In this book (published last week), I attempted to list all living, Western teachers who might be though to be teaching Advaita. Clearly, not everyone was going to agree with my assessment, maybe especially those teachers (and their students) who had been deemed ‘Not Advaita’.

There has already been a 1* review at Amazon UK which contained no comments and did not include a name. There is no way to cancel this so that the only way to redress the situation is for there to be positive reviews. I do not want anyone to provide insincere reviews. Please read and review honestly – 1* reviews are fine if justified.

Here is what I said in the book about my assessment of teachers:

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Caveats and Reservations

I compiled this list of teachers by consulting all of the ‘lists’ that I could find via Google or other sources, together with all of the material that I have accumulated myself over the past 20 years.

My aim was to include as many teachers that I could find who were stated (by themselves or others) as ‘teachers of nonduality’. I then endeavored to find out whether or not they claimed to be teaching Advaita. This I did by scanning through their own websites, book reviews, interviews etc. I freely admit that this was not a comprehensive process. To perform this task in a rigorous way would have taken a very long time. Accordingly, all of the following are possible:

• I have not included a teacher who does teach Advaita.
• I have included one who does teach Advaita but have said that it is ‘Not Advaita’.
• I have included a teacher who does not teach Advaita but have failed to identify this.

If any of these are true, then I freely apologize to that teacher, but suggest that maybe they need to change or add to their website to make the actual situation clear.

I do not want to be accused of unfair or unreasonable comments. I have sometimes included quotations from the websites own material. For this, I can only be accused of ‘out of context’ quotation, although I did genuinely try not to do that. Nevertheless, any quotations are the teacher’s own. If they no longer agree with what they said, then they should delete it so as to avoid misleading seekers.

There are lots of claimed ‘spiritual’ teachers, teaching ‘wholeness’, ‘love’ and other nice words, but who are clearly not teaching Advaita. I have not been rigorous in including or excluding them all. As a general guideline, if I could find mention of the word ‘nondual’ on their website or in articles, I have probably included them. Otherwise, I probably haven’t. I have tended to exclude ‘nondual healers’ and ‘nondual therapists’ and others describing their practice using contradictory notions.

If, whilst reading through material related to a particular teacher, I came across a statement that I felt merited highlighting, I have often quoted this. I do so without any comment of my own, leaving it to the reader to form their own opinion. It may sometimes appear that I am deliberately choosing outrageous statements in an effort to be sarcastic or amusing. There may be something in that but, in my defense, the quotation is the teacher’s own and I have endeavored not to take anything out of context to make it seem other than stated.

If there were indications that the teaching was in accordance with Advaita but I found quotations that contradicted this in any way, then I felt this justified including such quotations as examples of misleading teaching. These may appear elsewhere in the book.

Teachers may try to argue that, if they are teaching non-duality, then it must be the same as Advaita but this is not the case. Whilst it is true that the end-point of any non-dual teaching must be the same, the route for getting there may be quite different. Although I am unable to speak for any other route, what I can say is that the Advaita-path is possibly the oldest and most ‘used’, having successfully shown many the way to understanding. Despite being so old, the fact that it does not eschew reason and experience also makes it very amenable to the modern mind.

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See https://www.advaita-vision.org/finding-a-teacher/ for list of contents, link to extract, and link to purchase.