Friday 31 January 2020

Allah and God


An argument I’ve seen offered against Allah being the same god as the Christian god is that there is no possibility of Allah having a personal relationship with a human being. Allah, it is suggested, is an implacable punisher far beyond the personal; whose edicts are neither moral nor immoral merely absolute and the infractions of which draw vengeance.

This is an extraordinary claim. Many of the names of Allah imply a personal care. For instance:

The All- and Oft-Forgiving
The One who is forgiving and looking over our faults over and over again. He also protects us from the effects of our mistakes, in this life and the next so we may go on without shame or guilt. He is the One who can change our wrong deeds into good deeds.

Wednesday 29 January 2020

Nisargadatta Maharaj on Awareness


Writing about the unknowability of the Self leaves me with a strong sense of high grade impostership as if to say ' notice as I shuffle these cards my fingers never leave my hands'. Yes quite, but all this is happening and the Self continues to manifest ungraspably just beyond the tip of my mind. Nisargadatta Maharaj would say 'don't follow it (your mind) remain in the sense of the awareness of being as represented by I Am.


Q: Then what am I?

M: It is enough to know what you are not. You need not know what you are. For as long as knowledge means description in terms of what is already known, perceptual, or conceptual, there can be no such thing as self-knowledge, for what you are cannot be described, except as total negation. All you can say is: ‘I am not this, I am not that’. You cannot meaningfully say ‘this is what I am’. It just makes no sense. What you can point out as 'this' or 'that' cannot be yourself.Surely, you can not be 'something' else. You are nothing perceivable, or imaginable. Yet, without you there can be neither perception nor imagination. You observe the heart feeling, the mind thinking, the body acting; the very act of perceiving shows that you are not what you perceive. Can there be perception, experience without you? An experience must ‘belong'. Somebody must come and declare it as his own. Without an experiencer the experience is not real. It is the experiencer that imparts reality to experience. An experience which you cannot have, of what value is it to you?

Nisargadatta gives one no surprises, nothing that sets the illative antennae fibrillating yet his distinctions have a power of epistemic suggestion:

Q: I am puzzled. How can one be aware and yet unconscious?

M: Awareness is not limited to consciousness. It is of all that is. Consciousness is of duality. There is no duality in awareness. It is one single block of pure cognition.

What he is calling awareness is that absorbed immediate consciousness in which there is no differentiation. That 'single block of pure cognition'!

I AM THATby Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj is available in all formats on archive.org
Here is the epub:

I AM THAT

Monday 27 January 2020

Brhadaranyaka Upanisad - Stalk of Grass


The Self cannot be known in an isolated objective manner. Here are some citations to that effect.

Though it is so, yet during the waking state that light called the self, being beyond the organs and being particularly mixed up in the diversity of functions of the body and the organs, internal and external, such as the intellect, cannot be shown extricated from them
*********
Therefore it cannot be taken apart from anything else, like a stalk of grass from its sheath, and shown in its self-effulgent form. It is for this reason that the whole world, to its utter delusion, superimposes all activities peculiar to name and form on the self, and all attributes of this self-effulgent light on name and form, and also superimposes name and form on the light of the self, and thinks, 'This is the self, or is not the self ; it has such and such attributes. or has not such and such attributes ; it is the agent, or is not the agent ; it is pure, or impure ; it is bound. or free : it. is fixed, or gone, or come ; it exists. or does not exist,' and so on.
(from Sankara's commentary on Brh.Up. IV.iii.7)

Certain yogins claim that samadhi or immersion in pure consciousness is enlightenment and they thus try to extract it from the normal everyday awareness by stopping the mind's activity. Sankara in his commentary on the Vedanta Sutras (Brahma Sutras) discounts this version of the enlightened state:

As in natural slumber and samadhi (absorption in divine consciousness), though there is a natural eradication of differences, still owing to the persistence of the unreal nescience, differences occur over and over again when one wakes up
(from B.S.B. II.i.9)

The Self is not to be extracted in the manner of a stalk of grass. How the Self might be manifested we can only know from the presence of a realised sage. That it is is all we can know.

This movement between the two worlds is merely due to its resembling the intellect-not natural to it. That it is attributable to its resembling the limiting adjuncts of name and form created by a confusion, and is not natural to it, is being stated: Because, assuming the likeness (of the intellect), it moves alternately between the two worlds. The text goes on to show that this is a fact of experience. It thinks, as it were : By illumining the intellect, which does the thinking, through its own self-effulgent light that pervades the intellect, the self assumes the likeness of the latter and seems to think, just as light (looks coloured). Hence people mistake that the self thinks ; but really it does not. Likewise it shakes, as it were: When the intellect and other organs as well as the Pranas move, the self, which illumines them. becomes like them, and therefore seems to move rapidly ; but really the light of the self has no motion.

This contrast between the Self and the Intellect/Mind is paradoxical from the point of view of Western thought. In Upadesa Sahasri Sankara's original non-commentarial work he puts it thus:
The intellect has no consciousness and the Self no action. The word 'knows' can, therefore, be reasonably applied to neither of them.


The word 'knowledge', in the sense of the action of knowing, cannot, similarily, be applied to the Self. For the Self is not a change only (as is indicated by an action) inasmuch as it is taught (in the Srutis) that It is eternal.


The word 'knowledge', in the sense of the instrument of the action of knowing, is applied to the intellect and not to the Self as an instrument cannot exist without an agent. Neither can the word, in the sense of that which is the object of the action of knowing, be applied to the Self.
(from Chap. XVIII Thou Art That)

How then has the idea that the Self is acting become so firmly entrenched? Superimposition (adhyasa) is the answer. That is a very complex doctrine/theory/transcendental hypothesis and requires clarification. Anon.

Saturday 25 January 2020

Help Yourself to Mental Health


Beth Blum has a good essay in Aeon about the literary influence of the self-help manual:literary self-help

She draws our attention to the many ways that Ernesto Hemingway internalised his uncle Alfred’s How to make Good &c (It’s a long title that leaves nothing out). He adopted the cult of manliness and being a wise old bird who called himself Papa in his thirties.

Arnold Bennett is another writer that she mentions who wrote three such books none of which I’ve read. That's the mess I am. His literary work I recommend especially An Old Wives Tale and the Clayhanger trilogy. Now neglected of course yet his depiction of the female psychology and predicament in early 20th.C. is sensitive and unusual.

David Foster Wallace whom I haven’t read to any extent was a great reader of the form. His ego was a vast property in need of maintenance. Maria Bustillos had a comprehensive squint at some of the annotated volumes among his papers in Texas U.
Wallace self-help

God Bless and keep you Mother Machree you can hum while you read.

The greatest of them all and I’m reading it now is 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos by Jordan B. Peterson the multi-million copy bestseller down beside the Penguin lest you wander off a lone ‘un in the wrong direction. Mind you there’s irony in the title with its echos of the 7 Rules books of some years ago. The advice is stern and bracing and perfectly fine and uncontroversial moving from Stand up straight with your shoulders back interspersed with Jungian Archetypal encounters to vignettes from his extensive clinical practice. How has he come to be so hated by feminist scolds, ‘so what you’re saying’ types whom he encounters in tv. Interviews? My understanding of this is imperfect but I feel that his patience is severely exasperating to them as he repeats ‘no that’s not what I said’.

But you’ve probably read it already. I haven’t seen it being offered second hand yet so there must be millions of annotated copies out there.

Thursday 23 January 2020

Brhadaranyaka Upanisad - Upadhi, Adhyasa and the Sage Ashtavakra


I’m going to rest on this landing to take a breath before Sankara begins to desconstruct the position he has just sketched about upadhis. Not that they are wrong but merely a closer approximation to an ungraspable truth which eludes the rational mind. The Sage Ashthavakra threw away all epideictic props and resided in natural unwrought enlightenment.
Does that mean there are no rules, no method?

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An interesting thing about the Asthavakra Gita also known as the Ashtavakra Samhita is that there is no quoting of the scriptures in it. This suggests that it was composed by a realised sage and that it represents his own particular slant on the traditional teachings. One senses in it many of the characteristics of that modern day school which has come to be known as Neo-Advaita. Neo as a suffix nearly always has a pejorative implication. Neo as in new improved formula with special bacteria and added irony. We distrust the magic short cuts to realisation and an earnest satsanghi telling us that 'like man you are already there' seems like ascended Dudespeak.

Still this is ancient:

Chapter XII Abiding in the Self
Janaka said:
I became intolerant first of physical action, then of extensive speech, and then of thought. Thus therefore do I firmly abide.

Having no attachment for sound and other sense objects, and the Self not being an object of perception, my mind is freed from distraction and is one-pointed. Thus therefore do I firmly abide.

An effort has to be made for concentration when there is distraction of mind owing to superimposition etc. Seeing this to be the rule, thus do I firmly abide.

Having nothing to accept and nothing to reject, and having neither joy nor sorrow, thus, sir, do I now firmly abide.

A stage of life or no stage of life, meditation, control of mental functions - finding that these cause distraction to me, thus verily do I firmly abide.

Abstention from action is as much the outcome of ignorance as the performance of action. Knowing this truth fully well, thus do I firmly abide.

Thinking on the Unthinkable One, one only has recourse to a form of thought. Therefore giving up that thought, thus do I firmly abide.

Blessed is the man who has accomplished this. Blessed is he who is such by nature.


The Dude: Yeah, well. The Dude abides.
The Stranger: The Dude abides. I don't know about you but I take comfort in that. It's good knowin' he's out there. The Dude. Takin' 'er easy for all us sinners. Shoosh. I sure hope he makes the finals.
(repost from 2012)

Wednesday 22 January 2020

Brhadaranyaka Upanisad - Upadhi and Self






An upadhi is a thing which communicates its own property to another situated close to it as for instance, when a red flower is placed near a crystal, it imparts its red colour to the glass which then appears red; here the flower is the associate of the crystal.
(from Vichar Sagar by Sadhu Nachildas)

That is the standard example which is of course an analogy attempting to give the sense of a relationship between two objects which are separate. Clearly they must have the capacity to affect each other. An important point is that the nature of both elements is not changed by their association. Away from the rose the crystal is as it always was.

Likewise and similarly the inert mind body becomes aware by being 'close' to pure consciousness. Other expressions of that relationship mention pervasion and saturation.

The intellect being transparent and next to the self, easily catches the reflection of the intelligence of the self. Therefore even wise men happen to identify themselves with it first; next comes the Manas, (mind) which catches the reflection of the self through the intellect; then the organs, through contact with the Manas; and lastly the body, through the organs. Thus the self successively illumines with its own intelligence the entire aggregate of body and organs. It is therefore that all people identify themselves with the body and organs and their modifications indefinitely according to their discrimination.
(from Sankara's commentary on Brh.Up. IV.iii.7)

Thus it is said that the mind is an upadhi (limiting adjunct) of pure consciousness. It, as it were, shrinks it to its own size.

Next Sankara explicates the central advaitic concept of adhyasa (superimpostion) and its relations to upadhi. Later....

Sunday 19 January 2020

Brhadaranyaka Upanisad - Soma and Pneuma


There is ‘soma’ and there is ‘pneuma’. Now the bodiless spirits in Hades have a poor attenuated existence, pale shades squeaking like bats in the gloom. Christian theology holds to a ‘soma pneumatikos’ (spiritual body), the body being integral for personal immortality. Vedic thought has it that the mind/body dyad is a false one. Mind/Body is run together in the notion of the Jiva or incarnate individual. This unit is pervaded by consciousness. How would such a theory gain any credence; what would suggest it? Yoga with its disciplines of pranayama (breath control) and dhyana (mediation) is based on the concept of bio feedback. Control the breath and you control the mind. Combining breathing with a mantra is a favourite technique. Body and mind are interacting without difficulty. In other word ‘soma’ is ‘pneumatikos’. According to the Bhagavad Gita the thought at the moment of death underwrites your destination in the next life. I have a note on the esoteric doctrine of the linga sarira
subtle body
a theory of the bridgehead between lives.

How is the identification of the self and the intellect such a common error? Here we must introduce the concept of upadhi or limiting adjunct/form of limitation.

As a separate post.

Friday 17 January 2020

2020 - Without Hindsight


My father claimed he heard this at the checkout:
- Howya? Did you go anywhere on your holidays?
- Spain.
- Where in Spain
- Don’t know. It was dark when we landed.

Michael Huemer adds to this.
history of philosophy is bunk
He doesn’t think that it’s important where he left from. He’s here in Hotel Philosophy where the service is generally terrible.

I understand that his post is semi-serious provocation. If it isn’t, well then, unfortunately, we have an exquisite case of philistinism.

Wednesday 15 January 2020

Brhadaranyaka Upanisad IV.iii.7 - Janaka chews the rusk of the aporetic



So we have left Janaka chewing the rusk of the aporetic . The common sense view of the mind organising and guiding the activities of the body and being somehow on the same level as them is a baffling puzzle. Mind seems as much supervenient as immediately directive. We have moods and beliefs which give a cast to our conscious states without being present to us.

Which is the self? Among the body, organs, vital force and mind, which is the self you have spoken of - through which light, you said, a man sits and does other kinds of work? Or, which of these organs is 'this self identified with the intellect' that you have meant, for all the organs appear to be intelligent?

Everything seems imbued with the mental, all of them are qualified to be candidates for the position of the Self.

As when a number of Brahmanas are assembled, one may ask, 'They are all highly qualified, but which of these is versed in all the six branches of the Vedas?'

This is almost like the example category error of Gilbert Ryle in The Concept of Mind - I see all the colleges but where is Oxford University? Knowing the six branches of the Vedas is to be qualified.

Let us say that we are obliged to pick one candidate. The intellect as the judging and decision making aspect seems a likely candidate for the job of the Self.

'Which is this self that is identified with the intellect and is in the midst of the organs, the light within the heart?' is the question.
Further below:

Every object is perceived only as associated with the light of the intellect, as objects in the dark are lighted up by a lamp placed in front : the other organs are but the channels for the intellect. Therefore the self is described in terms of that, as 'identified with the intellect.'

At this point the commentary proffers a transcendental postulate suggested by the words of the sutra i.e. the Self in the midst of the organs.

The locative case in the term 'in the midst of the organs' indicates that the self is different from the organs, as 'a rock in the midst of the trees' indicates only nearness ; for there is a doubt about the identity or difference of the self from the organs. 'In the midst of the organs' means 'different from the organs,' for that which is in the midst of certain other things is of course different from them, as 'a tree in the midst of the rocks.'

What is about to be suggested is that the body, mind and intellect are not conscious by nature. They are irradiated by the light of the Self/Atman which makes them seem to be conscious.

Later.





Brhadaranyaka Upanisad - Self Awareness


Sankara consistently uses arguments which are on the weak side not because he hasn’t got others. They act as placeholders for the inquiry. He has placed his staff upon the area that he wishes the aspirant to knowledge to focus on or to work through. This is like the method of the vedanta according to Swami Satchidanandendra – false attribution followed by retraction. Arguments seemed to be graded according to the ability of the student to process them. After all as he has said in the Brahma Sutra Bhasya (II.i.11) when he impugns logic and epideictic reason as a way to realisation; no matter how clever your argument someone will come up with a refutation.
Brhadaranyaka Upanisad IV.iii.6:
You said, 'Some light which is of the same class as the body and organs must be inferred, since the sun and the like are of the same class as the things they help. This wrong, for there is no hard and fast rule about this help.’
Further below:
Therefore, when something is helped by another, there is no restriction about their being of the same class or of different classes. Sometimes men . are helped by men, their own species, and sometimes by animals, plants, etc., which are of different species. Therefore the reason you adduced for your contention, that the body and organs are helped by lights that are of the same class as they, like the sun etc., falls to the ground

That seems to deny the idea of causal closure suggested by the expression that the Self is in the midst of the organs, interacting with them so to speak.

Janaka in Brhadaranyaka Upanisad IV.iii.7:
J anaka cannot decide whether the self is just one of the organs or something different, and therefore asks: Which is the self!' The misconception is quite natural, for the logic involved is too subtle to grasp easily. Or, although the self has been proved to be other than the body, yet all the organs appear to be intelligent, since the self is not perceived as distinct from them ; so I ask you: Which is the self?

The solution is developed in a long commentary on that sutra which also deals with Buddhist objections.
More anon.



Tuesday 14 January 2020

Humanism and Christianity by Martin C. D'Arcy S.J.


Martin Cyril D’Arcy S.J. (1888 -1976) was a leading Catholic intellectual. Let me cog the summary from Wikipedia:

Martin Cyril D'Arcy SJ (1888–1976) was a Roman Catholic priest, philosopher of love, and a correspondent, friend, and adviser of a range of literary and artistic figures including Evelyn Waugh,[1] Dorothy L. Sayers, W. H. Auden, Eric Gill and Sir Edwin Lutyens. He has been described as "perhaps England's foremost Catholic public intellectual from the 1930s until his death".


The book I’m reading now Humanism and Christianity was published in 1969. It sets out with trenchant clarity the state of play at a time when self-indulgence was regarded as a bounden duty. He distinguishes between two varieties of humanism not just the one we are familiar with in Ireland that writes letters to the Irish Times complaining about the teaching of Christian Doctrine in Catholic schools.

Humanism, if it is taken to mean a belief in human nature to such a degree that man is held to be capable of creating a perfect life out of his own resources, ignores God and religion, and is therefore agnostic by disposition. On the other hand, if we mean by humanism merely that men and women should develop their own powers and rely upon them, so far as possible, then it is compatible with religion.

It would be churlish to add the embarrassing fact for the agnostic humanist that a very great deal of magnificent art and architecture was created by men of faith. Now if they can only be persuaded not to build a swimming pool on the top of Notre Dame!

A source of the decline of religion D’Arcy observes is that:

Modern impressionism rules, and the new forms of entertainment have stolen the minds and hearts of our generation. The result is an indifference to religious faith which hardly deserves the title of scepticism. It is so easy now – until tragedy strikes or threat of war – to live from day to day with a monotonous employment of some hours listlessly or ambitiously carried out in shops and factories, for the remaining time to be spent in mindless jamborees, the newspaper, the radio or T.V., the football stadium, the faces coming nearer and nearer as the years pass to those of a complete nonentity. Nonentities do at times pas muster for humanists!

Have things improved? Only a moral imbecile would hold that they have.

Friday 10 January 2020

C.S. Lewis in The Abolition of Man on Conditioners and Leaky Shoes Locke


For the power of Man to make himself what he pleases means, as we have seen, the power of some men to make other men what they please. In all ages, no doubt, nurture and instruction have, in some sense, attempted to exercise this power. But the situation to which we must look forward will be novel in two respects. In the first place, the power will be enormously increased. Hitherto the plans of educationalists have achieved very little of what they attempted and indeed, when we read them—how Plato would have every infant ‘a bastard nursed in a bureau’, and Elyot would have the boy see no men before the age of seven and, after that, no women,[1] and how Locke wants children to have leaky shoes and no turn for poetry[2]—we may well thank the beneficent obstinacy of real mothers, real nurses, and (above all) real children for preserving the human race in such sanity as it still possesses. But the man-moulders of the new age will be armed with the powers of an omnicompetent state and an irresistible scientific technique: we shall get at last a race of conditioners who really can cut out all posterity in what shape they please. The second difference is even more important. In the older systems both the kind of man the teachers wished to produce and their motives for producing him were prescribed by the Tao—a norm to which the teachers themselves were subject and from which they claimed no liberty to depart. They did not cut men to some pattern they had chosen. They handed on what they had received: they initiated the young neophyte into the mystery of humanity which over-arched him and them alike. It was but old birds teaching young birds to fly. This will be changed. Values are now mere natural phenomena. Judgements of value are to be produced in the pupil as part of the conditioning. Whatever Tao there is will be the product, not the motive, of education. The conditioners have been emancipated from all that. It is one more part of Nature which they have conquered. The ultimate springs of human action are no longer, for them, something given. They have surrendered—like electricity: it is the function of the Conditioners to control, not to obey them. They know how to produce conscience and decide what kind of conscience they will produce. 31 They themselves are outside, above. For we are assuming the last stage of Man’s struggle with Nature. The final victory has been won. Human nature has been conquered—and, of course, has conquered, in whatever sense those words may now bear.

Leaky Shoes Locke:
Some Thoughts concerning Education, § 7: ‘I will also advise his Feet to be wash’d every Day in cold Water, and to have his Shoes so thin that they might leak and let in Water, whenever he comes near it.’ § 174: ‘If he have a poetick vein, ’tis to me the strangest thing in the World that the Father should desire or suffer it to be cherished or improved. Methinks the Parents should labor to have it stifled and suppressed as much as may be.’ Yet Locke is one of the most sensible writers on education.

(From The Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis published in 1944 retrieved from fadedpage.com
The Abolition of Man
in an impeccable epub with linkable notes)



Wednesday 8 January 2020

Magi Unscripted


Since first encountering Dr. Gavin Ashenden in relation to Brephos the evangelical pro-life movement in Britain I have also been looking at a youtube show called Anglican Unscripted. On that, in a split screen format, he talks, in perfectly balanced whole sentences, with two Anglican ministers George Conger in Florida and Kevin Kallsen in Connecticut. Now those three men who have been adults for a while and suffer from an irreversible beige pigmentation, all stout fellows and thick in the chest, would you might suspect present slow moving targets. Hah! Over five theological feet they are sprightly as any young wight with vorpel blade dismissing the Spirit of the Age, this “filthy modern tide”. We are in agreement about that and of course when one listens to those three wise men long enough it will be inevitable that one is personally challenged.

In the last show:magi
which Ashenden called ‘Magi Unscripted’ it was remarked that the Magi came to Christ from Zoroastrianism. It was stated that no other religion has the Father and you could only get to the Father through Christ. Buddhism and Islam were also mentioned as having no Father. Hinduism the Grand-Father religion which would claim that it has all kinds of relations, Father, Mother and Auntiji wasn’t mentioned. I am not going to get into a mystical rap of ‘all is one in the oneness of the one’ because my particular spiritual path should not be generalised and has more twists than the average soap.

What we would agree on is that the Spirit of the Age is dispiritingly foul and can only be combatted by sadhana or spiritual practice. Broadcasting in meditation from our ‘caves’ is a powerful force counteracting the demonic.

Monday 6 January 2020

Is Shankara an Idealist?


You will occasionally read that Shankaracarya was an Idealist, a position which is clearly wrong when you consider his rejection of Vijnanavada (Buddhist Subjective Idealism) in B.S.B. II.ii.28. A pithy summation would be – we do not perceive our perceptions, we perceive/cognize a pillar, a wall or whatever as objects of perception. That’s straightforward but it might be interesting to consider why such a view might take root on the Coleridgean principle that until I understand a person’s ignorance I am ignorant of his understanding.

All philosophical systems require translation even those in our native language. How much more then can the usage of such terms as mind, matter, image etc offered as translations derail our understanding as we fit them into our native epistemology.

For the swerve towards idealism I blame the concept of vritti or mental modification.

Now, as the water of a tank, issuing through a hole, enters in the form of a channel a number of fields, and just like them assumes a rectangular or any other shape, so also the luminous mind, issuing through the eye etc., goes to the space occupied by objects such as a jar, and is modified into the form of a jar or any other object. That very modification is called a state (vritti)
(from Vedanta-Paribhasa by Dharmaraja Adhvarindra writing on perception)

You can see that a focus on the mental capture of the object might lead one to consider it as the point of departure to an inference of the object. Our knowledge of the object can become to be seen as mediated by the vritti. Vedanta-Paribhasa corrects us:

…, in the case of the perception of a jar as, “This jar,” the mental state in the form of the jar being in contact with the jar, the Consciousness limited by that mental state is not different from the Consciousness limited by the jar, and hence the knowledge of the jar there is a perception so far as the jar is concerned.

Pure Consciousness as limited by the object and pure consciousness as limited by the mind of the subject is one and the same. Therefore the object can be ‘in’ the subject as it really is.