The Advaita Vedanta /Non-Dualist Approach-An Analysis

Recently, I have been exploring an increasingly popular spiritual approach known as  Non-duality or Advaita Vedanta.  Although the tradition has roots going back millenia, the traditional  modern representatives of this tradition are people like Ramana Maharshi, Nisargadatta and Papaji. More recently still the tradition has been revived by people like Krishnamurti, Eckhart Tolle and Rupert Spira . Eckhart Tolle has been particularly popular writing some bestseller books like “The Power of Now” and being interviewed on the Oprah Show. Other names associated with this movement are Richard Rose, Brad Marshall, Douglas Harding, Fred Davis and my favourite Richard Adams. All of these people, very different in character one from the other, have some genuine spiritual attainment and authentic spiritual experiences. None of them, from the Sufi point of view, look quite right. Mostly this is because they have fallen for the Indian subcontinent distortion which puts too much emphasis on the transcendent and not enough on the right and blessed way of being in the world. But more about this later.

I got interested in this non-dualist approach because they seemed to have a more direct method to Ultimate Reality than most of the schools of mysticism I have been involved in. The Sufi, Buddhist and Christian contemplative ways require long and arduous years of practice and abstinence. Even then, in the majority of  cases, they fail to bring their adherents to the final station. So I wondered if this way might not be a simpler, more direct path. A path called Self-Inquiry.

The name for this Ultimate state varies from path to path. In Hinduism, it is called Samadhi, in Buddhism Nibbanna, in Zen it is Satori and in Sufism we call it fana and baqa.All of the descriptions of this end-point are similar. One gets to a place where the ego is effaced and the Divine luminous truth with Love and Compassion shines through. But for those of you have have made serious efforts in this direction, you know that this is no easy matter. Most of the gurus and masters and Shuyukh who make claims of getting you there most often fail-even if they, themselves, have arrived. So the question becomes: ”Is there a better way?” That is what I have been exploring recently.

Let me backtrack here a bit and explain my own learning process. I like to use the analogy from our Biology 101 course of the one-celled organism called the amoeba. The amoeba sends out a pseudopod to trap a food particle. It then takes the food particle into its body and metabolizes it to become part of itself. That is my own learning model. I explore things and then integrate what seems true and useful and expel the rest. So recently I have been having a feeding frenzy with material from the non-dualists. In that “frenzy” I went through audiotapes, videotapes, articles and books on Ramana Maharshi, Nisargadatta, Papaji, Richard Rose and finally Robert Adams who became my point of reference. The Gretsky or Michael Jordan of the non-dualists lol. I had previously been through much of the material of Krishnamurti who I visited in 1975 and Eckhart Tolle when I read and listened to most of his material several years ago . I should include Byron Katie whose seminars I attended twice a long time ago and can also be considered a non-dualist.

To be clear at this point, I am not only speaking purely intellectually and theoretically on these issues. I have had my own personal experiences of one-ness with the Absolute. Although they never remained for long, they did shape my understanding of Existence. And I still get subtle flashbacks on a fairly regular basis(sometimes in the form of what I call ‘the pristine state’-free of all thoughts and at other times with the feeling that all is right in Existence, something Robert Adams and the non-dualists mention often) although not enough to keep me in a state of permanent satisfaction. So I keep trucking along as they say.

As I explored the subject of Advaita Vedanta ,the field narrowed more and more until I found Robert Adams, a man of undeniable spiritual attainment and unlike many of the others ,a man of unquestionable integrity. So I decided he was the one to learn from. Unfortunately ,he died in the 1990’s so I was left learning from his writngs and his audiotapes and his Association-The Infinity Institute. I am still working with his spiritual practices and will write an update as the results unfold.

What I realized, however, was that there was a systematic, cardinal mistake in the point of view of the non-dualists! Philosophically the way we can frame the mistake is as the confusion between phenomenology(experience) and Ontology(Actual Existence or Existences).We could also describe this as “a Dimensional Confusion”.I will elaborate further  on this issue by taking Robert’s Four Principles and commenting on them(from his major book “Silence of the Heart”).

1)Principle Number One: The realization that everything you see, the universe, people, worms, insects, the mineral kingdom, the vegetable kingdom, your body, your mind, everything that appears, is a manifestation of your mind.” Wrong! Now if, in Reality, you are speaking from the position of God, it could well be argued that all of Creation is a manifestation of His mind. The Quranic and Christian point of view may be more that everything we see is a manifestation of His will.”Kun fayakun” says the Quran. Be and it is . So everything comes from His word which could be said to come from His mind. But it certainly doesn’t come from our minds .So this statement can create a lot of confusion. It is a product of an altered state of Consciousness where one is fused with the Divine mind. Thus it is only true experientially but not so in Reality. I hope the reader is beginning to understand what I mean by “Dimensional Confusion”. In reality (the Buddhists are not going to like this one lol) there is a Creator and a Creation. And actually(this comes from experience, not theory!) the Creator does not dismiss His Creation as non-existent. He loves His Creation! And I have seen that!

2)Principle Number Two: You are not born, you have no life, and you do not die. Clearly wrong! Of course, you are born, you have a life and you die! The One who is not born and does not die is God! That is true. But you are not God except experientially during a mystical state. This problem is not confined to Vedanta. There is an iconic Sufi story of Mansur-al-Hallaj who went around the public squares of Baghdad claiming: ”An Al Haqq”.I am the Realty. He was executed as a heretic and his teacher Junayd al Baghdadi did not dispute the judicial decision. In fact he had warned al-Hallaj not to make these statements publicly because it sowed confusion in the public. Fortunately for the non-dualists of today ,they are not living in a traditional Christian or Islamic or Judaic society or they too would be executed!

3) Principle Number Three: The egolessness of all things; everything has no ego. Tell that to Trump lol. But humour aside, there is only one Absolute Being. But there innumerable individual relative beings. You and I are but two of those!  Btw, I wrote an article that will be published in my upcoming book on “Proofs for the Existence of the Individual Self”. This was written in response to the Buddhist idea of ‘anatta’-no self- but applies equally well to the non-dualists. The followers of Ibn Arabi in Sufism had a similar idea called “wahadat al wujud” the singularity of Existence but this idea was challenged by many scholars and Sufis most notably Ahmad Sirhindi and has never received the same general acceptance in the Islamic community as Advaita Vedanta did in the Hindu world.

4) Principle Number Four: You can only know Absolute Reality by knowing what it is not(net-neti). Maybe… That is certainly one possible way, although many people have been led to Absolute Reality without that step including, ironically, Robert Adamas himself if you study his biography. So that is not necessarily true.

So where does all of this leave us? We first have to realize that we cannot accept the Aqida (articles of Faith or Theology) of Advaita Vedanta at face value. We DO exist, life does exist, problems do exist and perhaps most important of all good and evil do exist and we have to manage our lives accordingly. However the non-dualists may well have one of the best methodologies for experiencing Absolute Truth. We need to explore that further. It is incumbent on us to do so. But we must not throw out the baby (Divine Realization) with the dirty bath-water(wrong conceptions about our worldly life). God and His Mercy be with you. Salaams, Joel Ibrahim Kreps