Anybody read his book "How to Attain Enlightenment?" After having read a plethora of non-duality authors (Wheeler, Adamson, Wingate, Joan Tollifson, Leo Hartong, etc.), I reached out to Annette Nibbley who strongly encouraged me to pick up his book. He teaches traditional Vedanta and would love to hear anybody's experience with him directly or his book.
Thanks so much,
Parke
I read the Annette Nibbley thread Sunday morning. I thought the name James Swartz was familiar, found my book How To Attain Enlightenment having bought it at least a few years previous. I had gotten stuck on page 32, not unusual for me as there is always something else tempting me. I started over and have now gotten to page 144. The book is necessary and important, the subtitle is The Vision of Nonduality. (Now, I have poked around nonduality for years. Most of the modern versions do absolutely nothing for me, Western teachers (what below Swartz calls Neo-Advaita). I have never described myself as a non-dualist. To be concise but probably not explained enough, as of now, for me, God exists as Supreme Ordering Intelligence, so, OTOneH there is God and OTOH there is everything else. The everything else is created, not an "extension" of God's being. Other than that, everything else
IS nondual, so I am a non-dualist in the relative sense but not in an absolute sense. For me, SOI is Source of life, but our identity in any sense is not equal with SOI. The purpose of life is to unite with SOI. This is the journey of involution and evolution. (I can square this with James Swartz, enough to keep me reading anyway, the difference between reality and provisional or apparent reality, explained below).
Now, having said that, James Swartz answers many of my objections to the nondual view. He would not agree with what I have written above, but he is some one who I can "dialogue" with. I have read hundreds of books on philosophy, Eastern religion and philosophy, metaphysics, esotericism and nonduality since about 1970. As of page 144 I can say that, in (more than) a nutshell, How To Attain Enlightenment is the best overview, most knowledgeable, accurate and wise book I have ever read on the matters of man's nature, the nature of reality and man's place in reality. I would recommend the book to anyone.
I was going to wait until I finished the book to post on it, but this afternoon when I (thought) I had finished reading, I jumped to the back as I glanced at chapter headings, he was going to write on Osho and some other, what he calls Neo-Advaita teachers. He draws a distinction between (real) traditional Vedanta and Neo-Advaita. Ramana Maharshi, even though coming to Realization at the young age of 17 without a teacher, belongs to tradition. Swartz says Ramana spent 20 years studying the scriptures and in Spiritual practice before he really began teaching. But Swartz puts HWL Poonjaji, Papaji, who was a student of Ramana M., in the ranks of Neo-Advaita.
Now, I say all that to be able to share some of the objections of Swartz to Neo-Advaita. First of all, Swartz says the claims of Neo-Advaita are accurate,
from the standpoint of self, which is the partless whole. "Because reality is non-dual the mind is actually the self, awareness, under the spell of ignorance". (pg 22) "The mind is sandwiched between pure awareness and the material world. It is an interface or buffer through which awareness interacts with itself in the form of the gross elements". (pg 31) "An enlightened being is just the self functioning through a mind whose self ignorance has been removed. ....Enlightenment is just the hard and fast experience-based knowledge "I am awareness"..." (pg 34) "I am limitless Awareness......." (pg 311) .........However, getting to the teaching corrections of Swartz,
"It is true that it (ignorance) does not exist
from the self's point of view,
but the seeker does not know that he or she is the self or he or she would not be seeking,
so this teaching (that ignorance does not exist)
is not a teaching at all. It leaves the seeker with no avenue to actualize the desire for freedom that attracts him or her to the idea of enlightenment, and is tailor made to produce frustration". (pg 309)
"You cannot deny the existence of experience--although Neo-Advaita does its level best--because it exists. So to tell someone caught in the experiential world that he or she does not exist, or that nothing can be done to attain enlightenment, is not helpful. The sages who gave us self inquiry were considerably more sophisticated and worked out an intelligent solution. They assigned a provisional reality to duality that is in harmony with the experience of everyone and then proceeded to destroy it, using teachings that correspond with the common sense logic of the seeker's own experience. Without the notion of a provisional or apparent reality, which experience conforms, you are forced to superimpose the idea that all is consciousness on empirical reality. Needless to say, this does not apply to
this level of reality (emphasis sdp, above and below likewise). A verse in the scriptures on Yoga says, 'a yogi in Samadhi sees no difference between a lump of gold and the excreta of a crow.' Presumably, an enlightened Neo-Advaitan, in dire financial straights, might attempt to pawn a handful of crow poop and sweep his lump of gold into the garbage can. Non-duality, non-difference, does not mean sameness. ...The discrimination between what is real and what is apparent is the
signature of the enlightened person. ......When you superimpose the notion of non-duality on multiplicity, you add a belief that will eventually have to be discarded at some point. This kind of spiritual belief, which is just ignorance, is exceedingly hard to investigate if it is taken to be the truth". (pgs 308, 309)
Bravo!
.....................
I have made the point of "the gold and the crow poop" numerous times here on ST's, I have always gotten, "You just don't understand non-duality". It is exceptionally gratifying to find and read James Swartz.
mason, if you have not yet gotten the book, get it.
sdp
