Month: April 2025

Categories
Advaitic Inquiries

The Upanishads: The Oldest Voice of Nondual Philosophy – Compared to Other Nondual Traditions

Before Plato, before Laozi, before the Buddha, there were the Upanishads. In forest clearings across ancient India, long before the rise of formal philosophy or organised religion, sages sat in silence and asked the only question that ever really mattered: What am I? From that silence emerged a thunderbolt of insight—that the self and the cosmos are not two. The oldest surviving texts to declare this are not speculative essays or scriptures of belief. They are the Upanishads: bold, spare, poetic, and uncompromising in their message. Ātman is Brahman. The soul is the world. The knower is the known. And this insight, written more than two thousand years ago, remains the earliest—and perhaps the purest—expression of nonduality ever recorded.

This article sets out to show that the Upanishads are not just ancient—they are the clearest, most uncompromising voice of nonduality in human thought. By placing them in conversation with the many traditions that followed, we begin to see their singular force. In the light of comparison, their purity sharpens, like a mountain revealed when the mist lifts.

Categories
Advaitic Inquiries education Sustainability

When the Forest Reclaims the Classroom: Unlearning the Curriculum of Collapse

The world is spiraling toward ecological collapse, social disintegration, and spiritual desolation — the so-called polycrisis. Across history, many thinkers — both Western and Eastern — have raised profound critiques of the way education alienates human beings from their true nature. In this article, we turn our attention to some of the towering voices from the Western tradition — who, across centuries, recognized the silent war being waged against the human spirit in the name of “learning.” Each, in their own way, offered not only a withering critique of the factory-school model but also a luminous vision for what education could be: an act of liberation, a return to life. We must deschool the world, reclaim the Earth, and awaken the children — before there is no world left for them to inherit.

Categories
Advaitic Inquiries

When The Elephant Vanishes: Seeing Through Maya

In the timeless tradition of Advaita Vedanta, the pursuit of truth begins with a radical inquiry: Is what I perceive truly what is? This blog, based on an insightful article by Vivek, a member of the NEEV Community for Self-Inquiry and Sustainability, explores this very question through a powerful allegory—the story of a wooden elephant mistaken for the real.

At the heart of this reflection lies the fundamental Advaitic principle of adhyāsa, or superimposition. The root problem of human suffering is the superimposition (adhyāsa) of the non-Self (body, mind, world) upon the Self (pure consciousness), and vice versa. Just as one mistakes a rope for a snake or a wooden elephant for a real one, so too does the ignorant mind mistake the transient world/non-Self for ultimate reality/Self.