Know it or believe it

A monk put the whole of Advaita into three words of Hindi. Jano ya mano. Either you know it, or you believe it.

By Sovandarapor (James) Kong · 2026-08-21 · Nondual

Chapter 08 of 18 in Ninety minutes with a swami

A monk once summed up the difference between Advaita and everything else for Swami Sarvapriyananda in three words of Hindi. Jano ya mano. Either you know it, or you believe it. Both work, he said. They are just different ways in.

The swami lays out three paradigms. The first is belief. God, scripture, faith, and the promise that the higher power will give you the realisation. He is not contemptuous of it. He tells a story about listening to a man describe his religion, a great deal of myth and story that the swami privately thought was rubbish, and watching at the same time how completely that man believed it, and how the belief was making him more disciplined, more controlled, a better person. He uses a phrase I had not heard before, the mother heart of Hinduism, meaning the tradition cooks different food for different children. This one cannot digest what that one eats. Nobody is wrong for being hungry for something else.

The second paradigm is experience. You do not have to believe, you practise, you sit and breathe and visualise and you will have extraordinary experiences that prove the claims. This is the yogis, and the mystics of every religion. The trouble is that it can be doubted and always has been. Mystics have been called mad for as long as there have been mystics, and now neuroscience offers the tumour and the substance as explanations. The experiences are private. Nobody else can check.

Advaita is the third thing. It does not ask you to believe and it does not ask for extraordinary experiences. It starts from experiences that everyone already has, waking, dreaming, sleeping, noticing, and argues from there. The swami puts it carefully. Not that you can argue your way to enlightenment, but you can get very close. What it works on is the frame you are already using to see yourself, and it claims the thing it is pointing at is available now, not after a practice.

I have written before that this is the most argumentative mysticism I know. What I had not seen was the tolerance underneath it. The swami does not say belief is for the slow or experience is for the gullible. He says they are real routes, and that for someone who asks questions, the first one stops being available, which is not a virtue, just a fact about that person.

I am one of those people. I notice I am slightly proud of it, which is probably not the point.