Non-Duality Vs. Religion
(Excerpt from A Course In Consciousness,
Chapter 12. Nonduality, Religion, and Belief)
Stanley Sobottka Emeritus,
Professor of Physics, University of Virginia

There is an enormous difference between the natures of the teachings of nonduality and those of religion... Mankind creates its gods in its own images, and each religion then justifies its actions by claiming it speaks for God. The more vengeful and punitive is the god, the more vengeful and punitive are the people who believe in it... It is no accident that the most peaceful religions are the ones, like Buddhism, that have no concept of god.

Religions by their very nature are often divisive and exclusionary because the fear of another religion can be even greater than the fear of death. When a religion claims its god to be the only true one, its believers may endeavor to eliminate a competing one by trying to convert, condemn, or kill its devotees...

Since Truth transcends concepts, Truth cannot be conceptualized. Nonduality as a teaching contains many concepts, but all of them are meant to be pointers to Truth that can only be verified by direct experience...

In addition to the fact that spiritual beliefs cannot be true, no mere conceptual system can ever satisfy the yearning for wholeness which is the compulsion behind all spiritual seeking. Only direct seeing can satisfy this, and in the end, only direct seeing can lead to the realization that the individual does not exist. Because the intuition is constantly pulling us towards this realization, any practice based only on mentation rather than on inseeing must strive to ignore this pulling. Furthermore, any belief system is constantly being challenged by competing belief systems. The result is that any belief system, in order to be sustained, requires constant effort at defending it, reinforcing it, and shoring it up. This effort invariably strengthens the sense of separation that the belief system is supposed to dissolve.

The sage views the world as a lucid dreamer views his or her dream. Both see that the dream is not real, are disidentified from it, and just witness it. The difference is that the sage witnesses from pure impersonal awareness while the lucid dreamer still thinks of him/herself as the dreamer.

Comments? Questions? Send them to Professor Emeritus at ses2r@virginia.edu