Advaita Utsav or International conference on “Acharya Shankara’s Philosophy of Universal Oneness” was organised by Dr. Harisingh Gour Vishwavidyalaya in Sagar, Madhya Pradesh from 8th to 10th of December 2019. It was one of the rarest conference on Advaita organised in a central government university where every session of all three days were chaired by Sanatani Saints and Sannyasis. It was attended by Saints, students, scholars, researchers, professors, and common people, providing a great variety of audience.
In this conference several speakers from varied backgrounds talked about Advaita and its manifestation in several fields of life like Bhakti, Science, Folk culture, contemporary spiritual traditions, and many other fields of life. Swamis of several sects like Chinmaya Mission, Arsha Vidya Gurukulam, Sringeri Sharda Peetham, Advaita Ashram, Adi Shankara Brahma Vidya Peetham, etc. attended this conference and put forth their views.
A large number of artists portrayed their idea of Shankara and Advaita through their beautiful paintings, Rangolis, music, and dance. Someone compared Advaita with quantum physics, someone with oneness. Overall it was a great conference in which several concepts of Advaitavada were elaborated on by performers and speakers.
List of speakers included several famous names like Swami Parmananda giri, Prof Gautambhai patel, Prof Ramnath jha, Ex CM Shivraj Singh Chauhan, Shri Pawan Kumar Verma, Dr Satyapal Singh, Swami Samvit Somgiri, Shri Kapil Tiwari, Manoj Shrivastava, Gulab Kothari , Dr Alex Hankey, Mahesh Chandra Sharma, and many more experts from across India and other countries.
After listening to all intellectuals it became crystal clear for audience that “Advaitavada or the idea of oneness” is much bigger than any other Rights movements in the world like human rights, women rights, animal rights, plants rights etc. If we talk in the language of mathematics then we can easily say that Advaitavada is a super set of all other rights or human rights, animal rights etc are just a small and incomplete subsets of Advaita. The way Shankara Advaita explains the concept of Oneness is something extraordinary and impeccable. It wouldn’t be wrong to claim that is worthy of being adopted by United Nations to replace other incomplete ideas of rights-based approaches.
After attending this conference, I could only say that this conference is just a beginning of spreading Idea of Advaita to the world. All Indian and world universities should organize such conferences for the world to understand the Idea of Oneness from oldest living civilization of the world. I extend my sincere gratitude to Indic Academy for sponsoring me for such an amazing event.
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