Advaita bromides, cont. · 5 February 2009
A model:
Spiritual Bypassing Index: the time elapsed between event A and event BS, where A is the occurrence of real, juicy pain or struggle or conflict and BS is the utterance of some nondualist cliché.
Or, maybe:
advaita bromide : experience :: fidgets : vinyasa
They’re escape-doors. Escape doors are nice. We have to check out sometimes: it’s stressful to be on all the time. But come on. The words of the great sages turn to gravel in our mouths when we use them to control others, appear realized, or run away from our own real personalities. Why is this so common? Why not be with experience in a gritty, generous way… why not be thankful for an edge and resolve it with breath and the movement of energy… rather than deny it, flee from it, using the advaita eraser? Sometimes when the air gets hot, I feel that this practice is an elaborately choreographed cowardice, just as much as it is a sharp forgiving tool for joy.
I have been reading Advaita for 11 years and do not understand it at all. This philosophy grew up in relationship with hardcore samkhya dualism in a world where the two are as much complements as they are contraries. We westerners don’t really understand this context, the capaciousness and generosity of the tradition, so we reduce it to an “it’s all in the mind” escape hatch. A homogenized, pasteurized export with a vaguely Indian flavor. No wonder SKPJ doesn’t want to hear us theorize the tantric codes. We use them to turn a direct practice into goo.
End rant.
Posted by (0v0)
Categories: self-deception
, social theory
Previous entry: Bedtime reading / Next entry: AWOWL
Comment
Commenting is closed for this article.
And a good rant it is.
Posted by: knl · Feb 6, 03:16 AM · #
owlessence advaitadebenighta
Beak: 2-3 drops with espresso (doppio)
Claws: Apply neat – also brings brass knucks’ up a treat.
Posted by: meniscusmerangue · Feb 6, 04:10 AM · #
OMG. You know that I love this.
I’ve always wondered if advaita developed as a defense mechanism against the overwhelming suffering present in India.
But I’ve always liked what Patanjali said in YS 4.15 – 4.17…basically that objects are real but perception of objects varies based on the mind doing the perceiving.
http://www.swamij.com/yoga-sutras-41517.htm#4.16
Posted by: cody · Feb 6, 08:44 AM · #
Tailfeathers: whiskey chaser. Going whole bird.
But… I do wonder if we need more advaita, not less. Westerners use it as a way to fake out of the good stuff, living our lives as insane materialists and then (with the other half of the split personality) dismissing all matter to mind wherever yoga’s involved. The only two teachers who make nondualism make sense to me at all, MW and SKPJ—both students of Krishnama-Krishnamu—aren’t really engaged in some ancient Greek spiritualism/ materialism conondrum. Their method is to insist, on an utterly practical level, over and over, that “the world is all that is the case” and “see the indwelling perceiver in you and know that it is spirit.”
Personally, of course the first of these is why I trust them. But that second one is still a stretch. I spent so many years committed to the notion that I was only “atoms and the void” that even after a thousand sets of pointing-out instructions, the moment I lose track of my anima I go back to disbelieving in it. When Ram Dass says “be a soul,” I still want to rattle his wheelchair.
But from what I can tell, that is the message; and I do see value in it even as we’re surrounded by so many idiotic attempts at nondualism… attempts which are really more dualistic than anything because they fetishize imagined boundaries between matter and mind, immanent and transcendent, body and soul, teacher and student, prana and apana, bikram and ashtanga, toes and calves. I’m pretty sure SKPJ could not care less if anyone stands up from a backbend.
Posted by: (0v0) · Feb 6, 12:41 PM · #
Except none of this comes true except in practicing. And I don’t mean Ashtanga (necessarily).
Posted by: karen · Feb 7, 05:27 AM · #
True. :-)
Posted by: (0v0) · Feb 7, 02:02 PM · #
Is it? How do you know? That’s the sort of neat stitch-up which is used so often in the faux-effulgence that you’re squawking about above.
You understand ‘it’ very well. The difficulty comes (somewhat ironically) in mediating this in the first person, plural, which is,perhaps, a waste of time anyway.
Posted by: menisicusmerangue · Feb 8, 03:46 AM · #
No, just go with Martin and overturn RD altogether, need to get out of the whole mind/body subject/object trap, Go back to Witt’ , the later Ludwig that is (after he read Heidegger) and employ language games. Mind talk is one language game, body talk another, subject another and Object one more still. We can talk about them but that doesn’t mean we’re confined in a subject/object world. It’s certainly not a case of one or the other. And what’s the idea frowning on sweet old Moore as a logical positivist (which i don’t think he ever REALLY was and yet quoting and giving a nod to Early Witt’s “The world is all that is the case’ a living god to the positivists …... which is ironic : )
Posted by: grimmly · Feb 8, 08:39 AM · #
Ok. I only know for me. But it’s not a waste of time unless you go in for the kneejerk solipsism of bad advaita. Or maybe it’s just worthwhile because the first person plural is what’s most interesting. I to We, riding the nervous system and the silicon highway past the boundaries of simple self.
Grim, how impolite you are to Ram Dass and his main squeeze Maharshi! I guess that, at least when they’re not accidentally stuck in samadhi, they would agree with you that We can talk about them but that doesn’t mean we’re confined in a subject/object world.
Honestly, good thing for that Heidegger guy. I don’t get how he solved that problem, but LW clearly did and it made things pretty interesting. It is really hilarious that the Vienna Circle worshiped the pre-Heidegger Tractatus. In retrospect it feels platonic, full of the whispers of pure forms. I do wonder if it was his staircase to altered states.
Posted by: (0v0) · Feb 8, 05:15 PM · #
Have you read Heidegger’s On The Way to Language? It’s a set of dialogues between him and a zen monk, if I remember correctly (?) Also Ernst Cassirer’s On Language (I think). Books which sent me into raptures once upon a time as an MA translation student, little though I understood them. I was (am) fascinated by what lies behind the diverse languages and their beautiful varied expressions.. a kind of immanence..
and languages make the mind so flexible, able to penetrate closer to the essence of an object or event, get beyond labels. I liked Wittgenstein too but can’t even remember what I read!!
Posted by: susananda · Feb 9, 09:21 AM · #
Ok. And the kneejerk monism of a compulsive ‘I to we’ leads to this ‘bad’ (writing of) advaita does it not? And other more sinister things too.
Posted by: meniscusmerangue · Feb 9, 12:05 PM · #
Fuck. Seems all roads lead to bad avaita.
Susan, this book sounds amazing. How do you like it, Grim?
Posted by: (0v0) · Feb 9, 12:09 PM · #
Yes wonderful stuff the, Japanese friend bit is fun too, chats about Rashomen at one point. All that Language is the house of being stuff. Goes beyond Witt. Who says That which cannot be spoken should be passed over in silence. But for Heidegger the failure to say is a starting point….. What does that failure to say say. Important for us too and our encounter with ashtanga, yoga , India etc
Posted by: Grimmly · Feb 9, 02:11 PM · #
Yessssss. Which reminds me, next month should afford me some gratuitous pleasure reading and I don’t even know where to begin. Maybe I will ask for some feedback to narrow the options….
Posted by: (0v0) · Feb 9, 05:41 PM · #
Ah, that’s the one, Grimmly knows it.
The Cassirer is called Language and Myth by the way, all about humans beginning to differentiate themselves from their environment through speech… the boy who thinks ‘I am raining’ reminded me…
Posted by: susananda · Feb 11, 04:02 AM · #