Spiritual Evolution, Part 2 — Swami Manishananda

Recorded at the Vedanta Society of Western Washington on April 23, 2017.In this second lecture on spiritual evolution, Swami Manishananda continues the Vedantic understanding of inner growth as the gradual evolution and purification of the mind through experience. He first places individual spiritual development within a larger cosmic framework, explaining that Vedanta views the universe as passing through beginningless cycles of manifestation, preservation, and dissolution. Drawing on Sri Ramakrishna's teachings about Brahman and Shakti, he describes the universe as returning to a potential or “seed” state before being manifested again. The individual likewise passes through repeated birth, life, death, and rebirth, but unlike the cosmic cycle, individual existence can ultimately come to an end through mukti, or liberation. Experiences of pleasure and pain, success and failure, and the many other opposites of life thus become part of the process through which the mind develops and gradually moves toward God-realization.The second half of the lecture examines spiritual evolution through the three gunas—tamas, rajas, and sattva—and through the transformation of the ego. Swami Manishananda explains that spiritual development proceeds broadly from the inertia of tamas, through the activity and desire of rajas, toward the balance, purity, compassion, and tranquility of sattva, before ultimately transcending all three. He then distinguishes Sri Ramakrishna's concepts of the “unripe ego” and the “ripe ego”: rather than trying prematurely to eliminate the sense of individuality, the seeker transforms a worldly, possessive ego into one centered on God, devotion, self-inquiry, and non-attachment. Drawing on examples from Sri Ramakrishna, Holy Mother Sri Sarada Devi, Sri Krishna, and St. Teresa of Avila, he emphasizes learning when to hold on and when to let go, gradually exchanging attachment to worldly desires and personal opinions for attachment to the Divine. The lecture ultimately presents spiritual evolution as a long transformation from tamas to rajas to sattva, and from the unripe ego to the ripe ego, culminating in liberation and transcendental consciousness beyond the ego itself.