Sam speaks with Swami Sarvapriyananda, a Hindu monk and Minister of the Vedanta Society of New York. They discuss Sarvapriyananda’s spiritual background, including his early influences; longstanding doctrinal debates and commonalities among certain Hindu and Buddhist non-dual traditions; varying interpretations of “the self,” and its illusoriness; different methods for mitigating psychological suffering; making phenomenological vs. metaphysical claims; mystical and philosophical approaches to the hard problem of consciousness; and other topics.

Swami Sarvapriyananda is Minister of the Vedanta Society of New York. He joined the Ramakrishna Order in 1994 and received final monastic vows in 2004. He previously served as Assistant Minister of the Vedanta Society of Southern California and was a Nagral Fellow at Harvard Divinity School in 2019-20. 

He is a world-renowned speaker on Vedanta, and has spoken at such prestigious forums as TEDx, SAND, Google Talk, the World Parliament of Religions in Toronto, and the United Nations Headquarters in New York.