Sunday, March 25, 2007

Yogachara Buddhism, Gaudapada Karika, and Kashmiri Shaivism

Nonduality revisited March 24th, 2007 (posted by Edward Berge)...Alan seems to agree with some of what I said above regarding Ken’s mixing and matching of various kinds or schools of nonduality, at least when he wrote the following on The Atman Fiasco at this link:
Irrepressible contraries wreck Wilber’s Atman Project from the outset: evolution ( however “spiritual” it may be, and in whichever guise-Hegelian, Theosophical, Teilhardian, Aurobindoan) and the radical unitary monist idealism of Ch’an/Zen or Tibetan Mahamudra schools are mutually exclusive.
In short: Wilber continually uses the semantics of the differentiated monism ( or Theosophy ), but, since it is juxtaposed on the extreme unitary monism grand blueprint, it momentarily loses its coherence and meaning.
This entry was posted on Saturday, March 24th, 2007 at 2:11 pm and is filed under Integral Metatheory. Edward Berge Says: March 24th, 2007 at 2:16 pm kela had this to say from the Lightmind forum at this link:
To get the gist of what Ken is on about here in terms of the two ‘forms’ of non-duality, we need to go back to Da. And from there we need to backtrack, yet once again, to the contrast between trancendentalism and immanentism found in traditions like Mahayana Buddhism, Vedanta, and Shaivism. In fact, if we follow this line of thinking in detail, there are three structurally distinct forms of the “non-dual.”
alan kazlev Says: March 24th, 2007 at 9:36 pm Hi Edward, Thanks for continuing to so clearly elucidate the Wilberian post-modernist-inspired position. Even if I disagree with it, I still find it very interesting! Unfortunately I cannot take the credit for the superb scholarship of “The Atman Fiasco”, that essay is by my friend Arvan Harvat.
Also I got a lot from the very interesting and learned post by Kela from Lightmind forum, the analysis ofvarious forms of nondualism, and the way Da uses polemic to push the superiority of his own insight. And yes it is as Kela points out an old tactic - e.g. in Radha Soami previous teachings regarding the Godhead and Liberation are consigned to intermediate spiritual planes. I was also interested to read Kela’s statement that Ken follows Da’s account because he combines “formless samapatti, the state of “nothingness,” with nirodha…and calls them both “causal.” ”
This supports my own hypothesis that KW’s Wilber-II and all following stages (i.e. his developmental psychology stages, including all the AQAL levels) are based on (essentially just an elaboration of) Da’s “7 stages of Life”; Wilber becoming aquainted with Da and thus rejecting his earlier (Wilber-I) Transpersonal Psychology material. So the above is another example of evidence of this connection. So even though Ken wants to distance himself from Adi Da because of the latter’s contrroversial behaviour, there is no denying his intellectual dept to him. Even in his current (Wilber-V) post-modernist stage he hasn’t yet broken free of the Daist physico-psycho-spiritual developmental “narrative” story.

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