Tom Huston
NEO-ADVAITINS ANONYMOUS
“Work, family, busy schedules, relationships: all
seemed to sabotage simplicity. . . . The situation was the same everywhere. The realization was incredibly easy; living it was the challenge.”
The Translucent Revolution, pp. 3-4
These days, we're all used to seeing Deepak Chopra's winning
smile peeking out at us from the checkout lane of our local Stop
& Shop. Neale Donald Walsch's Conversations with God
and James Redfield's Celestine Prophecy seem to be
pretty ubiquitous too—archetypes of
spiritual-but-not-religious Americana. Still, despite their
omnipresence, and despite whatever degree of spiritual merit
they actually do possess, they can't quite prepare one for
encountering a treatise about authentic “nondual”
enlightenment for sale right next to the Twinkies and the
Ho-Hos.
I'm referring to The Power of Now. Published a few
years ago, but just recently released in paperback, German
mystic Eckhart Tolle's lucid and accessible exegesis on the
highest of spiritual attainments has sold over two million
copies (sales that were due, in no small part, to Oprah
Winfrey's 2002 televised endorsement of the book as one she has
read eight times and keeps on her bedside table). The endless
popularity of New Age and self-help books notwithstanding, these
figures are surprising because Tolle's mystical manifesto is
popularizing and conveying a level of spiritual depth that has
typically remained inaccessible to all but a chosen few. In
fact, with its constant emphasis on transcending the
“egoic mind” and powerful transmission of the
awakened state of timeless presence, The Power of Now
is like pop spirituality on steroids. Yet it is also merely
the most visible book in a genre that over the past decade, has
been working harder than ever to bring enlightenment down from
the mountaintop of esoteric traditions like Zen and Sufism and
cast it free into the secular mainstream.
Discarding the dogma of the past, stripping mysticism of its
religious and ritualistic trappings, the authors of these new
books about enlightenment—people like Byron Katie, Satyam
Nadeen, and Gangaji—stand united in their claim that the
true nature of reality is an “open secret,”
available to anyone bold enough to take a good look at the world
beyond the alluring sheen of the conceptual mind, right here and
right now. And if we do look, what will we see? Why, they say,
nothing other than reality as it actually is: a vast
oneness—or, more properly, a
nonduality—that has been variously called God,
Spirit, the Self, the Absolute, Nirvana, Consciousness,
Emptiness, or the Ground of Being.
Seeing themselves at the lead of this primarily Western
mystical reformation are the assorted men and women known,
loosely, as the Neo-Advaitins. A nonsectarian
derivation of the ancient Hindu sect of Advaita
(“nondual”) Vedanta, the Neo-Advaitins are a strange
breed, transcending time and place, ritual and tradition, class
and creed. A Neo-Advaitin could be your neighbor, your gardener,
or your favorite bartender, peacefully going about his or her
business while remaining half-submerged in the primordial Ground
of Being, and you'd never be the wiser. Indeed, the ability of
Neo-Advaitins to blend seamlessly into everyday life is one of
their most distinguishing features. While it's true that some
have chosen to stand out from the crowd by taking on the role of
spiritual teacher, adopting the name of a Hindu god or an Indian
river, or spending years sitting on the same park bench every
day, the majority clearly prefer to lead nondescript, ordinary
lives, just like you and me. There's only one crucial
difference: the Neo-Advaitins act fully in accord with the one
enlightened truth—the experiential recognition that
God is all there is—while the rest of us go about
our business in a disconnected daze.
At least, that's the ideal.
With the recent publication of The Translucent
Revolution: How People Just Like You Are Waking Up and Changing
the World, by Arjuna Ardagh, the hard truth about
Neo-Advaita may finally have been revealed.
NOTES FROM THE NONDUAL UNDERGROUND
“When I took a good look at my relationship
with my own family, with my friends, and with the earth, I had
to admit I . . . saw a schism between the depth of realization
and the quality of my life.”
The Translucent Revolution, p. 4
Arjuna Ardagh was a successful Seattle-based hypnotherapist
before becoming a popular teacher of the Neo-Advaitin way. In
1991, after two decades of spiritual seeking—including
many years as a student of the controversial guru Bhagwan Shree
Rajneesh (a.k.a. Osho)—he experienced a “radical
awakening” to his true, nondual Self with the aid of his
second Indian guru, the Advaita Vedanta master H.W.L. Poonja.
Returning to the West Coast of America after spending a year in
the company of his teacher, Ardagh started offering
satsang, or “communion in the truth,” to
roomfuls of spiritual seekers multiple times a week. But over
the next few years, he began to realize that merely experiencing
the truth of Neo-Advaita wasn't necessarily sufficient to
transform a person's life in any fundamental way at
all—including his own.
“I found myself and my friends in an interesting
predicament,” he writes in his 1998 manual of personal
transformation, Relaxing into Clear Seeing.
“Having seen the perfection underlying all apparent
imperfection, there is no turning back. You cannot unsee what
has been seen. . . . Yet for almost everyone I know there has
appeared to be some coming and going, some deep, invisible
mechanism that pulls consciousness back into separation, desire,
suffering, and time.” Along with the apparent instability
of their spiritual attainments, Ardagh and some of his fellow
Neo-Advaitins began to confess that their conscience had been
pricked by certain aspects of their outer lives that didn't
reflect their inner realizations of universal oneness. “I
was fortunate to have many deep and honest friends who also
played the role of 'spiritual teacher,'” he writes in
The Translucent Revolution. “These teachers were
respected, successful, and of immense service to many people.
Yet, like their students, they were challenged by the gap
between the teaching and its embodiment in their daily
lives.”
So, faced with such a predicament, staring squarely at the
disturbing divide between one's spiritual understanding and
one's actions in everyday life, what is a good Neo-Advaitin to
do?
In As It Is: The Open Secret to Living an Awakened
Life, Neo-Advaitin Tony Parsons writes: “A great deal
of confusion has been generated . . . concerning the need to
overcome the ego, the mind, thoughts, etc., and none of it is
relevant. . . . If any of these things are active, then they
will be active regardless of the idea that you can have any
influence on their manifestation. When awakening happens, then
everything is seen as absolutely fine just the way it is.”
And Neo-Advaitin Steven Harrison explains in Getting to
Where You Are: “There is no inner and outer. There is
no engaged spirituality. . . . There is nothing to engage that
is outside the movement of our own conceptualization. And there
is no place to stand from which to engage this constant flow of
interpretation. Thought has divided the world. Conveniently the
problem is out there, or in there, but not here, now.”
In other words, the Neo-Advaitin solution to the question of
a gap between one's knowledge and one's actions is essentially:
Don't worry, be happy! For the Neo-Advaitin is never
puzzled, troubled, or at a loss for words. Holding steadfast to
a vision of reality that transcends the “flow of
interpretation” generated by the rational, thinking mind,
the Neo-Advaitin sees all things clearly, and all is understood.
The thoughts and actions of the “human monkey,”
whatever they may be, are enjoyed with a smile and a
wink—as nothing but the empty dance of the one infinite
Consciousness that alone is real. Any ideas about a separation
between one's words and deeds, any gnawing sense that one is
living in a state of deepening hypocrisy, are seen merely as
dualistic thoughts and feelings—and therefore perfectly
irrelevant in light of the nondual truth. “Once awakening
happens,” Parsons assures us, “it is seen that there
is no such thing as right or wrong.”
But Arjuna Ardagh doesn't buy it anymore. Not all of it, at
least. Breaking ranks with the Neo-Advaitin army of thought-free
wisdom, Ardagh, through his Living Essence Foundation, is
pioneering a new kind of spirituality—one that strives to
integrate the revelation of nondual simplicity with all of the
natural complexities and challenges of our very human lives. And
if the 170 similarly minded teachers and theorists interviewed
for his 500-page Translucent Revolution are any
indication, he is by no means alone in this quest.