learn · 2026-09-19 · 4 min read
What I had to unlearn to practise Advaita after years of Vipassana
For eight years I practised in one direction. Sit. Observe the breath. Observe sensation. Do not react. Return when you wander. Endure when it hurts. Ten-day course after ten-day course, from 2012 on, in a tradition that's very good at one thing: producing a person who does the work.
Then I met the other question. Not what do I observe but who is observing. Advaita, the non-dual teaching of the Upaniṣads, of Śaṅkara and of Nisargadatta Maharaj (whose I Am became the first sitting of Himalayan Silence, a course I later recorded), doesn't ask you to do anything. It asks you to look at the one who is doing. And a Vipassana-trained mind, meeting that question, discovers that most of what it has trained is exactly what has to be set down.
Three things had to be unlearned. Three turned out not to need unlearning at all.
Three things I set down
The first was the doer. Vipassana trains effort. There is a technique, there is someone applying it, and the day is measured by how well the application went. That someone is the whole apparatus of the practice, and it's the first thing self-inquiry dissolves. Who repeats the mantra? is the second sitting of Himalayan Silence, and it's the question that ended my first way of practising. Look for the repeater and you don't find one. There is repetition; there is no repeater. And if there is no repeater, who exactly has been observing the breath for eight years? Training is needed only by someone who believes themselves imperfect. Before that thought appeared, who were you?
Then the path as a road. A ten-day course is a road with a gate at each end, and you walk it. Part one, part two, day six, day ten. That shape is right for the technique and it's the shape my own home course still has. But Advaita says the path isn't a road to be walked; it's the recognition of what was never left. Is there a path, and who is the one walking? You observe the movement of thought, the change of sensation, the flow of feeling. They come and go, and the observer remains. Nothing about the observer moved from day one to day ten. The road was walked by the body.
And the goal. The Goenka courses are honest that pleasant states aren't the goal; even in the Buddha's time the calm of concentration was mistaken for the destination, and people stopped there. I knew that. And still, eight years of measuring sittings had left a habit of reaching — for depth, for the good sitting, for the next stage. Self-inquiry has no next stage. You think you must become someone, achieve something. Becoming is a game of the mind. The truth is already here: not hidden, not closed, just unnoticed. When there's nothing to reach, a large part of what I called practice simply stopped, and what was left was quieter than anything the reaching had produced.
Three I kept
Sitting still, for one. The body that can sit for an hour without moving is the same body in both traditions. Self-inquiry done by a restless body is a restless inquiry. The eight years weren't wasted on this; they were the whole of it.
The observer, too. Vipassana's instruction (observe the sensation, don't react, notice that it changes) is already an instruction to be the witness. The tradition calls what the witness sees anicca, dukkha, anattā: impermanent, unsatisfactory, not self. These aren't beliefs to adopt; they're descriptions of what careful attention tends to reveal. Advaita turns the same attention around and asks what is looking. The witness and the observed: that's the fourth sitting of Himalayan Silence, and a Vipassana practitioner arrives at it with the witness already trained. They've been the witness for years without asking who the witness was.
And not-self. Anattā is the third of the three characteristics, and it's the one the Goenka tradition says least about, because it's the one that can't be observed as an object. Advaita begins where that observation ends. Look at the body without calling it yours. Look at the breath without controlling it. Look at the mind without joining its game. When identification drops, only clarity remains. That sentence could be spoken in either tradition. One arrives at it by observation; the other by asking. The clarity is the same clarity.
When I wrote the path page for my Russian course, I gave every step two readings, side by side. The Path: what to do, step by step. Unity: the same steps seen from the other side, each one turning out to be not a task but what already is. Discipline yourself, or: discipline isn't effort but the natural rhythm that appears when the chaos of the personal falls away. Persist, or: persistence loses its meaning when there's no resistance. Cultivate love for yourself, or: love for yourself loses its meaning when the idea of I and others goes, and simply love remains.
Neither reading is wrong. The first is for the one walking; the second for the one who has arrived, or who has noticed there was nowhere to go. I still teach the first, because the second can't be handed to someone who hasn't sat. But I teach it knowing the second is there, and I say so, which is the one thing my own first teachers, honourably, didn't.
Meditation isn't concentration, or relaxation, or a ritual, or a state of mind. It's awareness independent of thought: a state of no mind, if the phrase can be forgiven. I wrote that years ago, as a Vipassana practitioner, before I had a name for what I was describing. It was Advaita already.
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