My personal view
Frankly, I consider the whole spiritual field originating from India to be ineffectual. I know, many will find this surprising as I espouse a lot of Hindu and Buddhist philosophies, have travelled through India for fifty years, and it has been essential in my own path of growth. Nonetheless, that remains my view. The reason I have been able to successfully leverage off the Indian architype, is because I arrive into it with a strategy and practice pre-formed and gained from a totally different source – Indian physical experience and philosophy offer me the data which I process from my own developmental blueprint.
My reasons for rejecting the Indian ‘way’ are as follows.
Advaita
Look above at the general precepts of discernment, nonattachment, virtues and hunger for spirit. All of these are conceptual qualities. This is one of the most common critiques I have of Indian traditions – they are futilely over-optimistic at the power of the mind to produce lasting, deep transformations of being.
The complexity of our being is too extensive to expect effective results from thoughts, or non-thoughts, alone. We are composed of layers upon layers, and the really difficult task for any seeker of truth, is how on earth can we penetrate below the top few superficial layers? This is a perpetual and confounding question. No arm-chair contemplation or mind-freeing exercises would ever have the potency to pierce our intransigent inter-layer buffers nor permeate the vastness of our subconscious being. That doesn’t mean the pondering of profound ideas is without merit, just that it alone is ridiculously inadequate for the task that presents to us.
Then we have the ‘virtues’: equanimity, compassion, self-discipline, patience and freedom from anger. Honestly, who do we think we are kidding? None of these can be attained directly. They can only come as a consequence of penetrating experience and transformation, attained after subjecting oneself to the most creative techniques of personal change, which are not time-out experiences like one gets from a workshop, but practical shifts that are applied consistently over a lifetime.
Nonattachment: this is one of the greatest misconceptions of all religious traditions who espouse this quality. Like with the virtues, it cannot be attained directly. It also, is a consequence of having passed through thresholds of visceral realisations – not mental realisations. The distinction between mental and visceral realisations lies at the heart of all effective spiritual traditions. We know when we have passed a visceral threshold, usually after a devastating illness or an intense struggle, that lasted years, if not decades. We know, because when it happens, we feel it not as a light-bulb event but as a flat, cold awareness in the stomach that from this point forward, life has irreversibly changed.
Buddhism
The first three of the ‘Noble Truths’ (a name steeped in pretence) suffer from the same superficiality of mentation I described above for Advaita. The last, is the Eight-fold Path - right view, right aspiration, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration. My complaint about Buddhism is that it is steeped in lists of things to do or not to do. Western adherents don’t realise just how petty and inane these long lists of dos and don’ts are for the Eastern cultures who practice Buddhism.
I know the eight precepts have extended meanings, applications and attendant practices, but really, so much of Buddhist ‘method’ can be distilled down to ‘being a good person’. That just makes me vomit! I assume he was a product of his time, but the pedestrian, conforming to societal and community standards of compliant behaviour, and goddie-goddie ‘school prefect’ profile, all glorified as essential for ultimate realisation, is frankly pathetic and absurd.
The only ‘method’ Buddhism recommends, and classes as imperative, which has concrete value, is meditation. For those deeply serious, meditation must be practised over very long sessions and years of dedication. This dedication is also intrinsic to the Indian yogic path, so it has a long pedigree way back to Indus Valley Civilisation days – it is the pre-eminent emblem of Indian spiritual endeavour. Nonetheless, India is not the only land which realised the fundamental technique of inner silence through sustained physical, emotional and mental suspension of movement.
But meditation alone is not sufficient a path of spiritual growth. It ignores the fact that we have been born into a material world in which we must act. The path of inaction alone is as one-sided as the path of action alone, especially if both aren’t interwoven and engaged with through the lens of ultimately insightful technique. It is not what we do but how we do it, that makes all the difference.
Jaina
The problem with Jaina is that it is a static philosophy. By that I mean it lacks dynamic subtleties. It presents the human as a bowl – fill it with bad things and it will decay, fill with good and it will thrive until eventually its monad rises through the sheer lightness of being from expunging all the dross of life. It rejects the concept of intent.
All those rules of non-violence, speaking truth, no stealing, sex or possessions, fail to realise that it’s not what we do by why and how that causes the dross to accumulate. I just don’t buy that kind of dogmatic, simplistic, and ultimately ‘purist’ path. I expect Jaina is the cause of so much purism today, in the East and West. India is obsessed with purity in almost every aspect of life. But in the West, we have these ideas of toxicity. So many people are preoccupied with avoiding anything, like vaccines, that they believe will make their bodies toxic, flocking to de-tox programs and lifestyles. In distinction, my path is tantric – I accept the world, enter into the world, allow the world to enter into me.
This goes back to historical methods of immortality. The first approach was to find a way to sustain the life of the physical body forever – injecting the temporal into the infinite. The second was to identify and insert critical elements of infinity into the physical being, mostly by shape-shifting the physical being into extremely long-lived entities. The third method of immortality was discovered after witnessing the horror encountered by the proponents of the other two methods. This method reassigns identity from the temporal being, which is the common locus of identity, into the energetic kernel of that being, then opening the body and allowing death to flood in without resistance.
What this third method implied, was specifically not building a barrier to impurity and attempting to sustain a pure inviolability, but opening oneself to the world and transforming that energy in a way that strengthened the spiritual immune system. That is tantra – that the world is not seen as pure or impure, but as a partner in the quest of ultimate freedom.
No sex. This is nothing new, and it can be found as an injunction across almost all religious tradition in the world. It has caused so much trouble in all those religions because it asks the impossible. Even if a person succeeds in denying themselves sex, serious psychological distortions are likely to eventuate. The reason for this injunction is obvious, sex drains so much of our life-energy, both from the physical and mental manifestations, that the cost is unacceptable for a serious seeker of realisation.
The quest requires more energy than we have, and many clever techniques must be employed to store sufficient energy for this task. To waste it on sex is insane, let alone the effect of having children, which can drain even more energy. Unfortunately, placing a block against sex is asking for trouble because it has been set into our blueprint by the species. Everyone has a sexual drive, even Jesus and Buddha, the Pope and the Dalai Lama, so to smother this is dangerous. And it’s not necessary.
So much time has been wasted on this precept. The solution is simple. Firstly, don’t over-indulge in sex, or anything for that matter. Secondly, accept it – sexuality is perfectly natural. Enjoy it and don’t hang all kinds of agendas to it. Just keep it to a minimum, because there is an inceptual energy concealed in sex that can drain for years, especially when sexuality is not accompanied by genuine love. I’m not talking of ‘true love’, whatever that is, but simply a relationship that channels uplifting positivity. That channel remains open for so long after sex with another, be sure it is a source of inner joy, not guilt or anger.
Neo-Advaita
This new movement failed to recognise the fact that we have two eyes, two ears, two arms, two legs, two halves of the brain: we are not a unity but intrinsically a duality in the entity which we have incarnated into in this world. To deny that is to deny reality. But within that duality, the difference is between action, grasp, thought, structure, past, future, judgement, discernment on one side, and unfiltered perception, undefined identity, boundlessness, creative source on the other.
A practice that develops the whole being must foster both sides, and integrate them. One side is duality and the other side nonduality. The task of spiritual development is to utilise the duality side to build will, and to drop the duality side to experience nonduality. The simplest story to encapsulate this, is that of the seeker walking up a mountain path when he met an old man carrying a load of firewood on his back. In despair at his spiritual confusion, the seeker burst out and asked the old man, “What is enlightenment?” Whereupon the old man dropped his load on the ground. Then the seeker asked, “But what then?” The old man picked his load up again and walked on down the path.
The story has two main elements: the dropping and picking up. But people fail to realise the third critical element: the path.
Nonetheless, I find critiquing Neo-Advaita suffers from the exact same flaw as all of these Indian spiritual traditions, referred to above. The flaw is that the whole approach is ineffective. Indian spirituality originated from the life conditions of the subcontinent. For thousands of years, the natural forces created conditions that were totally unpredictable and unmanageable. No matter what, weather, in particular, but also hordes of plunderers, devastated or nourished the subcontinent. The dominant realisation was one of futility of control.
This led to a philosophy of samsara – eternal recurrence of the wheel of suffering. The only resolution, shared by all religious teachers, was to step off the wheel. There was never any solution which incorporated controlling the wheel, and building a lasting growth and evolutionary direction. Except the dominant belief that a being ‘good’ in this life will lead to a better birth in the next – the slow progress of incarnations until one reached an incarnation in which the conditions were ripe to achieve stepping off the wheel – freedom from the eternal recurrence of suffering.
That philosophy is unsuitable for aspirants who have grown up in a culture that worships meritocracy and the belief that action can produce lasting benefit. This is a European theme of identity, as essentially one of agency – that we have agency in life and the world. That concept was totally absent from the Indian subcontinent.
What is needed today, is a spiritual philosophy of development that focuses on will, empowerment, integration of both sides of our being, combined with the power of intent to merge the temporal and infinite.
But to do this, we must form a completely different approach to the old Indian model of spirituality.
