This immediate-direct-religious-intuitive experience of the Self in the ground of the soul is often refered to as an awakening; of it Abhishiktananda writes in his own prose poem:

This awakening is not caused by anything, and causes nothing. A bell may provoke psycho-nervous results, but the awakening is not caused by the sound of the bell. It just is, simply.

This is the experience that underlies the Hindu religious sensibility at its best. This is for a Hindu is a matter of faith; it is not something you can "figure out": theological, philosophical, psycological, anthropological speculations can at best lead to a thirst for the experience.

The Self cannot be known through study of the Scriptures, nor through intellect, nor through hearing learned discourses. The Self can be attained only by those whom the Self chooses.

The best way to foster the experience is through of life of virtue and spiritual practice--as the Upanishads tell us over and over again, "stilling the mind and training the senses"--that is, yoga.

The Self cannot be known by anyone who desists not from unrighteous ways, controls not the senses, stills not the mind, and practices not meditation.

What follows from this in the strictest interpretation is that individual selves and created matter, in some schools of thought, actually come to be seen as maya, which means the "illusion" or "mere appearance" that results from advidya, ignorance. Once one has had an experience of non-duality, of the Absolute Self, such as Ramana Maharshi had, that ignorance disappears.

The main proponent of this advaitin school of thought was the great Sankara, an eight century Indian wandering philosopher. Among the implications of his theology is the teaching that God is strictly abstract, nirguna-Brahman, which means without attributes. Those who reach this awareness realize that their own deepest Self is none other than the Absolute, of which God is only the first emanation, and a semi-illusory one at that.

Advaitan philosophy has had a profound effect on Indian thought. All three of the founders of Shantivanam wrestled with it at length. For all three the aim of the Christian is somehow a reconciliation of advaita and the Trinity, whom they loved to refer to as Saccidananda, the Father as Being, the Son as Consciousness and the Spirit as Bliss. At first glance the doctrine of the Trinity seems to be opposed to advaita if one follows the strict school of Sankara, because it seems to imply separate beings, ie. duality in the Godhead. Bede characteristically approaches it all very carefully, and often speaks of union by communion rather than union by identity. Though he writes eloquently and at great length about advaita in many articles and books, he seems to associate himself a little more closely with another school of thought that was also very influential, known as visist-advaita, qualified non-duality. This school of thought drew its language from the philosophical school of samkhya, which Bede was also fond of. The main teacher of qualified non-duality was Ramanuja, an 11th century philosopher-theologian. Ramanuja, who was a worshipper of Vishnu, first of all differed from Sankara in that he did not regard God-Brahman as simply nirguna, without characteristics; though beyond description, God can be he worshipped as saguna, with attributes, through various manifestations and avatars. Ramanuja did agree with Sankara that Brahman is the only thing that truly is, without any distinction, but he did not agree that nothing else is real, nor that everything else is merely appearance or maya, that is, the projection of ignorance-advidya. According to Ramanuja, individual selves and the world of matter are real, but they are the instruments of Brahman in a relationship like that of souls and bodies, and their existence and their ability to function are totally dependent on Brahman.

Abhishiktananda, on the other hand, leapt right in to a strict interpretation of advaita. I found a little booklet called Saccidananda: Garland of Letters, that Bede and the monks of Shantivanam prepared in 1990 for their canonical visitation in which Bede writes, in an essay entitled "Our Founders", with uncharacteristic frankness about Abhishiktananda's path. He says that Abhishiktananda's experience of this oneness with God, while in a cave on the mountain of Arunachala in Tiruvanamalai--and no one, not even Bede or Francis Archaya, denied that he had had a real and profound experience--was in fact so profound that it shook his faith in the traditional form of Christianity. In his experience of advaita he was left with a sense of absolute oneness in which he no longer felt any difference between God and the individual human person. For the rest of his life, as evidenced in his diaries, Abhishiktananda had to wrestle with how to interpret this experience as a Christian; it seemed to involve a denial of "rational difference between God and creation, whereas his Christian faith called for the recognition of distinctions in the Godhead and the Incarnation and the church."