Confusion not Confounded in Advaita Vedanta

 There is an excellent reason why Vedanta has chosen the apparently paradoxical way of talking about perception using the phenomenon of confusion.  Confusion in Vedanta is taking something to be what it is not. The rope is taken to be a snake, the stump at dusk is taken to be a human form etc.  It is important here to distinguish between this mis-take and the related phenomena of delusion and illusion.  

The point is that there can only be confusion when there is a state of affairs that is the case.  We are thus tied into a reality.  The mental modification (vritti) is not the true reality but that true reality can be found.  

This way of looking at things runs counter to the Western conundrum known as the argument from illusion.  If, it is said, we are mistaken in this instance, may we not be globally in error. This view has its origin in Cartesian doubt.  What we are in contact with is the mental experience.  That there is an external world corresponding to this is due to the mercy of a God who is not a deceiver.  Vedanta is different in that there is an ontological connection between the vritti (mental modification) and the upadhi (limiting adjunct).  They share the same substratum.  They meet on the plane of being.

Too Much

 What is there to do?

You are here now.

This is not going to go away.

You may get the fascination of consciousness for itself which is perhaps what samadhi is.

But this is not everything.

This is not dissolution.

We only want everything.

Is that too much to ask?

'The Count of Monte Cristo' by Alexandre Dumas

 ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’ was serialised over two years and for the modern reader beset by vastly more media and their attendant distractions one might imagine that a similar time might be required to get through its over 1200 pages.  As Dell Comix used to say “don’t take less”.  Really don’t, steer clear of the rocks of an abridged version.  It’s a lee shore as Edmund Dantes might have said in a nautical metaphor.  Anybody that starts to read the Penguin Classic, flex your knees when lifting, version will affirm that the voyage through this ‘baggy monster’ will be done much more quickly.  I may have spent two weeks or so at it.  

It speeds along with a fair narrative wind behind it.  The Penguin edition has footnotes which elucidated the political background and the various mythological references that Dumas throws to elevate the tone.  It’s a rattling good story and as I read it I thought apart from the treasure it is quite credible.  In regimes which were insecure the threat of summary incarceration keep a fractious populace in line.  Looking further into the background of the writing of the novel I discovered that the basic outline of the plot was lifted from the ‘memoirs’ of a policeman.  You might say being ‘stitched up’ was what got Dantes in durance vile and also what got him out of it to wreak: what?  Revenge or retribution?  Is not all judicial punishment a rebalancing of the scale and if that involves the loss of everything that the criminals hold dear then we accept it.  Call it what you will, the rent in the universe has been mended.  Dantes should have died but he did not, now they must pay.  The intricacy of their repayment of their debt is is beautiful.  We are given hints but the unfolding is like an engine of condign retribution, running smooth as a sowing machine stitching the traitors into a shroud.  All that was hidden will be brought into the light of day.  Long brooding on the mechanics of justice and how it is to be wrought has honed the blade that must fall.  Not literally of course, the miscreants destroy themselves by going steadily into paths of wickedness.  The irony is that two of them are ennobled, one a baron the other a count and another with the scoundrel’s ribbon of the legion of honour.  

All of them have forgotten that young sailor picked up at his betrothal party and whisked into oblivion.  The dungeon pallour of the Count of Monte Cristo, a nice running metaphor, has changed his appearance and unlimited money from the treasure is better than plastic surgery as a means of disguise.  Who could imagine that the two men were one and the same.  

The reading did not pall in the least and the high tone as it moves through multiple locations never descends into bathos. Perhaps once when Cristo dons a sailors kit when repelling a burglar is there a hint of buffo to the opera.  That I think is the keynote that should guide the reader.  It is grand opera.  Scale up.  Interludes like the Roman carnival with Franz and Albert are ways of lulling you into a lyric mode.  This is life, sweet isn’t it?  Now imagine being the victim of envy and cowardice and suddenly rapt into horror.  

Still can you control everything?  Might not your retribution bring collateral damage in its train?  Cristo wonders but we are quite complacent.  Stay not your hand, smite them we urge. 

Dammed good read.  It skips along. Forget the movies, this is the proper article warranted genuine Dumas.  I must read more of him.

Upamana Pramana (Comparison) and Genus and Species.

 Does the pramana of upamana translated as ‘comparison’ start somewhat in midstream?  We are immediately given the concept of genus and species, the cow in this case so in essence we already have the power to discover genus and species natively.  Taking the single example of the ‘gavaya’ ( bos gaurus) we can be immediately aware that it must be a member of a species and with that awareness comes the knowledge of differentiation which makes a species.  Sharing the same genus as the cow (bos Taurus) is a likely presumption.  

There is an element of the problem of universals lurking beneath the surface of Upamana:

This (upamana) is not possible through perception, for then the cow’s form is not in contact with the eyes.

We only sense particulars and actually to begin with genus and species is logically downstream from the universal ‘cow’.  The problem of universals is not salient in the ‘Vedanta Paribhasa’ of Adhvarindra.  Sankara deals with it in his section of Brahma Sutra Bhasya called ‘Vedic Words’.  I find some similarity (that word) between his treatment and the ideas of William of Ockham.

More anon on that.

Addendum to "A Tree in the Yard' 17/7/26

 It is important to distinguish between the object which can be grasped by the senses I.e. the tree in the yard and the metaphysical reality which makes that perception possible.  That reality is not itself perceptible but it can be realized.  That realization does not refer to a special mental condition or continuing experience.  Sankara in BSBh rejects the notion that samadhi is equivalent to the highest realization.  He regards it as just another state of mind.

What meaning then can we give to the notion of realization?  It is of course an unshakable belief in the unity of Being, the I AM that Nisargadatta focussed on during the time of his sadhana.  It creates a transformation in the qualities of the person, those that can be experienced by others.  It must be said that a penchant for the collection of Rolls Royce cars and high end watches is a counter indication of realization.  Spontaneous compassion and immediate insight into the spiritual condition of others is an essential indication.  Being in the presence of a sage can raise one’s own awareness to the point that instruction seems to come from within. I’m not sure that faith in him is even necessary.  It's a matter of spiritual harmonics.

A Vedantin views the Tree in the Yard

 The tree in the yard, that staple of solidity, reality and undeniable fact is sometimes referred to as unreal by the Vedantin.  What can he mean?  

Essentially the rope/snake analogy is being flaunted and asked to do a great deal of work.  We need to pull back a little further to get better focus and ask what the paradigmatic form of error is for the Vedantin.  It is confusion or taking something to be that which it is not.  That is perfectly fine for the everyday physical world.  In poor light we take the stump to be a man, the piece of shell to be silver etc., etc.

That sort of talk does not translate/transfer to the metaphysical however.  The tree is real but we may ask wherein does its perceptuality arise ?  How does that out there physical reality come to be in my consciousness as it actually is.  The short cut answer without going into the technicalities of upadhi and vritti is that there is a unity of the substratum of consciousness, a unity of Being.  What is real on the physical side, a tree that is separate and real for the perceiver is unified on the metaphysical side.  Taking the physical to be the only reality is a mis-take.  This is the world of duality.  Keeping both sides going is the world of non-duality.  

Thus we get the extravagant closing down sale of the world: everything must go.  This is an unreal bargain. 

Frank Wright's Moustache: The Loam which nourisheth and sustaineth.

 A really good, out-and-out "reactionary" journal is, at first, like a breath of fresh air in the midst of all this turbulent, pretentious, childish optimism. A royalist publication is worth its weight in gold. Catholicism, we feel, is essential to our health. We fly to the past — anywhere out of this suspended animation of the so smugly "revolutionary" present. Out of the detestable crowd of quacks — illumines, coueists, and psychologists — that the wealthy death-bed has attracted, and who throng these antechambers of defeat; from all the funeral-furnishers, catafalque-makers, house-agents, lawyers, moneylenders, with their eye on the Heir of all the Ages, we fly in despair.

But the "Reactionary" (a sort of highly respectable, genteel quack, as well, with military moustaches and an "aristocratic" bearing) is even more stupid — if that were possible — than the "Revolutionary." We listen to him for a moment, and he unfolds his barren, childish scheme with the muddleheaded emphasis of a very ferocious sheep. He lodges in the garret next to us at the inn, and is in arrears with the rent. The servants (who are all the reddest of revolutionists, of course) hate him. The Reactionary, in the long run, does not add to the cheerfulness of the scene.

(From ‘The Art of Being Ruled’ by Wyndham Lewis pub. 1926)

Lewis had a moustache and he was called a reactionary and a fascist so we may take the second paragraph as a piece of self mockery.  That flagrant item sported by Wright ends in points which demand wax.  I feel that he would repudiate gel as verging on the metrosexual.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that but when your aim is to bristle drooping fails to promote a sense of rigour.