There is no compulsive necessity, as most advocates of one or the other side seem to believe there is, to choose fully and finally between them, no real need to reject the one because the other is accepted. We may go along with the Vedantins and say that the One alone is real. But we may also go along with the dualists and say that the world around us and the human being are, in another sense, also real! It is quite fruitless to bring the two views into fanatical controversy with one another, far more useful to bring them into amicable relation. Why divide them when they serve us so well when reconciled?
Every time there is an attempt to communicate these truths by speech or in writing--let alone teach them to disciples--there is a falsification of the Vedantic tenet that there are no others! Then why do the Vedantists preach, teach, lecture, and write? Does this not show the utter impracticality of their position, true though it is as an ultimate metaphysical one?
The bliss that meditation practice at its deepest brings to a developed yogi does not annihilate the pain that the same yogi may feel when he resumes his ordinary active condition. Ramana Maharshi himself mentioned this quite a few times.
Iso Upanishad: "They enter the region of the dark who are occupied solely with the finite. But they fall into a region of still greater darkness who are occupied solely with the Infinite."
Nonduality in its extreme form is not to the taste of the masses. Instinctively they shy away from it. Let the two views accommodate each other. While these levels of reference ought not to be mixed together when theory and principles are concerned, there is one way in which there is considerable profit to be gained if the timeless eternal and universal atmosphere of Vedanta is kept at the back of the mind when the worldly problems have to be met. They can be met with this remembrance that one's true being is, and will be, safe and unaffected, and that whatever decision or action we are called to make, the first thing is to keep calm.
Each side--dualist and nondualist--is quite correct when they apply their teaching in its proper place, but quite wrong when they misapply. Thus, dualists who offer dualism as ultimate are wrong, but then nondualist Vedantists are also misconceiving the proper application of their tenets when they insist on applying their "no world exists, no ego exists" doctrine to human life generally.
-- Notebooks Category 23: Advanced Contemplation > Chapter 5 : Balancing the Paths > # 157
