I

The Purification of Doubt and Differences
via the Introduction of Advaitayana Buddhism

1.

In this age of scientific materialism, doubt is the only certainty and the only substance of mind. Therefore, people in this age are profoundly crippled in their ability to grasp matters of higher certainty or to relate to subtler mental and physical processes. Likewise, they have been wounded in the root wherein we are naturally moved toward Truth (rather than what is merely and temporarily factual or true). Therefore, this is an age in which people demonstrate little ability to understand and practice real religion or spirituality. Transcendental Awakening or Divine Realization has been reduced in the popular mind to the status of mere literary mythology. Because of all of this, my Teaching Work suffers a vague reception, and what I have made plain is commonly regarded to be unreal.

The Great Tradition 1 suffers in this same situation. The modern interpreters of the traditions generally do not approach their subject as practitioners and wise advocates. Rather, they approach their subject with this “scientific mind,” empty of everything but doubt and doubt’s opinion. The usual interpreters of religion and spirituality are not themselves really religious or spiritually motivated. At most they may represent some conventional and profoundly secularized “religious” mind (such as tends to characterize contemporary Christianity), but there is a great range of presumptions common to the traditional structures of religious and spiritual consciousness that such individuals simply cannot uphold. Such presumptions include the certainty of the continuation of existence after death, experiential presumptions about the “invisible” or non-elemental (or at least higher elemental) dimensions of the cosmos of Nature, presumptions about the reality of spirits, ghosts, subtle entities and powers magic, miracles, mystical ascent and experience, the laws of karma (or the cause and effect laws that necessarily produce the future from the actions or motions of all present processes), and the supremely valuable resource or instrument of Help represented by individuals who are either highly evolved or perfectly Awakened. It is the blind or weakness represented by the inability to make such presumptions that causes scholars to misinterpret secularize, and generally underestimate the traditional sources. And it is this same disability that makes popular interest understanding, practice, and ultimate conversion to the Way of Truth so unlikely in this age.

For further reading go to