Worship through one window
If you stay as the patch of sky in your own window and pray to the great sky through all the others, that is religion. Advaita says it is not wrong.
By Sovandarapor (James) Kong · · Nondual
Chapter 11 of 18 in Ninety minutes with a swami
The window picture from the last piece does one more job, and it is the part that I had never seen done politely before.
Take the sky through one window. That is you, consciousness limited to one body and one mind. Now take the sky through every window at once, a whole wall of them, consciousness identified with all minds and all bodies. Swami Sarvapriyananda says that is what Vedanta means by Ishvara, the God of religion, and he admits plainly that this is the point where faith comes in. That you exist as a conscious being is not a matter of belief, Descartes saw that. That there is a being related to the whole universe the way you are related to your body is a claim, and you can decline it.
What I had not seen before is what he does with the dualist religions from inside this picture. They take the person as given, consciousness and mind and body as one package, and they project the universal version of that as their God, and they stop there. From the Advaita side this is not an error. If you remain as your one square of sky and worship the great sky shining through a million squares, you are still pointing at the sky. It is the same sky. You are referring to it indirectly, and the tradition's view is that this should at some point lead you to the thing you are referring to, but it does not tell you that you were wrong to kneel.
He notes that every firmly dualist religion carries a non-dual strand somewhere in it, usually heretical, usually marginal. Eckhart in Christianity, the Sufis in Islam, strands in Judaism, and in the Netherlands, Spinoza, who got there on his own. He mentions the story that Einstein, asked whether he believed in God, said he believed in Spinoza's God, and then adds, I do not know if that is true. I liked him for adding it.
I wrote about Eckhart here a while ago, the Dominican who asked God to rid him of God, and at the time I read it as a man on the edge of his tradition. The window picture makes it look less like an edge and more like the same view from a different seat.
I am aware that this is a very accommodating philosophy, and accommodating philosophies make me check my wallet. It would be convenient if everyone turned out to be right in a way only I understand. I do not think that is what he is saying. I am not certain.