Wonderland Advaita

Imagine if you will, that you awaken one morning in another world. As you rub your eyes to get accustomed to the bright sunshine, you see that it is in many respects a world not unlike this one.

All around you there are creatures that, to your eyes, look identical to the human beings with whom you are used to sharing the world. You observe them going about their daily activities, living their lives, engaging in conversation with others, making the myriad choices and decisions that life inherently demands. The picture looks reassuringly familiar and normal.

But in this world, you soon discover that things are not necessarily as they seem. For these are not human beings. No, these are "body/mind organisms" which, unlike their human counterparts, do not have the ability to choose between options or to make decisions.

In fact, these organisms do not have anything even resembling what we would call free will. The scripts of their entire lives were written in stone long before they were born, leaving them only to go mechanically through the motions of acting out their programming.

These seemingly human creatures, it would appear, are not unlike machines. While to all appearances they seem to behave like ordinary freethinking individuals, busily engaged in daily activities, strangely, when asked, they maintain that they are not doing anything at all.

In fact, in this peculiar world, they say that there are "no doers." Furthermore, no one in this world is ever held accountable for anything. Even when one of these beings appears to harm another, there is no remorse felt and no blame attributed. If you were to ask one of these body/mind organisms about it, the response would be that there was no one who had done anything.

Ethics is an unknown concept here. The laws of nature do not seem to apply in this brave new world. Or maybe they have been rewritten here, since the beings do seem to observe some strange laws. You wonder where on Earth you could be. But you are not on Earth. You have landed on Planet Advaita.

WIE: In the end, though, how can we say that we know it is destiny or God's will? All we know is that certain events take place. Afterwards we can look back on something we did and say, "It just happened," and if we like, we can call it destiny. But isn't it more accurate to say that we don't really know whether it is destiny or not?

RB: That's the point. We don't know.

WIE: But saying that we don't know is different from saying "we know that it is God's will." It's different from saying we know that everything is fixed. You see, it sounds to me like you're saying that you do know that everything is the will of God. What I'm suggesting, though, is that we just don't know; we don't know if it is God who is deciding these things, so we can't really say, "This is how it works" or "Everything is all mapped out by God."

RB: We don't know and that is the bottom line; so if you like, you can drop the concept of destiny and say that nobody can really know anything. Fine! There is no need for the concept of destiny. After all, if you accept that whatever happens is not in your control, then who is there to be concerned with destiny?

Suddenly the welcome sight of a teashop appeared through the smog, and as I made my way inside, I was relieved to find the kind of quiet oasis for which I had hoped.

It was there, at one of the many empty tables, as the first sip of sickly sweet milk tea passed across my lips that, in a flash, it hit me. I was not drinking the tea!

I was not sitting at the table! In fact, I was not the one who had entered the teashop. And I was not the one who had just been tormented for an hour in discussion with a man who at that moment was beginning to seem like the sane one.

In fact, it had never been me doing anything. It was as if a burden I had been carrying for my entire life was suddenly lifted into the sky by a hot air balloon, whisked away, never to return again.

All those years I had struggled to be a better, more honest and generous human being—all that effort I had made to renounce my tendencies toward superiority, selfishness and aggression—had all been a folly, all foolishly, needlessly based on the self-important idea that I had some control over my own destiny, and the petty presumption that what I did to "others" ever mattered anyway.

How could I have been so misguided? But wait, it wasn't even me who was misguided! As if through parting clouds, clearly now I could suddenly see that what I had thought of as "my life" had in fact been only a mechanical process. The person I had thought I was just a machine.

And the world in which I thought I had been living was not, as I had assumed, a world of human complexity, but one of mechanistic simplicity, of perfect order, a mathematical playing out of programs in motion since the beginning of time.

As the clinical perfection of God's scientific plan started to open up before me, the ecstatic thrill of absolute freedom—from worry, from care, from obligation, from guilt—began to rush through my veins like a torrent of undammed rivers.

And with it came an enveloping, resounding peace, an absolute cessation of tension, in the recognition that no matter what apparent ambiguity or uncertainty I might encounter thereafter, no matter what seemingly difficult decisions I might face, I could always rest assured that whatever choice I made was exactly the choice God wanted me to make.

The mysterious sense of an Unknown that had tugged at me for so long had evaporated. The others in the café turned their heads as I laughed out loud, a long belly laugh, and mused to myself what a fantastical game life would be if everyone understood how it all really works, if everyone could at least get a glimpse of how free we could be, if we all lived on Planet Advaita.

Planet Advaita! What is Enlightenment!