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. Timothy Conway
“Neo-Advaita has reduced thousands of years of Advaita teachings into the spiritual equivalent of McDonald’s junk food. No longer is it necessary for the spiritual student to engage in inner work on oneself. Now all that is necessary to ‘realize the Self’ is a constant repetitive denial of one’s own identity and the (pseudo) ‘understanding’ that the ego and all else that happens in the universe is ‘simply an illusion. Essential Value is seen on the same level as identity: as being non-existent.” Everything ‘just happens, there is no path, no cause’, there is “nobody here at all” “there is no free will” and consequently there is absolutely nothing to do and no one to do it."
I am one among many survivors of radically self-negating non-dualisms, who "while initially finding their free-floating, infinitely empty, de-personalized perception as profound, eventually came to find it gnawingly devoid, numbly disconnected, and alienating." 10 years ago, I went diehard with Neo-Advaita, finding heaven and then hell in losing myself inside of myself, and I've spent the last 4 years untangling myself from its' nihilistic, de-realizing lens and radical ego dissolution path that left me in the most desolate state of annihilation, trying to piece back together my mangled sense of inner and outer reality. It's been a profound ordeal coming down from the mountaintop I was stranded on and coming to terms with all that I'd sacrificed and repressed for that lofty transcendent view. I was like a bird trapped in the sky because it could not land. Like others, I was ravaged for years by harrowing depersonalization, disorientation and immense grief over this deal with the devil I'd made, tormented by impossible choices and questions. There were times when I truly wasn't sure if I was alive or had died, but I was driven by my soul's instinct to live this human life fully, embodying my own flesh, free to enjoy and meaningfully participate in the precious world of form and relationships. It is my soul's calling to begin creating what I wish I'd found sooner - a space where other souls can help breathe one another back to life, in a collective soul revival, moving away from a path that belittles separateness to one that can only unify us through our diversity. We can stop looking through form to see its true nature, because we're looking right at form's true nature as formlessness enformed.
For me and many others, engaging with Neo-Advaita's promise of liberation through self-annihilation, eventually proves to be a deal with the devil - for all the serenity we gain, an equally precious sacrifice was made, and all things considered, the price is seen as too high to have been paid. Many end up wishing they could trade in their detached, de-personalized tranquility for the lost option to live a fully human life. This is after the unexpected sour twist of boundlessness becoming its own kind of prison, and of becoming locked out of our own inter-personal lives, robbed of our very ability to fully engage.
There's a dark irony in which "... lacking their "soul", the element they gave up as payment, the gift ultimately becomes worthless."
There's a dark irony in which "... lacking their "soul", the element they gave up as payment, the gift ultimately becomes worthless."
Reaching this point, we are deeply disillusioned by the limitations of the kind of freedom delivered by self-effacement and reducing all of reality to an illusion.
From where I stand, of the top 3 desires/promises made to those drawn to these teachings, only one of them is fulfilled:
It doesn't deliver #1, and it even creates new forms of suffering. lt doesn't follow through on #2, leading only to partial truth at best. #3 will come true and its' long-term value depends entirely on what you do with it.
From where I stand, of the top 3 desires/promises made to those drawn to these teachings, only one of them is fulfilled:
- The final end of suffering
- Knowing ultimate truth
- A radical, astounding shift in perception
It doesn't deliver #1, and it even creates new forms of suffering. lt doesn't follow through on #2, leading only to partial truth at best. #3 will come true and its' long-term value depends entirely on what you do with it.
10 Less-than-wholesome Aspects of Neo (Pseudo) Advaita by Timothy Conway
Beyond Essence: A New Path to Awakening - Essay by Jason Shulman
Recovering from Neo-Advaita - An extremely informative Youtube Channel
The Healthy Ego is Beautiful / Patriarchal Spirituality - short piece by Jeff Brown
When Non-dual Teachings Are Not Non-dual Chapter from Spiritual Bypassing by Robert Augustus Masters
Encounters with the Absolute - Have you pooped today? - Jason Shulman excerpt
The Numinous Narcotic that Nearly Destroyed My Life - Tom Huston
A Constructive Critique of Non-dual Spiritual Teachings Chapter from The Presence of the Infinite by Steve Mcintosh
Self-ishly Losing Oneself Chapter from What's it All About? Philosophy and the Meaning of Life by Julian Baggini
Re-visioning the idealized view of how spiritual beings deal with painful emotions - Excerpt from a Jason Shulman gathering
Beyond Essence: A New Path to Awakening - Essay by Jason Shulman
Recovering from Neo-Advaita - An extremely informative Youtube Channel
The Healthy Ego is Beautiful / Patriarchal Spirituality - short piece by Jeff Brown
When Non-dual Teachings Are Not Non-dual Chapter from Spiritual Bypassing by Robert Augustus Masters
Encounters with the Absolute - Have you pooped today? - Jason Shulman excerpt
The Numinous Narcotic that Nearly Destroyed My Life - Tom Huston
A Constructive Critique of Non-dual Spiritual Teachings Chapter from The Presence of the Infinite by Steve Mcintosh
Self-ishly Losing Oneself Chapter from What's it All About? Philosophy and the Meaning of Life by Julian Baggini
Re-visioning the idealized view of how spiritual beings deal with painful emotions - Excerpt from a Jason Shulman gathering
"We arrived at the escape of an illusory non-existent soul from an illusory non-existent bondage in an illusory non-existent world as the supreme good which that non-existent soul has to pursue!" - Aurobindo
A self-effacing nondualist (I was one of them) will say that "yourself" is just an illusion, but I've come to see that the real illusion is that the ego is merely an illusion. For me, psycho-spiritual growth based on oneness is not about knocking our egos further unconscious, but becoming conscious egos, that is, knowing that what we are is so much more than ego, and that the ego is an integral part of the greater whole of what a human is, which is why we cannot be whole humans, without our egos fully intact!
We can even come to see each individual, personal self as the universe/god incarnate, here to express itself and experience ever-deepening intimacy with itself. This is the nonduality of divine immanence - man's divinity is god's humanity, or transimmanence - the transcendent, the spiritual is the material and vice versa. That they exist in isolation from each other, is yet another illusion, for they, like all polarities, only exist together.
The healing ego becomes a key to our wholeness, the less healed, the more it rejects of itself and the longer we'll experience a hole in wholeness. Oneness is not reached by excluding until there is nothing left, but including, including, including until there is nothing left out.
We can even come to see each individual, personal self as the universe/god incarnate, here to express itself and experience ever-deepening intimacy with itself. This is the nonduality of divine immanence - man's divinity is god's humanity, or transimmanence - the transcendent, the spiritual is the material and vice versa. That they exist in isolation from each other, is yet another illusion, for they, like all polarities, only exist together.
The healing ego becomes a key to our wholeness, the less healed, the more it rejects of itself and the longer we'll experience a hole in wholeness. Oneness is not reached by excluding until there is nothing left, but including, including, including until there is nothing left out.
A 2 min. nutshell
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