Advaitaholics Anonymous: Sobering Insights for Spiritual Addicts

224 Pages·2020·3.151 MB·English

by  Shiv Sengupta

About the Author
Shiv Sengupta experienced a powerful awakening in his twenties after suffering
from years of debilitating depression. What followed was an unexpected four-
month period of inner silence and psychological freedom which, to his
disappointment, eventually ebbed. After spending several frustrating years
attempting to recreate his experience, he realized that awakening wasn’t a solution
in itself, but a glimpse into an effective way of approaching the problem of our
existence. A problem that he spent the next decade investigating without resorting
to metaphysical rationalizations, spiritual belief systems or cut-and-dried scientific
explanations.
He came to realize that his ‘own mind’ wasn’t the problem, as he had once been
led to believe. The problem was that his mind wasn’t his own to begin with. It
belonged to others—to society, to peer groups and to political, social and spiritual
authority figures. And in order to reclaim his mind, he embarked on a process of
painstakingly questioning his beliefs—from the personal to the social, from the
metaphysical to the mundane.
In 2018, Shiv began sharing his reflections on a Facebook page called
Advaitaholics Anonymous which rapidly gained a large readership amongst veteran
spiritual seekers, many of whom had grown disillusioned after years of being
mired in fruitless spiritual teachings. In his writings, they found a refreshingly
honest, down-to-earth, no-nonsense approach to the existential questions of life.
This book is a compilation of some of his selected essays and serves as testimony
of a man who has found his own mind.
A Canadian citizen born and raised in India, Shiv has been living with his wife
and two daughters in snowy Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost island, where he has
been working as a Business Strategy consultant. He can be contacted through his
Facebook page: Advaitaholics Anonymous
ADVAITAHOLICS ANONYMOUS
Sobering Insights for Spiritual Addicts
Shiv Sengupta
New Sarum Press
UNITED KINGDOM
ADVAITAHOLICS ANONYMOUS
First published by New Sarum Press October 2020
Copyright ©2020 Shiv Sengupta
Copyright ©2020 New Sarum Press
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilised in any form or by any means, electronic or
mechanical, without prior permission in writing from the Publisher.
ISBN: 978-1-9162903-6-5
NEW SARUM PRESS
www.newsarumpress.com
https://advaitaholics.com
Contents
Author’s note
Introduction
1. Getting Sober
2. On the Edge of Enlightenment
3. Where All Paths Lead
4. Ambivalence
5. The Reunion
6. Square One
7. There Are No Masters
8. Be As You Are
9. Always Present
10. Awakening Vs. The Art of Living
11. The Story of The Gamer
12. Something Missing
13. Morally Bankrupt Teachers
14. Why Do You Want to Wake Up?
15. Reorientation
16 Law of Inertia
17. No Compromise
18. Balance of Power
19. Spiritual Bullshittery
20. What Are You?
21. Other World
22. Is This Enlightenment?
23. Short and Sweet
24. Pick Your Poison
25. Once Again Mountains
26. Pornlightenment Now!
27. Gateless Gate
28. The Same You
29. Dark Night of The Soul
30. The Last Hour
31. Baseline Happiness
32. Spiritually Incorrect
33. Non-Dualusions
34. The Myth of Being Awake
35. Mirror, Mirror
36. Just Fucking Life
37. Secrets of The Universe
38. An Impossible Choice
39. Spiritual Consumerism
40. Staying Alive
41. The Need of The Hour
42. Spiritual Pyramid Scheme
43. Bombs Away!
44. Break on Through
45. I Am Not, Yet I Am
46. Halo of Hope
47. To Wake or Not to Wake
48. There Is No How
49. I Do Not Know
Author’s note
In the late summer of 2018, I created a Facebook blog page on a whim and began
writing articles which cast a sober yet satirical glance on contemporary spirituality
and the culture that is woven around it. The page was called Advaitaholics
Anonymous and within a very short time it won a strong support among many
seasoned seekers; individuals who had followed various ‘spiritual’ teachers, read
all the literature, practised various meditative techniques yet were left with the
vacant feeling that in the end it had all been a form of escape.
The page also earned its fair share of critics. Advaitaholics Anonymous remained
controversial from the first post to its very last. By the end,1 the page had
thousands of readers worldwide. Over the span of a year, a total of a hundred and
ninety articles were featured on it; I have selected forty-nine of them to appear in
this book.
To me, ‘enlightenment’ is not some pinnacle state of consciousness but rather is
a continuous process of ever-increasing clarity about self and reality—one that
every sentient being is engaged with whether one is aware of it or not.
INTRODUCTION
What is an Advaitaholic?
‘Advaitaholic’ is a term that I coined in reference to the phenomenon of spiritual
addiction; an addiction that plagues so many seekers who claim to be in search of a
higher truth, transcendence, awakening, enlightenment, liberation or whatever
other form that holy grail may take. And although the term appears to single out
Advaita2 as its focus, it is much broader than that. It encompasses all forms of
spiritual belief systems and doctrine.
Spirituality is a highly personal business. It is a person’s unique relationship with
reality. Yet, the moment it is taken out of the person and objectified in the form of
a system of thought it is no longer a personal affair. Once it is made concrete for
others to congregate and build a community or culture around then that spirituality
—our own relationship with reality—ceases to be the focal point.
Most of what we call ‘spirituality’ today—the communes, the ashrams, the
temples, the online communities, the philosophies, the institutions, the satsangs3
and such—have very little to do with spirituality at all. They are distractions whose
primary focus is to create a culture of identity—the feeling of belonging to a
group. Spirituality simply becomes reduced to nothing more than a useful
foundation around which to build and sustain that culture.
But this is not something unique to spirituality alone. Most cultures work in this
way; ethnic cultures, political cultures, music cultures, fashion cultures. Culture
exists to provide an individual with a socially sanctioned worldview and a
corresponding sense of identity which then allows that person to be safely inserted
somewhere within the hierarchical fold. And the standard price one pays in
exchange for the existential security and sense of belonging culture provides is that
one token of truth we were all born with—that is our very birthright.
What is especially ironic about spiritual culture is that it promises to return that
token to us. The token we once naively traded away. But this is, of course, a lie.
Because if that token were to be returned as promised, the culture itself would
capitulate overnight. For who would remain to support it?
If all became liberated as the gurus promise, who would remain to follow them,
to support them, to worship and idolize them? It comes as no surprise then that
these same gurus appear to have a poor track record of actually ‘liberating’ those
whom they claim to teach. Liberation was never the end goal here. Domestication
was, by which I mean the acceptance of sociocultural fetters.
There are those who have arrived at this deflating realization the hard way. Now
that they’ve exhausted every avenue that promised them salvation from suffering
they find themselves at an impasse. Many are jaded, bitter, angry. And they
wonder in their confusion:
Was I delusional even to question things in the first place? Was that impulse,
to delve deeper into myself, that started me off on this journey—before the
books, before the gurus, before the communities—was that impulse, that
instinct, just a false hope?
Through the insights in this book, I encourage you to revisit everything you
think you know about yourself, about the world, about spirituality, about teachers
and yet to trust in your own intuition, first and foremost. While the bathwater may
be murky, there is still a baby somewhere in there.
In the end, spirituality is really about getting sober. Developing the courage to
see life as it is, without needing to inflate it with escapist love and light rhetoric
nor resorting to a nihilistic resignation by declaring that everything is just illusion
and thus meaningless. Sobriety involves engaging with life in its all-encompassing
ordinariness and taking responsibility for it in all its manifestations, the good, the
bad and the ugly, not only for our own part. I mean taking full ownership of our
circumstances, however they may appear. If I get hit by a car tomorrow from no
fault of my own—then, even though I am not responsible for how it happened, I
am responsible for how I choose to face the aftermath.
When common sense becomes the highest form of wisdom to which we can
aspire, and sanity the greatest kind of enlightenment, then it is safe to say that the
path of recovery has truly begun.
CHAPTER 1
GETTING SOBER
Let me be clear. This book isn’t about Advaita. It is about addiction. And addiction
relates to substance abuse.
That substance can take the form of a drink or a narcotic. It can take the form of
an activity that we feel compelled to do even to our own detriment: like sex or
work or exercise. And it can take the form of an ideology or belief system and the
culture surrounding it: like religion, communism or scientism.
The substance itself is often neither harmful nor beneficial. It may be designed to
produce a certain effect within the individual. The addiction is the issue. And one
can become addicted to pretty much anything one can imagine: a car, a person, a
pet, a hobby, a lifestyle, a habit, a group, a job…
Addiction restructures the reality we perceive and arranges it according to its
own agenda. It hijacks the basic intelligence of the body and brain and allows them
to operate only in accordance with its own perspectives. The body and brain
comply and are stimulated by this process which hijacks their ‘natural’ mode of
expression.
Addiction is an internal Stockholm Syndrome4 whereby our substance of choice
holds us captive and refuses to release us. In the process we fall in love with our
captor and rationalize its actions as beneficial.
No matter what kind of addiction we might have, this is the dynamic. An
irrational love for the substance,5 even in the face of abuse, often accompanied by
a sense of self-loathing.
The substance can be anything: a liquor, a narcotic, a person, an ideology.
In truth, most of us are addicts in some way or another, to some degree. This is
because a sense of lack is almost universal within human beings. And it seems that
the journey for most people is about how to resolve that feeling of lack. While part
of this feeling of lack may be conscious, most of it is unconscious. The void we
feel inside goes deep.
What we call ‘life’ becomes nothing more than a series of strategies to fill that
void.
Some believe that material objects will somehow satisfy that lack. So, they are
driven by a need to acquire a vast amount of money, assets, homes, businesses and
so on.