35] Q – Does Vyasa’s Breaking of the Fourth Wall Have Any Implications for Free Will?

You mentioned that there were a few times where Veda Vyasa interfered and basically broke the fourth wall and interfered with the storyline. Does that have any implications or any symbolism in relation to free will? Was he interfering with the free will of the players of the story and is that symbolic of anything that happens in the cosmic storyline, so to speak?

[51:00] The Free Will to Determine Everything

It’s expressive of the relationship between free will and determinism, which is really worth looking into here for a moment. You know, this great pseudo-intellectual debate about free will versus determinism. Do we have free will or is everything determined? And if we think we have free will, is the thing that we think we’re free willing about, actually determined thoughts that we had planted in us and so on?

Is there free will? Is there determinism? These things are all predicated on a lack of understanding of Vedanta. Let me illustrate this.

There’s actually, according to Vedanta, there’s one consciousness. There are not two consciousnesses. The consciousness that could determine, and might be determining everything that you think is your free will, and then, versus that, the consciousness that you are, that has free will and causes cascades of change on its own, perhaps working with certain laws of Nature that a re inexorable.

So this kind of individuality versus Cosmic is basically what the argument is here, and Veda just blows all that up, Vedanta, by saying there’s only one consciousness, it has free will to determine everything and, get this, this is the punchline; You are it. You are the consciousness that is determining everything with its free will. And if it wishes to change the story, à la Vyasa, if it wishes to change the story, it can, but the it is not it. The it is you. You are That.

You are That which has free will to determine everything and has free will to change what it has determined at any time. There’s only one consciousness. When there’s only one consciousness, we don’t have this enigma and dichotomy between free will and determinism. There’s only one consciousness.

What role have you decided you’re going to play in this play? Are you going to be a player in the play on the stage? In Sanskrit, we call a play a lila. Lila literally means lila like children playing. It also means a play. Like, you know, running around on the theatrical boards and playing Hamlet or something.

And you know how a story goes. Stories which are in display, there’s always an author of the story, there’s a director of the play. There are the actors in the play. There are the lighting specialists. A ll these different aspects going on in the production.

Now, when you are an actor in a play, you are supposed to go by the direction, unless you also happen to be an actor who’s also the writer and the director. What if you’re an actor in a play and you’re also the writer and the director? Do you have the right to say, “Hang on for a sec. I think we’ll change the story now.” Well, of course you do. You’re wearing all those hats. So what hat are you wearing at any given time?

[54:46] Changing the Storyline

Sometimes we submit to determinism. Why? It’s making a good story, that’s why. A good story is coming out of it. Sometimes we may push the pause button and say, “Hang on for a sec. I don’t really like the way this story’s going right now. I’ve got a better idea. I’m going to author the story differently. I am the one indivisible whole consciousness field. And I’m also an actor.

“I’m playing a role and I’m the writer and I’m the director. I can basically do whatever I want. So if I say, ‘Cut, cut, cut. I’ve changed my mind. The story’s not going to go this way. Now it’s going to go this way. Okay, action. I’m back in character again.’”

Vyasa is showing us this thing. He’s showing us that free will and determinism are in fact one consciousness. They’re not two consciousnesses. It’s just a question of what role are you playing in a given time? Acting. What role are you playing?

So if you don’t like the way your story is going, change it. I remember Maharishi Mahesh Yogi saying to me, I said, “What about the astrology? You know, the stars and all that? You’re going to meet a tall, dark stranger on Thursday in the afternoon at four. Is that determined?”

He said it, “It’s just telling you the way the story is written at the moment. If you don’t like it, change the stars.” I’ll never forget him saying, “Change the stars,” and in fact, Yajurveda, the Veda of yagyas, tells you how to do that.

If you don’t like what your astrology is saying, or your jyotish, you can make arrangements to change the way that the entire Unified Field storyline’s going. As long as you don’t do anything that is life damaging. You can’t say, “I want everyone on Earth obliterated, except all the ones who say yes to me.”

We do see people who behave that way, not to get political or anything. That particular thing goes against the grain of evolution. Although it could be a temporary reality around which everybody gets and so on. It could be a disruptive force that’s going to cause adaptive forms and functions to emerge.

So like that there’s only one thing. A nd so, Vyasa is showing this to us. He’s us , ” Hold on, I’m the director, I’m the writer, I’m the actor. I can do what I want.” And he’s giving us that… we want to be like that. We want to say, “Stop. Stop. Okay. Hold on. I want the story to go this way.”

[57:36] Q – Was Maharishi Mahesh Yogi the Vyasa of this Age?

It’s more a comment that I would like you to comment on, and what we were talking about being a Vyasa for every age or epoch, my feeling on it is that the Vyasa of our epoch was Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and we’ve filtered down from that. So if you could speak about that and his role and all our evolution.

That would be much appreciated.

[58:04] Demonstrating Vyasa-like Sequencing of Knowledge

It’s my surmise and that of many of the masters who are my fellow, we call them _mahants, M-A-H-A-N-T. _A mahant is someone who has been awarded by the people of Bharat, of India, as a knower of the Vedic knowledge.

When I became ordained as a Mahamandaleswhar, a mahant, in short, last January of 2025, I met the other 12 members of the Council of Mahamandaleshwars, women and men, and, each one of them said to me, “I knew your master, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. He was the greatest saint of our era, and he was the master who was the most like his own master.” 

His own master, Guru Deva, had roughly 240, give or take, disciples. They said, each one of them said things like, “He was the master who was the most like Guru Deva, his own master.”

And Maharishi Mahesh Yogi really was a Vyasa. He had the capacity to take a body of knowledge and to show you sequence. His greatest gift to the world was an articulate and eloquent description of the seven states of consciousness; sleeping consciousness, dreaming consciousness, waking consciousness, the transcendental state, the Cosmic Consciousness, the first stage of enlightenment, God consciousness, Unity Consciousness.

And then how each of these states of consciousness elaborated sequentially. That’s a Vyasa act right there, and nobody else that I ever came across in India had any idea about how to describe the evolution of human consciousness from one state to the next and what the telling signs and symptoms were of being in one state.

[01:00:34] Reality is Different in Different States of Consciousness

So, for example, there are ‘scholars,’ so called, I’m going to put this in like single inverted commas, not double inverted commas because ‘scholars,’ who, let’s just say supposed scholars who will read the writings of one of the great masters of our tradition, Adi Guru Shankara. Adi means first, Guru means a guru, Shankara, after whom the entire Shankaracharya tradition was named.

His name, Shankara, was given and backdated to everybody, all the way back to the beginning of the tradition, even though they predated him. Shankara. And so you read the writings of Shankara, and in one of these writings you can see him saying, “The Self is the one indivisible wholeness. The unmanifest is the only reality. You have to practice meditation and stop attending to all of this relativity as if it’s going to solve your unhappiness.

There’s only this one individual whole thing. Yes, you are it, but it’s back here. And everything that comes out of it is just an ever-dying transitioning field of not worth even paying attention to.” Cosmic Consciousness.

Then in later texts, Shankara writes, the relative world is a world of elaborate creative intelligence personified. Personified with worlds of beings, and the hierarchies in the worlds of beings. The Devic hierarchy, the deities, and at the head of this, Shiva Surya, Mother Divine, Ganesh, Vishnu, all comes from Shankara.

And then in later text he says, “Actually, there’s only one thing. There’s the one individual wholeness. There’s all of this relativity, but it’s also actually just the one individual wholeness that’s elaborating, and that anyone who can’t transcend devotion can’t transcend the idea of there being something “other” because devotion is based on a devotion to Supreme other, but there is no other. There’s only one.”

So ‘scholars’ would read this and they would say, “This guy can’t make his mind up. He can’t make his mind up. You know, at some stage of his life he is writing about this. Another stage of his life, he’s writing and saying, this is it. Another stage of his life, this is it.”

And so, we have a history of Shankara changing his mind. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi said, “He’s not changing his mind. He is showing you that reality is different in different states of consciousness.”

Reality is different in different states of consciousness. Someone who has blue glasses on, they see everything blue. You show them a white wall and you say, “What’s that?” They go, “Blue.” Somebody who has green glasses on, you show them the white wall that is green. For them it really is blue or green. It’s those colors. Red glasses, red. And so reality and different states of consciousness is still reality, but it’s the reality of that consciousness state.

[01:04:30] Sensory Perception Brings Oneness

A sequential elaboration, it’s not just like what’s true? Well, what state of consciousness do you want to know from? You know, you want to know what’s true? It’s not true to say that all there is is one thing, unless you’re experiencing that. We can say it. We can do it as a challenge, “There’s only one indivisible whole consciousness field. To what extent have you realized it? To what extent have you actualized it?” But if somebody’s not experiencing that through their senses, their mind might conceptually be saying there’s only one thing, but their senses are delivering different things.

And so the senses know, no matter how much I have conceptual idea of oneness, if my senses are delivering multiplicity, I’m going to be behaving; so sensory perception determines behavior. So then you know, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi says, “Through regular practice of meditation, morning and evening, you end up creating sensory perception that is predominantly bringing oneness.”

When sensory perception brings oneness, you don’t need to even have the conceptual framework anymore. Your senses are telling you there’s only one thing. So as long as your senses are telling… whatever your senses tell you, that’s what determines your behavior.

Conception, you know, somebody can have a concept. There was a boy once I was on a weekend retreat with him. He was about 18 and he was an armchair philosopher. He’d read a lot of books and everything, and he was like, “I’m not my body. I’m not my body. I don’t care about my body. If my body died, I don’t really care.” And he was carrying on a lot about that.

We were walking together shoulder to shoulder, up a very narrow driveway with hedges on each side. And as we were going up the driveway, suddenly a car appeared in the opposite direction coming toward us. And not only did he jump out of the way, he pushed me in front of the car so he could leap into the bushes.

And the car squeezed to a halt and everything was fine. But after we overcame all that, I said to him, “So all this kind of, I’m not my body and I don’t care about it and all that. I didn’t see that just now. What I saw just now is you definitely thought you were your body and I was my body. And your body was going to be the one that survived, even though it was at the cost of my body.”

So what this shows us is you can have a conceptualization, you can have a philosophy, you can have an understanding, you can have a theory, but if your senses are delivering something other than that, the senses always win.

So, in each one of these masters that we’ve been naming, Vyasa, Adi Shankara, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and so on, we see how do you actually cause reality, your reckoning of reality to change? You can’t just do it through conceptualization, your actual physical, sensory perception of what is the nature of the known, not just conceptually, perceptually that has to go through a change.

And so, Unity Consciousness is delivered through sensory perception, not merely through concept.

And they all share that ability to show you, “here’s the sequence by which this happens.” That careful sequencing of knowledge is shared by all of those great masters who are actually all basically the same guy wearing different hats, playing this role in this era, playing that role in that era, playing that role in that era.

Jai Guru Deva