Foundation Course
This self-guided course provides the foundational materials necessary to understand the teachings of Vedanta, and to help you to assimilate the full meaning and implications of this liberating knowledge.
What is Vedanta?
Vedanta is a means of self-knowledge based on scripture, namely the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita and the Brahma Sutras. Because these primary texts can be difficult for beginners to understand, later teachers of Vedanta began writing introductory works in order to familiarize students with the basics of the teaching and prepare them for more advanced study. However, because these introductory texts were written in Sanskrit for those highly familiar with Vedic culture, it is helpful to the modern student to have the content of these texts presented to them in a language and context they can more easily understand.
That is what the materials included in the Vedanta Foundation Course do. They will give you—in plain and modern English—everything you need to become familiar with Vedanta, and prepare you to study the scriptures in depth, if necessary. Because make no mistake, this course does not leave out any part of the teaching. Properly understood, the materials in the Beginners Course alone are enough to give you moksha, freedom or enlightenment.
The Value of Vedanta
Please don’t think that because you have been seeking for a long time that you can skip the Foundation Course and go directly to the Advanced Course. If you are new to Vedanta you need to start at the beginning and work logically through the teachings because every teaching is based on complete assimilation of the preceding teaching.
The Foundation Course is a self-guided course that consists of three steps. The steps can be done in any order that you choose. Self-guided means that we respect your desire to know and assume that you are sufficiently self-motivated to cover all the requirements without bias. However, once you are ready to commit to the path of Vedanta, you need to conform to the method of teaching, which is to say that you need to work through the steps systematically.
If you imagine that you are highly qualified when you aren’t and skip the qualifying steps, you may initially experience a spiritual high but will eventually be disappointed and be tempted to assume that Vedanta, not your lack of qualifications, is the problem. This would be a grave mistake, in so far as you will have to go back to seeking. Once you understand the value of Vedanta, your seeking ends and you can actually begin to grow organically toward your goal, complete Self knowledge, which is freedom from a sense of smallness, incompleteness and inadequacy.
Instructions:
Select one book and one video from the options below. You need not worry about which to choose because they all cover the same material in slightly different ways.
Once you have chosen, read and watch the material slowly, contemplating what they have to say as you go. It is important to move on to the next chapter or video section only after you have fully understood what has been said because Vedanta is a step-by-step teaching where each concept builds on the prior one. When you don’t understand a particular concept, you are unlikely to understand the one that follows.
Read one of these books. Each covers the foundation of the teachings of Vedanta in a comprehensive and accessible manner.
View one of these video series’ featuring James Swartz speaking on the topic of Self-Inquiry, the foundational practice of Vedanta. Hearing the teachings directly from a qualified teacher is a powerful way to assimilate the knowledge of Vedanta.
This is the first video in a full series recorded in 2014 in Westerwald, Germany. You can bookmark the full series by clicking here.
Self Inquiry Berlin – Series recorded in Berlin in 2011. Available for purchase here
Self Inquiry Toronto – Series recorded in Toronto, 2012. Available for purchase here.
Read “Experience and Knowledge,” by James Swartz. This book removes the most important confusion in the spiritual world concerning the nature of enlightenment: the apparent contradiction between experience and knowledge.
Read as many satsangs as you can in our satsang database. They are a veritable gold mine of information and contain answers to nearly any question about Vedanta you can imagine.
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