What is Advaita?

The attentive reader may already have noticed. Advaita is not Chinese wisdom! It comes from India. But truth rarely respects national borders. And what Advaita describes touches the same core as the I-Ching and Qigong. That is why it has its own place here. All the more so because it contains something essential that is sometimes overlooked in other traditions.

Advaita (अद्वैत) is a Sanskrit word. It literally means ‘not two’. In the West it is also called non-dualism. No separation between you and the world. No distance between the observer and what is observed.

Its origins lie in the Vedanta tradition, one of the oldest schools of philosophy in India. The best-known line of teachers runs from Gaudapada through Shankara (8th century) to modern teachers such as Ramana Maharshi and Nisargadatta Maharaj. What connects them is not a doctrine, but a recognition: what you truly are is not the story you tell about yourself.

At its core, Advaita revolves around one question: what remains when you take away everything that comes and goes? Thoughts come and go. Feelings come and go. Even the sense of being a person keeps shifting. But there is something that does not move along with it. Not as a concept. Not as a belief. But as direct experience. That unchanging something, that is what you really are.

Advaita is not an exercise and not a method. It asks nothing of you. It adds nothing. It simply points to what is already there when you stop searching.

Let me begin with a stubborn misunderstanding. It goes something like this: if there is no doer, it no longer matters what you do. We are all one anyway. So you can’t really harm anyone. Everything is already fine as it is. Just sit back and relax.

It sounds like freedom. But if you look closely, you see something else. This is not a recognition; it is a conclusion. And conclusions are drawn by exactly the thing you are trying to see through in Advaita. The ego picks up the insight and turns it into a licence. “There is no I, so I no longer have to take responsibility for anything.” Do you hear it? There is still someone there who wants something, someone who wants to avoid responsibility.

It is precisely when the personal falls away that something else appears. Not indifference, but a more direct involvement. When the identification with yourself as a person falls away, you begin to see that you have always looked at the world through a narrow tube. Everything filtered through what it means to you, what you think of it, what you get out of it. When the person falls away, that tube falls away too. And what remains is a far wider view. Without the filter of ‘what’s in it for me’, there is no longer a buffer between you and what happens. Pain is pain. Injustice is injustice. Not because you judge it that way, but because you can no longer look away from it.