I am delighted to welcome resident Swami and head of the Vedanta Society of New York,

Swami Sava Priyanda.

Alongside him, we have the highly accomplished philosopher, author and scientist Dr. Bernard Oastrop.

Welcome and Namaste Swami.

Thank you very much for having me in this event.

It's an honor to be with Bernardo and Ivy and Sam and with the rest of you who are in our live audience.

So I'll just start with what I'm comfortable with,

which is the Adwaita Vedanta perspective

and a little broader picture of some of the other

allied schools of Indian philosophy.

The subject today is, you know,

Ivy just told us on a,

if you look into that, it's self-consciousness, what is the world, and life itself, basically.

So all the really, really big subjects, really big questions.

All right. So first, I think it will be helpful to get a view of classical Adwaita Vedanta in brief, and then maybe open it up. Then maybe Bernadu can come in.

So Adwita Vedanta is one of the many schools of ancient Indian philosophy.

It's based on the Vedas, which are the foundational texts of Hinduism.

In the Vedas, there are these texts called the Upanishads,

which give us sort of the final or the highest conclusions of Vedic Hinduism.

And based on the Upanishads, all these the orthodox

schools of Hindu philosophy have developed over millennia. So the term Vedantah itself refers to

the Upanishans, the source of spiritual knowledge called the Upanishans. Adwaita Vedanta is one of the schools of Vedanta,

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