I've got a love-hate relationship thing going with neo-advaita/non-dual teachings -- which is what Leo Hartong's book, "Awakening to the Dream," is all about.
(Note: I'm pretty sure "Awakening to the Dream" should go in the neo-advaita, rather than traditional advaita, literary category. Advaita-philes like to argue about the distinctions between the two -- see here and here -- which strikes me as sort of strange given their emphasis on oneness and non-duality.)
I'm not certain how I learned about this book. I think Amazon sucked me into buying it through one of those "readers who bought X also bought Y" lures. Anyway, as soon as it arrived I found myself reading it avidly.
Up to a point.
Then I started skimming it, because I'd reached the end of what I could like about "Awakening to the Dream" and started to focus on what I dislike about some forms of Advaita and Nondualism.
[Update: just ran across a great humorous post by Jeff Foster that beautifully captures the irritating nature of many nondual/advaita types. Read "The Advaita Trap" and laugh.]
Namely, their faith-based religious aspects, which are plainly evident in Hartong's book. His emphasis is on Pure Awareness, which I have some problems with. (See my post, Brain's "dark energy" casts doubt on pure awareness.)
Supposedly the essence of human consciousness is Pure Awareness, which is completely separate from the awareness of all the stuff that we're usually aware of. How anyone, including Hartong, could know this isn't talked about. It's just something to be taken on faith.
It [Awakeness] will shine when it shines, and it will shift the attention from the content of Awareness to Pure Awareness itself. This Pure Awareness is what you really are. When you think you're not it, this thought is part of the temporal content of Awareness and has no bearing on Awareness itself.
Just let yourself be. Give yourself permission to be up, down, pissed or delirious. Observe the process and don't get caught in the content. Know yourself as the limitless field of Pure Awareness in which the drama of life merely arises.
Well, why should I believe this is true?
The notion that worldly existence is maya, illusion, a dream, unreal, a reflection of higher realities, shadows cast by a divine sun -- this is a core tenet of Hinduism, Platonism, and other religions/philosophies which urge us to discount the reality of everyday experience.
Hartong, echoing various systems of Indian thought, says that the Self is all there is. This is the same as Pure Awareness, so far as I can understand. You know, Atman is Brahman; Pure Awareness is the Self; Self-Realization is God-Realization.
What irks me about all this "Self" talk is that this concept sounds exactly like "God." Something transcendent, mysterious, invisible, unknowable, yet to be taken as the Most Real Thing.
Now consider the possibility that the Self dreams up this manifestation in a similar way. Like the dreamer appearing in his own dream, we can say that the Creator appears in his manifestation while, at the same time, the manifestation appears in the Creator. Dreamlike, He manifests the whole cosmic drama out of Himself...The substance of this dreamed up 'reality' is Pure Awareness -- the dream that stuff is made of.
OK, I'll consider the possibility. Just as I'll consider the possibility that Jesus died for our sins, Allah revealed the truth to Mohammad in the Koran, and lots of other religious propositions.
But I won't believe or accept possibilities unless they make good sense, or have demonstrable evidence supporting them.
I starting reading "Awakening from the Dream" avidly because I resonate with several themes that Hartong focused on in his opening chapters: (1) there is no such thing as a "self" or "soul" residing within the human psyche, and (2) genuine enlightenment is realizing there's no such thing as enlightenment, because there's no individual self to be enlightened.
Maybe later I'll write a what I like post about this book, because there indeed is a lot to like in "Awakening from the Dream." At the moment, though, having finished the book this afternoon, I'm zeroed in on the discrepancy between Hartong's certainty about the Self and Pure Awareness with passages he wrote like these:
Whatever we say about it is as true or untrue as its opposite...Take for example a simple sentence like 'Pure Awareness is beyond all concepts.' Labeling Pure Awareness as being beyond concepts objectifies it as a new concept.
...No matter how we try, by talking or thinking about this we cannot escape the limitation of making it into a concept, and so it forever escapes each and every attempt to define it. It remains forever a paradoxical and intimate mystery, an ongoing open question, and a constant answer.
Absolutely.
I like these thoughts. The idea that we humans can comprehend the essence of the cosmos seems astonishingly anthropomorphic, grandiose, and unproven to me. Yet somehow Hartong manages to claim that the Self is eternal, since it will remain when time runs out and the manifested universe dissolves.
Sounds just like God. Something to be taken on faith. (Also, how does Hartong know time will run out and the universe will dissolve? This is a Hindu belief without any proof behind it.)
When I ordered "Awakening to the Dream" on Amazon, I noticed that 34 of the 35 reader reviews were 4 or 5 star, highly positive. Today I read the single 1-star review, which was quite interesting and well written.
Have a read. It's a better critique of the book and neo-advaita than I'm capable of. Plus, the guy (or gal) offers up a bunch of suggestions for spiritual/philosophical reading that he or she finds more credible than "Awakening to the Dream."
I'll copy in the 1-star reader review as an extension to this post.

By | Boileau0663![]() |
Do, dear reader, the following experiment, one Leo Hartong's non-teacher Tony Parsons often has his hearers do during his workshops (but definitely isn't a form of self-inquiry a la Ramana Maharshi): close your eyes and stare into the dark and still void behind your ocular globes and ask yourself who is there...
This is IT! This is what Tony and Leo want you to discover and which has apparently eluded countless generations of spiritual seekers throughtout the ages and under all latitudes because of their absurd desire for more and the "fireworks" of salvation or illumination. This is what you are, this is the Ultimate Mystery, hidden for long centuries of dark ignorance and now revealed jargon-free (but not free of charge!) by the non-teachers of what is nowadays called neo-advaita, a Macdonalized Anglo-Saxon version of the age-old Hindu advaita doctrine that denies the existence of real diversity in the Universe.
Isn't that void within your skull perfectly still and indifferent? Isn't that void perfectly non-judgmental and impersonal? By Jove, it is! Therefore, you too are invited to drop all notions of right and wrong, all ideas of perfection and striving to become a mirror image of that perfect Nothingness devoid of any Will: the Divine Puppet. Since the space inside your head has apparently no Will and makes no judgments, this is what God and you as God must become and in fact already are. Constant change in a complex universe is occurring out there? Moral questions and choices are assailing you in the world? Urgent change and action to avert ecological disaster and cultural degeneration seem required? This is all an Illusion. The Dream. Awaken: ONLY this quiet thing within your skull is real.
Now do another, somewhat longer experiment: like Leo's "master" and "personal" friend Tony Parsons or their archrival Eckhart Tolle, go to a park slowly (Tolle-like) but spontaneously (Tony-like) and sit there on a bench for a while. Stare with a blank mind at anything you like while repeating to yourself the imperishable verities of the School: "I am nobody", "there is nothing there", "there is nowhere to go", "there is only this!" If you do that persistently, chances are that you will soon experience yourself as an ex-orbitated non-presence watching a three-dimensional film. If you continue this non-practice (neo-advaita claims to be devoid of any spiritual practice!) and keep reading Leo's book every day "to remind yourself of your true nature", go to lectures by him or his friends, this state of not being there and of seeing life as a gigantic movie theater may become a more or less permanent fixture of your mental apparatus. Then you will be Cyclops All-Eye Nobody or already perfect Mr/Mrs.Oneness. In this state, there is apparently minimal friction and very little misery. And one, obviously, needn't do anything special or change anything: life is nothing more than a dream peopled with unreal characters. The only thing that is real is the detached seeing of the Cosmic Joke.
This quiet and at times amused aloofness, coupled with a childish and irresponsible enjoyment of the glossy appearance of things is what is being offered here. There is nothing more to neo-advaita than living a cinemascope life of sanctified routine.
As should be clear by now and also appears from the picture on the cover of this book, this is from beginning to end an optical illusion, an inflation of the eye, a Cyclopic form of myopia, one that was bound to arise in a culture which has become totally obsessed with pictures, screens and the sense of sight and has lost touch with the other senses, and more importantly, with intelligent reasoning.
For intelligence will easily expose this fraud: reality isn't ALREADY perfect, which would make it static and purposeless, but constantly moving in a direction. What direction? In my opinion, it is moving toward Oneness. It is imperfect Love striving after perfect Love. And even after one has apparently attained Love and Oneness, one doesn't remain like a perfect, self-satisfied pool of limpid but stagnant water, but one keeps moving. Towards what? Moved by what? Moved by Love (not by egotic desire!)towards greater Love and Oneness, for Oneness is inexhaustible. Nobody, not even the most popular neo-advaitist teachers, possesses the whole of Oneness or Life, nobody is the whole truth, nobody is the whole path, for Path, Truth and Life are living and infinite.
Rather than this unnameably mediocre stuff read Alan Watt's books on Taoism and Zen Buddhism. Better still, dig into his "Behold the Spirit", the most illuminating book I've ever read on the vexing question of the relationship between the One and the Many, the crucial question neo-advaita hasn't been able to solve. For those who have a strong philosophical bend, I recommend reading Leibniz and Spinoza. You may also take a look at Arthur Koestler's concept of "holon" in "The Ghost in the Machine" and "Beyond Reductionism", or read Morris Berman's masterful "Reenchantment of the World" on the cultural history of the ego sense. For Christians, I recommend the books of Jean-Pierre de Caussade and Brother Lawrence about the practice of "presence to God".
For people who don't belong to any creed and are not looking for one, I recommend J. Krishnamurti, an author most neo-avaita teachers seem to have heavily borrowed from, without ever citing him. Not that Krishnaji shares with neo-advaitists their core doctrine of "everything is already perfect". K. has no such dogma. Start with "The First and Last Freedom", continue with his delightful and profound "Commentaries on Living" and, if you can find it, read his austere mystical "Journal". I also love "Beginnings of Learning" and "Think about these Things". Listening to his conversations with American physicist David Bohm, the theorist of the "Implicit Order", or Religious Studies professor Allan W. Anderson may also prove enlightening.
The shallowness of this thoroughly cerebral neo-advaita thing is stunning, but there is no question that it is highly seductive for people who are already highly cerebral and eye-oriented because of their cultural background and are consciously or unconsciously looking for a sanctified way of escape. The attractiveness of neo-advaita stems from its containing a great truth, which it unfortunately pursues without regard for the WHOLE truth, namely the (partial) truth of the Immanence of God. No false teaching can be attractive unless it contain some reflection of the truth, the whole truth being that the Source is both transcendent and immanent. Here and not here. In Love the tension is resolved, which leads to Compassionate Wisdom.
Send food and tents to Africa. Or go there, preferably without your ego. Let your heart bleed. Don't just have a beer at the local pub while making easy intellectual jokes with your buddies about the "Cosmic Dream".
Hartong: "Just let yourself be. Give yourself permission to be up, down, pissed or delirious. Observe the process and don't get caught in the content. Know yourself as the limitless field of Pure Awareness in which the drama of life merely arises."
Blogger B: "Well, why should I believe this is true?"
--I don't know. This could be very misleading terminology depending on what the words conjure up in a person's mind. Certainly just hearing about it doesn't change anything. A lot of this is just semantics. Some people prefer words like void, consciousness, self, it, this, mind, awareness, stillness, emptiness, presence, even the 'ocean of light', etc. Whatever. There just comes a time when you see for yourself. Then you can make up your own name for the nameless. How about the selfless self? Or oink, blurp or blatt?
Blogger B: "Hartong, echoing various systems of Indian thought, says that the Self is all there is. This is the same as Pure Awareness, so far as I can understand. You know, Atman is Brahman; Pure Awareness is the Self; Self-Realization is God-Realization."
--One source of misunderstanding is that in order to talk about it some sort of name has to be used which may stir up all sorts of preconceived notions about what that term means which may or may not be what it means to the one who originally used it.
Blogger B: "What irks me about all this "Self" talk is that this concept sounds exactly like "God." Something transcendent, mysterious, invisible, unknowable, yet to be taken as the Most Real Thing."
--See what I mean? Your take on "Pure Awareness" may not be the same as what it means to Hartong. I don't know what it means to Hartong. Do you? All these little books about neo-advaita or whatever you want to call it are just books, concepts and words. You know that. At best they serve as a "springboard" to discovery for yourself or lack of self. They may awaken something within you, but the words in the books will never encompass the Thing. Really, all words in this context are lies because they cause us to conceptualize. Yet, somehow something must be conveyed in order for people to know there is nothing to be conveyed, nothing that can be understood in a way that can be thought. Ironically it sometimes takes a lot of words for people to realize there is nothing about infinity that can be conveyed in words. Take the word "forever". What does that mean if time is purely conceptual? There is no forever. Yet people use that word to convey some idea of what infinity might be.
Blogger B: "OK, I'll consider the possibility. Just as I'll consider the possibility that Jesus died for our sins, Allah revealed the truth to Mohammad in the Koran, and lots of other religious propositions."
--Don't even think about it at all. Take a walk instead and don't stop until it all is clear, or not. Like Forrest Gump. One day he knew it was time to stop walking.
"But I won't believe or accept possibilities unless they make good sense, or have demonstrable evidence supporting them."
--You want a concrete answer... THIS IS IT!! There is none. All this blog will ever do is beat around the bush. No speech, book or thing will ever encompass whatever it is. No one will ever be able to say it or tell you to your satisfaction. When they try, it always sounds like some sort of "God" concept which always must be taken on faith just like any other concept about the infinite. That's just the way it is.
I recommended "Awakening to the Dream" to a commenter on this blog a short while ago. For some reason the book came to mind. Maybe it was the right thing for that person to read at this time. I don't know. I think it is as good an introduction to advaita-like thinking as most others, but still there is always something to find fault with because, as I said, no compilation of words will ever be truly true and finally be THE BOOK (although Watts wrote a pretty good book with that title). The reader will always finish unfulfilled.
You said: "I starting reading "Awakening from the Dream" avidly because I resonate with several themes that Hartong focused on in his opening chapters: (1) there is no such thing as a "self" or "soul" residing within the human psyche, and (2) genuine enlightenment is realizing there's no such thing as enlightenment, because there's no individual self to be enlightened."
--You started reading it avidly because you hoped, just as you do with many of the books your read (I do this too) that finally the right combination of words will come together in such a way that you finally see for yourself.
Then you said: "Whatever we say about it is as true or untrue as its opposite...Take for example a simple sentence like 'Pure Awareness is beyond all concepts.' Labeling Pure Awareness as being beyond concepts objectifies it as a new concept."
--See, you know it. Your anticipatory reading of the next hot book is like an addict taking a drug that they know ultimately won't help them but they can't stop the habit. You know all there is to know. Time to go beyond knowing.
Here again you say it yourself..."No matter how we try, by talking or thinking about this we cannot escape the limitation of making it into a concept, and so it forever escapes each and every attempt to define it. It remains forever a paradoxical and intimate mystery, an ongoing open question, and a constant answer."
--Again you already know as well as I do what I have been saying. We're going around in circles trying to find this ineffable answer. We are never going to find it until "we" are not around to find it.
Like Mike Williams says, Let's try to find this "who", this "we", that wants to know whatever it is we think we want to know. Where is this 'who'? No book is needed for that.
This is not to say this blog is useless. Well, in a sense it is, but on the other hand why not blog if it's what we like to do? No harm in that as long as we know we're just playing games...like ping pong.
Posted by: tucson | September 07, 2010 at 11:42 AM
Leo Hartong stated, "This Pure Awareness is what you really are. When you think you're not it, this thought is part of the temporal content of Awareness and has no bearing on Awareness itself."
Much of what Hartong says about enlightenment is true. But, he goes off course a little. (He is not enlightened).
There is no such thing as Pure Awareness.
A person whom is aware, is always aware
of something, even if it is just the blackness ones sees when ones eyes are closed.
Such authors typically try to attach our
identity to awareness and exclude thought
and body, etc.
It will not cause enlightenment by sitting in pure awareness without thought, trying to disidentify with everything except awareness.
Awareness is temporal and dies with the body
which produces it. The thoughts and body also die.
While we are alive, we are a combination
of awareness, thought and body with sensations.
We cannot seperate awareness from sensation.
The affirmation we are awareness will not help one to become 'awakened'.
The reason is, the self (WHO) is still there. The WHO believes in the myth it has created and all actions will be tainted
with 'selfish' actions above ones needs.
The WHO (self) should be directly looked at.
Look directly at thought itself. If a person can directly see the fallacy of the WHO as a myth, the WHO becomes disfunctional. It can no longer dictate action.
Then there is pure action without personified thought. Impersonal thought personifies itself by way of the belief
it has a WHO.
Impersonalization of thought blows the self away.
Oneness, Love, Compassion, etc., are what
the unenlightened call this state.
They will never describe it correctly.
It can only be lived.
It is spontaneous pure action.
But, these actions may not appear holy.
In order to get people to stop hurting
themsleves, sometimes one must hurt
people and create conflict.
When a jnani critisizes fake Gurus,
they do not look so holy to a believer.
So, often the enlightened upset the apple
cart and create havoc.
But, there is a method to their maddness.
They are not seen as good people to most of mankind.
What you said about Jiddo Krishnamurti is true. I knew him for a few decades. Many
people now copy him. He was a true jnani.
One jnani creates 10,000 fakes, whom play with the words endlessly. But, the fakes
never quite get it right.
Posted by: Mike Williams | September 07, 2010 at 01:59 PM
in my honest opinion (which btw, required no amount of deliberation on my part)...
Hartong and all his talk about "Pure Awareness", and all the other similar advaita and so-called "neo-advaita" teachers and all their rhetoric... is totally useless.
it is nothing but a bunch of empty talk aimed to impress the gullible, and to get money and personal recognition. it reflects nothing of any real substance. in other words, its all bullshit... all of it. so i pretty much agree with Brian and also with that guy who posted the critical commemt on the book.
there is nothing to "see". there is nothing beyond your everyday experiences. there is no inner self, or trandscendental self, or special awareness.
all these people who teach and preach this kind of stuff, are merely clouding and obscuring and adding more conceptual garbage. and it doesn't matter what they say, its all useless abstraction and distraction.
no matter whetherits 'nameless' this, or 'formless' that, or such-and-such 'awareness', or 'self' or 'not-self'... its all bullshit. if you don't believe me, then go ahead and keep on swimming around in the mystical/philosophical cesspool, searching for that 'something' that you will never find.
so it doesn't matter what Hartong's "take" on "Pure Awareness" is. his is just more of the same advaita mumbo-jumbo.
if you want my advice... then i say: simply surrender.
abandon all varieties of religion and philosophy and mysticism. abandon it all. give it up. none of it is usefull. none of it will ever be the answer. nada. there is no answer. so just surrender to life and accept that you can never know. there is no final knowledge. you are simply one infinitesimal part and parcel of something that far too vast for you to ever comprehend the whole of it.
so just surrender. surrender to the whole. then your useless search will finally be over. then you can get on with the business of living your own life as you were before you got caught in the trap of the obscurations. only then will you be unencumbered by all these fools who want to sell you their fancy ideas and useless versions of supposed reality.
wisdom is to totally abandon all ideas and efforts, and simply surrender to the whole.
the more you try to talk about it, or figure it out, or to arrive at some final understanding... the more you will remain bewildered. there is no anwer and there is nothing that you can do about the situation. you will never find what you are looking for. so surrender is your only truly wise option.
otherwise, you will continue to stay on the not-so-merry go-round. so it all really just depends on how long it will take you to get sick of being on this endless wheel, the spiral road to nowhwere.
surrender
Posted by: tAo | September 07, 2010 at 03:39 PM
While I agree with tAo, I am not sure that all advaita books are useless in this sense... A good advaita book will help you to realize that it and others like it are useless. Otherwise you might go on reading, studying and searching when you could be getting on with the business of just living without chasing your own tail.
For example, here is part of the introduction to one of Wei Wu Wei's books:
"A reader who firmly believes that he can reach any satisfactory understanding of himself and his relation to the universe which apparantly surrounds him--via a self which he is conditioned to regard as an autonomous individual, is wasting his time reading this book. He would need to be prepared to lay aside such a point of view and find that as such he has nothing but an apparent sentient existence that has no ultimate significance whatever, on account of the evident fact that he himself as a 'fact' and a 'self' does not exist at all."
and another introduction:
"These pieces are called 'posthumous',
Not because I am 'dead';
Unborn, that is forever impossible.
But because they (the words) are,
Which is inevitable.
They are tombstones,
A record of living intuitions
Which, embalmed in relative terminology,
Are well and truly dead."
Posted by: tucson | September 07, 2010 at 04:52 PM
Classical Advaita and Neo-Advaita are merely forms of cerebral entertainment. Only a certain range of unbidden and unasked-for neurological "anomalies" (if you will) will allow a person to tolerate anything more than a grudging nod to the existence of such thought forms.
I suffer with the very anomalies that I propose. I wouldn't have it any other way. I have (literally) hundreds of books on (mostly) Neo-Advaita and I have read them all many times. It is a hobby. I enjoy it. It is just a pastime.
Posted by: Willie R. | September 07, 2010 at 06:14 PM
The only "practice" is life. Whatever form it seems to take.
Posted by: Suzanne | September 08, 2010 at 12:29 AM
This thread has to be one of the best of this blog.
I liked,
"Here again you say it yourself..."No matter how we try, by talking or thinking about this we cannot escape the limitation of making it into a concept, and so it forever escapes each and every attempt to define it. It remains forever a paradoxical and intimate mystery, an ongoing open question, and a constant answer."
and
"it is nothing but a bunch of empty talk aimed to impress the gullible, and to get money and personal recognition. it reflects nothing of any real substance. in other words, its all bullshit... all of it. so i pretty much agree with Brian and also with that guy who posted the critical commemt on the book."
and
"so just surrender. surrender to the whole. then your useless search will finally be over. then you can get on with the business of living your own life as you were before you got caught in the trap of the obscurations. only then will you be unencumbered by all these fools who want to sell you their fancy ideas and useless versions of supposed reality."
and
"A reader who firmly believes that he can reach any satisfactory understanding of himself and his relation to the universe which apparantly surrounds him--via a self which he is conditioned to regard as an autonomous individual, is wasting his time reading this book. He would need to be prepared to lay aside such a point of view and find that as such he has nothing but an apparent sentient existence that has no ultimate significance whatever, on account of the evident fact that he himself as a 'fact' and a 'self' does not exist at all."
Thanks guys for your contributions...Roger
Posted by: Roger | September 08, 2010 at 07:41 AM
Was hopeing you'd say something suz...Nice
Posted by: Dogribb | September 08, 2010 at 10:07 AM
I tend to agree with Tao. Since I let go of trying to figure "it" all out, I feel so much more relaxed, open, and carefree.
I can take a walk in Nature and, without having to understand anything, just enjoy what is Divine right in front of my nose.
What a relief!
Bob
Posted by: Bob | September 08, 2010 at 04:16 PM
I hope you don't mind that I sent this post to the Seers and Seekers Yahoo group:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/seerseeker/
Posted by: libramoon | September 10, 2010 at 03:47 PM