Why Most Neo-Advaitins Are Out to Lunch

There are many spiritual teachers around these days, particularly in California, who espouse a modern version of the ancient Hindu mystical teaching known as Advaita ("nondual") Vedanta. These "Neo-Advaitins" almost universally share, to varying degrees, a peculiar (albeit ancient) belief that the ordinary world of space and time, matter and mind, is nothing but "maya," a cosmic joke or illusion, a deceptive veil that masks the face of God. From a certain point of view, that definitely seems to be the case. Abiding in a state of awakened Consciousness, the world can certainly appear that way--as nothing but an empty dream, almost as if it's never even existed, the same Transcendent Reality being equally obvious whether one's eyes are opened or closed.  But that's a one-sided absorption in pure Consciousness; it isn't a nondual view, which sees the Unmanifest and the Manifest as equally important aspects of one Reality. And that's where the Neo-Advaitins err--in thinking that because they can "be in the Now" and experience the entire universe dissolving in Emptiness (as a vast "oneness" or "not-two-ness"), they've therefore somehow got themselves a "nonduality." I think that's a pretty dualistic nonduality, leaving out of the picture--oh, I don't know--EVERYTHING?

Fortunately, the great Sri Aurobindo, the revolutionary philosopher-sage of the early 20th century, is here to save us all from such a row-row-row-your-boat interpretation of life (which I personally used to believe in for years, until a deeper understanding of my experience convinced me that such a view was actually utterly inhuman and insane...and, frankly, just "embarrassing," as Aurobindo puts it):

"All that is in the kinesis, the movement, the action, the creation, is the Brahman; the becoming is a movement of the being; Time is a manifestation of the Eternal. All is one Being, one Consciousness, one even in infinite multiplicity, and there is no need to bisect it into an opposition of transcendent Reality and unreal cosmic Maya....

"If the Reality alone exists and all is that Reality, the world also cannot be excluded from that Reality; the universe is real. If it does not reveal to us in its forms and powers the Reality that it is, if it seems only a persistent and yet changing movement in Space and Time, this must be not because it is unreal or because it is not at all That, but because it is a progressive self-expression, a manifestation, an evolving self-development of That in Time which our consciousness cannot yet see in its total or essential significance. In this sense we can say that it is That and not That,--because it does not disclose all the Reality through any form or sum of its forms of self-expression; but still all its forms are forms of the substance and being of that Reality. All finites are in their spiritual essence the Infinite and, if we look deep enough into them, manifest to intuition the Identical and Infinite.... Even if the universe is only a phenomenal reality, still it is a manifestation or phenomenon of Brahman; for since all is Brahman, phenomenon and manifestation must be the same thing: the imputation of unreality is a superfluous conception, otiose and unnecessarily embarrassing....

"The one thing that can be described as an unreal reality is our individual sense of separativeness and the conception of the finite as a self-existent object in the Infinite. This conception, this sense are pragmatically necessary for the operations of the surface individuality and are effective and justified by their effects; they are therefore real to its finite reason and finite self-experience: but once we step back from the finite consciousness into the consciousness of the essential and infinite, from the apparent to the true Person, the finite or the individual still exists but as being and power and manifestation of the Infinite; it has no independent or separate reality. Individual independence, entire separativeness are not necessary for individual reality, do not constitute it."

--Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, pp. 479-484 (Lotus Press, 1990)