On Absolute Truth in Hinduism: Impersonal Energy or a Supreme Person?

At Harvard’s Bhakti Yoga Conference in 2025, a man whose Hindu name is Kaustubha spoke on the three phases of ultimate truth: Brahman, Paramatma, and Bhagavan. Is the absolute truth an energy or a person? Is God a non-personal energy or a person. In Vedanta Hinduism, this is a salient question. According to Kaustubha, absolute truth is that which is not dependent on anything else; a truth from which everything else comes. Kaustubha defined Brahman as being impersonal energy, which is that from which everything else manifests. The Upanishads emphasize the realization by a person that one’s true self is identical to the impersonal energy of being itself that is infinite, aware, powerful, and blissful.  Although the Bhagavad-Gita can be interpreted thusly, as per Shankara’s commentary, but also as Krishna being the Supreme Person, which is more ultimate than Brahman. What gives? Who, or what, is on top in terms of ontological ultimacy (i.e., ultimately real)?

Vyasdeva wrote Srimad Bhagavatam, in which divine love is emphasized. He was trying to clarify the Hindu scriptures. For him, devotion includes knowledge of renunciation (i.e., Brahman realization). Also, devotion is not oriented to getting earthly things, such as wealth. Life should be used for enquiring into the nature of absolute truth. Vyasdeva’s answer: “Learned transcendentalists who know the absolute Truth call this nondual substance Brahman, Paramatma or Bhagavan.” These are three features of the one absolute truth, which is the source of all existence. We can know that truth in three ways. They are “qualitatively one and the same. The same substance is realized as impersonal Brahman by the students of the Upanisads, as localized Pramatma by the Hiranyagabhas or the yogi, and as Bhagavan by the devotees.”[1]

Paramatma is a manifestation of Vishnu in the human proverbial heart.  Bhagavan is in a personal form as the Supreme Person. Vyasdeva claims that “Bhagavan, or the Personality of the Godhead, and impersonal Brahman is the glowing effulgence of the Personality of Godhead. . . . (T)hose who are perfect seers of the Absolute truth know well that the above three features of the one Absolute Truth are different perspective views seen from different angles of vision.” Yet Vyasdeva contends in his text that Bhagavan is superior to Paramatma and Brahman. To be sure, he nestles realization of Brahman and Paramatma within the realization of Bhagavan. A person does not have realization of the Supreme Person (Bhagavan) without realizing Paramatma in one’s heart and without Brahman being realized at identical to one’s innermost self (atman).

Kaustubha interpreted Brahman realization as a person realizing that one is made of spiritual energy, and thus is in reality eternal, immutable, and one with the universe. In saying, “I am beyond desire,” a person has an evenness of mind. “I am spirit.” Paramatma realization too can be achieved by a yogi in meditation.  In this realization, a person might say, “I am in constant contact with, and under the shelter of the supreme consciousness, the cosmic intelligence, the soul of the universe.” That Supreme Soul exists within a person because it exists in one’s own heart. This divine Being is controlling the material universe, and is the dear friend of everyone. Brahman realization is included within this realization. In Bhagavan realization, a person might say, “I realize and love the supreme form of Vishnu, which has all-attractive names, forms, qualities and pastimes, and expands ultimately through its various energies and reciprocates with my love.” The material realm consists of three gunas; each one of these modes of energy, illumination, detachment, and destruction, has an influence on a person.

In the Bhagavad-Gita, Krishna’s recipe for not being attached to these gunas is devotion to the deity, Krishna.[2] But aren’t forms the opposite of Brahman realization, such that seeing beyond forms is necessary? Krishna answers that Brahman is one of that deity’s energies, so if a person is lovingly devoted to Krishna as the Supreme Person (i.e., Bhagavan), a person has Brahman realization too, so viewing Absolute Truth as personified in a form does not violate the non-dual quality of Brahman as impersonal energy. In fact, Kaustubha implied that devotion to Absolute Truth as Krishna, the Supreme Person (and thus the highest deity in the Hindu polytheistic pantheon), is better in resulting in a person being compassionate to other people than is Brahman realization, wherein a person’s true self (atman) is known to be identical to the infinite impersonal energy that pervades (and is) reality.

In Srimad Bhagavatam, Vyasdeva asserts, “The most advanced devotee sees within everything the soul of all souls, the Supreme Person. Consequently, he sees everything in relation to the Supreme Lord and understands that everything that exists is eternally situated within the Lord.”[3] So, a “devotee who faithfully engages in the worship of the Deity in the temple but does not behave properly toward other devotees or people in general is called a prakrta-bhakta, a materialistic devotee, and is considered to be in the lowest position.”[4] Such devotees, Kaustubha claimed, are not devotees because they do not recognize the divine apart from the Supreme Person.  Hypocrisy comes with this. In contrast, a sincere devotee “shows mercy to ignorant people who are innocent and disregards the enmity of those who are inimical towards them.”[5] Compassion toward all naturally emanates from having loving compassion in devotion to the Supreme Person. That is, regular religious experience that is sincere automatically renders one more compassionate to other finite beings. I submit that such a mechanism is more efficacious than is intention to put a religious teaching into practice by being compassionate to other people because we have various inclinations that can eclipse any intention.

Is it the case, however, that Bhagavan realization, in which the devotee’s love is directed to Krishna as the Supreme Person qua ultimate reality, is better than Brahman realization in resulting in people being compassionate to other people? I contend that Bhagavan realization is indeed superior because the currency of compassion is in a person’s bhakti relation to the deity already. In contrast, knowing Brahman—that a person’s self is really the same as the impersonal being that supports the created realm as a floor of sorts—does not in itself include compassion. Rather, it is by realizing that we are all the same because we are all basically the same “substance” as Brahman that the implication is reached cognitively and through meditation that we should be compassionate to other people. In other words, an experiential, extratextual realization of the identity of individual and infinite being is not itself compassion; rather, the exercise of compassion should follow from the realization. Even if this happens automatically rather than by intention, which is admittedly possible, compassion is not in the realization itself, whereas compassion is in bhakti devotion to Absolute Truth in a personified form. This is the idea.

Such a conclusion is not necessarily generalizable to reach Kaustubha’s claim that Bhagavan realization is superior to Brahman realization, for it has not been shown that Absolute Truth reduces to (or is epitomized by) compassion. For example, Brahman realization may be superior to bhakti yoga in terms of not suffering from being attached to the desire for objects in this world. Furthermore, Kaustubha’s hierarchy of realizations flies in the face of his preachment on religious toleration. A person who values compassion most may prefer Bhagavan realization, whereas another person who is primarily concerned with not suffering may prefer identifying intellectually and experientially with Brahman. Even if the latter is considered to be one of Krishna’s energies (and thus that the Supreme Person is more real than even Brahman), encapsulating the divine in a human form is, as David Hume points out, highly anthropomorphic (i.e., positing human characteristics onto non-human things or animals). As Nietzsche might say, it is human, all too human, to view Absolute Truth in our own terms. It is much more difficult, Hume maintains, to grasp divine simplicity without hanging recognizable forms on the transcendent. Furthermore, that Brahman is one of Krishna’s energies may defy the nature of Brahman itself as that which even the creation of the gods comes, as Brahman is out of which everything that exists comes, is sustained, and ends. It may be asked nonetheless if a better means of showing compassion as caritas seu benevolentia universalis to everyone isn’t worth some anthropomorphism if that is necessary to get compassion “up front” in the process of realization itself such that compassion may more automatically flow out, with other people, fellow devotees or not, as the referents.

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1. A.C. Bhaktivedenta, Purport to Srimad Bhagavatam 1.2.11.
2. See the Bhagavad-gita, 14.21-27.
3. Vyasdeva, Srimad Bhagavatam (11.2.45-47).
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.

Transcendence in Action in the Bhagavad-gita

Chaitanya Charan spoke at Harvard’s Bhukti Yoga Conference in 2025 about action and transcendence in the Bhagavad-gita. Arjuna faces adversity even though he is a good. That life is suffering is a Noble Truth in Buddhism. Why noble? Even suffering can be ennobling. That life can be unfair is a given in the Gita. Getting less than we think we deserve can be from our bad karma in a previous life. So, we can’t really know what we actually deserve, so it is important to accept results. They aren’t in our control anyway, whereas our present karma is. So, the advice is to be committed to doing your best in acting, but with detachment on whatever results from the action. I contend that detachment from pride and especially arrogance goes automatically with the transcendence of detachment from not only the results of one’s actions, but also from the created realm itself, which by analogy looks smaller and smaller as the planet Earth does from a spacecraft on the way to the Moon.

Acceptance and commitment to acting lead to transcendence, spirituality goes from being an anchor to being an airplane. In terms of bhukti devotion, Krishna is the higher reality. As a person grows spiritually, the deity becomes more important and the world’s importance becomes less. Transcendence is a matter of being more oriented to “another reality” than to the world, and thus such a person might seem to be not fully “here” in conversations with other people. Differing somewhat from Charan’s interpretation of the Gita, I contend that the higher “reality” in the Gita can be understood to be a deity itself, as in bhukti devotionalism, or, as Shankara claims in his commentary on the Gita, reaching the higher reality can be thought of as an ongoing realization that a person can have that one’s self (atman) is really the very same as brahman, which is conscious, limitless, powerful, and blissful being. In bhukti (i.e., devotion to a deity), according to Charan, a deity as a higher reality that is to be the primary focus even while the person is committed to actions in the world.  Charan pointed out that bhukti devotion does not mean that a person should not be fixed on a goal, for a goal is held before acting whereas results are afterward.

In the Gita, according to Charan, Arjuna is initially perplexed. If he does not fight, disaster on the battlefield would be likely because the other side, which has unjustly cast out Arjuna and his brothers from a share in rulership, would win. If Arjuna does fight, he might kill his teachers and even one of his grandfathers. The Gita is essentially a call to action; the philosophical basis for acting is not the point in the Gita. Act, but with detachment from whatever results. Act with wisdom; act with a higher consciousness, which, means transcending attachment to things of the world to a higher realization.

Whether in being oriented to Charan’s bhukti higher reality personified as Krishna or Shankara’s impersonal brahman, that the process of transcending the world shifts a person’s orientation such that the world looks smaller and the higher reality looks larger is decisive in Charan’s view of spirituality gained from having studied and meditated on the Gita text. He did not mention, however, the compatible idea that a natural or automatic sense of humility is an important inherent byproduct of shifting (and then holding) one’s primary focus to a reference-point that is by definition, according to the Christian theologian, Pseudo-Dionysius, beyond the limits of human thoughts, perception, and emotions. Even in the realization that one’s atman is identical to brahman, a person’s ego cannot be front and center if the reference point (i.e., brahman) is not sourced in and thus limited to the world in which we live (i.e., the created realm, whether it is created by brahman or Krishna). Being limitless is a quality of brahman. 

Human beings are so steeped in pride (i.e., the presumptions of ego, as if deserving to be on stilts during a flood) that the byproduct of having a qualitatively unique kind of orientation (i.e., in terms of religious transcendence) is crucial not only to being able to be at peace, but also for interpersonal relations to be so as well. A focus on Jesus or the kingdom of God can serve the same purpose for a Christian even without taking into account the leitmotif of humility in the Gospels. In fact, that humility is a byproduct of maintaining a transcendental orientation even while performing actions in the world and relating to other people is especially valuable precisely because intending to be humble can be such a weak motive in human nature. I suppose that relying more on a natural byproduct of a distinct kind of orientation than on an intention to have the byproduct itself as a quality may be Taoist in nature. In other words, it may be more natural to human nature to assume an orientation to a transcendent referent point or entity than it is to try to be humble, given the gravitas of the human ego.  This is not to say that valuing humility highly as a virtue is not another means by which a person can be naturally humble.

Integrating Our Humanity and Divinity

Dayal Gauranga spoke at Harvard’s Bhukti Yoga conference in 2025 on how spirituality can complement psychology in the healing of past traumas. He explicitly related religion/spirituality and psychology; my question is whether he succeeded, and if so, what put him past the finishing line. I contend that even though at times his use of spirituality lapsed into psychology (i.e., conflating the two domains by psychologizing spirituality), at the end of his talk he related spirituality to truth, which is not within the purview of psychology. By truth, I mean religious truth, rather than, for example, 2+2=4.  I contend, moreover, that disentangling religion from other domains by plucking out weeds from other gardens so to be able to uncover and thereby recognize the native fauna in the religious garden, as well as pulling the religious weeds that have been allowed to spread other gardens is much needed, especially in a secular context. It is with this in mind that I turn to analyzing Gauranga’s spiritual-psychological theory of healing oneself of traumatic wounds.

Gauranga began his lecture by discussing two patterns that inhibit spiritual development. One is struggling with everyday human experience because of childhood conditioning, ego, and unresolved wounds.  The second is engaging in spiritual bypassing by using spiritual practice to avoid pain rather than transform it. Transforming hurt into a sense of wholeness requires a person to integrate one’s spiritual dimension with one’s embodied (i.e.,, materialist) daily experience.

The process of overcoming the obstacles begins with identifying unresolved psychological pain, even if it is due to a wound from long ago in childhood. Gauranga’s main point is that spirituality can be used in the healing process; it is not only psychological. What, then, is spirituality? One view is that it is the understanding of, connecting to, and living as our authentic self, which is not material. I believe he had Advaita Vedanta in mind here. A person is not one’ bank balance, one’s insecurities, one’s job title, etc. Rather than leave these things behind, the task is to integrate them with one’s spiritual dimension. In Vedanta meditation, the key lies in getting in touch with one’s self not as ego and definitely not as the id, but, instead, as a one’s seat of consciousness. I contend that the seat goes beyond being conscious of things, including one’s own personality and desires. By a person getting in touch with one’s seat from which one is conscious of even oneself as an embodied creature, Gauranga claims that it is possible to turn inward in compassion to heal the wounded parts of oneself, such that the person can be restored to wholeness, which includes being spiritually connected to other people. Gauranga cleverly brought up the notion of a cybernetic system, such as a thermostat in a house that regulates heating and cooling, that responds to external stimuli and returns to a homeostatic state of equilibrium. If the temperature in a house gets too high, the thermostat is triggered to bring the temperature back down to the temperature-setting. Human beings have such a system internally; we can return from unalignment to spiritual wholeness.

It seems to me that by drawing on the theory of Gregory Bateson in his Steps to an Ecology of Mind, our species can, if it has the will, enable the planet’s carbon dioxide thermostat to function to being the atmosphere and oceans back to equilibrium. Whether that includes our species may depend on how long until, or even if, we will it collectively, as a species, and back up our will with political power. Bateson theorizes the maximizing, schizogenic forces, such as our species is described by Agent Smith in the film, The Matrix, can piece ecologizing forces that are oriented to equilibrium. Perhaps in terms of psychology, the human psyche has both types of forces instinctually. Gauranga’s point can be interpreted as adding that the ecologizing forces that are part of a person’s mind can involve spiritual wholeness, which the schizogenic self-maximizing force of the mind as ego can, unfortunately, knock off kilter, and thus off from equilibrium.

Gauranga applies his notion of spiritual wholeness both to a person and to one’s interpersonal relations. In both respect, compassion plays a key role. It is precisely in being compassionate to one’s wounds from past trauma that one self-heals. I contend that this does no obviate the need for psychoanalysis by a trained psychologist. In fact the defense mechanisms that can even come to be imbedded in one’s personality can become so engrained that therapy is needed for a person to be able to recognize them. A person could then apply compassion to those internal distorted mechanisms too. Once psychologically and spiritually healed, and thus rendered mentally and spiritually whole, a person is freer internally to be compassionate in one’s interpersonal relationships and external spiritual connections.  

In short, we can discover and reconnect to our inherent sense of self, and thus compassionately relate to the parts of us that have been wounded by past traumas. In other words, a person can integrate one’s body, psyche, and spirit and thus be whole. Krishna’s first and final advice to Arjuna in the Bhagavad-gita is to surrender and fear not. From a standpoint of less fear, a person can approach one’s spiritual connections in the world with broader compassion, as in Augustine’s notion of benevolentia universalis.

Recognition of one’s own spirituality and materiality/biology includes reconnecting with one’s body in the present moment, rather than in recalling past trauma. Spirituality does not lie in forgetting that we are embodied, which includes the brain. Then can come recognition of the mentally and spiritually wounded parts of oneself and the related psychologically protective defense mechanisms, relating to those parts of oneself with compassion and curiosity. By this means, a person can release and repair those burdens so to be able to return to the deeper self and free up one’s connection to the sacred. That is, a person’s spirituality can be a means by which recurrent pain from past trauma can be healed. Having sketched Gauranga’s theory of healing, I now turn to the question of whether his theory adequately distinguishes spirituality, and thus religion, from psychology. From the standpoint of the religious “garden,” I want to pluck out weeds from other gardens to be able to find what is distinctly and uniquely religious in the theory.

Inherent spiritual being, which is one’s own self below all the crap, is not reachable by a cognitive process, which, Gauranga claimed, is psychology. This may be a reductionistic claim, however, as psychology involves emotion. The pain from past traumas is itself emotional rather than cognitive. Presumably psychotherapy includes a patient feeling unpleasant emotions rather than merely thinking about or analyzing them. Reducing psychology to cognition is thus problematic. Gauranga’s claim that psychology is limited to the mind is more fitting, if the mind is understood to include the biology of the brain. Cartesian mind-body duality can by the twenty-first century be shown the door thanks to natural science. Gauranga asserted that a person’s authentic self (atman) goes beyond the reach of a person’s mind. Certainly atman lies beyond the stench of ego, but Gauranga was saying something else: using the mind to cognitively know one’s self at its very foundation or ground falls short. To be sure, because the mind (i.e., concentration) is used in meditation, which is oriented in Vedanta Hinduism to realizing one’s ultimate self as identical to brahman, distinguishing psychology from spirituality is not so clear. However, experiencing “pure” consciousness as being itself as a person’s real self can be said to transcend the mind because thoughts are arrested as the person is just aware of one’s being. To be aware does not mean that the mind is aware of anything other than awareness itself. Having focused on a repetitive mantra, prayer, scriptural passage, or divine attribute in a bhukti (i.e., lovingly devotional) way, the human mind can suddenly just stop, and just be aware. A person is then simply part of awareness, which as universalized is brahman. The person is not thinking about lunch, Krishna, Jesus, or even oneself, for thinking itself has stopped. Even the passage of time is not noticed. In this respect, spiritual experience does not reduce to, or even include, psychology because both thoughts and emotions have stopped.

Gauranga is on less firm ground in asserting that compassion towards a person’s own psychological wounds is spiritual in nature. Compassion is a virtue in philosophical ethics. Furthermore, David Hume asserts that sympathy, which can give rise to compassion, is involved in making a moral judgment regarding other people’s motives and acts. Lastly, Freud posits the psychological existence of not only the the id and ego, but also the superego, the latter of which is in a mind saying what the person (or another person) should think, feel or do. Freud’s concept of the superego, which is psychological in classification, is very close to compassion. To wit, I should be compassionate, and you should be compassionate.

Therefore, compassion itself cannot be claimed to be distinctly spiritual even if it is a byproduct of the realization experientially and cognitively that one’s real self is identical to brahman, which is infinite being that is conscious, powerful, and, according to Ramanuja, blissful as well. To be sure, compassion is no stranger to religion, as the personifications as Krishna and Jesus illustrate. Compassion is part of what Gauranga called “spiritual connection.” I’m sure he would agree that such connection is not the same as what is described in social psychology textbooks. In this respect, it is crucial that he brought in the notion of (a) higher being as being foundational to spiritual connection. Whether as one’s real self as being realized as identical to the transcendent, inherently unmanifest brahman, or as a deity such as Krishna, including a transcendent extratextual referent distinguishes spirituality as qualitatively different from psychology, and even as unique, as sui generis.

Interestingly, religions in which religious belief is important have a harder job in claiming that spirituality is distinct from Gauranga’s cognition-delimited notion of psychology. Spirituality can be distinct even from a more expansive definition of psychology. A “straw-man” is not needed for religion to survive the modern onslaught of psychology. Neither must psychology set up a merely “straw” definition of spirituality to resist its encroachments! The saying of politicians that everything is political also gets at the maximizing (schizogenic) nature of human domains. In claiming sovereignty or rights to wholeness, religion too can be understood to schizogenic rather than ecologizing. From the standpoint of other domains, the hyper-extended right of sovereignty that religion claims stops at its borders. This does not invalidate the distinctly religious meaning, which would represent an overreach onto the territory of religion by schizogenic forces in another domain.

The key, I submit, to Gauranga’s claim that spirituality is distinct from psychology lies in the type of referent that anchors a person’s spirituality. In asserting that “any real healing includes the spiritual self as a healing agent” as distinct from the psychological self (i.e., the mind), Gauranga added that “reconnecting to the truth of what we are is spiritual” rather than psychological in nature. Truth. In including that word, Gauranga successfully supported his claim that spirituality is distinct from psychology, for the latter domain does not include making truth claims, just as history too cannot. Faith narratives are not historical accounts, whether in authorial intent or written content, for drawing on historical events (and adapting others rather than merely adopting them) is not the same as writing a historical account.

In being oriented to one’s true self (atman), and as being identical to brahman, or to loving Krishna or Jesus compassionately, especially in extratextual experience that goes beyond thinking over specifical scriptural passages, a person’s yearning for distinctly religious truth is not within the realm of psychology. Crucially, religious truth is based beyond the limits of human cognition, perception, and sensibility (i.e., emotion), according to the sixth-century Christian theologian, Pseudo-Dionysius. In chapter 11 of the Bhagavad-gita, the vision that Krishna provides for Arjuna of Krishna transcends Arjuna’s cognitions of Krishna’s divine attributes. As Gauranga noted in concluding his talk, Krishna’s last advice to Arjuna is not to be afraid. The vision in the Gita overwhelms and perplexes Arjuna’s mind.

Therefore, the incorporation of truth, as in a person’s true self, or as a transcendent being (i.e., a deity) that is believed to be the Supreme Person and thus ultimately real renders spiritual connection distinctly religious and not just the quality of garden-variety compassion. Even revelation must travel into our realm as through a smoky stained-glass window, according to Augustine. Rather than arriving untouched through inert human nature as pristine, Augustine’s view can be put in terms of the recognition that what we know, perceive, and feel regarding religious truth inevitably must pass through our biochemical processes, which include even our use of reason (i.e., ratiocination). Simply put, even though religious truth is eternal, not material, and infallible, no person alive as embodied qualifies (i.e., not counting souls in heaven or liberated individual selves) for these divine attributes. Even so, a human instinctual (even genetic) urge to yearn for a reference-point that is transcendent may exist even though the referent transcends instinct. Rather than bypassing the psychological work that must be done to heal trauma, acting on such an urge by meditation, bhukti, ritual, or prayer can provide a transcendent sense of grounding that can fortify distinctly psychological therapy and self-healing. Spirituality and psychology can work together without falling into each other, or one conquering the other.