Advaita is a Sanskrit word that literally means “non-secondness.” Advaita is also apparently the name of a religion. According to Google, it is “a Vedantic doctrine that identifies the individual self (atman) with the ground of reality (brahman).”
I have recently been writing about what-is-and-is-not, which is this [looks around]. A (very) few people have referred to what I have been writing as “neo-advaita.” I want to make absolutely clear that what I am writing about has nothing to do with Advaita. I know very little about Advaita, but even the first few words of the Google dictionary definition shows that Advaita-the-religion has absolutely no relationship to what I have been writing about.
The first thing the dictionary definition mentions is “the individual self,” in the context of it being somehow real. Well, there you go: there is no individual self. The individual self is a complete illusion. There is only this, what-is-and-is-not. There is no self at all, anywhere, ever (except as a concept). Where could it possibly be hiding?
I have a suspicion about what Advaita is, but no way of knowing for sure. It seems to me that Advaita may have formed around a communication related to what-is-and-is-not. It’s possible that the communication was misunderstood to reify the illusion of self, and framed to give hope to the self, hope…
