"A shared working relationship and agenda, limited actual knowledge of the subject in this case and unfortunately no desire to seriously discuss how much to highlight an obscure thesis. Of course. Best to just put NPOV tag on the article because consensus is impossible. Not that the Edwards reference concerns me much. 

There is a published view that Advaita and ""enlightenment"" itself is a fraud created by possession by power hungry beings, specifically referencing Ramana Maharshi. That view deserves equal treatment as far as being referenced. To quote the author: 

Consider this quote by the currently popular guru, Ramana Maharshi: “Repetition aloud of His name is better than praise. Better still is its faint murmur. But the best is repetition within the mind — and that is meditation. Better than such broken thought is its steady and continuous flow like the flow of oil or of a perennial stream.”

Ramana Maharshi’s statement represents mantra meditation’s goal: a state where the mind is timelessly identified with surrender to the name of one’s god – identical with the god himself. The mind itself has become self-negation at the feet of the deity. Empty of original thought and dynamic desire, the “liberated” person’s ego is dissolved: the very thing that made him or her human. All that is left is a mind-body shell, a meat-robot, that moves through life as a surrendered instrument of some greater will. I suggest the greater will is not that of the Infinite. It is the will of the god who has taken the place of one’s mind...

Does this sound like possession? It surely appears to be. Think of all the gurus you’ve met with their palpable shakti. An energy so real no one who experiences it can deny it. What is that light in their eye, a light beyond this world? Whose is that power they touch you with, embrace you with? Is it the shakti of Brahman, the light of pure consciousness? Or is it the power of Kali or one of her friends? Gurus often say they are the embodiment of Shiva, Kali, or some other god. Why do we not take them at their word?

I would like to suggest that mantra meditation turns humans into zombies who serve the agenda of the gods. That agenda is procurement of more humans and more human energy. This explains the common phenomenon of proselytizing by the religious, including fundamentalist Christians, TMers, and disciples of other varieties. Servants of “God” or the gods feel a driving need to bring in more recruits. The god that moves through them fills them with this zeal, as a hungry stomach fills the mind with an overwhelming need to procure dinner.

There are no gods, in the sense the gods would have us think of them. No one has been designated by the Infinite to control creation and administer the laws of nature. The sun shines by itself as an entity with its own consciousness. The rain and wind don’t need a god to direct them; they move where they will in harmony with their fellow elements. All things are children of the Infinite, spirits or egos in their own unique right, expressing in physical form and also in astral dimensions.

The gods are spirits/egos like everybody else. Most of the time they dwell on astral planes, which is why human senses normally don’t perceive them. According to ancient records, they have visited the earth in ages past in physical forms of their own, as entities from the stars.

They are no more divine than a ghost, no more cosmic than you or I, and no more entitled or intended to run the universe than any other gang of warlords might be. Somehow they’ve gained control of this planet, and have held that control at least since the beginning of recorded human history. But that is no reason to think the Infinite wants it that way, or that life needs to continue that way.

True empowerment is not the Indian concept of enlightenment. It is knowing what we are and living from there. We are spirit: individual and eternal, moving within the consciousness of That which created, sustains and pervades all life. Knowing this is not difficult. It only requires putting attention on that which is beneath the content of thought. Acting from this place of empowerment is natural: we can ordain reality from that quantum level. Everyone can do it. Everyone is equally powerful moving and creating in the depths of their own consciousness.

Unfortunately, people rarely do that, though, as the mass hypnosis that governs human life convinces us that karma, fate or the will of God runs the world, that we as individuals have little direct control over what happens to us. The gods are the purveyors of this global hypnosis. It serves their agenda of control. True liberation does not mean rising above the illusion of ourselves as egos. It means rising above the illusion that as egos we are cut off from the powerhouse of creation. That as individuals we are something less t