If God is Formless, How to Pray? Dualistic Worship in Non-Dualistic Vedanta

Advaita Vedanta teaches that non-dual brahman alone exists, yet its teachers often prescribe dualistic practices like prayer and worship. How can this apparent contradiction be reconciled? How can non-dualists pray at all? To whom do they pray? Q&A series #27

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0:00 Introduction - Satyam & Mithya
7:57 One God vs Many Deities
9:20 Brahman vs Ishvara
12:26 How to Worship Formless Ishvara?
15:56 To Anthropomorphize Ishvara
18:48 How to Choose a Deity?

Adi Shankara famously wrote, "brahma satyam, jagan mithya," brahman is satyam, absolutely real. Brahman is the uncreated, unchanging fundamental reality because of which the world exists. Jagat, the world, is mithya, false. Here false means that the world you experience each day is not as real as brahman. Unlike brahman, the world was created and it's constantly changing. More than that, the very existence of the world (vyavaharika satta) depends on brahman (paramarthika satta) as it's underlying substratum (adhishthana).

Shankara never used the word mithya to suggest that the world is merely an illusion or a dream. Vedantic scholars like Shankara don't define mithya as being unreal or illusory. Instead, they define mithya as adhishtana ananyatvam, a state of dependent existence. Like the existence of a pot depends on clay, the existence of the world depends on brahman. And like a pot coexists with clay, but at a lower order of reality, the world of duality coexists with brahman because it is mithya.

If this is understood properly, there's no conflict whatsoever between non-dual brahman and worldly dualities, dualities like worshiper and worshiped, deity and devotee, God and man. All these dualities coexist with brahman, but at a lower order of reality.

Swami Tadatmananda is a traditionally-trained teacher of Advaita Vedanta, meditation, and Sanskrit. For more information, please see: https://www.arshabodha.org/