On YouTube, I've been watching various non-duality spiritual teachers this last week - seeing them giving talks, answering questions, and being interviewed on Conscious.tv. I find three main illusions being propagated by them all:
1) There's a repeated belief or implication that they have reached the final realisation. They even mention God as if they know God. How can a small human being know anything about God? Both our capacity for perception and our ability to understand are limited. So let's drop the grandiose claims.
2) I hate this talk about everything having to be the way it is so that we would wake up. Really? So torture, gas chambers, rape, and starvation have to be here? Is the Oneness so stupid that it needs to go through all that to see itself? It's a laughable rationalisation. It's the non-duality spiritual belief system inherited from India with its belief in karma and destiny. And the misery obviously doesn't achieve the goal of waking anyone up - nearly everyone goes to their deathbeds deluded. So the claim is complete nonsense. Hope we move past that soon.
3) They keep claiming that liberation is a mystery and will always be so. It's not true. We can sort it out. Why don't these non-separation gurus end their separation from each other by getting together and analysing how it happens and how to teach better? They are too busy being special to lower themselves by joining a group of teachers. To afraid to admit that they don't know and could do better. Anyway, here's a hint: The way to liberation for everybody is through fine-tuning of attention about what's going on inside. That ends the leaking of energy into illusion. The person might not articulate it that way, and they might not even know that that is what happened, but it is what happened in every case. It's not a mystery, so let's cut out the magical-thinking, romanisation, and mystification.
"There's a repeated belief or implication that they have reached the final realisation"
ReplyDeleteThat destroys the entire edifice they stand on indeed.
"I hate this talk about everything having to be the way it is so that we would wake up. Really"
I agree with that point. In most forms of Advaita, especially Neo-Advaita and The Direct Path approach, there is a lot of reluctance to go back to the"dream world "once they "made it?", that is not surrendering it is nihilism. To my opinion, that situation is caused by an excessive attachment to their spiritual strategy more than to the naked flame of what IS which allows everything to happen. Most pseudo-Advaita "teachers?" don't pay any attention to the opening of the heart, hence, they are good at shattering egos but it stops there, in their nothing/everything. I do think that awakening has TANGIBLE applications, one of them is to make the "dream" more comfortable for everyone and everything, and I am planning to spend more time demystifying that point through a couple of articles in a near future.