[Advaita-l] tradition and adwaita

[Viswanathan N]

Manishji
   
  Waht you said is absolutely true. Truth is beyond all bounds like religion, culture , language or nation.
   "BhArat is everywhere...whoever loves wisdom is BhArat..... BhArat is "BhAs iti rataha ...one who is dissolved in (in love with) wisdom (awakening,truth,realization)"...very rightly said.
   
  Infact nothing to read or to know or acquire in the name of knowledge. As it is you are there, but covered by so much of dust and dirt in the name of knowledge/culture/religion etc...just drop them and see yourself as pure and that is enlightenment....  to reach that stage we start learning/doing all sorts of things (means) and unfortunately struck there itself, further accumulting more and more dirt& dust and becomming grosser and heavier.
   
  Request all the members to go thru " Ashtavakra Samhiti" ad that is ultimate in this Jnana marga
 
   
  Pranams 
  Vishy

m w <all_discussions at yahoo.com> wrote:
  Gerji,

Wisdom reveals not through the scriptures but the one who studies them, it is again not through the guru but the one who seeks, and the guru's finger is a pointer and so are there endless pointers and none of them is the goal in itself and can never be. If people are making advaita into another religion or anything very crude and rigid set, into which if one fits, only then one is an advaitin as they are often saying "HE is advaitin and HE is not", then it is never so. An ocean has all kinds of creatures, and it doesn't mean that those creatures who lie outside the little pond of their imagination can not be in the ocean either. In that they are totally mistaken and mislead.
There is no rigid set of beliefs or faiths that advaita proposes. It is an ocean and it is the heart and destination of all rivers, be they from christianity or islam or any other 'ity' or 'ism', be it theism, pantheism, monism or atheism..... There is an advaitic truth on which the whole advaita stands and that too supportless and from there everything emanates, every relative truth or falsehood. Everything else is relative and there can be two truths that are relative to the frame of reference and together may seem paradoxical. The freeing process that you are talking about here is what I use to call as reaching notionless state where there is dissolution... 
Don't take anything as bound in some rigid boundaries when it comes to advaita, Gerji. There are always people everywhere who make something rigid out of everything, which is also ok. This is how it is with their understanding!!! The way you understand advaita is perfectly fine. Advaita is about "Wisdom"...call it knowledge....freedom...truth...
Ye be truth and everything will be taken care of.... 
No need to worry about anything. Ages have passed, things are going on and on like this, what will your concern do. Islam is suffering because of few people and so is christianity and every other so-called religion. Everyone is not like that, but only few... There is no religion apart from spirtuality and once spritiuality ensues, there advaita IS, to which one comes only after awakening, before that, if someone does something in sleep, in a sleeping state, how much is one to be blamed. 
Truth frees, and if you want to give it a name, call it Advaita or what else....These are names...what good is in binding oneself with them....those who are bound will come out of it some day, if not now....There is nothing that comes specifically from so called physical "BhArat" (India in English)....BhArat is everywhere...whoever loves wisdom is BhArat..... BhArat is "BhAs iti rataha ...one who is dissolved in (in love with) wisdom (awakening,truth,realization)"... 

Pranaams
Manish









Ger Koekkoek wrote:
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


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