I always found advaita vedanta to be a tad life-denying due to the focus on the one-ness (which felt specious to me in some way but I never understood why), to the exclusion of everything else, but I haven't gone super deep so I may be wrong.
Do you think that these types of spiritual practices end up inadvertently causing people to make false ontological and epistemological claims (or even deny them)?
My friend's text to me: "More or less people came to see (this is shared language of the retreat leader and participants) that their true self is not anywhere in their body but is a huge all-pervading awareness that has no shape, edges, boundaries and is formless and timeless. Everything arises in this awareness and is essentially empty. Additionally everyone who realized this in a deep way had extreme reaction of compassion. They felt this awareness was essentially loving and they also started to ask questions like how evil can exist and how this loving awareness even pervades murder, genocide etc. and they felt immense sadness and compassion for everyone else in the world who hadn’t realized this view
I understood that this is one awareness that is all-pervading. But this awareness is refracted like a light through our bodies, the causes and conditions that make us different. So it’s not like the fully enlightened teachers experience themselves as a hive mind with multiple bodies to manage, it’s more nondual - both and. Each person is able to experience that they share a true self - which is this one awareness."
This sounds very interesting but nothing like either what I've experienced personally, or read in the more western mystical texts or philosophy. The awareness he refers to sounds like its on a plane higher than the mental, and it skips all the other emanations (gods etc completely).
What do you make of it?
Is there a reason why say the greeks and the neoplatonists were much more concerned with trying to describe the structure of reality also beyond just experiencing the mysticism?
Re: Q
Do you think that these types of spiritual practices end up inadvertently causing people to make false ontological and epistemological claims (or even deny them)?
My friend's text to me:
"More or less people came to see (this is shared language of the retreat leader and participants) that their true self is not anywhere in their body but is a huge all-pervading awareness that has no shape, edges, boundaries and is formless and timeless. Everything arises in this awareness and is essentially empty. Additionally everyone who realized this in a deep way had extreme reaction of compassion. They felt this awareness was essentially loving and they also started to ask questions like how evil can exist and how this loving awareness even pervades murder, genocide etc. and they felt immense sadness and compassion for everyone else in the world who hadn’t realized this view
I understood that this is one awareness that is all-pervading. But this awareness is refracted like a light through our bodies, the causes and conditions that make us different. So it’s not like the fully enlightened teachers experience themselves as a hive mind with multiple bodies to manage, it’s more nondual - both and. Each person is able to experience that they share a true self - which is this one awareness."
This sounds very interesting but nothing like either what I've experienced personally, or read in the more western mystical texts or philosophy. The awareness he refers to sounds like its on a plane higher than the mental, and it skips all the other emanations (gods etc completely).
What do you make of it?
Is there a reason why say the greeks and the neoplatonists were much more concerned with trying to describe the structure of reality also beyond just experiencing the mysticism?