If you’re feeling all messed-up in life, the only thing to do is to find the most trustworthy person you can and follow them and their advice to you! And don’t let your mind and your doubts OR your friends interfere!
All posts by jebrahim2@gmail.com
Advaita Vedanta/The Non-Dualist Approach-An Analysis
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
Marifat(Knowledge of God)
Marifat(knowledge of God) actually has three sections. 1) Experiential knowledge of God as separate from us.This can only happen outside of bodily consciousness-i.e. in the other world.Otherwise we would be knocked down unconscious as were the people of Moses when they asked to see God.All of the religions have had mystics who had this experience,but the most accessible accounts are those in the n.d.e. literature (near-death experiences).Check it out.
2) Experiential knowledge of God as identical to our innermost self.This has various names (fana,samadhi,satori,Nibbana etc.etc.)and is the central tenet of the Buddhist and Advaita Vedanta traditions and
3) Knowing what God is getting at in the unfoldment of events in the World.The Buddhists and Advaita Vedanta people, so focused on Oneness, don’t have the foggiest idea of this dimension.”Karma’ is a very inadequate,mechanical explanation.They believe that only the stated number 2 function(enlightenment) is important.The Quran and the Bible are very useful tools to understand this dimension.We can see that it requires Revelation- not Enlightenment! Then if we are fortunate enough to have an elevated teacher or if we are given the gift of deep intuition(rare) into this interaction, we may be able to ferret out the details as to what is happening on a moment to moment basis in this world and its interaction with the Creator..It is ALL meaningful!
Learning from the Existentialists-“Bad Faith”
This is a citation from the Existentialists-most particularly Jean-Paul Sartre.As you know,I think we need to learn from everyone and every situation.Muslims, particularly, need to reflect on this phenomenon as it is endemic in our community.It does have a parallel concept in Islam-nifaq(hypocrisy) but that concept has a more specific meaning around those who don’t really believe in the religion.The concept of”bad faith” has a more general application and can apply to believing Muslims and Christians as well.Thus it has a more general applicability.See if you can spot it in or around you.This is a very important matter for Muslims who are more susceptible to social and family pressure than most and often use the terms of the religion -‘adab’, ‘bir walideyn’,avoiding ‘ghiba’ etc. to prevent themselves from being authentic.Think about it.
Bad faith (French: mauvaise foi) is a philosophical concept utilized by existentialist philosophers Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre to describe the phenomenon in which human beings, under pressure from social forces, adopt false values and disown their innate freedom, hence acting inauthentically.[1] It is closely related to the concepts of self-deception and ressentiment.
Dealing With the Other
I am not a great fan of the Existentialists,to be sure.A group of hyper- cerebral atheists is not my cup of tea,so to speak, But one thing Jean-Paul Sartre said has stuck with me through all the years since I read it. “L’enfer,c’est les autres”(Hell is the Others)I am sure you know what he means,if you look honestly at your life.
Now ethically,in all the religions and even amongst secularists we are supposed to “treat our neighbour as ourselves”.But, what if that neighbour,that friend,that family member is a proverbial “pain in the butt”.What if that neighbour continually causes us pain or frustrates and annoys us to the point we can no longer bear it.Repressing and containing our reactions often doesn’t work.We end up either exploding on the other person or avoiding them altogether.”Ghosting” is a new and ugly way of doing just that!What do we do then?That is one of the great arts of living.
Now,theoretically ,we are supposed to show patience and tolerance and compassion.But that can be very difficult at times-read impossible.So are there other methods? I think there are but don’t expect them to work all the time.Two terms that I like to use are “calling people out” and “mixing it up.”Calling them out” implies expressing your observations and your feelings -but in a way that is not assaultive (although the aggression you feel cannot be hidden totally)but that highlights their bad behaviour and your feelings about it.”Mixing it up” implies going back and forth again with a maximum of objectivity and a minimum of rancor until your point is made or at least until you have made your best possible effort to do so.None of this is easy but it is certainly better than being emotionally bullied and building up resentment.
So try it out and tell me how it works for you.Don’t be a victim .Be an intervenor instead.Salaams,Ibrahim
Spirituality vs. Religion-a Modernist Delusion
Religion cannot be separated from spirituality any more than the body can be separated out from worldly experience.All spirituality comes from the bedrock of religion and is intimately tied up with it.Yes,even Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta- both of which are variants and updates of the Hindu religion just like Christianity is a variant and update of Judaism.So all the marketers of the trendy slogan:”Spirituality is good;religion is bad” should seriously re-examine their conclusions.This is another modernist delusion!
The Talibanization of the Muslim Community
The psychoanalysts learnt relatively quickly, in their work with people, that it was more effective to begin their interpretative work by analyzing the defenses rather than go directly to the “Truth ” of the matter.In a way the first part of the Islamic testification of Faith “laillaha ilallah” says something similar(There is no god besides the One True God) So first you denounce the falsehood and then you affirm the truth.
When there is an entire Community, or at least large sections of it, involved in this kind of defensiveness the problem becomes even more complex.This is because a large-scale social consensus then is involved in supporting the falsehood-or at least in promoting an incomplete version of the Truth.This is what I have been coming up against frequently for a long time but particularly in the last couple of years as I try to promote authentic Sufism as the best possible spiritual path and the most noble form of Islam itself.The Community pushes back!
In order to give you some concrete examples of what I am talking about, let me cite the following episodes-all occurring recently in the space of a few weeks.1) I message a Facebook friend to describe an event in the endodentist’s office(read root canal) .Although being one of the most skilled people in this specialty,he was unable to find the root canal for what seemed like a long period of time”i don’t understand it”he said”.Usually, especially after a clear Xray like the one I did on you,I hit it in a few minutes.This one seems to be calcified and very difficult to locate”. I tell my friend that I then made dua to Faqih Muqaddam the saint of lost objects –a practice I was taught in Yemen amongst the Habaib. Less than 30 seconds after the prayer the dentist announced with obvious relief in his voice that he found it.”I cant understand why it was so difficult “he said.God isn’t in his equation obviously lol.
My friend then chastised me” I will never make dua to a saint “she said adamantly.It is shirk to do so.We must only make dua to Allah.Please note that this is not someone who self-identifies as a Salafi or even a Dedobandi.The next day I did a little research and found a fatwa on Seekers Hub by Faraz Rabbani(may Allah raise his rank) that stated that ‘Tawwasul'(the name of this kind of practice) to awliya is permitted in all four madhabs of traditional Islam.I sent the fatwa to my friend and I did not receive any response or acknowledgment.It is quite possible that she doesn’t believe either me or Faraz lol
2) Two young Muslim females ‘freeze’ when we do Dhikr with some simple movements from Chigong added to the ritual.They obviously felt there was something wrong or even haram in doing so.One of my most shariah-strict shuyukh,Sheikh Nuh, had used Chigong himself to recover from a post-hajj respiratory infection that had been resistant to all the standard treatments.He did warn us not to pay attention to the Aqida (beliefs)of Taoism but had no problem with their healing movements.And did the Prophet sal not advise us“Seek Ye wisdom even if you have to go to China.”The only reason the Muslims would go to China nowadays would be on a business venture lol.In all fairness, the wisdom traditions in China have more or less been erased by the rampant materialism there..We could,however, say the same,to a lessor degree,about the Wisdom traditions in Islam including Sufism.So what’s the problem of adding in some health-inducing Chigong movements?!The Buddha did say that”habit-energy” is one of the biggest impediments to Enlightenment .Another potential source of wisdom for the Muslims!
3)I go to visit a Sheikh who claims to have been and still be a disciple of Bawa Muhayyideen, one of my earliest sheikhs.I can feel the ‘Bawa hal'(powerful energy force) coming through him but all he talks about to his audience and in his writings is about Shariah.When I confront him with the fact that his discourse sounds nothing like B awa’s he pridefully responds”Excuse-me!” obviously irritated by my statement.He then goes on to say” You have to adjust the talk to the audience” -a plausible explanation but completely unconvincing.Something else is going on here.You see there was a serious problem with the teachings of Bawa which only looked at the inner process and didn’t seem to be concerned about the outer practices of Islam.A serious problem-ironically the opposite one to the one we are addressing here which is the overemphasis on the external.But the sheikh didn’t seem to want to address that.Instead,he seems to have gone into denial- a common ploy in a state of cognitive dissonance but a mistake nevertheless.
So what is going on here?! Why are the internal processes of the Islamic practice being given so little importance and so much energy is devoted to the outer sciences.Where is the Islam of the Middle Ages when Muslims preserved the science of the Greeks in medicine and philosophy and translated their texts into Arabic thus preserving the knowledge?Where is the Islam of the Ottomans where people of all the nations and religious affiliations were able to use their talents for the futherance of the needs of the people?Where is the Islam of the great Sufis like Jellalludin Rumi and Ibn Arabi and Fariduddin Attar. Mostly gone! Instead, we have narrow-mindedness ,rigidity,obsessive rule-following,”cook-book” religion .I call this process the “Talibanization” of our religion.Follow the rule-book closely and all will be well. Clearly it is not working!
If we go further still, in terms of psychological and sociological analysis,we will see that contemporary Muslims are often more like the Quraysh than like the Sahhabba. Shocking,yes!The Quraysh are the foils for the Muslims-showing them how not to be and yet they have become like them.The Sahhabbas, on the other hand, had to be open-minded people.They adapted a system of thought and behaviour that was radically different from that in which they had been raised.Their lives were turned upside-down both conceptually and concretely and yet they accepted it enthusiastically.Admittedly they had an excellent teacher but that is another matter.Many of their Qurayshi cohorts rejected that same teacher in no uncertain terms as we know from studying the seerat of the Prophet.The Sahhabbas heard the Truth and followed it regardless of the risks involved.Can contemporary Muslims say the same?
Then to continue our historical analogies there was Jesus a.s. and the Pharisees, the believers in the letter of the law but not the spirit..Unlike the Qurash ,they had a proper legal code,a proper shariah.But they misapplied it by losing its life-force. Are contemporary Muslims not somewhat similar to these Jewish Pharisees? Can they hear the Truth beyond the texts as the apostles of Jesus a.s. had to do? Or are they more like the Pharissees who got stuck on a literalist view of the Revelation?
Now the so-called practical people amongst you, unsatisfied by just being conscious of the problem,will ask what to do to change this.Believe me,it is no easy matter.I have been struggling with this issue for decades and the situation seems to be getting worse rather than better!The simple answer is that we need to bring back and support and disseminate the teachings of the authentic uncorrupted Sufis.But as soon as we try doing this we come up against the defenses.”This is shirk”. This is bida.This is kujfr” the opponents will exclaim.Answering their protestations is usually of no avail.The opponents are”deaf,dumb and blind” as the Quran describes unbelievers of all sorts.Another possible venue for development is learning about psychology and Comparative Religion,something I consider vital for my own students.Both of those disciplines point the way to interiority and away from literalism.Both,understood properly, can have salutary effects on the soul Otherwise,if we continue on the same path,a calamity,an Apocalypse, is certainly on the way.Nothing less seems able to shift peoples’ consciousness.In the meantime it is incumbent on us to try. our best to warn people.That is the purpose of this writing.May Allah give us tawfiq in these efforts,Salaams,Joel Ibrahim Kreps
Ok.I get it!
Ok.Ok. I get it! You need to reason with some people! They just don’t get intuition,inner seeing and the Ear of Truth.Pity though?! It’s SO laborious.
The Great Hack
Here we go again! The proverbial dark black pot(the regular media including Netflix which is essentially a Hollywood variant)) calling the electric kettle(Facebook,Twiiter and Instagram ) black lol
Ok. The latest in vogue Netflix production”The Great Hack”. You know what?! Netflix is hacking your brain as are all the regular media,with hyped, mildly paranoid propaganda.Cambridge Analytica and all the data-sharing is manipulative but IT IS NOT THE REAL PROBLEM,by any means! Even Trump and his election are not the real problem .Nor is Google or Facebook or Amazon! There ARE very real and deep problems and they have nothing to do with data-sharing and manipulation.Here are are just a few of them.
1) Our educational system does not teach people how to think.Instead it is a propaganda machine for politically correct ideology and Scientific Materialism
2) People are taught to respect the experts who are just as often wrong as right and often supremely impractical and out of touch
3) Our politicians are in the pockets of the corporations big-time and therefore are no longer acting for the public good.That was true long before Trump!
4) Schools of Business Administration are teaching current and future administrators to put maximum emphasis on efficiency and productivity and profits to the detriment of everyone else including their clients and their employees who are increasingly stressed out.
5) People are educated to use their reason but not to develop their inner sight,their ear of Truth and their subtle heart.This despite decades of Research trying to highlight the importance of Emotional Intelligence.Still not operationalized in any official educational system I know of and
5) Doubt and Cynicism as well as the accompanying relativism and atheism and agnosticism are endemic in our societies so that morality has been severely compromised in much of the modern world.
The list goes on and on You will notice that none of this has anything to do with data-sharing.in fact if anything,data-sharing is a consequence of this lack of values rather than its cause..
“Fake Spiritual News”
This world is NOT an illusion as the Advaita Vedanta people and the Buddhists would like us to believe.It is a concrete reality! The illusion is that obtaining things we wish for, like academic degrees and money and status and partners will bring us complete and lasting satisfaction.That is the illusion.That is our mind lying to us!The Buddhists are proud of their eight-fold path ,one of the folds being”Right Thinking”. Well,the idea that this world is simply a creation of our deluded mind is “wrong thinking”.I believe that wrong thinking contributes significantly to human suffering as it leads to misunderstanding of the meaning of the joys and sorrows of this world So we have “fake political news”(courtesy of Trump),fake medical news(courtesy of our narrow-minded medical scientific establishment) and now we have “fake spiritual news” courtesy of Mother India lol