The problem with Advaita

Firstly there’s not really a problem with Advaita – it’s us. 

More correctly it’s our senses, our perception & our concepts that can make Advaita tricky. 

Advaita means ‘not two’ and Advaita, as a philosophical premise, is the attempt to describe the realization of the deepest level of identity or Being – the true nature of things. 

Another term for Advaita would be ‘non-dualism’.  This is the insight that though it may be entirely convincing to our senses and perception that there are separate protagonists in the game of life -  some heroes, some villains, the forces of good, the forces of darkness – fundamental all these myriad, apparently separate characters, are ‘not two’. This can be deeply troubling to our concepts of right & wrong, good and bad etc. Let it trouble us. The deepest teachings are not always comforting, in fact they can be far from it. At some point we have to accept that all the great traditions have only ever offered means by which ‘we’ can be freed from false understanding and illusion. That is liberation.

As Morpheus says to Neo in the Matrix – “Remember, all I’m offering is the truth. Nothing more.”

Another concept that is integral to Advaita, and just as thorny, is that of ‘non-doership’. Confusion can arise here when we misunderstand the meaning and state ‘well I’ll just sit on my sofa for the rest of my life’. It’s not a question of action or inaction, non-doership brings the question of ‘who’ is doing into the equation – to whom does the action truly belong? Despite everything our senses, and our conventions, tell us the teachings of Advaita politely suggest that we begin to question the idea of our perceived experience of volition, of free will. 

Again we may throw our hands up indignantly and cry ‘What?! So I can just what I want when I want regardless of the consequences?’ 

That would literally cement the idea, the notion of this self-directing, in-charge individual. Maybe what’s going unfold through us will just unfold through us. 

Spiritual life warns us to guard about being too certain in our proclamations of what we think is the truth. The very first line of the Tao Te Ching states that;

‘The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name.’

The moment we align ourselves, as it were, with any particular concept or description – free will, no free will – we step away from the ‘eternal Tao’, we lose it. 

Maybe the Truth always lies in that space between fixed positions. In that space before our minds ‘collapse’, or close, around a certain concept or notion. A mature spiritual practice might not ask us to abandon all our concepts rather it may advise us to hold them lightly – to remember that a concept is just a ‘finger pointing to the moon’ and not the Moon itself.

A truly inaccurate, yet also very understandable, impression of Advaita, and other teachings, is that there is a coldness, a dryness to it – that it is purely a process of negation. There is some truth to this however there is a method to this. Advaita speaks of that which is to be shed – illusion, confusion, false concepts. 

It does not speak of that which is to be revealed – it does not utter the name that cannot be named as it were. 

Because that can’t be described, it can only be realized – and in that lies incredible wonder. 

 1. It’s likely that so many of the worlds wisdom teachings focus on questioning our assumptions of free will, of volition as that’s one of the beliefs or impressions that we hold onto most dearly – it’s so utterly convincing that it needs quite some loosening.