Standing as Awareness (Greg Goode)
Dry, Boring, Pedantic Advaita Vedanta
[My 2-star Amazon review (NDA) of “Standing as Awareness: The Direct Path” by Greg Goode.]
This book is very dry and analytical, not an enjoyable read like the teachings of Ramana Maharshi and Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj. The author is familiar with the teachings of all the big-name Advaita gurus, including Jean Klein (whom I spent time with) and Ramesh Balsekar (who followed Nisargadatta), but if you've read them, you won't get anything new here except the author's flawed epistemology (seemingly derived from his guru, Sri Atmananda) which, like many idealistic, primacy-of-consciousness epistemologies, attempts to attack the efficacy of man's cognitive faculty (including his senses and perception, which provide the raw material for concept-formation).
Interestingly enough, if you compare this book to one I recently reviewed, "Meditation on Emptiness," by Jeffrey Hopkins, you'll see that the Buddhist Madhyamakans follow the same methodology to deconstruct objective reality as Goode, but reach a different conclusion: instead of all objects being defaulted to awareness (or self), the Madhyamakans see them as reduced to emptiness (or no-self). Two sides of the same counterfeit coin, to my mind.
If the author understood the highest Advaita Vedanta methodology--Self-enquiry, as taught by Ramana Maharshi--he wouldn't devote the bulk of his writings to attempting (unsuccessfully) to deconstruct the conventional reality of objects; instead he would direct seekers to undermine (by enquiring into and obviating) the continuum of ego-`I' thoughts as they arise, and thereby realize the underlying transcendental `I,' or pure Self-Awareness. In other words, instead of being object-oriented, his teachings would be Subject-oriented.
Finally, this text is devoid of spiritual esotericism, containing no information about the deeper "mechanics" of the Self-realization process, the Energetic (or Kundalini-Shakti) Dimension of the Atman project. Self-realization occurs when Kundalini-Shakti, the Energetic correlate of awakened Consciousness, severs the Heart-knot (the Causal-root of the self-contraction), but Goode only talk about Mind, and not Energy, in his discourse.
In sum, this book is arid, tedious, and pedantic, like a text you'd encounter in a college philosophy course; its epistemic thesis is nonsense; and it is spiritually exoteric, never moving beyond the parameters of stilted, staid Advaita Vedanta. Because it's a genuine Advaita Vedanta text, and not a neo-Advaitan one, I give it two stars rather than one.
[My 2-star Amazon review (NDA) of “Standing as Awareness: The Direct Path” by Greg Goode.]
This book is very dry and analytical, not an enjoyable read like the teachings of Ramana Maharshi and Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj. The author is familiar with the teachings of all the big-name Advaita gurus, including Jean Klein (whom I spent time with) and Ramesh Balsekar (who followed Nisargadatta), but if you've read them, you won't get anything new here except the author's flawed epistemology (seemingly derived from his guru, Sri Atmananda) which, like many idealistic, primacy-of-consciousness epistemologies, attempts to attack the efficacy of man's cognitive faculty (including his senses and perception, which provide the raw material for concept-formation).
Interestingly enough, if you compare this book to one I recently reviewed, "Meditation on Emptiness," by Jeffrey Hopkins, you'll see that the Buddhist Madhyamakans follow the same methodology to deconstruct objective reality as Goode, but reach a different conclusion: instead of all objects being defaulted to awareness (or self), the Madhyamakans see them as reduced to emptiness (or no-self). Two sides of the same counterfeit coin, to my mind.
If the author understood the highest Advaita Vedanta methodology--Self-enquiry, as taught by Ramana Maharshi--he wouldn't devote the bulk of his writings to attempting (unsuccessfully) to deconstruct the conventional reality of objects; instead he would direct seekers to undermine (by enquiring into and obviating) the continuum of ego-`I' thoughts as they arise, and thereby realize the underlying transcendental `I,' or pure Self-Awareness. In other words, instead of being object-oriented, his teachings would be Subject-oriented.
Finally, this text is devoid of spiritual esotericism, containing no information about the deeper "mechanics" of the Self-realization process, the Energetic (or Kundalini-Shakti) Dimension of the Atman project. Self-realization occurs when Kundalini-Shakti, the Energetic correlate of awakened Consciousness, severs the Heart-knot (the Causal-root of the self-contraction), but Goode only talk about Mind, and not Energy, in his discourse.
In sum, this book is arid, tedious, and pedantic, like a text you'd encounter in a college philosophy course; its epistemic thesis is nonsense; and it is spiritually exoteric, never moving beyond the parameters of stilted, staid Advaita Vedanta. Because it's a genuine Advaita Vedanta text, and not a neo-Advaitan one, I give it two stars rather than one.
