Is dogma insidiously creeping into the Dharma/Advaita world? We have managed to get off our backs burdensome religious beliefs, various statements of Canon Law and much of the top down forms of authority that characterise religion.
We certainly can travel more lightly through the world without the burden of religious authority and the variety of beliefs that enslave our minds to a rigidity of viewpoint that seem self evident to the believers, whether supported through a view of experience or not.
Allow me to offer just a handful of the growing number of spiritual dogmas, we, the Western authorities, generate (perhaps unconsciously) in the Dharma/Advaita world.
Dharma world.
- The reality is everything is changing
- Meditation technique is the path to purification and nirvana
- You cannot achieve anything without practice
- If you are really committed to the Dharma, you will ordain or go on very long retreats
- Dharma practice is about being in the here and now
- Politics belongs to the mundane. Political engagement is the judgmental mind at work
- It’s not possible to be fully awakened in this day and age
- Advaita followers are caught up in formless experiences as the ultimate and resist facing themselves through intensive retreats
- There is a path and a goal.
- There is no truth in words.
Advaita (Non-Dual) World
- Reality is permanent. It is an illusion to be concerned with impermanence
- Any use of meditation techniques shows an avoidance of Presence
- All practice shows the mind making an effort to achieve some future goal.
- There is nothing to do and nowhere to go. That’s just the mind that thinks there is
- There is only Consciousness or Awareness
- Reality is non-dual. Political engagement is dualistic. There is only Oneness.
- You are already enlightened so there is no need to meditate.
- Dharma practitioners are caught up in form and attached to the meditation cushion.
- There is no path. There is only your True Self.
- There is no truth in words.
We have to see through our experience and insight whether there is merit to such views in the Dharma/Advaita world. At times, the expression of such views may serve a useful purpose in terms of letting go of a standpoint, of a view, or have become the new beliefs of inflexible absoluteness.
E.g Those who spend a huge amount of time developing their mind, or heart and mind, may have become stuck in this process. Those who see the mind as the problem may show a conceited standpoint and thus a lack of inner development.
Those who claim words cannot express truth may deny the power of language to reveal a truth whether through a discourse, an inquiry, a line of poetry or words shedding light on suffering, conditions for it, resolution and the way to resolve.
It is the sheer repetition of unexamined one liners that make a dogma. Devotion and dogma serve as two of the major building blocks for a religion. It is easy to fall into the spell of the growing number of one- liners.
Those who claim enlightenment may appear to have numerous blind spots.
Those who do not claim enlightenment may abide with deep love and freedom of being.
Stay awake!