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translations, and increased scholarly specialization".{{sfn|Gleig|2011|p=6}} Nevertheless, those Asian religions which fit into a perennial scheme, such as "Mahayana Buddhism, translations, and increased scholarly specialization".{{sfn|Gleig|2011|p=6}} Nevertheless, those Asian religions which fit into a perennial scheme, such as "Mahayana Buddhism,
Vajrayana Buddhism, Hindu tantric traditions , Advaita Vedanta and Theravada maps of awakening"{{sfn|Gleig|2011|p=6-7}} are still favoured in the west.{{sfn|Gleig|2011|p=6-7}} Vajrayana Buddhism, Hindu tantric traditions , Advaita Vedanta and Theravada maps of awakening"{{sfn|Gleig|2011|p=6-7}} are still favoured in the west.{{sfn|Gleig|2011|p=6-7}}

===The Neo Advaita Trap===
Even though most western teachers do not view their teaching in these terms, the Neo Advaita approach, infuses students with a false sense of awakening based on either a deep experience or experiences of recognizing the limitless nature of the what is known as the Self. These experiences effectively put students in a 'comfortable mental zone' or even a blissful state of consciousness based on what is described as the 'phantom me' or egoic mind. This unwittingly causes students to perceive these experiences as true liberation, when in actually, it is only the reflective consciousness of the mind that leaves ego, even though it might be subtle or ''phantom ego'', in charge. A perfect metaphor for this phenomenon is the idea of putting a fox in charge of a hen house or a thief in charge of a bank.<ref>The Mountain Path (2004) </ref> In the deepest sense, only through the endless application of Self-inquiry combined with the support of Silence and the Vedic practices can one realize absolute consciousness or true Self-realization as described in detail by Ramana Maharshi.<ref>Self-inquiry edited by </ref>

The Neo Advaita approach effectively relegates Self-inquiry to an idea that negates the necessity of its repeated application in combination with the grace of true devotion to the limitless nature of the absolute consciousness of the Heart recognized as the inner teacher or Self instead of the form or personality of the physical or outer teacher, guru, or ]. In effect, this form of Self-inquiry, embraces a psychotherapeutic model of inquiry, which does have tremendous value in breaking free of conditioned patterns of behavior and appeals to a wider western audience, but it also can lead to the continuation of suffering in both subtle and gross terms. In many cases Neo Advaita teaching provides a deep introduction to Ramana; however, if the desire is for true liberation from the egoic mind, the actual work of Self-inquiry is required. The consistency of the repeated use of Self-inquiry, creates an inexplicable energetic transference of the Self or unlimited consciousness as well as the essential annihilation of the sense or feeling of separation based on the egoic identity. This complete annihilation of the sense of 'I' or ''phantom ego'' is the essence of true liberation.<ref>The Mountain Path (2004) </ref>

Recognizing the trap of Neo Advaita, Kosi has made every effort to insure that the purest teaching of Sri Bhagavan Ramana Maharshi is maintained and presented in the appropriate context. She also recognizes the value of the ancient Vedic texts and practices that have been utilized for centuries as essential support for true awakening.<ref>Back to the Truth - 5000 Years of Advaita by Dennis Waite ISBN 978-1-84694761-1</ref>


===Lack of preparation and practice=== ===Lack of preparation and practice===

Revision as of 23:58, 16 November 2012

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Hindu philosophy

Neo-Advaita is a philosophical concept developed in the 1930s to describe a spiritual movement of people seeking liberation/release by self-enquiry, and recognizing the non-existence of the "I".

The basis for Neo-Advaita is Advaita Vedanta, which originated in India before 788 AD. Advaita Vedanta relies on long preparation and training, usually under the guidance of a guru. It involves efforts such as knowledge of scriptures, renunciation of worldy activities, and inducement of direct identity experiences. In opposition to this, Neo-Advaita primarily focuses on experience inducement.

Although this has contributed to the popularizing western interest in Neo-Advaita since the 1970s, the omission of traditional Advaita Vedanta preparatory practices in favor of insight alone has brought criticism as to whether the Neo-Advaita trained mind in fact is prepared for the insight into non-duality, and whether enlightenment-experience induced by Neo-Advaita is superficial.

History

See also: Ramana Maharshi and Self-enquiry

Advaita Vedanta can be dated back prior to the common era. It's greatest proponent was Adi Shankara, who established the system as it is known nowadays. It's greatest modern proponent was Ramana Maharshi, well—known for emphasizing the enquiry of the question "Who am I?" as a means to attain awakening.

The intellectual root of neo-Advaita lies in the reform and emancipation-movements from leading Hindus such as Radakrishnan, Vivekenanda and sri Aurobindo. Their approach, which In the 19th century Hinduism took on a new self-consciousness, in reaction to but also under influence of the British rule.

Vivekenanda saw all religions as paths leading to the same goal. This appoach presents ultimate reality in a substantialist way. This essentialist approach resembles the perennial philosophy, but has also been opposed. For example, it contradicts the Buddhist doctrine of sunyata.

The spiritual root of neo-Advaita is Ramana Maharshi:

These groups constitute a growing segment of North America’s liberal spirituality subculture and bear witness to the transposability of the Maharshi’s teachings and the portability of his method of self-inquiry into non-Indian cultural spaces.

Already in the 1930s Ramana Maharshi's teachings were brought to the west by Paul Brunton in his A Search in Secret India. Stimulated by Arthur Osborne, in the 1960s Bhagawat Singh actively strted to spread Ramana Maharshi's teachings in the USA.

Since the 1970s western interest in Asian religions has seen a rapid growth. Ramana Maharshi's teachings have been further popularized in the west via his student Poonja, and his own students:

In North America alone, at least seventy-seven different teachers and organizations acknowledge or claim the influence of the Maharshi, or of prominent followers such as H.W.L.Poonja (a.k.a.Papaji,1913–1997). Many of these teachers fall into the category of Neo-Advaita, a term not always complimentary from a traditional Advaita perspective.

Poonja had been critizised for too easily authorising students to teach:

One of the tragedies of Poonjaji's teaching ministry is that he either told, inferred, or allowed hundreds of individuals to believe they were fully enlightened simply because they'd had one, or many, powerful experiences of awakening. These "enlightened" teachers then proceeded to enlighten their own students in a similar way, and thus was born what is known as the "neo-Advaita", or "satsang" movement in western culture.

Neo-Advaita has become an important constituent of popular western spirituality:

...a Neo-Advaitin subculture stretching from British Columbia to Nova Scotia, from California to North Carolina, from Australia to New Zealand, and from Western Europe to South Asia.These seekers can listen to a diverse cohort of Neo-Advaitin and Advaitin teachers at seminars, workshops,retreats and satsangs on five continents.

It is being spread by websites and publishing enterprises, which give an easy access to its teachings.

Western discourses

See also: New Age, Perennial philosophy, and Orientalism

Neo-Advaita uses western discourses, such as "New Age millennialism, Zen, self-empowerment and self-therapy" to transmit it's teachings. It makes little use of the "traditional language or cultural frames of Advaita Vedanta".

The western approach to "Asian enlightenment traditions" ...

... is a notoriously eclectic and messy affair. The individual actors and communities involved in the dialogue have often practiced or still practice in more than one Asian or Asian-inspired tradition and borrow from numerous Western discourses such as psychology, science, and politics.

Neo-Advaita is framed in a western construction of experiential and perennial mysticism, "to the disregard of its social, ethical and political aspects":

This modern experiential and perennialist mystical framework has been hugely influential in the presentation of Asian religions in the West. It can be found in Neo-Vedanta, particularly in the works of Sarvepalli Radhakrishna and Swami Vivekananda, and is present in D.T. Suzuki's popular decontextualized and experiential account of Zen Buddhism. The notion of a philosophia perennis is also a major theme in the works of the Theosophical Society and undergirds much of the New Age appropriation of Eastern religions within contemporary western culture. Particularly influential are Aldous Huxley's The Perennial Philosophy, which champions Advaita Vedanta and Mahayana Buddhism, and his The Doors of Perception, which compares his experiences on mescaline to Hindu and Buddhist soteriological goals. The perennial philosophy also reappears and is widely disseminated in psychological form in transpersonal psychology with the work of popular thinkers such as Ken Wilber.

Gregg Lahood also mentions Neo-Advaita as an ingredient of "cosmological hybridization, a process in which spiritual paradises are bound together", of which New Age, transpersonal psychology and the works of Ken Wilber are examples:

ranspersonalism’s search for a presumed inner truth may well be the skeletal structure around which the New Age has clothed itself—with a hybrid paradise.
Central to this project was a series of strange marriages, amalgamations, juxtapositions, and cultural borrowings largely between the mysticism of the East and the psychology of West—between America and Asia. These included, the American Transcendentalists’ embrace of the Vedas Aldous Huxley with Vedanta, Allan Watts with the Tao, Zen, Advaita Vedanta This long cultural procession of religious blending is the fertile cultural mélange out of which Ken Wilber’s influential ladder of consciousness grew: a hybrid cosmos of Neo-Platonism and Neo-Advaita Vedanta (which as will be shown is also the backbone of the New Age movement).

Brown and Leledaki place this "hybridization" in a "structurationist or post-dualist theoretical view of the social world", pointing out that this is an "invented tradition", which claim a continuity with a "historic past", where...

...the continuity with is largely facticious. In short, they are responses to novel situations which take the form of reference to old situations, or which establish their own past by quasiobligatory repetition.(Hobsbawm, 1983, quoted in

Brown and Leledaki see these newly emerging traditions as part of western Orientalism, the fascination of western cultures with eastern cultures, but also the reduction of "Asian societies, its people, practices and cultures to essentialist images of the 'other'". Brown and Leledaki also note that this Orientalism is not a one-way affair:

here has been a dynamic interaction between Asian and Western representatives of various religious traditions over the last 150 years. These interactions do illustrate that sufficient numbers of cultural exchanges have taken place both formally and informally for us to suspect that cultural blending of thought and practice is embedded (to various degrees) in the invented traditions emerging from modernities in both East and West.

The "Ramana effect"

See also: Ramana Maharshi

Lucas has called the popularisation of Advaita Vedanta in the west "the Ramana effect". According to Lucas, following Thomas Csordas, the succes of this movement is due to "portable practice" and "transposable message":

Ramana Maharshi's main practice, self-inquiry via the question "Who am I?", is easily practiceable in a non-institutionalized context:

Although the Maharshi was inscribed in a Vedantic culture/tradition, he did not require seekers to adopt it in order to practice self-inquiry. He also did not demand commitment to an institution or ideology, but only to the practice itself. Neo-Advaitin teachers in North America use variations on this basic practice, and present it without its traditional Advaitic framing.

Ramana's teachings are also transposable:

The Maharshi made no demands that seekers leave behind their primary religious affiliations and often quoted Jewish and Christian scriptures to Westerners. By deemphasizing specifically Advaitic elements (i.e.,traditional language, philosophy and theology) of their teaching and repackaging them within the psychologized thought-world of contemporary North Americans, Neo-Advaitin teachers are able to transform Maharshi’s Advaitin teaching into a species of self-help accessible to a sizable number of adherents.

Criticism

Since the 1970s, besides the growing interest and participation of a lay audience in Asian religions, there has also been a growing awareness of differences between Asian religions, due to "unprecedented access to a plurality of Asian religious communities, the growth of departments of religious and comparative studies, significant improvements in translations, and increased scholarly specialization". Nevertheless, those Asian religions which fit into a perennial scheme, such as "Mahayana Buddhism, Vajrayana Buddhism, Hindu tantric traditions , Advaita Vedanta and Theravada maps of awakening" are still favoured in the west.

The Neo Advaita Trap

Even though most western teachers do not view their teaching in these terms, the Neo Advaita approach, infuses students with a false sense of awakening based on either a deep experience or experiences of recognizing the limitless nature of the what is known as the Self. These experiences effectively put students in a 'comfortable mental zone' or even a blissful state of consciousness based on what is described as the 'phantom me' or egoic mind. This unwittingly causes students to perceive these experiences as true liberation, when in actually, it is only the reflective consciousness of the mind that leaves ego, even though it might be subtle or phantom ego, in charge. A perfect metaphor for this phenomenon is the idea of putting a fox in charge of a hen house or a thief in charge of a bank. In the deepest sense, only through the endless application of Self-inquiry combined with the support of Silence and the Vedic practices can one realize absolute consciousness or true Self-realization as described in detail by Ramana Maharshi.

The Neo Advaita approach effectively relegates Self-inquiry to an idea that negates the necessity of its repeated application in combination with the grace of true devotion to the limitless nature of the absolute consciousness of the Heart recognized as the inner teacher or Self instead of the form or personality of the physical or outer teacher, guru, or Satguru. In effect, this form of Self-inquiry, embraces a psychotherapeutic model of inquiry, which does have tremendous value in breaking free of conditioned patterns of behavior and appeals to a wider western audience, but it also can lead to the continuation of suffering in both subtle and gross terms. In many cases Neo Advaita teaching provides a deep introduction to Ramana; however, if the desire is for true liberation from the egoic mind, the actual work of Self-inquiry is required. The consistency of the repeated use of Self-inquiry, creates an inexplicable energetic transference of the Self or unlimited consciousness as well as the essential annihilation of the sense or feeling of separation based on the egoic identity. This complete annihilation of the sense of 'I' or phantom ego is the essence of true liberation.

Recognizing the trap of Neo Advaita, Kosi has made every effort to insure that the purest teaching of Sri Bhagavan Ramana Maharshi is maintained and presented in the appropriate context. She also recognizes the value of the ancient Vedic texts and practices that have been utilized for centuries as essential support for true awakening.

Lack of preparation and practice

The neo-Advaita movement has been severely criticized, for its emphasis on insight alone, omitting the preparatory practices.

Traditional Advaita Vedanta...

nvolves decades of study and practice under the guidance of a qualified teacher and has little to do with the "enlightenment" that is proclaimed in much of the present-day neo-Advaita movement.

This study and practice is necessary to prepare the mind for the insight into non-duality:

Traditional Vedanta completely insists that a person be discriminating, dispassionate, calm of mind, and endowed with a ‘burning’ desire for liberation along with other secondary qualifications like devotion, faith, perseverance and so on. In other words it requires a mature adult with a one-pointed desire to know the Self.

The enlightenment-experiences induced by these teachers and their satsangs are considered to be superficial:

To assume that such temporary experiences of perceiving emptiness and enlightenment are the end of the path is a grave error.

Advaita practice

See also: Jnana Yoga

Indian philosophy emphasizes that "every acceptable philosophy should aid man in realizing the Purusarthas, the chief aims of human life:

  • Dharma: the right way to life, the "duties and obligations of the individual toward himself and the society as well as those of the society toward the individual";
  • Artha: the means to support and sustain one's life;
  • Kāma: pleasure and enjoyment;
  • Mokṣa: liberation, release.

According to Puligandla:

Any philosophy worthy of its title should not be a mere intellectual exercise but should have practical application in enabling man to live an enlightened life. A philosophy which makes no difference tot eh quality and style of our life is no philosophy, but an empty intellectual construction.

Advaita Vedanta gives an elaborate path to attain moksha. It entails more than self-inquiry or bare insight into one's real nature. Practice, especially Jnana Yoga, is needed to "destroy one’s tendencies (vAasanA-s)" before real insight can be attained. Classical Advaita Vedanta uses the "fourfold discipline" (sādhana-catustaya) to train students and attain moksha. It consitsts of four stages:

  • Samanyasa, cultivating oneself the following qualities:
    • Viveka, the capacity to discern between the real and the unreal;
    • Viaragya, dipassion, detachment, indifference to pleasure and pain under all circumstances;
    • Shad-sampat, the six virtues:
      • Sama, tranquility or control of mind, calmess;
      • Dama, control of the senses;
      • Uparati, renunciation of worldy activities;
      • Titiksha, endurance of changing and opposite circumstances;
      • Shradda, faith in the guru, the atman and the scriptures;
      • Samadhana, concentration of the mind.
    • Mumukshutva, intense longing for liberation.
  • Sravana, listening to the teachings of the sages on the Upanishads and Advaita Vedanta, and studying the Vedas and Vedantic texts, such as the Brahma Sutras, Bhagavad Gita, Ramayana and Mahabharata. In this stage the student learns about the reality of Brahman and it's relationship with atman;
  • Manana, the stage of reflection on the teachings;
  • Dhyana, the stage of meditation on the truth "that art Thou".

See also

Notes

  1. See also Sharf's "Buddhist Modernism and the Rhetoric of Meditative Experience".
  2. See also the influence of the Theosophical Society on Theravada Buddhism and the Vipassana movement, and the influence of the Theosophical Society and western modernism on Buddhist modernism, especially D. T. Suzuki.
  3. Lucas: ... serious critiques leveled at Neo-Advaitins by more traditional Advaitins in India and North America. Disputes over the authenticity of a transposed tradition are a commonplace in the history of missionization and the spread of traditions across cultures.

References

Book-references

  1. Marek 2008, p. 10, note 6.
  2. Jacobs 204, p. 82. sfn error: no target: CITEREFJacobs204 (help)
  3. ^ Lucas 2011, p. 96. sfn error: multiple targets (2×): CITEREFLucas2011 (help)
  4. ^ Smart 2009, p. 268. sfn error: no target: CITEREFSmart2009 (help)
  5. lucas 2011, p. 93. sfn error: no target: CITEREFlucas2011 (help)
  6. ^ Lucas 2011, p. 99. sfn error: multiple targets (2×): CITEREFLucas2011 (help)
  7. Swartz 2008, p. 306-307.
  8. lucas 2011, p. 94. sfn error: no target: CITEREFlucas2011 (help)
  9. Caplan 2009, p. 16-17.
  10. ^ Lucas 2011, p. 109. sfn error: multiple targets (2×): CITEREFLucas2011 (help)
  11. Lucas 2011, p. 108-109. sfn error: multiple targets (2×): CITEREFLucas2011 (help)
  12. ^ Gleig 2011, p. 9.
  13. ^ Gleig 2011, p. 5.
  14. Gleig 2011, p. 5-6.
  15. Sharf & 1995-B. sfn error: no target: CITEREFSharf1995-B (help)
  16. Lahood 2010, p. 31.
  17. ^ Lahood 2010, p. 33.
  18. Brown 2010, p. 127.
  19. Brown 201, p. 127. sfn error: no target: CITEREFBrown201 (help)
  20. brown 2010, p. 129. sfn error: no target: CITEREFbrown2010 (help)
  21. Brown 2010, p. 131.
  22. Gombrich 1996.
  23. McMahan 2008.
  24. Lucas 2011, p. 97. sfn error: multiple targets (2×): CITEREFLucas2011 (help)
  25. Gleig 2011, p. 6.
  26. ^ Gleig 2011, p. 6-7.
  27. The Mountain Path (2004) page 84
  28. Self-inquiry edited by DR T. M. P. MAHADEVAN, M.A., Ph.D
  29. The Mountain Path (2004) page 84-85
  30. Back to the Truth - 5000 Years of Advaita by Dennis Waite ISBN 978-1-84694761-1
  31. ^ Lucas 2011, p. 110. sfn error: multiple targets (2×): CITEREFLucas2011 (help)
  32. ^ Caplan 2009, p. 17.
  33. Puligandla 1997, p. 8-9.
  34. Puligandla 1997, p. 8.
  35. Puligandla 1997, p. 11.
  36. puligandla 1997, p. 253. sfn error: no target: CITEREFpuligandla1997 (help)
  37. ^ puligandla 1997, p. 251-254. sfn error: no target: CITEREFpuligandla1997 (help)

Web-references

  1. Timothy Conway, Neo-Advaita or Pseudo-Advaita and Real Advaita-Nonduality
  2. ^ James Swartz, What is Neo-Advaita?
  3. Advaita Yoga Ashrama, Jnana Yoga. Introduction

Sources

Further reading

External links

Background

Teachers

Category: