Clarity from Advaita

Sri Ramakrishna taught, in the spirit of the Advaita tradition that we all go through stages in our spiritual development, from dualism to semi-non-dualism and eventually to pure non-dualism. This kind of concept is right in line with the Course's emphasis on not skipping steps.

As I have covered in a recent blog, the Course's version of the "creation myth," (how did the impossible happen?), for many people may offer certain advantages in clarity compared to the Advaita tradition. The Course posits that the tiny mad idea (the separation thought, the ego), was our (the Son's) idea, and that the problem was not having the idea, but taking it seriously. The Course then appeals to our innate ability to change our mind as a straightforward "way back" to our Home in Heaven. This "change of mind" (Greek: "Metanoia,"), is the core teaching of Jesus, both what remains of his teachings 2000 years ago, and in ACIM today.
This particular aspect of the Course's explanation of our current predicament, is psychologically extremely powerful and helpful to us in returning to our mind where the problem is, rather than trying to fix the outcomes in the world, where the problem isn't and thus cannot be fixed either. It helps us in taking responsibility for entertaining the separation thought seriously, and now enables us to start to doubt our choice, and help to undo it, for which the Course offers us a stepwise training program, centered on "forgiveness," which properly understood is not dualistic forgiveness of someone out there (the Course would call that "forgiveness to destroy,") but forgiveness of myself for projecting my guilt on someone else, and taking it back to let the Holy Spirit be the judge for me instead.

The secret of salvation is but this: that you are doing this unto yourself. No matter what the form of the attack, this still is true. Whoever takes the role of enemy and of attacker, still is this the truth. Whatever seems to be the cause of any pain and suffering you feel, this is still true. For you would not react at all to figures in a dream you knew that you were dreaming. Let them be as hateful and as vicious as they may, they could have no effect on you unless you failed to recognize it is your dream.

This single lesson learned will set you free from suffering, whatever form it takes. The Holy Spirit will repeat this one inclusive lesson of deliverance until it has been learned, regardless of the form of suffering that brings you pain. Whatever hurt you bring to Him He will make answer with this very simple truth. For this one answer takes away the cause of every form of sorrow and of pain. The form affects His answer not at all, for He would teach you but the single cause of all of them, no matter what their form. And you will understand that miracles reflect the simple statement, "I have done this thing, and it is this I would undo." (ACIM:T-27.VIII.10-11).

In The Disappearance of the Universe, Gary Renard through the voice of Arten, proposes a similar developmental path from duality, to semi-dualism, to non-dualism (such as Vedanta), and finally pure non-dualism as represented by Jesus, in the sense of the total reunification of the Father and the Son (see DU, pp. 30-37). non-dualism is realizing that the world is an illusion, as indeed the Advaita teaching of lila (the godhead playing a game of "who am I" with himself) and Maya does. Pure non-dualism is reflected in the Course in the notion that "there is no world." (ACIM:W-132). Realizing that all these steps are a necessary part of the process is important, and is in-line with the Course's notion that we should not skip steps, lest we trip ourselves up. This is an evolutionary process while you are in it, and you need to respect your attachment to seeing things a certain way, until experience shows you that you are not giving up anything, but rather confining yourself to a constrained point of view, and you can't help but let it go.

Lately, I have been talking with Dutch teacher Jan van Delden, whose path was via Advaita in the tradition of Sri Ramana Maharshi, but who lately realized why A Course in Miracles often is so helpful to people because the forgiveness process teaches us gradually to turn to the Holy Spirit, and incrementally to let go of our ego attachments, in the context of our normal daily lives. Recently, Jan has shifted to teaching the Course for that reason. I already reported how his Advaita teacher at the end of his life had agreed with Jan's personal intuition that the origin of Maya (the life we dream), is our idea of separation, not a game of God, for that would impart some degree of objective reality to the world again. Much later, after the death of his teacher, Jan then found the Course via the work of Margot Krikhaar. However, his Advaita background, along with his in depth study and understanding of the spiritual metaphor of Homer's Odyssey, in turn help him explain the Course in a vibrant, new and different way.

Via Ken Bok I recently became aware of Mooji, and I have been taking in some of his material, which is also quite wonderful and helpful exactly because the language is different from the Course. Interestingly, Ken's interview with him sort of shows that transition, where at first the difference in terminology seemed to be a hurdle, but gradually better and better communication happened, until it ended in an experience of total surrender for Ken, which he has also shared with us, here.
One of the many things I found very helpful in Mooji's presentation was his reaction to the death of his guru, Papaji:

A month after returning to London, Mooji received news that the Master had passed away. Of this Mooji declares: "That Principle that manifests as the Master is ever HERE NOW. The True Master never dies, it is the mister that dies. The true Master, that Sat Guru* within, alone is the Real".

(http://www.mooji.org/biography.html) 

Interestingly, with the Course we are first being pointed to the existence of an "Inner Teacher," and gradually learn that he may show up for us in various manifestations through people, places and things, as we learn to tune in to the Voice more and more because engaging in forgiveness process would gradually lower our resistance, our defenses.

And again, the language of Advaita is different from the Course, but Mooji's approach to questioning our ego is quite interesting, and could be helpful to people:

So unsparing is his scrutiny and uncompromising stance, that the 'I' concept is inescapably exposed as a mental construction, when viewed from the formless awareness we are. 

(http://www.mooji.org/biography.html)

Yet another Advaita teacher caught my attention recently: Tony Parsons. His way of talking about True Empathy (his term: Compassion) versus False Empathy (his term: Complicity), is quite instructive, and really in synch with the Course, except I like the words even better - in particular the word complicity, for that's what it means to play into the ego's conspiracy, which is always about tempting the son of God to believe he's a body, in other words the conspiracy is about making the world real at all costs, and suffering and sacrifice does a great job of that.

In the end all ways lead to Rome, and it won't matter which way you came. The Course respects all paths, but simply suggests that you "stick" to yours in terms of being consistent in your practice. Skipping around on the buffet line is simply another ego stalling tactic. But simply listening to other ways of saying the same thing helps deepen our understanding, and can sometimes bring to light issues we had not been clear on for ourselves, for hearing it in different words, requires a more intent, conscious listening effort.

Translating Margot Krikhaar's Second Book "The Great Liberation"

It is a total delight to be working on Margot Krikhaar's second book, The Great Liberation, which to all intents and purposes was the platform for her formal teaching of the Course. The first book was more "girl next door does the Course," and as such invited the reader to look in the kitchen of one who steadfastly practiced the Course and experienced her complete awakening in this lifetime.

Subsequent to the first book, Margot quickly became a prominent teacher of A Course in Miracles in Holland. This second book reflects her thorough preparation for her teaching and the complete integration of her own learning, to which readers of her first book were a witness.

Although this second book is much more rigorous and structured than the first, it retains Margot's delicious sense of humor and her light touch. Early on she describes the two broad categories of how people can get off on the wrong foot with their practice of the Course. Essentially, one is to totally focus on the theory and forget the day to day practice, by which it becomes a vaporous intellectual exercise that is all in your head. And the other is the route of ignoring the theory and working only on an emotional level with all the seemingly reassuring statements in the Course, and misusing them as affirmations or mantras. Naturally there are many variations on these themes.

Margot's treatment of these extremes of reacting to the Course are spot on, based on what I have seen personally in my years working with ACIM. Most specifically though, it made me reflect on my own experiences in my early years with the Course. Personally, I had studied a lot of the "apocryphal" literature and its provenance, and had been acquainted with the Thomas gospel early on, when it was translated for the first time in the late fifties (in Dutch, in 1959). Along with it, I had read a fair amount of Plato, and Plotinus in Greek, and was in the habit of reading my New Testament in Greek, though my primary focus remained on the Gospel of Mark, which I believe to be relatively the least embellished of the canonical gospels. I had also studied some of the early Christian history, and various Gnostic teachers, only to become more confused as I went along.

In my younger years, I'd experienced my parents leaving the very liberal protestant church they had belonged to and where I was baptized (Remonstrant Brotherhood). They left within 2 years after my birth, though they clearly retained a sense of a relationship with Jesus and his gospel but seen in a very different light, and with a sense that his church was within, and not in some building. When the first public presentations about the Thomas gospel took place, I remember a certain level of excitement when they went to a speech by Prof. Gilles Quispel, who was the first translator. There was an excitement about the notion of getting to know how Jesus sounded in the original, before he was turned into a little Christian by Paul c.s. in later years.

My mother had  spent some time with the Oxford movement before settling in the Remonstant Brotherhood for a few years, and my father's spirituality was more widely framed, with religious and spiritual traditions from around the world, including Hindu teachers like Sri Ramana Maharshi, and Sri Ramakrishna, as well as Buddha, Lao Tse, and (then) modern authors from Tolstoy and Dostoyevski, to Romain Rolland, Áldous Huxley, and Herman Hesse. Professionally, he was a psychiatrist, and very much in touch with the spiritual undertones of what he did. Never mind all that, it seemed as if my mother in particular had a very strong sense of awe for certain "mysteries of the faith," and she would convey an attitude that mirrored the "Ours is not to reason why." type of respect. There were questions you weren't supposed to ask. Her conviction seemed to be that revelation was our only hope, but I was never satisfied with that. So, when I finally found A Course in Miracles,  at age 40, it came as quite a relief, and I could wholly appreciate Helen Shucman's famous exclamation: "Finally, God for intellectuals." In the Course there is never a question you can't ask, although Jesus can be quite annoying with his answers, at times pointing out that our questions are not really questions, but trick questions that are really veiled statements.

For me the Course instantly clarified the whole early history of Christianity, about which I've written since then in my book Closing the Circle: Pursah's Gospel of Thomas and A Course in Miracles. For one thing it became clearer than ever how much Jesus was never a Christian, but just bombarded into one by those who came later and exploited his teachings for their own ends, in similar ways to what is happening with A Course in Miracles today. He was certainly never a Gnostic; the later gnostics merely co-opted some of his vocabulary, but to consider Jesus a gnostic in the formal sense would be completely anachronistic.

The big thing for me was that the Course answers every question and explains everything, and never stops its full accounting of the ego system, which only serves to lift the veils of "mystery" which that insane thought system uses to protect itself, and clothe itself in an appearance of meaning, when it has none. At the limits of what can be explained, the Course has established complete confidence and accountability with the reader, and merely states that only experience can go beyond the words, so if they made sense so far, you might want to try to do what the Course is saying. In other words, the whole thing provides a full and complete transparency and accountability, and nowhere appeals to blind "faith," but to experiential validation.

There are times when the ego just short-circuits with the material of the Course, and for a moment it seems incomprehensible, but always those blockages are resolved if we trust our experience, and they can be gone beyond. The answer always is that things must be first forgiven and then understood.

Margot's book is very much informed by her own experiences as we already know from her first book, and the fact that she speaks from that deep knowledge of the Course's process makes this book, while it is a rendering of the Course theory primarily, into a valuable guide for many who are first becoming aware of A Course in Miracles.

Copyright, © 2012 Rogier F. van Vlissingen. All rights reserved.