Conscious awareness of mind's machinations

Satchi:

It is certainly possible to wake up spontaneously without any prior practice. One well known example is that of Ramana Maharshi. But I would say this is very rare. What is notable is that because Ramana woke up without practice or indeed without any interest in spirituality beyond a book he had about Indian saints, he didn't then go on to say that practice is unnecessary. On the contrary, he advocated self inquiry. He was in a very good position to be able to reverse engineer his experience. He knew what was required as a practice to reach his state. And he knew that the main obstacle to self-realization was mind itself. It is an obstacle to that deep silence that is the essence of true nature and he was always in that deep silence. I'm not advocating one particular path because I think that finally it all comes down to one thing which is letting go of everything. Many paths lead to silence but you cannot say that silence is any kind of path. Anything will do that gets you there. But does the neo-advaita approach do that? Maybe, if someone is very ripe. If they already know what it is to be quiet. Papaji said all you need to do is to keep quiet. But when I look at a lot of the western style neo advaita nonduality teachers I don't see much opportunity to get quiet because the mind is being given a lot of contradictory and paradoxical concepts to grapple with about identity, separation, being told there is really no me etc. The mind loves that. It also hates it because it doesn't become satisfied by these paradoxical concepts. The mind is far from quiet. And then very often there is an unequivocal message that practice is unnecessary because there is no one to practice. You know what I mean. You've heard it all before. Zen is at the opposite extreme of just sitting without the concepts but maybe sometimes that gets too rigid. Traditional advaita Vedanta and also yoga doesn't sound at all like neo advaita. Nor does Buddhism. If you take away all the spirituality from neo-advaita what's left? It sounds like counseling or therapy to me. It's psychology.. That aspect is completely lacking from the other traditions. Sure they will talk about the nature of human suffering, but it doesn't dwell on it. These traditions are very specific about there being a path. The funny thing is that although neo advaita keeps talking about the impersonal what it actually addresses sounds very personal. It's difficult to avoid the fact that when you listen to neo-advaita it seems to be about using the mind to talk yourself into realization. It's using the mind to try and kill the mind but the mind doesn't want to die. So many words. Too many words.