Alex O'Connor

Division is an illusion and unity is real and it heavily implies that consciousness or like the soul, the kind of stuff that makes you yourself is kind of one thing with everybody else's self and that all of that consciousness is kind of the same thing as the universe, that there's this great big sort of unity of stuff.

I thought that was really cool.

So it's a bit of a sort of long-winded way to say that I started looking into that.

And then I had Swami Sava Priyananda, he's the head of the Vedanta Society of New York or whatever it's called, on my show.

And we talked about Advaita Vedanta.

We talked about consciousness.

We didn't talk about the Hindu pantheon of gods.

I still don't understand how Brahman manifests in like hundreds of different deities.

I still don't really get that at all.

I don't know about the different traditions who see different deities as their main gods and stuff like that.

I don't really understand that.

But

I understand the philosophy of consciousness.

We were able to have a great conversation about this particular Indian tradition.

But the thing about Advaita Vedanta is it's not really a religious tradition.

It's a philosophical tradition that comes from India.

So when I do this show, yeah, I'm speaking to a Hindu and people say, great, you're talking about Hinduism for the first time.

It's like, no, I'm not really.

I'm talking about a philosophical school that comes from India, which is not the same thing.

I mean, the word Hindu is very unhelpful anyway, because it's what's called an exonant, which is a word which is applied from the outside.