Advaita

No postings for one month, and now four in one day! I'm currently resting in Desert View Motel in Yucca Valley, on the edge of Joshua Tree National Park, where I've just spent a few nights camping. It's blisteringly hot and sunny outside. The clothes I washed in the shower a couple of hours ago are almost dry, and they're inside my room! I'm getting hungry, and I'll soon have to venture out and find some tacos...

I've been fascinated with Advaita Vedanta for years. Advaita means non-duality in sanskrit, and it is one of the six major schools of thought of India (yoga being another of these six). Basically, it says we are not our body, not our mind, not our thoughts, not our personality, not anything we can think of... Anything we can think of is an object, and since all objects come and go, we cannot be that. So what does that leave us? Subject, pure subject without an object, pure consciousness. Advaita says that is our true nature, this sense of being. We have access to this at all times (right now for example!), we've always been that and nothing we do can tarnish it. In other words, we're already complete, enlightened, perfect, we just think we aren't because we identify with the contents of our minds and with our bodies. Advaita says all our suffering comes from thinking we are our stories.

I've always found this very appealing, but it mostly stayed at the intellectual level, because Advaita doesn't advocate a practise, a form, like Buddhism or yoga do. Advaita describes reality and doesn't really propose exercises to reach that reality, because exercises are form, and Advaita is about the formless, the non-dual. This always left me feeling frustrated. After reading Ramesh Balsekar or Nisargadatta Maharaj or Ramana Maharshi, I'd be left asking "Yes, but how do I get there? And what do I do with my pain?".

Enter the Work. Byron Katie was a very miserable woman until the age of 43. She was an drunk who hit her kids, she hated herself and life. Then one day in 1986, as she lay on the floor of a halfway house (she felt too unworthy to sleep on the bed), a cockroach crawled onto her toe, and she had a sudden realization of what she was under her story of pain and abuse and depression. She spontaneously disidentified from her story. The Work grew out of this experience and aims to help us see that who we think we are is nothing more than a story we believe in. Reality is much kinder than our thoughts about it.

I'm going to a 2-week advaita retreat tomorrow in Temecula, South of here. The retreat leader is Francis Lucille, a well known Advaita teacher who supposedly walks the talk, just like Katie. I'm excited about this, because in my mind, Advaita and the Work are the same thing, except the Work starts from the story end and deconstructs it, whereas Advaita starts from the enlightened, disidentified end, and pulls us toward it. As I see it right now, the Work is Advaita with a method. How refreshing!