[Advaita-l] tradition and adwaita

[Ger Koekkoek]

This discussion about adwaitic tradition might be a bit upside down.
The goal of this tradition and it's guru's is, as far as I understood it:
To free your attention, awareness, alertness, or the I-sense, whatever you may call it, from anything it feels attracted to, and once it is free, to turn it inwards to it's own source, or to say this with other words, to stop it from wandering around and let it rest in itself.
But this process of freeing our attention can be very complex and dangerous, and it is very difficult to do it on your own.
Of course it is very useful, if you go this way, to have a guru. Then you don't have  to recover the wheel again. (Sometimes the use of a metaphor can be very short without being less logical.) It takes perhaps a whole live to recover this magnificent instrument again, while a teacher can explain the principle of the wheel in 5 minutes.
Of course a guru can be important, but not in an absolute way. Brahman is "what is", and this implifies that any creature that is starting to study on his own being can find Brahman.
Of course your tradition is very important, has some aspects in it, had recovered some spiritual wheels that are very much needed in modern times, otherwise, when I did not thought so, why else should I be in this traditional minded mail-ring as a European?
But when you interpret your tradition in an absolute way, like the Islam does with the Koran, and Christianity does with the bible, well, if you allow me to say so as an outsider, then you act perhaps even against the means of adwaita itself! 
The goal is: to free the I-sense form everything it feels bounded to, and then to turn it inwards to it's own source.
In fact this goal is very simple, it only needs sometimes complex philosophies, and other methods like bhakti, course we as human beings feel bounded to many matters in a complex and very often even fanatic way. 
But when you talk about your tradition in an absolute way, well, then your I-sense is bound by this tradition!
And that is, I'm afraid to say so, upside down, according to adwaita. You feel bound to some traditions around adwaita, which is contradicting with the means of adwaita itself, which has as a goal to free your attention from anything it feels bound to, so that it will be able to look inwards.

With greetings,
Ger