Tag Archives: seeking

Finding a Teacher

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Over the years, many seekers from all over the world have asked for my help to find a teacher. Rarely have I been able to do so. To paraphrase a common saying: a good teacher is hard to find. If there is one within striking distance of your home, you will be very lucky indeed! My new book, out this month, explains why, and endeavors to look at all of the ‘teacher resources’ available through books and Internet.

Self Seeking:- Finding a Modern Teacher of Advaita

Below is the Contents List so that you can see what you will be getting. For a general summary of its aim, I cannot do better than repeat the publishing summary: Are you interested in Advaita and want to become enlightened? How should you go about it? What will happen if you do? How can you know what works and what doesn’t? In particular, how should you go about finding a teacher? What books should you read? Author Dennis Waite answers all these questions and more, having communicated with many teachers and seekers over the past 25 years, accumulated around 1500 books on Advaita, and written more than 10 books himself.

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SELF SEEKING: Finding a Modern Teacher of Advaita

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This book may now be pre-ordered from bookstores around the world. It will actually be available on 28th October but, from Amazon at least, there is a 20% reduction if ordered now (normal price £19.99, pre-order £15.99; $27.95 with no reduction from Amazon US). The links to buy from Amazon are: UK and US. The ISBN is 978-1803418896.

[The E-Book should be available imminently but is an EPUB file so cannot be read on Kindle readers without first converting (e.g. using an app such as Calibre).]

Here is the publishing blurb:

Are you interested in Advaita and want to become enlightened? How should you go about it? What will happen if you do? How can you know what works and what doesn’t? In particular, how should you go about finding a teacher? What books should you read? Author Dennis Waite answers all these questions and more, having communicated with many teachers and seekers over the past 25 years, accumulated around 1500 books on Advaita, and written more than 10 books himself. In these pages, you will learn how to identify false teachers by spotting irrelevance, pitfalls, fallacies, and mystical mumbo jumbo. You will be warned against grandiose marketing claims, spiritual catchphrases, unclear language and poetry, and why you should be wary of various transcriptions and translations. For instance, the styles of Neo-Vedanta, Neo-Advaita, Direct Path, and satsang, in general, are compared with the original traditional teaching, and the relative values of scriptures, psychology, social media, and even AI are investigated. An attempt has been made to research all living teachers and organizations that claim to be teaching Non-Duality in the West and establish whether it is really Advaita. Do they help you to seek the Self or are they simply self-seeking?

Being: the bottom line (Conclusion)

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(Read Part 1)

Another misleading claim is that “there’s no one bound and therefore no liberation from bondage.” This sounds very clever and obvious and is very likely to be accepted without question by the listener, adding still more to the ammunition against the traditional Advaitin position. But everything should be questioned! Advaita is a supremely logical and scientific philosophy if followed correctly and glib statements such as the above must be looked at carefully. (And it is acknowledged that ‘glib’ here is a ‘loaded epithet’!) Traditional Advaita does not, in fact, claim that there can be liberation from bondage. In fact, it is stated openly that there is not actually anyone bound. What is said is that there can be the realisation that there is no one who is bound – and that is liberation.

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Being: the bottom line

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Since I am busy writing my next book (for a change), I have been looking through the past 25 years of written essays and reviews, looking for material that is not currently available anywhere. And there does seem likely to be quite a bit. So I will be (re-)publishing some of this over the next few months. The first of these is a two-part (quite long!) review of the book by Nathan Gill (who sadly died some years ago), I wrote the review back in 2006 but it is still relevant – possibly more so.

A Review of the book “Being: the bottom line” by Nathan Gill and a critique of Neo-Advaita.

This is a courageous book in that it openly tackles some of the most difficult questions that neo-Advaita has to answer and it doesn’t shy away from those that are phrased in the most challenging ways. It is also a dangerous book, in that it appears, superficially, to be providing satisfactory answers. Nevertheless it is a valuable book, albeit not perhaps for the reasons the author intended, in that there are some very searching questions and Nathan’s attempts to answer them expose the vulnerability of the neo-Advaitin position.

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Nothing you can do

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The point is, if you want to know what you can do, what I will say is that you can do a virtually endless number of things, none of which will necessarily provide that which you are seeking, but it may. If it happens, you causally link the two; you ignore the 10,000 other cases in which it didn’t. You say: ‘But I did that and then I got this – therefore I am living testimony! I did this and then got that, therefore there’s a connection!’ The connection’s notional of course.

Wayne Liquorman in conversation with Paula Marvelly. ‘The Teachers of One. Living Advaita. Conversations on the Nature of Non-duality‘, Paula Marvelly, Watkins Publishing
ISBN: 1842930281. Extract Link. Buy from Amazon US; Buy from Amazon UK

Three neo-Advaitin Quotes

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Three quotes from neo-Advaitin teachers on the value of seeking, and finding the truth (or not):

Spiritual seeking is the art of walking in very small circles. This does two things: it creates the illusion of motion, of getting somewhere; and it prevents one from stopping, from becoming still, which is where one would look around and see the futility of it all. David Carse

We all have a deep longing and a deep fear of the discovery of what we are, and the mind devises any way it can to avoid this discovery. The most effective way it avoids awakening is to seek it. Tony Parsons

Spiritual seekers do not become finders. Nathan Gill

Ego – desire

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Once the ego sees that it only seeks what it already knows, that its desires are conditioned and that its true desire is for permanent security and tranquility, it loses its dynamism to find itself in phenomenal things. Then what is behind the desire, the ego, the mind, is revealed. We are left in wonder and all dispersed activity dissolves in this wonderment.

I am, Jean Klein, compiled and edited by Emma Edwards, Non-Duality Press, 2006. ISBN 978-0-9551762-7-2. Buy from Amazon US, Buy from Amazon UK

Closer Than Close

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” a documentary that investigates the spiritual search; the search for the essential questions of human life: is there an eternal part of ourselves? what has lasting meaning? where do we find certainty? Rather than philosophical discussion, it explores the possibility of living a life devoted to a search for answers, and the radical possibility that answers exist, closer than we can imagine, within our selves.”

Watch this promotional video advertizing the DVD from Poetry in Motion Films.