ABSTRACT
The problem of social conditioning is often explicitly woven into accounts of tradition itself. For example, there is a well-known story about Adi Shankara, the eighth century exponent of the Advaita philosophy of non-duality. Spiritual practices simultaneously manifest and mirror the dynamics of the aspirant’s journey, a fact related to the importance of process in all religious traditions. The inescapably interpretive dimension of a religious or spiritual vocation makes it similar, in certain respects, to other social or political philosophies. There is one important way in which the process of spiritual knowing is distinguished from secular knowledge acquisition, namely, the place of revelation in its unfolding. Spiritual teaching primarily addresses the individual seeker. But the ethics of practice call upon the practitioner to learn how to take her or his place in the phenomenal world in cognisance of the truths of love, oneness, non-harming and interdependency.
