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Comments
Lust of Results
This matches to my observations too. My own generation of twenty-somethings seem to be more oriented this way that in the typical New Age way.
On the more positive side, I find that many of the young spiritual seekers/practitioners often ask that does it work? These people wish for less bullsh*t and more something that leads to results - at least after some effort. Those people do have the tendency to actually start doing practices and finding out something that way. However, I think that people who actually start to practice anything are always in the minority. I do not think that this can never be a mass movement.
One more concrete example would be the so-called hardcore dharma movement. It is not the whole thing, but works as an example. They really emphasize that people should actually do the practices and it is important that the practices yield real results.
But the "less bullsh*t more results"-approach has its own challenges. When people want to stip things to their bare essentials baby is sometimes thrown out of the bathwater. (Like Daniel Ingram's "Simplified Four Path Model" of the process of enlightenment. I was initially much inspired by it before becoming familiar with Aro gTér, but for me in the end, that model was more detrimental than useful. When I threw that model out of the window, I started to make sudden progress - though the problem could just be that the model may be very much at odds with the Dzogchen Sem-de.)
(Oh, I seem to have only litte to do in the christmastime, because I do all this commenting. :D)
Separating the tech from the tradition
@Kündröl — I'm glad this seemed to fit with your experience of 20-somethings. Most of my circle are older, so it's good to get a reality check.
The Hardcore crowd speak of "separating the tech from the tradition." I have mixed feelings about that slogan; it seems you and I share that ambivalence. On the one hand, it's attractive because large parts of any system seem to be culturally-specific dogma and ritual, which we're better off not wasting time on. On the other, it's hard to be sure which parts, and there's also value in the cohesiveness of the system as whole.
Also, I think that one needs to ask, along with "what can I get out of this tradition," "what can I do on behalf of this tradition?" That may mean being less results-oriented and more respectful of the system as it exists, warts and all.
I haven't yet figured out what to think about the Daniel Ingram/Kenneth Folk movement. As you observed in a recent blog post, partly it's hard to make sense of their technical vocabulary. It doesn't seem to line up with my experience of meditation. But then, I don't do meditation their way, and maybe if I did, I would have the experiences they describe.
One thing that puts me off – to tie back again to the topic at hand – is that they incorporate a fair chunk of monism. Not only do they get that from modernist Theravada (which got it from Germany), they've also pulled in bits of Advaita Hinduism.
They aren't the only ones doing that, either—several "mainstream" American vipassana teachers have gone to study with Advaita gurus like HWL Poonja. From a traditional Buddhist point of view, this is inconceivable; Advaita was wrong wrong wrong, and for a Buddhist teacher to study with a Hindu is consorting with the enemy.
It's probably a good thing that Buddhism has opened up to foreign ideas. But, in my opinion, Advaita is wrong wrong wrong, so I wish Buddhists would exercise some skeptical judgment along with their openness.
Attractiveness of a simple model
I have noticed that. But at least Ingman criticizes the Advaita crowd. He thinks that they are lazy.
The monism of the hardcore dharma movement does cause a certain confusion because they use the word "non-dual" as something that means that "all is one". Just a day ago, I spotted this example: http://uroboros.wordpress.com/2010/11/07/new-model-monism-open-thread/ from a writer who is a part of the hardcore dharma movement.
I wonder why many mystical experiences, and whatever, are interpreted in a monist way? I have tried that too myself when trying to make sense of my own experiences. I stopped that eventually because the pieces did not just seem to fit.
Monism seems very simple, very elegant - like the notion that reality can be completely explained by a couple of equations (I am a physicist, but I am very critical towards the so-called Theory of Everything crowd). Modern people like simple elegant explanations, and monism seems to provide one. For many people, a model that is nebulous, does not seem to be a good model. While writing this, I wonder is there a connection between monism and physicalist reductionism in some weird way. Both wish for simple elegant explanation for everything - even though you could not apply it directly to understand the "real world".
Advaita is wrong wrong wrong
Oh, whew-- it's such a relief to encounter sense, in a time when 'discrimination' is seldom considered a good thing. Maybe the invisible context that makes Advaita seem plausible is that Indian society-- at the time the doctrines and methods developed-- had a place, and a highly venerated one, for those who had ascended to 'the enlightenment ward' and couldn't make ordinary distinctions sufficient to care for themselves.
Of course, the fact that our lives are entirely devoid of such supports, makes the attempts to foist such a delusional doctrine on us as the acme of spiritual development not only wrong, but heinously wrong.
The seeming complexity of nebulosity
I think this is a very good insight, that monism is appealing for its simplicity.
It ties in with something mtraven said in a comment here recently: that God—and I think he may have meant a monist, abstract conception of God—has a kind of inevitability as a concept, because there is nothing somewhat-similar. It's an isolated point in concept-space. Once you accept "All is One", the rest follows almost deductively.
What I will be doing in the book is presenting a way of thinking about pairs of confused stances, in which each appears to be the only alternative to the other. Dualism and monism are one example of that (along with eternalism and nihilism, for instance). The way to resolve these these oppositions is to observe that both sides involve fixation and denial as ways of not-seeing nebulosity.
Accepting nebulosity always looks more complicated than rejecting it, because nebulosity has complex manifestations. But actually, accepting it is simpler than rejecting it.
When you have a mystical experience, you see that there's no fixed, definite boundary between self and world. Lacking any better interpretive framework, the easy conclusion is that there is no boundary at all, because the self and world are One.
A nebulous, fluctuating, vague, is-it-or-isn't-it boundary seems complicated. Maybe people worry that it would take constant vigilance to keep track of what this out-of-control boundary is up to. But just accepting that this is how things are, and letting it be, is simple. Not easy—but simple.
In Western philosophy, just as you suggest, reductive physicalism (called "materialism" in philosophy of mind) is considered a monist stance. Materialism is the insistence that there is no mind, only matter. Idealism is the insistence that there is no matter, only mind. Those are the two usually-cited forms of monism... there is also "neutral monism", which says that there's only one thing but there's no point arguing about which one it is, since it's both. [Which seems more sensible, if you had to pick one of the three monist options.]
I didn't know that Daniel Ingram criticized Advaita as lazy. That's really interesting... I did a bit of googling and found this: http://www.interactivebuddha.com/bullshit.shtml
I liked a lot of what he had to say there.
I have read essays by famous Western Buddhist teachers who spent time with HWL Poonja ("Papaji", a famous Hindu monist teacher). I was really surprised that they would want to do that, so I was curious about what their motivations were. What they said was that he made everything seem easy.
I'm all for easy, when I can get it. But I don't think he could deliver—because I don't think anyone is God, so if he gave people an experience of being God, that was a delusion.
Spiritual But Not Religious - monists?
I agree - the Spiritual But Not Religious does seem to often mean a kind of monism...
The monism involved is all too often, though, a kind of lazy mystical (and hollow) pantheistic monism.
As I (as emotional reaction - I don't go around doing it!) at http://dispirited.org/about-the-book/ -
"When someone tells me that they are “Not religious, but very spiritual”, I want to punch them in the face.
Hard…"
The dilemma of our times
I enjoyed reading this. The progression through the various alternatives follows my current experience. It's interesting that spiritual seekers are beginning to operate as error detection in the seeking of truth.
For centuries prior, I think the elaborate and mystical creation stories / myths satisfied people enough, so there was not a need for an extensive search for integrated alternatives.
It's funny though that you finish by offering a 4th alternative. A few decades from now, we will probably look back on this and realize the 4th alternative was another dead end. It seems so long as we build our spirituality from "not being another system", we will finish our quest empty-handed.
An interesting work of fiction I read recently is "Spiritual Warfare" by an anonymous author under the name Jed McKenna. The book symbolizes what every spiritual person TRULY wants to BELIEVE, which is a blissful, content VOID OF BELIEF. If you have read this book, you will realize how undesirable truly being alone and confident with one's own system (or lack thereof), is.
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