Timothy Conway: 9 Less-than-wholesome aspects of neo- or pseudo-advaita
1) Many neo-advaita teachers, not fully balanced or compassionate in their living and teaching, exploit the two-level nature of discourse by repeatedly, chronically one-upping their dialogue-partner, their interlocutor. For instance, they respond to questioners' legitimate queries and concerns with: Who is asking the question? or What are you before your thoughts and feelings arise? or What happens when all such concerns entirely stop? Such questions subrate or undermine the finite, personal sense of self and intuitively point to the Infinite, Supra-personal Vastness of our abiding, eternal Reality. Now granted, going to the ultimate, absolute level of discourse is an ancient way for the Guru to undermine false thinking and ego-identification by a disciple. When used in certain circumstances, at the right time, it can have a beautifully liberating effect. The problem is that many so-called spiritual teachers in the neo-advaita movement evidently feel a contrarian compulsion to repeatedly prove their superiority over any and all dialogue partners by using this technique in a chronic oneupsmanship manner to stay “on top” in any relationship by posturing as the Guru of Infinite Awareness mentoring the lowly disciple, still identified with the finite self. This is just egocentric attachment to power over others in a posture of “being right”—it is not compassionate, or skillful means (upāya).
2) Similarly, the pseudo-advaitin labors under and suffers a chronic compulsion to always absolutize everything onto an “ultimate” or “final” truth-level of discourse. There’s no appreciation for the Divine manifestation—the Form of the Formless. All relationship is negated, dismissed or de-valued in a manner that verges on or falls completely into de-personalization, a syndrome marked by strong, pathological dissociation and detachment, apathy and loss of empathy. Basic humaneness, warmth and tender loving care vanish in a preference for a cool, robotic demeanor and a slavish adherence to speaking “Absolutish” and always having to sound “profound.”
3) Often needing to go perfectly still and stare and smile (or not smile!) in human interactions with a partner and in other ways go “numb & dumb” (insensitive and silent) in one's relationships with fellow beings, especially fellow human beings. This is the “playing possum” approach to relationships. There's nothing wrong with and actually something very beautiful with being able to silently “gaze at the Beloved” in the form of a dear fellow human being, with a tremendous sense of gratitude and veneration for the Manifest Divine Self. But when one feels the chronic need to go cool or cold on someone and suppress or ignore our warm expression as human beings, this comes close to or falls right into the de-personalization disorder, not honoring the richly meaningful Divine manifestation as the beautifully unique and wonderful person. In the daily-chanted Heart Sūtra, it is clearly seen that “Emptiness is Form, Form is Emptiness, emptiness is not different from form, form is not different from emptiness,” and so on with each of the other aggregates (skandhas) of personality (i.e., not just form/energy, but sensations, perceptions, emotions and volitional impulses, and the cognizing sense of personal consciousness). In other words, the personality-aggregates need not always, chronically be deconstructed via literal stillness-frozenness and "blanking out."
4) The aloof pseudo-advaitin condemns any forms of engaged spirituality (politically aware-active spirituality) as “māyā” (illusion) or “buying into samsāra” (the cycle of cause-effect, death-rebirth). For the pseudo-advaitin, matters of justice and injustice (e.g., economic justice, environmental justice, gender justice, racial justice, political justice, etc.) have no meaning and are simply absurd, not worth bothering about. Of course, this makes a mockery of everything the Buddha and other sages taught about morality, virtue, ethics, and a just society. Engaged spirituality heroes and heroines like Mahātma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Dorothy Day, et al., according to this stunted view of spirituality, were just wasting their time. A woman is being raped or a child is being physically abused on the street? No problem for the pseudo-advaitin. “It’s all just a dream. Nothing’s really happening. Whatever happens is God’s will, the insubstantial play of the One.”
5) A pseudo-advaitin's own misbehavior can be quickly rationalized away in the same glib manner as merely "a dream," "God's will," "Māyā". On this point, the towering sage of nonduality, Ramana Mahārshi (1879-1950), has strongly critiqued this confused mixing of levels and "misplaced advaita" by saying that advaita should NOT be applied to action, in the sense of non-discrimination between proper and improper behavior. Yet one Western neo-advaitin has written, in the type of remark echoed repeatedly by other neo-advaitins: “Once awakening happens, it is seen that there is no such thing as right or wrong.... All concepts of good or bad, karma or debt of any kind are products of an unawakened mind that is locked into time and the maintenance and reinforcement of a sense of father, mother and self.” (Tony Parsons, Open Secret, p. 40) To this we can only reply: Oh really? Then the Buddha, Nāgārjuna, the Chan-Zen-Son masters, Śaṅkara, Ramana Mahārshi, Siddharāmeshvar Mahārāj, Nisargadatta Mahārāj and many, many other great advaitins were all by this neo-advaitin definition quite unenlightened, because all of them taught that, on the conventional level, we must still be able to distinguish between wholesome and unwholesome actions, and be well aware of karmic consequences.
The Buddha, for one, often defined the disbelief in karmic consequences as that dangerous heresy of nihilism (uccheda-ditthi). Much of what is taught by neo-advaita is clearly a form of the nihilist heresy, as defined by the Buddha.
6) One of the most characteristic marks of pseudo-advaita is the premature demanding that people “call off the search”
7) Neo- or Pseudo-Advaita condemns or denigrates any form of devotional spirituality as more “māyā” or “dualism.” This, despite the fact that the most towering figures of Advaita nonduality in India, from Śaṅkara to Jñāneshvar to Utpaladeva to Rāmakrishna, Ramana Mahārshi, Swāmī Gñānānanda, Pāpā Rāmdās, Siddharāmeshvar, Nisargadatta and others, all featured a strongly devotional side—albeit a nondual devotion (abheda bhakti, "devotion without difference," or parabhakti, "transcendent devotion"). In truly mature and full Self-realization, a spontaneous love flows nondually in/by/from the transcendent Self for the Self immanent within all persons, human, celestial and divine. There can blossom a blissful zest and "nondual heartfelt gratitude" spontaneously expressed over the fact that the One is somehow Many, and the Many are really this One, i.e., that Emptiness is Form, and Form is Emptiness.
8) Along this line, much of neo-advaita presents itself as an attack on the mind, an attempt to stop the mind in its tracks and destroy it forever. Nothing wrong with the "no mind" or "mindlessness" state from time to time, especially when a person is addicted to mental contents. It's also well-known to Buddhist "mindfulness" meditators that one can very easily "drop" below the mind and its concepts-perceptions-reactions by simply paying exquisite attention to sensations and energies (the first two khandhas or skandhas of the five levels of embodied personhood). But the notion that a sage no longer has any kind of functioning mind at all and just spends the rest of his or her days in some kind of a tranced-out zombie state is ridiculous. Ramana Mahārshi, we have already noted, made great and beautiful use of the mind, utilizing it as an instrument for editing and translating texts, monitoring correspondence, resolving the doubts and clarifying the confusions of his interlocutors, inquiring into their well-being, preparing food and managing the kitchen work, and so forth. A really interesting Zen-like kōan-riddle for neo-advaitins is this: Ramana Mahārshi was observed on almost a daily basis to carefully read the newspaper. If there was "no world" and "no need for the mind" for anything, what was this daily newspaper-browsing all about? The old-timers i've talked to insist that Ramana was not just "looking at the pictures," nor using the newspaper as some kind of a "cloak" or "cover" merely to go into interdimensional states or avoid any visitors assembled in the old hall. He was genuinely interested in the well-being of people, animals, and society. The newspaper (along with the radio, to which he often listened) was a conventional way for him to access information about sentient beings at other places.
Let us here further consider how too many neo-advaitins in their anti-intellectual bent put down all book-reading as a waste of time being stuck at the mere "mental" level. And yet, in a quite unintended but hilarious stroke of irony, we are encouraged by many of these same neo-advaitins or by their disciples and publicity persons to buy all the books (and CDs and DVDs) of their Great Teacher's teachings. We are to ignore classic gems of spiritual instruction like Śaṅkara's Upadesha Sāhasrī and the Yoga Vāsishtha, but by all means we should hasten to buy the dumbed-down, distorted pile of deconstructivism from the latest "fully enlightened" neo-advaitin.
9) So much of neo-advaita, as revealed by many quotes from its main proponents, can be seen as a stunted form of spiritual development in only emphasizing the deconstructive via negativa or "negating way." Yet, first there are mountains and rivers. Then there are no mountains, no rivers. Then there are mountains and rivers.” The second stage refers to the utter dropping or relaxing of all sense of self or world. Mystics with an aptitude for it can in this stage easily merge in formless trance states (nirvikalpa samādhi, etc.), thereby literally blanking out any perceptible inner or outer world of phenomena. The third stage in this Zen model refers to the “intrinsic/natural oneness” of sahaja samādhi wherein the sage lovingly honors and responsibly interacts with a world of beings, promoting their wellbeing.
In its presentation of spiritual teaching, neo-advaita stumbles badly here, falling into the “dark cavern” of second-stage “no mountains, no rivers.” Indeed, it is actually an even stranger state of nihilism that neo-advaita falls into—i.e., denying the relative reality and meaningfulness of “persons”; denying any Divine purpose or plan to life; denying the validity of any and all phenomena, including moral distinctions between help and harm, virtuous morality and selfish sinfulness, ego-free behavior and egocentric behavior.
In this way, neo-advaita nihilistically stays stuck in a strange “no man’s zone” which at best can only be considered an intermediate, deconstructive level of spiritual development. The only “purpose” for the “No-thingness” teachings of this intermediate level (as originally presented by the true advaita sages) is to clear out all false egoic-identifications. Once free and liberated from these identifications and attachments-aversions, it makes no enlightened sense to fixedly dwell in the vacuous limbo of “mere nothingness,” amorality and impersonality, like so many neo-advaitins do. (Many neo-advaitins appear like a team of "demolition wrecking crew" men who delight in exploding and collapsing all the old beautiful buildings in a neighborhood, and then triumphantly standing atop the pile of rubble.)
Truly enlightened spirituality is transcendence so fully transcendent as to be fully immanent within and involved with a manifest world of distinctions.
2) Similarly, the pseudo-advaitin labors under and suffers a chronic compulsion to always absolutize everything onto an “ultimate” or “final” truth-level of discourse. There’s no appreciation for the Divine manifestation—the Form of the Formless. All relationship is negated, dismissed or de-valued in a manner that verges on or falls completely into de-personalization, a syndrome marked by strong, pathological dissociation and detachment, apathy and loss of empathy. Basic humaneness, warmth and tender loving care vanish in a preference for a cool, robotic demeanor and a slavish adherence to speaking “Absolutish” and always having to sound “profound.”
3) Often needing to go perfectly still and stare and smile (or not smile!) in human interactions with a partner and in other ways go “numb & dumb” (insensitive and silent) in one's relationships with fellow beings, especially fellow human beings. This is the “playing possum” approach to relationships. There's nothing wrong with and actually something very beautiful with being able to silently “gaze at the Beloved” in the form of a dear fellow human being, with a tremendous sense of gratitude and veneration for the Manifest Divine Self. But when one feels the chronic need to go cool or cold on someone and suppress or ignore our warm expression as human beings, this comes close to or falls right into the de-personalization disorder, not honoring the richly meaningful Divine manifestation as the beautifully unique and wonderful person. In the daily-chanted Heart Sūtra, it is clearly seen that “Emptiness is Form, Form is Emptiness, emptiness is not different from form, form is not different from emptiness,” and so on with each of the other aggregates (skandhas) of personality (i.e., not just form/energy, but sensations, perceptions, emotions and volitional impulses, and the cognizing sense of personal consciousness). In other words, the personality-aggregates need not always, chronically be deconstructed via literal stillness-frozenness and "blanking out."
4) The aloof pseudo-advaitin condemns any forms of engaged spirituality (politically aware-active spirituality) as “māyā” (illusion) or “buying into samsāra” (the cycle of cause-effect, death-rebirth). For the pseudo-advaitin, matters of justice and injustice (e.g., economic justice, environmental justice, gender justice, racial justice, political justice, etc.) have no meaning and are simply absurd, not worth bothering about. Of course, this makes a mockery of everything the Buddha and other sages taught about morality, virtue, ethics, and a just society. Engaged spirituality heroes and heroines like Mahātma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Dorothy Day, et al., according to this stunted view of spirituality, were just wasting their time. A woman is being raped or a child is being physically abused on the street? No problem for the pseudo-advaitin. “It’s all just a dream. Nothing’s really happening. Whatever happens is God’s will, the insubstantial play of the One.”
5) A pseudo-advaitin's own misbehavior can be quickly rationalized away in the same glib manner as merely "a dream," "God's will," "Māyā". On this point, the towering sage of nonduality, Ramana Mahārshi (1879-1950), has strongly critiqued this confused mixing of levels and "misplaced advaita" by saying that advaita should NOT be applied to action, in the sense of non-discrimination between proper and improper behavior. Yet one Western neo-advaitin has written, in the type of remark echoed repeatedly by other neo-advaitins: “Once awakening happens, it is seen that there is no such thing as right or wrong.... All concepts of good or bad, karma or debt of any kind are products of an unawakened mind that is locked into time and the maintenance and reinforcement of a sense of father, mother and self.” (Tony Parsons, Open Secret, p. 40) To this we can only reply: Oh really? Then the Buddha, Nāgārjuna, the Chan-Zen-Son masters, Śaṅkara, Ramana Mahārshi, Siddharāmeshvar Mahārāj, Nisargadatta Mahārāj and many, many other great advaitins were all by this neo-advaitin definition quite unenlightened, because all of them taught that, on the conventional level, we must still be able to distinguish between wholesome and unwholesome actions, and be well aware of karmic consequences.
The Buddha, for one, often defined the disbelief in karmic consequences as that dangerous heresy of nihilism (uccheda-ditthi). Much of what is taught by neo-advaita is clearly a form of the nihilist heresy, as defined by the Buddha.
6) One of the most characteristic marks of pseudo-advaita is the premature demanding that people “call off the search”
7) Neo- or Pseudo-Advaita condemns or denigrates any form of devotional spirituality as more “māyā” or “dualism.” This, despite the fact that the most towering figures of Advaita nonduality in India, from Śaṅkara to Jñāneshvar to Utpaladeva to Rāmakrishna, Ramana Mahārshi, Swāmī Gñānānanda, Pāpā Rāmdās, Siddharāmeshvar, Nisargadatta and others, all featured a strongly devotional side—albeit a nondual devotion (abheda bhakti, "devotion without difference," or parabhakti, "transcendent devotion"). In truly mature and full Self-realization, a spontaneous love flows nondually in/by/from the transcendent Self for the Self immanent within all persons, human, celestial and divine. There can blossom a blissful zest and "nondual heartfelt gratitude" spontaneously expressed over the fact that the One is somehow Many, and the Many are really this One, i.e., that Emptiness is Form, and Form is Emptiness.
8) Along this line, much of neo-advaita presents itself as an attack on the mind, an attempt to stop the mind in its tracks and destroy it forever. Nothing wrong with the "no mind" or "mindlessness" state from time to time, especially when a person is addicted to mental contents. It's also well-known to Buddhist "mindfulness" meditators that one can very easily "drop" below the mind and its concepts-perceptions-reactions by simply paying exquisite attention to sensations and energies (the first two khandhas or skandhas of the five levels of embodied personhood). But the notion that a sage no longer has any kind of functioning mind at all and just spends the rest of his or her days in some kind of a tranced-out zombie state is ridiculous. Ramana Mahārshi, we have already noted, made great and beautiful use of the mind, utilizing it as an instrument for editing and translating texts, monitoring correspondence, resolving the doubts and clarifying the confusions of his interlocutors, inquiring into their well-being, preparing food and managing the kitchen work, and so forth. A really interesting Zen-like kōan-riddle for neo-advaitins is this: Ramana Mahārshi was observed on almost a daily basis to carefully read the newspaper. If there was "no world" and "no need for the mind" for anything, what was this daily newspaper-browsing all about? The old-timers i've talked to insist that Ramana was not just "looking at the pictures," nor using the newspaper as some kind of a "cloak" or "cover" merely to go into interdimensional states or avoid any visitors assembled in the old hall. He was genuinely interested in the well-being of people, animals, and society. The newspaper (along with the radio, to which he often listened) was a conventional way for him to access information about sentient beings at other places.
Let us here further consider how too many neo-advaitins in their anti-intellectual bent put down all book-reading as a waste of time being stuck at the mere "mental" level. And yet, in a quite unintended but hilarious stroke of irony, we are encouraged by many of these same neo-advaitins or by their disciples and publicity persons to buy all the books (and CDs and DVDs) of their Great Teacher's teachings. We are to ignore classic gems of spiritual instruction like Śaṅkara's Upadesha Sāhasrī and the Yoga Vāsishtha, but by all means we should hasten to buy the dumbed-down, distorted pile of deconstructivism from the latest "fully enlightened" neo-advaitin.
9) So much of neo-advaita, as revealed by many quotes from its main proponents, can be seen as a stunted form of spiritual development in only emphasizing the deconstructive via negativa or "negating way." Yet, first there are mountains and rivers. Then there are no mountains, no rivers. Then there are mountains and rivers.” The second stage refers to the utter dropping or relaxing of all sense of self or world. Mystics with an aptitude for it can in this stage easily merge in formless trance states (nirvikalpa samādhi, etc.), thereby literally blanking out any perceptible inner or outer world of phenomena. The third stage in this Zen model refers to the “intrinsic/natural oneness” of sahaja samādhi wherein the sage lovingly honors and responsibly interacts with a world of beings, promoting their wellbeing.
In its presentation of spiritual teaching, neo-advaita stumbles badly here, falling into the “dark cavern” of second-stage “no mountains, no rivers.” Indeed, it is actually an even stranger state of nihilism that neo-advaita falls into—i.e., denying the relative reality and meaningfulness of “persons”; denying any Divine purpose or plan to life; denying the validity of any and all phenomena, including moral distinctions between help and harm, virtuous morality and selfish sinfulness, ego-free behavior and egocentric behavior.
In this way, neo-advaita nihilistically stays stuck in a strange “no man’s zone” which at best can only be considered an intermediate, deconstructive level of spiritual development. The only “purpose” for the “No-thingness” teachings of this intermediate level (as originally presented by the true advaita sages) is to clear out all false egoic-identifications. Once free and liberated from these identifications and attachments-aversions, it makes no enlightened sense to fixedly dwell in the vacuous limbo of “mere nothingness,” amorality and impersonality, like so many neo-advaitins do. (Many neo-advaitins appear like a team of "demolition wrecking crew" men who delight in exploding and collapsing all the old beautiful buildings in a neighborhood, and then triumphantly standing atop the pile of rubble.)
Truly enlightened spirituality is transcendence so fully transcendent as to be fully immanent within and involved with a manifest world of distinctions.