Hi Ramji,
I haven’t reached out to you before but will catch you in Bali next month. My wife and I will be making it there from Australia for the retreat. Must say I read through a few of the reddit comments to folks there and kudos to your patience!
Would be good to hear your observations sometime on where the traps are that people are falling into. It’s very hard I’ve learnt with neo-advaita half -truths, to find the full truth without a systematic process of logic. Maybe a way to help is to catalog the common logical wrong-notions and create a post detailing the biggest ones you can link to. Would’ve helped me on the journey earlier I’m sure.
For instance, “The suffering is consciousness and I am consciousness and I’m not a doer so can’t get rid of it” was one that I was stuck in when I took the detour from vedanta and went to neo-advaita for a few years. Ultimately the tree that doesn’t deliver fruits has to be abandoned and I found my way back to Vedanta with double the conviction to not take the shortcut again
James: I look forward to meeting you in Bali. This is a good suggestion because you are absolutely right; the modern non-dual guys are deluded dualists who imagine themselves to be non-dual. They picked one convenient teachingand passed it off as the whole truth, which sounds good to the “have your cake and eat it too” ego but it doesn’t work as you know. Welcome back to a serious, complete teaching.
The traps are legion…indulging endless fears and desires for objects to remove fears and desires for objects!…but they all boil down to one big trap…the zero-sum setup into which we are born. Once you get zero-sum you become qualified for freedom from the person who has fears and desires and are willing to develop the secondary qualifications that make inquiry a great pleasure.
S: For instance, “The suffering is consciousness and I am consciousness and I’m not a doer so can’t get rid of it” was one that I was stuck in when I took the detour from Vedanta and went to neo-advaita for a few years. Ultimately the tree that doesn’t deliver fruits has to be abandoned and I found my way back to Vedanta with double the conviction to not take the shortcut again “
James: Well, it takes what it takes to learn what one needs to learn. This laughable bit of Neo-Advaita non-sense is new to me but not surprising. Just for fun I’ll break down the fallacies.
Consciousness doesn’t have equipment…a body-mind-sense complex…that is capable of action and/or suffering. If we take Maya (ignorance of the fact that I am whole and complete unborn consciousness and that my nature is bliss) into account, then consciousness apparently acquires the capacity to suffer. But apparent suffering is as good as no suffering since consciousness is unassociated with anything, not to mention that the word apparent itself means unreal. This is so because reality is non-dual, which means there is nothing other than myself with which to associate. If there were even the slightest association, then what happens to the equipment would rub off on consciousness and I existence shining as consciousness would be subject to change, which is suffering. If consciousness jumped out of its “hermetically sealed bubble” and affected its equipment, the equipment would be transformed by consciousness into consciousness, which is absurd for various reasons, the most obvious of which is that something which is unreal can’t be transformed and if it could, it could it could only be transformed into another unreal something. God bless the poor Neos. They must be here to drive mature thinking people to Vedanta! I have one friend who spent 8 years trying to figure out Tony Parsons! Imagine that.
Vedanta requires faith in inference, which is a valid means of knowledge. The teachings expose the unexamined logic of one’s own experience, which is all that is required to remove the ignorance that apparently hides the fact that I am the bliss that makes bliss blissful.
Love,
Ramji
