Inquirer: I was hesitant to write to you, partly because I assume you are very busy, partly because I do not know if or how you can help me. Please know that I genuinely do not expect an answer. I completely understand if you are too busy and just the act of writing and putting my thoughts on paper helps me.
Suffering
There is a sense of despair – being 47 years, being one of the seekers who ‘seek not to find’ and I have sought (almost) everywhere (since 25 years), but indeed, I have always skipped advaita vedanta, partly because I thought liberation is impossible for me. I understand now, reading your books, that enlightenment does not involve a ‘Buddhist’ complete renunciation of desires , which I deemed impossible).
Renunciation of Desire
James: Freedom and non-dual love is definitely possible if you are qualified, but you have obviously been barking up the wrong tree. As you know, complete renunciation of desires is impossible. When desire stops your body is food for worms. Desire is fine as long as it doesn’t cause you to break the physical, psychological, and moral laws operating in the field of life. Understanding this fact is one of the qualifications for enlightenment, which Vedanta defines as complete satisfaction with yourself as you are at any given moment and complete satisfaction with the world as it is at any given moment.
Upside and Downside of Psychology
Inquirer: I work as a Jungian psychoanalyst and to be very honest, I hate my job more and more. It is exhausting me. Yet I cannot stop working because I need to pay the rent. I always thought that studying Jung and depth psychology would be my way out of suffering, although I understand that Jung was not self-realized. But I always assumed that the developmental approach (Ken Wilber, Sri Aurobindo) is kind of necessary to purify the mind in order to be able to receive ‘enlightenment’.
Enlightenment is Not a Discrete Experience
James: Vedanta agrees that the mind needs to be purified as a qualification for enlightenment. However, the mind doesn’t “receive” enlightenment because it is insentient. You, awareness/consciousness, understand your true nature as immortal being. Nobody can transmit “enlightenment.” A qualified teacher endowed with an impersonal vetted means of Self knowledge can teach you how to recognize ignorance of your blissful wholeness and you can set out to remove it with Self inquiry.
The Collective Unconscious
Inquirer: …and that through a gradual process of development of consciousness I would thus pierce through all the personal unconscious layers (both the Freudian subconsciousness and the deeper dissociated parts) and the collective unconscious, so that at the end of the tunnel I would start to “see” the Self (I understand the Self cannot be experienced and that I am already That, but this is all intellectual within me). Anyway, my Jungian path has come to a definitive end.
James: Well, you can’t “develop” consciousness. You can gain more knowledge but consciousness doesn’t change. Only the mind changes. It is possible, however, to change the thoughts and feelings that make up the mind. However, you can’t purify the collective unconscious, only those unwanted tendencies you’ve developed over time, leaving the valuable parts of the psyche as the basis for a stable personality and lifestyle.
Karma Yoga
Anyway, look on the bright side, you are now investigating Vedanta, which can guide you to Self knowledge and freedom from your suffering. You didn’t mention thoughts of slitting your wrists in a warm bathtub and you are transparent about your despair, which is an excellent qualification, so count yourself lucky. Although they meant well, Wilbur, Aurobindo, Cohen and the rest of the evolutionary enlightenment crowd, don’t offer a simple down to earth path to remove unwanted thoughts and emotions.
Karma Yoga offers an stress-busting burnout-insured practice without the burdensome intellectual superstructure that psychological types favor. I should point out that the downside of Western psychological models is the lack of a straightforward theology that explains the creation of the world and ties it to the purification of the psyche. The Self doesn’t create the world and the individual, however you define it doesn’t create it either. That leaves ignorance as the only culprit.
Karma Yoga, however, goes right to the root of creation…ignorance of the self’s unborn wholeness…and attacks the fears and desires, likes and dislikes that keep one chasing ephemeral things. Karma Yogis are committed to liberation from the personality, not a self-improved personality, although the personality becomes more beautiful as a result of the practice.
Burning Desire for Freedom and Non-dual Love
Anyway, ask why you believe the voices of diminishment that steal your happiness and sap your cheerfulness. They lie.
Inquirer: I am determined to find a way out of my long existential crisis and I understand I need a teacher, whom I have not found yet.
James: Good for you. Forget all the intellectual Ken Wilber, Andrew Cohen stuff etc. Ken Wilbur is seriously confused. He once thought Adi Da was the cat’s pajamas, then switched to Andrew Cohen when Adi Da went seriously off the rails. I have no idea who his role models is these days, in so far as Andrew Cohen is a shadow of his former self.
Read the chapter on Karma Yoga in my books and watch my videos of the first six chapters of Bhagavad Gita. This is what you need now.
Inquirer: May I ask you three questions?
James: Yes. You supply the questions and Vedanta supplies the answers.
Inquirer: Are you aware of a teacher in the Netherlands or Belgium or simply somewhere else in Europe? I live in the south of the Netherlands, near the Belgian border.
James: I teach in Europe as does my wife. I have seminars coming up in Netherlands, Germany, Spain, etc. Sign up for the ShiningWorld newsletter for details. Please understand that Vedanta works , but it requires a serious commitment and a spirit of renunciation that includes a rigorous evaluation of other paths. It also requires inquirers to take a professional attitude to seeking, not the willy-nilly approach dictated by one’s likes and dislikes. I don’t insist that you like me, only that you keep an open mind, until you have heard the whole teaching.
Inquirer: Please bear with me if my next question has been answered in your books. I read “How to Attain Enlightenment, “ “The Essence of Enlightenment,” and ‘The Yoga of the Three Energies. It is just that I still do not fully comprehend what is going on.
James: OK.
Inquirer: How come that, when a person realizes the Self, the knowledge of the Self does not at once shine away all the impurities (e.g. complexes, dissociations/blind spots, trauma, neurotic and schizoid-psychotic character structures and all other defense mechanisms) in the mind? Once you have established that “I am divine,” I would assume that the Perfect One simply shines away all the shadow aspects, assuming that the mind and thus the ego more or less disappears and that only a very minimum ego is kept alive to navigate through 3D. I am kind of confused about the gradations of enlightenment, although I am aware that this is nonsense from a non-dual perspective.
James: Your assumption is partially correct but partial understanding is not knowledge. There are two orders of reality, dual and non-dual. They never actually intersect; they seemingly meet. If there were an actual connection, freedom would be impossible because the world of experience….your neuroses… would modify your unborn eternal self…and freedom, which is knowing the difference between these two orders, one of which is real, the other which isn’t, would be impossible. Or as you more or less suggest “The Perfect One” would cross the line and blow all the apparent self’s impurities. Although you read my books, it seems you missed the most important and difficult topic, Maya.
Why? You haven’t been systematic in your seeking. In fact, you don’t know how to inquire. I will teach a seminar in Spain in October that unfolds the method of inquiry. Every Vedanta teaching Vedanta explains Maya directly or presupposes that an inquirer understands it.
You also can’t read your way to Self knowledge. Your biases…the unexamined logic of your experience…prevent discrimination between the two orders of reality, which is enlightenment. So you need to start at the beginning.
Inquirer: What I mean is this: realized beings like Buddha, Jesus and I guess also Ramana Maharshi, are perfect beings in the sense that their enlightenment was (more or less?) 100% – they didn’t suffer from complexes or other real shadow aspects.
James: There is no 1% to 99%. Enlightenment, like water, only turns to steam at 212 degrees. It’s just disturbed water at 211 degrees. Anyway, you mean unreal shadow aspects. What you experience as an individual feels real but isn’t real.
Inquirer: I understand that people like Adi Da and Osho, whose perspectives on enlightenment were experiential, have had an enlightened experience with the ego intact and thus their shadow showed up monstrously after their ‘enlightenment’. I believe you call this “enlightenment sickness”. But others, who for example have come to realize the Self through advaita vedanta, also still possess a shadow and thus, though knowing I am perfect and whole, create very dualistic experiences for themselves and others. I truly do not understand what is going on. My assumption has always been that once enlightened, it is all God within and thus perfect love.
James: Yes, it was the ego that experienced “enlightenment.” Once “enlightened” the ego needs to keep its head down and patiently work on its psyche until it is more or less free of shadow content. We call it the reflection (manana) phase. Adi Da, Osho, etc, never received a proper impersonal teaching from a purified teacher because they weren’t qualified. Misfortune followed them to their graves like a needy dog. They didn’t know the difference between the karmic order and the consciousness order of the one reality, knowing which is which is moksha. If you know the difference, you won’t confuse them and try to get from enlightenment what you failed to get from endarkenment.
Ramana was an exception. He drew the right conclusion from his epiphany, unlike the aforementioned people, and once he was clear that he was the Self, he spent twenty plus years humbly cleaning up his karmic account so the his life was an accurate reflection of this Self realization. He walked the talk.
You can clean up your mess before or after Self realization. Most people, whose so-called enlightenment is epiphany-based, think the their Self realization is the end of their seeking, not the beginning of serious inquiry. They can’t resist the temptation to hang out a shingle advertising their “extraordinary” accomplishment and start immediately misinforming gullible seekers.
Inquirer: Related to this, article a second question:
Can it also be true that, even though enlightenment as such is not a matter of evolution (I get the point that you cannot become what you already are), our “equipment,” so to speak, (mind and body) evolves further through eons of cycles of development, such as described in for example theosophy (Blavatsky), anthroposophy (Steiner) and Kabbalah? Meaning, that you can realize the Self innumerable times in innumerable reincarnations and that Isvara-Maya simply decides that there is no game over until the entire game has been played?
James: Yes. If the one reality has two dimensions…which is does, it is possible for a thing and its opposite to both be true at the same time. Your karmic account is canceled when Self knowledge is firm. You gain confidence in it with every insight, satori, and fleeting samadhi, hopefully aided by a complete impersonal teaching, until one fine day, there is no long any doubt about your identity as unborn bliss-full existence shining as consciousness/awareness.
Inquirer: According to the developmental approaches, such as theosophy and anthroposophy, we and the universe shall evolve further, manifesting higher levels and bodies of consciousness. Even though we can at any time realize the Self…?!
James: Yes. But we can devolve too. It depends on our behavior; it’s a tricky topic. But don’t fixate on fixing the world. Remove one knucklehead from the world and the world improves. Physician heal thyself.
Inquirer: But does the latter, moksha, really mean that the reincarnation cycle is over?
James: Yes. Reincarnation simply means continual identification with the decaying unreal material part of yourself, not the unborn eternal bliss-full part. It has nothing to do with the “next” life. There is only one life that never ends because there is only one reality that never ends.
Inquirer: Or, is there indeed a more “perfect” moksha (I know, this contradicts non-dualism), such as the one realized by Jesus and Buddha, versus a moksha attained by some who still have impure minds and thus will reincarnate, notwithstanding that they know their true nature.
James: No. Jesus, Buddha…the so-called greats…were just regular guys who realized garden variety moksha and spoke common sense wisdom but whose reputations have been inflated by generations of spiritually-inclined people with questionable self-esteem who were looking for heroes and think that the various “levels” of the apparent dimension of reality are actually real. With the right guidance i.e. Vedanta, you can set yourself free.
Inquirer: My last question is the least important one.
I have also been very fascinated by A Course in Miracles and I can say that I have a thorough knowledge of it. I have a love-hate relationship with ACIM and I have never fully trusted its source (channelled by Helen Schucman). Yet, having studied it in-depth I cannot just brush it aside as a New Age frill – I really believe there is more to it, it is just too sophisticated. I did read a short writing about ACIM on your website by Sundari, in which she says there is no real methodology etc. This is, with all respect, not true in my opinion. But I do understand that advaita vedanta is a much more well established tradition and that its methods have been proven effective, all of which can be debated in the context of ACIM.
However, what fascinates me about ACIM is this: It is a true non-dual tradition, summarized in three sentences in its opening lines: “Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists. Herein lies the peace of God.”
James: Peace of God for whom? God, the Self…and you… are peace itself.
Inquirer. ACIM claims that the world (universe, all duality) has been created as an escape from God. The ego, believing it has actually achieved separating from God, finds itself, according to ACIM, in a kind of existential fear now that it seemingly has destroyed heaven. This fear and existential guilt would have given rise to the universe as a place to hide from God and His assumed wrath. I realize I am trying to describe something in a few sentences, that ACIM describes in 1333 pages.
James: This is more or less a rudimentary understanding of Maya, beautiful intelligent ignorance.
Inquirer: ACIM has at once a negative view on the universe (as a hiding place for the ego who, in its fear, created a world of duality, with death as the opposition to (eternal) life), but yet states – “nothing unreal exists” (non-dual). What has always fascinated me is that this view – while non-dual as well – stands in seeming complete contradiction with Maya’s “cosmos as play,” And yet, since it is the same illusion both the positive (the world is a play) and the negative (the world is an attack on God and a hiding place from God) can both be true. It is not happening in reality anyway.
James: You’ve touched on the most important point your inquiry raised. One word is missing…apparently. The world and the individuals in it are apparently real. Apparently real is not non-existent, but it is as good as non-existent because it has no impact on you, who are non-different from reality.
Inquirer: Perhaps this is all a frivolous trick of my mind to occupy myself with not really important matters, but I keep finding myself in a total split (and not) where I am inclined to believe ACIM, as well as non-dualistic scriptures as advaita vedanta. Could both visions be true?
James: Yes and No, you have discovered the crux of the whole existential riddle. Congratulations. ACIM is similar to many of the “non-dual” epiphanies that meditators, seekers and yogis stumble on. It certainly may stimulate inquiry if you can figure out the language, but it is in no way equivalent to Vedanta.
Anyway, channeled knowledge may be true and it also may be contaminated by unpurified biases in the channel. The statements you quoted are partially true but they are only a fraction of the equation. Most people see the language as mumbo jumbo or at best inspiring mumbo jumbo. I am very familiar with ACIM because a friend who had a class asked me to teach it for a few months when his mother fell ill and he was her full-time caretaker. They used to call it Christian Vedanta but it isn’t even close, although at least it gets the non-dual aspect partially right, as do some other Neo-Advaita “teachings,” which like ACIM are basically duality masquerading as non-duality because they don’t negate the doer, while claiming to do so.
Vedanta is in a class of its own and can’t be compared to any other “path.” If ignorance is the problem there is only one path. That is why you only hear of it when you have enough merit in the form of qualifications you might gain from following other paths…or simply by living a normal life in the right way. It turns out that the least important of your questions is one of the most important, although ACIM says it in own confusing inimitable way.
Inquirer: And last I want to thank you for your lifelong work. The best I can do now is to seriously study your books and find my way to and through advaita vedanta. I am very grateful for all the resources on your website. If you have made it reading until here, I genuinely want to thank you for taking this time and effort.
James: I enjoyed reading it because it helps me determine if you are suited for Vedanta. Here’s a useful suggestion: clear your mental decks and start over. As you progress, you will see the value in what you have learned when you didn’t know how to seek. So nothing is lost. Go to the website and follow the new to Vedanta links. Don’t commit to Vedanta until you understand what is involved. We are not looking for recruits, only for sincere humble people who need helpful information. Unqualified people can keep knocking around in samsara looking for answers. Maya is the best teacher because it will frustrate you until you give up seeking and are ready for a systematic proven means of Self knowledge. You can come to my seminar in Amsterdam in November. You need to study my books in the right sequence starting with Tattva Bodh. Your reading list confused you. Be systematic. Don’t rush.
Love,
James
