Session 10 · March 11, 2026 · Vedanta Beginner Series
Before the formal session began, a question arrived that I want to address at length, because it reveals something important about how Eastern and Western philosophical traditions differ at their foundations.
The question: if karma is generated by our actions, and our actions are shaped by our predispositions (samskaras) accumulated from previous lives — then what about the very first life? The first soul sent to earth, before any karma existed? What action could have initiated the entire cycle?
It is a sharp question. And the answer requires us to understand something fundamental about how this tradition views creation.
There Is No First Individual
Oriental philosophy — Vedanta in particular — does not subscribe to the model of individual creation. There was no moment when pure consciousness decided to create a specific number of souls and send them out one by one. The concept of a 'first Adam and Eve,' or a first entanglement, fundamentally misreads the map.
The issue is not a historical event. The issue is a cognitive posture — the moment of identification with the individualized self, the moment pure consciousness 'forgets' its own nature and begins to operate as a limited, separate being. This is not something that happened once in history. It is something that, in a sense, is happening continuously — in each moment of unawareness.
One useful way to hold this: pure consciousness is like an infinite dreamer. The characters within the dream — you, me, everyone we interact with — are the dream's content. The question 'who was the first dream character?' misunderstands the nature of dreaming. Dreams do not have a clear origin in linear time; they simply arise as the expression of the dreamer's nature.
The question of why pure consciousness projects itself as the world and the individual is, honestly, a question that belongs to pure consciousness itself. Our role is not to explain the why of the dream, but to wake up within it.
What sets the cycle in motion is not a moral failing or a primordial sin. It is simply the nature of Maya — the veil that causes the whole to appear as the partial. And the way out is not backward through history, but inward through inquiry.
Ethics as the Sharpener of Discrimination
Living ethically — in thought, in speech, in action — is not primarily about following rules or exrning virtue points. Its function in this philosophy is specific and pragmatic: it sharpens Viveka, the faculty of discrimination.
Viveka is the capacity to distinguish between what is real and what is merely apparent, between what is permanent and what is transient, between what leads toward greater freedom and what leads toward greater bondage. Without this discriminative capacity, spiritual inquiry cannot proceed.
An ethical life minimizes the internal turbulence that muddies this discrimination. When you are weighed down by guilt, resentment, deception, or cruelty — toward others or toward yourself — the mental energy required to maintain those states is simply not available for inquiry.
The Remaining Steps of Adi Shankara's Yoga
We picked up from where Session 9 left off, continuing through the remarkable 15-step system. Last session we covered the first seven; here we complete the map.
8. Mulabandha — Anchoring Attention at the Root of Awareness
Shankara reinterprets it as the stabilization of attention at the root of awareness itself — the practice of returning attention again and again to the simple, prior sense of 'I am.'
9. Deha Samya — Bodily Equilibrium
Extreme temperature, poor food, physical agitation — these create friction that makes sustained contemplation difficult. Deha Samya is the wisdom of not creating unnecessary bodily turbulence.
10. Drik Sthiti — Steady Vision
The conscious practice of seeing, in every direction and every experience, what you are not. Neti Neti applied as a continuous visual practice.
11. Pranayama — Regulation of Vital Force
The regulation of breath influences the quality of awareness. Slow, conscious breathing creates a different quality of mental state.
12. Pratyahara — Withdrawal from Sensory Pull
Not the suppression of the senses, but the reduction of their habitual pull. The same attention that goes outward is now directed toward the awareness itself.
13. Dharana — Concentration on the Witness
Who is watching? What is the nature of the awareness that is present whether I am happy or sad?
14. Dhyana — Meditative Alignment with the Witness
Dhyana is not something you do. It is something that begins to happen when the doer becomes quiet enough to recognize what was always already present.
15. Samadhi — Non-Dual Absorption
The culmination. The seeker and the sought dissolve into the simple recognition that was always present: pure consciousness, limitless, self-luminous, complete.
Tyaga — The Hardest Renunciation
We tend to think of renunciation as giving something up a meal, a possession, a comfort. Shankara's Tyaga points at something much more difficult: releasing the psychological grip of the identities we have built around ourselves.
The renunciation Shankara asks for is not the abandonment of your role or your relationships. It is the loosening of the belief that these roles exhaust what you are.
Next session: the Mahavakyas — the four great statements of the Upanishads.
Abhishek Maheshwari · Vedanta Series · Session 10 of 14