The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray) / quote 36 of 125
Advaita means not-two
Over the intervening years I had been surprised by the increasing number of people who were coming to feel the same way. Not only had Buddhism made steady inroads into Western culture, but so had the Indian tradition of Advaita Vedanta, of nondual philosophy. Probably Ramana Maharshi had been its most celebrated exponent in the twentieth century, and his teaching, like Gurdjieff’s—or like Zen, for that matter—was simply to locate, from moment to moment, your own most intimate sense of yourself and to examine whether it is truly separate from everything else. The meaning of the Sanskrit word advaita is not just “one,” it is something subtler than that. Literally advaita means “not-two”; and by the end of the twentieth century, a number of different contemporary religious philosophies were beginning to crystallize around the term. What I found particularly striking about this process was the way it was happening outside any kind of previous “religious” context. Perhaps it’s worth remembering that twentieth-century awareness of “sleep” and daydreams wasn’t originally highlighted by a religious teacher at all, nor by a psychologist, nor even by a philosopher. On the contrary, they were first held in the spotlight by a creative artist, by a novelist—by James Joyce in Ulysses.