User:Joshua Jonathan/Neo-Advaita

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Neo-Advaita is a New Religious Movement based on a modern, western interpretation of Advaita Vedanta, especially the teachings of Ramana Maharshi. Neo-Advaita is being criticized for discarding the traditional prerequisites of knowledge of the scriptures and "renunciation as necessary preparation for the path of jnana-yoga". Notable neo-advaita teachers are H. W. L. Poonja, his students Gangaji Andrew Cohen, and Eckhart Tolle., and Eckhart Tolle.

History
Advaita Vedanta can be dated back prior to the common era. It's greatest proponent was Adi Shankara, who established the system as it is known nowadays. It's greatest modern proponent was Ramana Maharshi, well—known for emphasizing the enquiry of the question "Who am I?" as a means to attain awakening.

The intellectual root of neo-Advaita lies in the reform and emancipation-movements from leading Hindus such as Radakrishnan, Vivekenanda and sri Aurobindo. Their approach, which In the 19th century Hinduism took on a new self-consciousness, in reaction to but also under influence of the British rule.

Vivekenanda saw all religions as paths leading to the same goal. This appoach presents ultimate reality in a substantialist way. This essentialist approach resembles the perennial philosophy, but has also been opposed. For example, it contradicts the Buddhist doctrine of sunyata.

The spiritual root of neo-Advaita is Ramana Maharshi: "These groups constitute a growing segment of North America’s liberal spirituality subculture and bear witness to the transposability of the Maharshi’s teachings and the portability of his method of self-inquiry into non-Indian cultural spaces."

Already in the 1930s Ramana Maharshi's teachings were brought to the west by Paul Brunton in his A Search in Secret India. Stimulated by Arthur Osborne, in the 1960s Bhagawat Singh actively strted to spread Ramana Maharshi's teachings in the USA.

Since the 1970s western interest in Asian religions has seen a rapid growth. Ramana Maharshi's teachings have been further popularized in the west via his student Poonja, and his own students: "In North America alone, at least seventy-seven different teachers and organizations acknowledge or claim the influence of the Maharshi, or of prominent followers such as H.W.L.Poonja (a.k.a.Papaji,1913–1997). Many of these teachers fall into the category of Neo-Advaita, a term not always complimentary from a traditional Advaita perspective."

Poonja had been critizised for too easily authorising students to teach: "One of the tragedies of Poonjaji's teaching ministry is that he either told, inferred, or allowed hundreds of individuals to believe they were fully enlightened simply because they'd had one, or many, powerful experiences of awakening. These "enlightened" teachers then proceeded to enlighten their own students in a similar way, and thus was born what is known as the "neo-Advaita", or "satsang" movement in western culture."

Neo-Advaita has become an important constituent of popular western spirituality: "...a Neo-Advaitin subculture stretching from British Columbia to Nova Scotia, from California to North Carolina, from Australia to New Zealand, and from Western Europe to South Asia.These seekers can listen to a diverse cohort of Neo-Advaitin and Advaitin teachers at seminars, workshops,retreats and satsangs on five continents."

It is being spread by websites and publishing enterprises, which give an easy access to its teachings.

Western discourses
Neo-Advaita uses western discourses, such as "New Age millennialism, Zen, self-empowerment and self-therapy" to transmit it's teachings. It makes little use of the "traditional language or cultural frames of Advaita Vedanta".

The western approach to "Asian enlightenment traditions" ... "... is a notoriously eclectic and messy affair. The individual actors and communities involved in the dialogue have often practiced or still practice in more than one Asian or Asian-inspired tradition and borrow from numerous Western discourses such as psychology, science, and politics."

Neo-Advaita is framed in a western construction of experiential and perennial mysticism, "to the disregard of its social, ethical and political aspects": "This modern experiential and perennialist mystical framework has been hugely influential in the presentation of Asian religions in the West. It can be found in Neo-Vedanta, particularly in the works of Sarvepalli Radhakrishna and Swami Vivekananda, and is present in D.T. Suzuki's popular decontextualized and experiential account of Zen Buddhism. The notion of a philosophia perennis is also a major theme in the works of the Theosophical Society and undergirds much of the New Age appropriation of Eastern religions within contemporary western culture. Particularly influential are Aldous Huxley's The Perennial Philosophy, which champions Advaita Vedanta and Mahayana Buddhism, and his The Doors of Perception, which compares his experiences on mescaline to Hindu and Buddhist soteriological goals. The perennial philosophy also reappears and is widely disseminated in psychological form in transpersonal psychology with the work of popular thinkers such as Ken Wilber."

Gregg Lahood also mentions Neo-Advaita as an ingredient of "cosmological hybridization, a process in which spiritual paradises are bound together", of which New Age, transpersonal psychology and the works of Ken Wilber are examples: "[T]ranspersonalism’s search for a presumed inner truth may well be the skeletal structure around which the New Age has clothed itself—with a hybrid paradise. Central to this project was a series of strange marriages, amalgamations, juxtapositions, and cultural borrowings largely between the mysticism of the East and the psychology of West—between America and Asia. These included, the American Transcendentalists’ embrace of the Vedas [...] Aldous Huxley with Vedanta, Allan Watts with the Tao, Zen, Advaita Vedanta [...] This long cultural procession of religious blending is the fertile cultural mélange out of which Ken Wilber’s influential ladder of consciousness grew: a hybrid cosmos of Neo-Platonism and Neo-Advaita Vedanta (which as will be shown is also the backbone of the New Age movement)."

Brown and Leledaki place this "hybridization" in a "structurationist or post-dualist theoretical view of the social world", pointing out that this is an "invented tradition", which claim a continuity with a "historic past", where... "...the continuity with [the historic past] is largely facticious. In short, they are responses to novel situations which take the form of reference to old situations, or which establish their own past by quasiobligatory repetition.(Hobsbawm, 1983, quoted in"

Brown and Leledaki see these newly emerging traditions as part of western Orientalism, the fascination of western cultures with eastern cultures, but also the reduction of "Asian societies, its people, practices and cultures to essentialist images of the 'other'". Brown and Leledaki also note that this Orientalism is not a one-way affair: "[T]here has been a dynamic interaction between Asian and Western representatives of various religious traditions over the last 150 years. These interactions do illustrate that sufficient numbers of cultural exchanges have taken place both formally and informally for us to suspect that cultural blending of thought and practice is embedded (to various degrees) in the invented traditions emerging from modernities in both East and West."

The "Ramana effect"
Lucas has called the popularisation of Advaita Vedanta in the west "the Ramana effect". According to Lucas, following Thomas Csordas, the succes of this movement is due to "portable practice" and "transposable message":

Ramana Maharshi's main practice, self-inquiry via the question "Who am I?", is easily practiceable in a non-institutionalized context: "Although the Maharshi was inscribed in a Vedantic culture/tradition, he did not require seekers to adopt it in order to practice self-inquiry. He also did not demand commitment to an institution or ideology, but only to the practice itself. [...] Neo-Advaitin teachers in North America use variations on this basic practice, and present it without its traditional Advaitic framing."

Ramana's teachings are also transposable: "The Maharshi made no demands that seekers leave behind their primary religious affiliations and often quoted Jewish and Christian scriptures to Westerners. By deemphasizing specifically Advaitic elements (i.e.,traditional language, philosophy and theology) of their teaching and repackaging them within the psychologized thought-world of contemporary North Americans, Neo-Advaitin teachers are able to transform Maharshi’s Advaitin teaching into a species of self-help accessible to a sizable number of adherents."

Criticism
Since the 1970s, besides the growing interest and participation of a lay audience in Asian religions, there has also been a growing awareness of differences between Asian religions, due to "unprecedented access to a plurality of Asian religious communities, the growth of departments of religious and comparative studies, significant improvements in translations, and increased scholarly specialization". Nevertheless, those Asian religions which fit into a perennial scheme, such as "Mahayana Buddhism, Vajrayana Buddhism, Hindu tantric traditions [...], Advaita Vedanta and Theravada maps of awakening" are still favoured in the west.

Lack of preparation and practice
The neo-Advaita movement has been severely criticized, for it's emphasis on insight alone, omitting the preparatory practices.

Traditional Advaita Vedanta... "[I]nvolves decades of study and practice under the guidance of a qualified teacher and has little to do with the "enlightenment" that is proclaimed in much of the present-day neo-Advaita movement."

This study and practice is necessary to prepare the mind for the insight into non-duality: "Traditional Vedanta completely [...] insists that a person be discriminating, dispassionate, calm of mind, and endowed with a ‘burning’ desire for liberation along with other secondary qualifications like devotion, faith, perseverance and so on. In other words it requires a mature adult with a one-pointed desire to know the Self."

The enlightenment-experiences induced by these teachers and their satsangs are considered to be superficial: "To assume that such temporary experiences of perceiving emptiness and enlightenment are the end of the path is a grave error."

Advaita practice
Indian philosophy emphasizes that "every acceptable philosophy should aid man in realizing the Purusarthas, the chief aims of human life:
 * Dharma: the right way to life, the "duties and obligations of the individual toward himself and the society as well as those of the society toward the individual";
 * Artha: the means to support and sustain one's life;
 * Kāma: pleasure and enjoyment;
 * Mokṣa: liberation, release.

According to Puligandla: "Any philosophy worthy of its title should not be a mere intellectual exercise but should have practical application in enabling man to live an enlightened life. A philosophy which makes no difference tot eh quality and style of our life is no philosophy, but an empty intellectual construction."

Advaita Vedanta gives an elaborate path to attain moksha. It entails more than self-inquiry or bare insight into one's real nature. Practice, especially Jnana Yoga, is needed to "destroy one’s tendencies (vAasanA-s)" before real insight can be attained. Classical Advaita Vedanta uses the "fourfold discipline" (sādhana-catustaya) to train students and attain moksha. It consitsts of four stages:
 * Samanyasa, cultivating oneself the following qualities:
 * Viveka, the capacity to discern between the real and the unreal;
 * Viaragya, dipassion, detachment, indifference to pleasure and pain under all circumstances;
 * Shad-sampat, the six virtues:
 * Sama, tranquility or control of mind, calmess;
 * Dama, control of the senses;
 * Uparati, renunciation of worldy activities;
 * Titiksha, endurance of changing and opposite circumstances;
 * Shradda, faith in the guru, the atman and the scriptures;
 * Samadhana, concentration of the mind.
 * Mumukshutva, intense longing for liberation.
 * Sravana, listening to the teachings of the sages on the Upanishads and Advaita Vedanta, and studying the Vedantic texts, such as the Brahma Sutras. In this stage the sudent learns about the reality of Brahman and the identity of atman;
 * Manana, the stage of reflection on the teachings;
 * Dhyana, the stage of meditation on the truth "that art Thou".