Church of the Churchless

I've got a love-hate relationship thing going with neo-advaita/non-dual teachings — which is what Leo Hartong's book, "Awakening to the Dream," is all about.

(Note: I'm pretty sure "Awakening to the Dream" should go in the neo-advaita, rather than traditional advaita, literary category. Advaita-philes like to argue about the distinctions between the two — see here and here — which strikes me as sort of strange given their emphasis on oneness and non-duality.)

I'm not certain how I learned about this book. I think Amazon sucked me into buying it through one of those "readers who bought X also bought Y" lures. Anyway, as soon as it arrived I found myself reading it avidly.

Up to a point.

Then I started skimming it, because I'd reached the end of what I could like about "Awakening to the Dream" and started to focus on what I dislike about some forms of Advaita and Nondualism.

[Update: just ran across a great humorous post by Jeff Foster that beautifully captures the irritating nature of many nondual/advaita types. Read "The Advaita Trap" and laugh.]

Namely, their faith-based religious aspects, which are plainly evident in Hartong's book. His emphasis is on Pure Awareness, which I have some problems with. (See my post, Brain's "dark energy" casts doubt on pure awareness.)

Supposedly the essence of human consciousness is Pure Awareness, which is completely separate from the awareness of all the stuff that we're usually aware of. How anyone, including Hartong, could know this isn't talked about. It's just something to be taken on faith.

It [Awakeness] will shine when it shines, and it will shift the attention from the content of Awareness to Pure Awareness itself. This Pure Awareness is what you really are. When you think you're not it, this thought is part of the temporal content of Awareness and has no bearing on Awareness itself.

Just let yourself be. Give yourself permission to be up, down, pissed or delirious. Observe the process and don't get caught in the content. Know yourself as the limitless field of Pure Awareness in which the drama of life merely arises.

Well, why should I believe this is true?

The notion that worldly existence is maya, illusion, a dream, unreal, a reflection of higher realities, shadows cast by a divine sun — this is a core tenet of Hinduism, Platonism, and other religions/philosophies which urge us to discount the reality of everyday experience.

Hartong, echoing various systems of Indian thought, says that the Self is all there is. This is the same as Pure Awareness, so far as I can understand. You know, Atman is Brahman; Pure Awareness is the Self; Self-Realization is God-Realization.

What irks me about all this "Self" talk is that this concept sounds exactly like "God." Something transcendent, mysterious, invisible, unknowable, yet to be taken as the Most Real Thing.

Now consider the possibility that the Self dreams up this manifestation in a similar way. Like the dreamer appearing in his own dream, we can say that the Creator appears in his manifestation while, at the same time, the manifestation appears in the Creator. Dreamlike, He manifests the whole cosmic drama out of Himself…The substance of this dreamed up 'reality' is Pure Awareness — the dream that stuff is made of.

OK, I'll consider the possibility. Just as I'll consider the possibility that Jesus died for our sins, Allah revealed the truth to Mohammad in the Koran, and lots of other religious propositions.

But I won't believe or accept possibilities unless they make good sense, or have demonstrable evidence supporting them.

I starting reading "Awakening from the Dream" avidly because I resonate with several themes that Hartong focused on in his opening chapters: (1) there is no such thing as a "self" or "soul" residing within the human psyche, and (2) genuine enlightenment is realizing there's no such thing as enlightenment, because there's no individual self to be enlightened.

Maybe later I'll write a what I like post about this book, because there indeed is a lot to like in "Awakening from the Dream." At the moment, though, having finished the book this afternoon, I'm zeroed in on the discrepancy between Hartong's certainty about the Self and Pure Awareness with passages he wrote like these:

Whatever we say about it is as true or untrue as its opposite…Take for example a simple sentence like 'Pure Awareness is beyond all concepts.' Labeling Pure Awareness as being beyond concepts objectifies it as a new concept.

…No matter how we try, by talking or thinking about this we cannot escape the limitation of making it into a concept, and so it forever escapes each and every attempt to define it. It remains forever a paradoxical and intimate mystery, an ongoing open question, and a constant answer.

Absolutely.

I like these thoughts. The idea that we humans can comprehend the essence of the cosmos seems astonishingly anthropomorphic, grandiose, and unproven to me. Yet somehow Hartong manages to claim that the Self is eternal, since it will remain when time runs out and the manifested universe dissolves.

Sounds just like God. Something to be taken on faith. (Also, how does Hartong know time will run out and the universe will dissolve? This is a Hindu belief without any proof behind it.)

When I ordered "Awakening to the Dream" on Amazon, I noticed that 34 of the 35 reader reviews were 4 or 5 star, highly positive. Today I read the single 1-star review, which was quite interesting and well written.

Have a read. It's a better critique of the book and neo-advaita than I'm capable of. Plus, the guy (or gal) offers up a bunch of suggestions for spiritual/philosophical reading that he or she finds more credible than "Awakening to the Dream."

I'll copy in the 1-star reader review as an extension to this post.