Advaita, Neo-Advaita, Non-Duality — Spiritual Philosophy — Leo Hartong, Awakening to the Dream (2001) — Book Review

05 March 2014

Caveat — not a book or philosophy for many, but important for some

Leo Hartong’s Awakening to the Dream: The Gift of Lucid Living (Non-Duality Press, 2001, 2007) may appeal to those who are curious about:

(a) the nature and meaning of human consciousness

and more negatively and indirectly,

(b) the ways in which it can mislead us into thinking that we know more than we do.

This short volume, however, will not appeal to most Christians, Muslims, Jews and other deists. And its conclusions will be considered a little too far out, even by the scientifically inclined.

Incidentally, Hartong’s book — and two others that I cite in the conclusion — may inspire substance abusers in their recoveries. I make this point solely on the basis of the personal information all three authors provide about their journeys to recovery.

Why Leo Hartong’s book, specifically?

Awakening to the Dream is an abbreviated introduction to non-duality/Advaita spiritual philosophy.

Its 146 pages provide an efficient way for spiritual seekers to experiment with non-duality’s perspective, without spending a whole lot of time in the discipline before recognizing that it might not be to their taste.

What is Advaita spiritual philosophy?

Advaita comes from Indian Vedanta philosophy. See an excellent explanation at:

Sangeetha Menon, Advaita Vedanta, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (visited 10 February 2014)

At one level, one can think of Advaita as a hypothesis of all things.

Advaita’s basic idea

The crux is most simply stated by the Advaita Fellowship:

All there is . . . is Consciousness.

In the West, this perspective is often called non-duality or neo-Advaita philosophy. The distinction is a fair one because westernized Advaita seems to chop many of Advaita’s contextual Hindu precursors out, as if they were never there.

Though purists might quarrel with this surgery, one can argue that neo-Advaita captures the most basic elements of the older thinking. Just without all the characters and mythology which led to its construction.

Ramifications of the “consciousness alone” idea

Awakening to the Dream explains that:

While reading texts from non-dual systems such as Zen, Advaita, Taoism, or Dzogchen, you will the affirmation that Self-realization has no promise other than to release you from your belief in a separate self or ego. That’s it. The dropping away of an illusion simply revealing this as it is.

Enlightenment not only shows that your separate identity is an illusion, it reveals that sheer purposelessness is at the heart of this whole creation.

The final understanding is not the result of seeking, but brings freedom from seeking. It is not about fulfilling expectations, but about being free of them.

Life’s freshness is recognized; its presence is acknowledged; its oneness is seen — but by no one. There simply is recognition, acknowledgement, and seeing.

How do Leo Hartong and non-dualists know this “truth”?

Non-dualists use the existence of the mind’s awareness to conclude that separation from each other and the cosmos does not exist.

In other words, the whole shebang — including all the apparently separate entities within it — is just a boundary-lacking agglomeration of a unity comprised of aware consciousness.

To experience this yourself, sit meditatively and just notice whatever comes up in the mind. Eventually, it will become clear that the awareness that notices thoughts and sensations does not seem to be connected to a sense of identifiable me-ness. This awareness has no history and no particularity. The normal mind’s background noticing appears to be comprised of only raw consciousness.

The me-lacking meditative experience is genuine, but the conclusions that non-dualists derive from it may not be:

Awareness is the non-dual space that sustains both the noticed and the ignored.

Awareness simply is.

To see that you are this awareness is to see that you were never born, never lived, and that you will never die. You are the living Awareness, which is the clear and open space in and from which everything arises, including your body-mind and your sense of individuality.

Pure Awareness is unconditioned and without attributes; it is simply present with no beginning or end, and it does not require any effort on your part.

Obvious analytical flaws

Like Leo Hartong, I frequently reside in the non-dualist mental state. Unlike him, I do not ascribe cosmic significance to it. This means that I see the evidentiary and analytical flaws that mar neo-Advaita, as well as most other forms of spiritual thinking.

Non-dualists arguably put too much emphasis on our brain/mind as being a reliable indicator of Truth. Any neuroscientifically educated person can list numerous ways in which the healthy brain fools us at every turn. Throw in some structural or biochemical abnormalities, and it is even more off to the Inaccuracy Races.

Our easily experienced sense of depersonalized awareness is not necessarily a manifestation of depersonalized, unitary and eternal consciousness

Even if Unity Consciousness exists, evolutionarily there would be no obvious reason to connect our brains to it, as a survival trait.

In fact, the depersonalization that non-duality posits would works against the me-centered drive to compete and survive in a Darwinian world.

For example, we can surmise that a creature that is firmly caught up in a feeling of death-facing separateness might be more motivated and skilled at surviving Nature’s harshness, than one that frequently traipses off into the complacence of sensing itself to be at deathless one with everything.

Simply experiencing the easily accessed state of depersonalized awareness does not logically necessitate Hartong’s overarching conclusion “that you were never born, never lived, and that you will never die.”

Even if one buys non-dualists’ idea that our apparently separate awarenesses are the Universe creating itself — from and within an unseparated Singular Wholeness — that does not eliminate the possibility that we are just separate enough to give ourselves the locational and temporal differences in perspective that Einstein implicitly pointed to with his relativity theory.

Of course, non-duality can absorb the paradox of simultaneous separateness and wholeness by positing that the One is looking at itself from different angles. That said, if we chop out the individual validity of apparently separate existences, is not the hypothesized Whole commensurately diminished?

Westernized Advaita also has trouble explaining how material objects fit into Reality

Are they consciousness, too?

Or do they only exist insofar as consciousness perceives them?

And how should we persuasively explain the probable continuing existence of insensate objects that are no longer (or never have been) perceived by sentient beings?

Note

Here, I tentatively reject non-dualists’ simple-minded resort to (misunderstood) quantum mechanics as the metaphorical equivalent of their spiritual thinking.

Non-duality, as Westerners simplify it from its original Hindu-derived form, loses the myth-based ability to answer these questions.

In short . . .

Just because there are mental states in which we feel eternal and undifferentiated does not logically mean that we are.

Non-duality arbitrarily prioritizes our shared ability to observe apparently undifferentiated awareness — apparently on the basis of the idea that because it lacks personalized differentiation, it has to be primary.

One could just as soon elevate our feeling of separate individuality to primary status on the reverse reasoning.

Being intensely differentiated (me versus you) and individually responsible for our day-to-day survival, one could easily posit that separateness must be the primary condition. For example, if I do not evade a hungry tiger, I cease to exist in Hartong’s “dream” world.

This is one aspect of neo-Advaita that mildly irritates me. It consistently uses the wave-in-ocean analogy to characterize our separate existences, as if waves are not momentarily and energetically distinct from the ocean entity they propagate through.

Non-dualistic thinking would have us surmise that, even though the wave has vanished — meaning that our separateness is now dead, having been eaten by the tiger — we are still alive in the form of the ocean.

That metaphor is about as meaningful as saying that our post-cremation molecules are eternal.

People who worry about the demise of their individual consciousness are not likely to be comforted by the thoughts of an energetically vanished wave or a scattered group of insensate, but surviving atoms.

Non-duality abstracts human experience to the point of meaningless and purposeless idiocy.

An example of even more blatant analytical silliness

Leo Hartong concludes, on the basis of no presented evidence:

When time runs out and the manifested universe dissolves, Pure Awareness still is.

You, as a dream character [meaning the sense of me-ness], are a temporary occurrence, while you as the dreamer are beyond space and time.

We can certainly walk around intuiting and emotionally experiencing this. But that does not make it true or metaphorically meaningful.

Scientifically and spiritually, I do not see the need to extrapolate to what I cannot possibly know from the little that I can or do recognize. This is a philosophical area in which I think Zen’s comfort with ambiguity and “not knowing” is spiritually more accurate.

The moral? — Non-dualism has obvious analytical and evidentiary flaws, as all spiritual disciplines must — but those flaws are not enough to eliminate it from legitimate philosophical consideration

Leo Hartong’s book is a good “test strip” introduction to Westernized Advaita.

If you find yourself emotionally connecting to what he says, go on to read two other longer, but still introductory books to the philosophy:

Jeff Foster, The Deepest Acceptance: Radical Awakening in Ordinary Life (Sounds True, November 2012)

Joan Tollifson, Nothing to Grasp (Non-Duality Press, August 2012)

Neither of these latter volumes overcomes my analytical objections to Westernized non-duality thinking. But I can see why all the message of all three books can be reassuring to some people.

As a potentially important aside, the three authors are recovered substance abusers. All have struggled with a sense of purposeless suffering.

My medical student clinical experience with substance abusers — all of whom had one or more psychiatric diagnoses to go along with their substance dependencies — makes me intuit that these books might be comforting to some among that group. Reason enough to recommend their pages.

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Advaita, Neo-Advaita, Non-Duality — Spiritual Philosophy — Leo Hartong, Awakening to the Dream (2001) — Book Review