Advaitayana Yoga
What is it? We know what Advaita means: it is the absence of duality, the absence of the main obstruction to clear vision – dichotomous perception – which is nonduality. Yana here is a Sanskrit suffix that generally means “vehicle” or “way”. So Advaitayana is the Way of Nonduality. Yoga means “union” or yoking, the putting together of two; the process of unifying or re-unifying two into oneness.
What Advaitayana Yoga boils down to is the activation of the process of disentangling oneself from the dichotomous view, the deluded way of perceiving the external and internal “worlds”. We become apparently disunited with our true and real identity with BEING when we get entangled in separative thinking which leads to the obsession with BECOMING. Getting rid of the ignorance that keeps us unrealized will leave us in our original and true existential nature. Once we learn how to sever the perceptive barriers by understanding our fictitious identity and the process of disidentification from it, we are left in the state of our primal unqualified Consciousness-Being. Preference and prejudice, attachment and aversion, and all the rest of the discriminative biases are gone from our mind processes when we depart from the clinging created by ego-based ambition and the fears and hopes of supportive belief notions. We get glimpses of correct vision and these short epiphanies eventually accumulate and help develop more stable abidance in real Being.
In the realization that Advaitayana Yoga can help to bring about, we can know that the real and authentic Being which we are is not the personality mask, nor is it the ego, the mistaken identity conjured up by conditioned identification with the body-mind complex or with any other objective referent such as one’s name and fame or dramatic history. Recognition of innate authentic Being results in spontaneity of conduct, whether in the body, the mind, or speech because Being-ness is based in the recognition of sameness with noumenal source essence. Re-identity is not a result of a re-structuring or transformation of ego-identity, as in “modern” Western psychology, but a de-structuring of the false identity. Authenticity has no conditioned structure in its manifestation in the phenomenal worlds; it is dynamic manifestation of its own truth and enlightened activity. Authenticity is spontaneously manifested by one who is in presence of perfect identity with noumenon, pure stainless consciousness wherein truth and transcendental knowledge spontaneously appear. The holistic vision of nonduality dissolves ego-based motivational illnesses, tensions, agitations, and delusions that hinder the relaxed presence of the awareness of reality.
The web of judgmental and biased thought is a strong entanglement but it can be broken through by learning wakefulness in the continuum of a stainless Consciousness not polluted with dualistic biases. We can unlearn our conditional and habitual reactive ways of perception and instead remain in a responsive and flexible “yana” of freedom that is unobstructed with fictitious identity complexes. We then find ourselves in a relaxed, non-conceptual naked GNOSIS, our original and real BEING, free from clinging and attachment to superimposed conceptual errors.
© S. R. Allen
