Swami Sarvapriyanada & Bernardo Kastrup in Conversation
Buddhist, Hindu and Western percpectives on enlightenment, Self vs No Self & Emptiness as medicine for non-duality
Date: 22 April 2025
Duration: 2h 36m
Title: Does emptiness deny consciousness?
Duration: 6:11
https://vimeo.com/1226768940/3fb252bd00
0:00:00 Greetings
0:08:05 Buddhism and Hinduism in India
0:20:22 Chandrakirti's seven-fold attack on the Self
0:27:45 Swami responds to the Jay Garfield debate
0:34:13 Hume’s attack on subjectivity
0:45:26 Misunderstandings of both the Buddhist and Advaita approaches
0:49:22 Hume did not go far enough: what is an object?
0:57:44 Is total emptiness actually a philosophical position?
1:03:00 There is something called an ultimate reality
1:20:30 Swami’s critique of Indian civilisation
1:27:38 What can Analytic Idealism learn from the Five Koshas?
1:38:56 Jung’s individuation is for the second half of life
1:47:30 How to deal with trauma and suffering
2:06:40 The Jungian ego in the fight against suffering
2:18:45 Life is not about you
This session was really special, reconciling many Buddhist and Vedantic ideas, and bridging Eastern and Western approaches to metaphysics, meaning and more.
The recording, transcript and chat from this session are all below.
We primarily explored the rich history of debate in India between Buddhists and Hindus, and how Swami Sarvapriyananda reconciles them. The topics included:
- Self or no self?
- The value and drawbacks of both schools
- Eastern vs Western approaches and what each can learn from each other
- How individuation and realisation are complimentary
- How engagement with the world goes alongside transcendence
- Bernardo stayed on to discuss how he has navigated suffering.
To join events with Swami Sarvapriyananda: https://www.vedantany.org/
An apology
I had agreed with Swami that he would attend for just 9o minutes, which is what his scheduled allowed, but in my enthusiasm totally forgot, and it may have looked like he had made a mistake. The mistake was mine!
Swami Sarvapriyananda
Swami Sarvapriyananda is a widely respected monk of the Ramakrishna Order, currently serving as head minister of the Vedanta Society of New York. A dynamic teacher renowned for his ability to convey complex Vedantic principles with remarkable clarity, he regularly attracts global audiences through his lectures and online presence. His background combines deep scholarship in traditional Vedantic texts - particularly his illuminating talks on the Mandukya Upanishad and Drig Drishya Viveka - with an engagement with contemporary philosophy and science.
Before joining the Vedanta Society of New York, he served as assistant minister of the Vedanta Society of Southern California and prior to that as Principal of the Probationers' Training Center at Belur Math. He holds a degree in Business Management from Xavier Institute of Management, Bhubaneswar, and his talks seamlessly weave insights from modern fields like neuroscience and quantum physics with traditional Vedantic teachings.
Bernardo Kastrup
Analytic idealism
Bernardo Kastrup is the Executive Director of Essentia Foundation and Founder/CEO at AI systems company Euclyd BV. His work has set off the modern renaissance of metaphysical idealism. He has a Ph.D. in philosophy (ontology, philosophy of mind) and another in computer engineering (reconfigurable computing, artificial intelligence).
As a scientist, he has worked for the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) and the Philips Research Laboratories (where the ‘Casimir Effect’ of Quantum Field Theory was discovered). He has also been creatively active in the high-tech industry for almost 30 years, having founded parallel processor company Silicon Hive (acquired by Intel in 2011) and worked as a technology strategist for the geopolitically significant company ASML. Most recently, he has founded AI company Euclyd BV.
Formulated in detail in many academic papers and books, his ideas have been featured in Scientific American, the magazine of The Institute of Art and Ideas, the Blog of the American Philosophical Association and Big Think, among others. His most defining book is Analytic Idealism in a Nutshell: A straightforward summary of the 21st-century’s only plausible metaphysics.
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