Hi everyone, hope all is well.  I would like to ask everyone’s opinion on Dr. Stephen Wolinsky’s work, that is, his books and DVD’s on the teachings of Nisargadatta Maharaj and Advaita-Vedanta.  Thanks for your time and have a great day!

Maybe I need to be a little more specific in order to get some feedback.  Both Ken and Stephen share some fundamental elements in their understanding of no-self, big mind, one taste or whatever you would like to call it.  However there are some differences that I am having a difficult time understanding.  If someone could be so nice as to illumine my naiveté on the subject it would be appreciated.  The main difference between their views is that Ken seems to talk about his various experiences of no-self, the witness or big mind.  He does this in all his books I believe, especially in his One Taste.  However Wolinsky comes from the perspective that all experience is nervous system dependent and to get a true experience of non-dual or no self one would not even be aware of it.  He criticizes those teachers today that talk about presence or the witness because these are just modes of the nervous system or biochemistry.  In fact he states that there is no true present awareness state because everything that is experienced happens before we experience it.  Therefore I see a difference in the understanding of the ultimate non-dual big mind.  I believe the main difference is that Ken talks about the non-dual in terms of experience and Wolinsky states how it cannot be experienced because there will not be an “I” there to perceive it.  Any thoughts?  Thanks so much.

'Sounds like Wolinsky needs to add a few more quadrants to his model of the Kosmos.

Pay attention when an expert is talking about their area of expertise and ignore them when they are not.

brooks,  what has been a contribution to me in what you have brought up conserning experience, is what someone once shared with me is you can't couch experience in concepts or symbols. Lingustically no has ever been able to describe what they are experiencing right NOW. As soon as you try to descibe what you are experiening, it is no longer an experience, it is a concept of what you were experiencing a little while ago, meaning a tiny fraction of a second ago. 

What comes  to mind as I type this is what Ken brought up when Galeleo was attemting to communicate to the church what he was experiencing when he looked through the telescope and the churched chose not to look.  Maybe Wolinsky has not done the work in the UL quandrant to get the communication that Wilber was attempting to make.

Language takes us only so far in these matters we are discussing.  The best we can do is make distinctions,ie:  like you can never figure out THE TRUTH, THE TRUTH  is a space we come from in the NOW,   NOW as a transcendency to time is always and only created coming from NOTHING.

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Bill Kilburg,