New Age vs. Neo-Advaita vs. Authentic Spirituality

[Monkey-man]

@Shanmugam enlightenment is what you define as enlightenment = non-dual awareness, no suffering, no self, unconditional love etc etc etc

It might be binary or non-binary I don’t have opinion on that. But salvation is not the stage of enlightenment or anything what Buddha and Krishna and Advaita talked about. They are only relevant until you have enlightenment but not further on the spiritual path. Because mind the period of time when they lived! It was before Jesus and evolutionary progress had limitation back then.

Salvation that Jesus talked about is beyond enlightenment. Enlightenment is a naturally occurring realisation that one will have on the path to salvation. Salvation is when subtle body or what is called ‘soul’ fully merges with physical body, it is when descending evolutionary energy transforms ‘matter’ and eventually human-being acquires new supramental body within his physical body (Jesus resurrection). Whenever you had your head buzzing - know that it is evolutionary energy pouring through your head!!! And it only wants to fully purify you from all kinds of things and give birth to new body within yourself, you only need to surrender to it and let it do it’s work once you are enlightened. And yes salvation is from Judgement day. And what is it???  It is the quantum leap of the evolutionary process on the earth. I don’t want to dig into what salvation is because it’s difficult to explain that, everyone will misunderstand it because not many people really want to understand the big picture and what comes after their life and how this dream and evolution is structured, they just want instant relief here and now so they seek enlightenment, instant happiness instant paradise instant bliss, consumerism takes new shape, they want to hear beautiful words like life is a dream and that they don’t need to do anything at all, see ppl want easy solutions and relief but that’s just another delusion. They don’t want to listen anything about punishment and any scary things, it will hurt their mental paradigm. And anyway salvation was explained by Jesus and sources that I mentioned to you.

If there’s nothing beyond enlightenment then there’s no reason for Bible and Quran to exist at all. Things would stop on Buddha. Abrhamic religions wouldn’t exist. Absolutely zero reason for them in such case.  yet they all exist and talk about hell and heaven and apocalypse and resurrection and sin and all that staff which seems to be non-sense and completely unrelated to enlightenment. Hehe it’s because enlightenment is just one part/step of the whole game. Game is not based around enlightenment, game is never-ending show that will go on. And Death won’t liberate you from this eternal game (c) Aurobindo.

Btw it’s not that I’m simply believing in some authority, I’m researching various sources and experiencing certain things. You should do it too if you are truly interested in Jesus teachings and  Sri Aurobindo can help you. 

I might sound like BS, but anyway don’t believe, just research, that’s what I did when I intuited that it’s not as simple as nondualers think  Well it’s simple in the end when you see bigger picture, but not when you don’t know and stuck with ‘enlightenment is the end’ paradigm. People like to simplify everything, make theory of everything consisted from few words like enlightenment and everything is one and nothing exists and so on. Haha yes all is one so what? Game is still on and it has its own rules

[Shanmugam]

4 minutes ago, Saumaya said:

How the hell is your grandma 65 years old?! Mine is above 70 and Im 18

It is just a ballpark figure.. I have to ask her exact age...  . But I think she should be 70 or less. My grandma's marriage was early marriage. My mom got married when she was 18 and I was born when she was 19. 

[Nahm]

What’s revealed in enlightenment, is that the entire thing, the whole production, the big show, all that is,  is you. There was never any truth to the mystics, or books, or literally anything. It’s you. You are the only truth. This is the ‘cosmic joke’. There’s no cosmos, or Jesus, or Buddha, or “we” or “us” or “him” it’s all you. There are many clues, pertinent ones that comes to mind are the “evidentiary” findings for those like Jesus and Siddartha. That they lived could not be proven, nor disproven. Another clue that comes to mind is how physicists are mindful to use the term “observable” before the word universe. A dream has no end, because it is a dream. There’s no edge because it’s not ‘real’, in terms of what is implied by the word ‘physical’. There is no physical and nonphysical. Just God, you. “Physical” is appearance. Is this not what is meant with the word enlightenment? The quotes of the masters and books of the ancients are great, but enlightenment reveals you wrote them. Just for fun, read the Bible, especially the judgement day content, in the light that you wrote it, so that in the dream, you could read what you wrote to yourself, to enlighten you. 

****If this offends you in any way, as religion convo’s sometimes can seem offensive, please know I have no intention to be offensive. Just talking to myself. 

*****My grandma’s 88 and Catholic, so I know what I’m talking about.lol

[Shanmugam]

@Monkey-man  Read and understand each and every line here.. There is no hurry to reply. I can wait for eternity. But it is very important that you understand and take your time to consider certain things open-mindedly..

I have talked to people who are impressed by various authorities and follow them... And this is the first time I am talking to a person who bases what he says on Aurobindo. It is really interesting to meet you.

When I say to people to not to blindly take everything the authority says, their immediate response would be "No, I am not just blindly following; I can think for myself.. I have experienced certain things myself"... This is the natural human response and I know that very well. The collection of various logical explanations, nuances and the sense of wonder that these books give you convinces you to accept these things gradually.. This has happened many times for me when I was too young. As I said, before, my only suggestion to you is 'Don't conclude anything yet'..

If you have read Paramhamsa Yogananda's book 'The Second coming of Christ' in which he claims that he got a direct communion with Christ, your opinion would be different and Paramhamsa Yogananda would be your authority. This is how authority bias works. 

I have read many books ever since I started to read in my childhood. And there is a huge list of mystics and saints who have written those books and talking about things like this. After seeing the clarity and the logical explanation, I have always found them very convincing. But when I noticed that many of the things are quite contradictory and completely different from each other, I decided to not to come to any conclusion about anything and simply keep exploring all the contradictory philosophies. After a lot of confusion, contemplation, suffering etc etc etc, I have found my home as a result of lifelong seeking.  . And I know now that none of these things really matter. 

By the way, I have a question. I have heard that Aurubindo claimed that he will never die physically and he will resurrect just like Jesus did. But it never happened. Is this true?

[Monkey-man]

@Shanmugam I don’t care about authorities really, I’m not into believing them, I’m not identified with any religion. I’m not asking to believe in anything. I’m simply researching it and it is in progress, I’m not concluding anything. But you have to understand that There are rules to this dream, you see? Everything changes. we used to be monkeys, now we are clever monkeys, then we will be something else. There is evolution and it’s not only physical but also happens on the level of subtle bodies or souls. It’s easy to understand that once you dig deeper into understanding of karma and reincarnation cycle. This cycle exists for evolutionary purposes, not just to torture us like Buddha thought. That’s it, evolution has its logic and plan and Homo sapiense is not the highest stage of evolution. Its not about higher meaning and purpose per se, its about how reality is structured, how it progresses, how it changes. Christianity, Islam and Judaism only exists because of that, they give a guidance within this ‘dream’, they are not about enlightenment, enlightenment for them is just one step, if they are about enlightenment they would simply state that, like Buddha did he said I teach enlightenment, but they stated different things. It’s not just bunch of metaphors of enlightenment like many ppl like to think. And they seem to be contradictory but once you look on the spirituality and religions from integral point of view you can see that they actually complement each other. To understand what Aurobindo meant,  one need to research it, it’s rather a complicated topic.

Even the chosen ones will be deceived (c) Jesus. (chosen ones = enlightened ones)

Edited March 8, 2018 by Monkey-man

[Guest Quanty]

I do not suscribe to none of the above titled. 

I only suscribe to my own flying if you know what i mean. 

One learns to fly and there is no need of books or people to guide you.

Make chi/prana/breath etc. your doing and be, smell and see. 

 

Namaste, Mfks! 

[Joseph Maynor]

Advaita Vedanta is a very old school that comes out of the Vedanta Hindu Tradition.  The Vedanta School looked to the Upanishads for guidance, especially the concepts of Atman and Brahman.  Advaita Vedanta was the philosophical legacy of Adi Shankara, who was a Vedanta scholar who wrote a bunch of commentaries that later became the doctrine of Advaita Vedanta.  What's significant about Advaita Vedanta is, contrary to the two other Vedanta schools, Advaita Vedanta is non-dual.  So, with Advaita Vedanta we've got a really great model of a non-dual philosophy that reaches back to the Upanishads!  It's got a much richer philosophical structure than Taoism does.  So, it's a nice system to study if you wanna see what a non-dual philosophical/spiritual theory can look like.

Neo-Advaita is a label given to those teachers who try to simplify or modernize Advaita Vedanta in order to teach it easier or to avoid a lot of stuff that they don't like about Advaita Vedanta.  

New Age is a label give to Spiritualists in the West who are fairly open-minded and liberal in their views who don't really share much in common except for a search for Spirituality.  New Age is a movement that was birthed out of the cultural shifts in the 60's and 70's.  New Age people tend to be highly intelligent, open-minded, creative, independent, liberal, and highly-conscious people.

 

Edited March 9, 2018 by Joseph Maynor

[WildeChilde]

@Joseph Maynor Thanks Joseph; that was a very detailed and easy-to-comprehend answer.  I tried studying Advaita Vedanta, but at my intellectual and experiential level right now, I honestly find the whole Atman/Brahman dichotomy to be entirely opaque and inscrutable.  It's the same kind of confusion I had when trying to understand the Trinity back when i was a Christian.  

[Haumea]

As I interpret it, death and resurrection aren't literal but metaphoric, death of the ego and rebirth in the natural state.

If salvation is somehow different from enlightenment, why did Jesus describe what amounts to sahaja in Matthew 18:3 as "kingdom of heaven."?

Is there higher you can go than "kingdom of heaven"?

The only question on my mind is what kind of non-duality teacher Jesus was.  

I suspect he was some kind of bhakti yogi, but I haven't researched the Bible enough to be confident.

Edited March 9, 2018 by Haumea

[Leo Gura]

It's very simple:

There are 7 billion unique minds on this planet, and they will all interpret and understand (or misunderstand) nonduality in their own unique way, as you would expect a complex organism, composed for trillions of neurons to do.

Nothing surprising here. The surprise would be if 7 billion different minds all agreed with each other.