Wednesday 29 December 2021

News from the Grassy Knoll

When did conspiracy theory become prophesy?  A year ago the idea that soon vaccine passports would be required to go about your daily life was met with eye rolling mention of  the power of tin foil to repel lunar rays.  The strange and unsettling thing is that some theories mention names of people who would never think of denying what they intend.   So where are the illuminati when you need them?  The hidden agenda like Poe’s ‘Purloined Letter’ is lying on the desk its only camouflage being a report.  There is no diving deep in a murky pond to recover a nefarious truth, just a snorkel cruise in a pellucid lagoon.

Bill and Melinda spread the billions around, to the WHO, to Global Private Public Partners etc. etc.  One hand shakes the other and they are not secret handshakes, only a little clammy.  Iain Davis in his book ‘Pseudo Pandemic’ has the whole story with more endnotes and references than my Xmas tree has lights.  He does not deny that there is some class of ‘grippe’ going round which is dangerous for some but to treat it like Ebola is mad.

A small Irish point.  The stats for excess deaths in 2020 show a similar number to the bad flu year of 2017.  I don’t remember that.  There was no major fuss at the time.

My fibrillating antennae tell me that the outer edges of the 30% Mattias Desmet calls the truly rapt into Mass Formation; they are peeling away slightly as the contradictions of government guidelines and strictures become unmistakably fatuous.

Meanwhile there is Harvard Prof. Charles Lieber with his nano tech transistor and his conviction for hiding a connection to Wuhan’s University of Technology.

cf:

virus sized transistors

lieber convicted

Now the question is: do I take my hat off to him or leave it on? 

Get your free copy of Pseudopandemic at 

in-this-together


Friday 24 December 2021

William Hazlitt and Sex Change

 We would sooner be miserable after our own fashion than happy after theirs. It is not happiness, then, in the abstract, which we seek, that can be addressed as

For which we wish to live or dare to die,’

but a happiness suited to our tastes and faculties—that has become a part of ourselves, by habit and enjoyment—that is endeared to us by a thousand recollections, privations, and sufferings. No one, then, would willingly change his country or his kind for the most plausible pretences held out to him. The most humiliating punishment inflicted in ancient fable is the change of sex: not that it was any degradation in itself—but that it must occasion a total derangement of the moral economy and confusion of the sense of personal propriety. The thing is said to have happened au sens contraire, in our time. The story is to be met with in ‘very choice Italian’; and Lord D—— tells it in very plain English! ( 'On Personal Identity'  from 'Winterslow/Essays and Characters Written There' )

What does Hazlitt mean by propriety here?  It would be fair to describe him as libertine so not I think conventional behaviour rather that which is contrary to a natural disposition in the untransed condition. The au sens contraire possibly refers to the catamite or punk of Lord D’s story.  I have an Oxford dictionary from 1971 that defines with crisp high table concision :

Catamite: (n) Sodomite’s minion. (f. L. catamitus f. Gk. Ganamides, cup-bearer of Zeus)

N.B. Not the current definition.

Thursday 23 December 2021

Dr. Mattias Desmet and Covid Mass Formation

I am a private intellectual.  Only those close to me suffer my explanations and find that something pressing has come up which they must attend to directly.  Your public intellectual is the classic village explainer about which Gertrude Stein remarked (re Ezra Pound ) ‘fine if you were a village, if not, not’.  At this time of covidology the existence is vital of someonewho can explain to us the general bemusement, contrary and senseless guidelines, and general decerebrate flailing.  Mattias Desmet a professor of Clinical Psychology with a masters in statistics gives one hope that there is a way out of this general panic  not by way of convincing the 30% spellbound utterly committed to chasing the zero covid ignis fatuus but through the 40% that are prudentially going along with it.  Here he is in conversation with Dr. Martenson:

mass formation

Friday 17 December 2021

An Post (Ireland) Xmas stamps designed by Thinkhouse


I use postage stamps once a year, to send Xmas cards here, there and everywhere.  This year I will be using what’s app with a Nativity scene image because the offering from An Post national stamps designed by Thinkhouse, a London outfit with a presence in Dublin, are a dismally dopey offering.  Reading the bumf on the Thinkhouse site is like a glossary of slightly dated corporate speak: ‘creative storytelling’, ‘from the get go’, ‘education journey’, ‘drive change’, ‘long-tailed geo targeted ad’ etc.   Secularism will die from boredom, though that may be unfair to Thinkhouse who are so bland that they do not arrest the attention long enough for that response.

Happy Xmas.

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In the bleak midwinter

by Christina Rossetti

 In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,

Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;

Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,

In the bleak midwinter, long ago.


Our God, Heaven cannot hold Him, nor earth sustain;
Heaven and earth shall flee away when He comes to reign.
In the bleak midwinter a stable place sufficed
The Lord God Almighty, Jesus Christ.

Enough for Him, whom cherubim, worship night and day,
Breastful of milk, and a mangerful of hay;
Enough for Him, whom angels fall before,
The ox and ass and camel which adore.

Angels and archangels may have gathered there,
Cherubim and seraphim thronged the air;
But His mother only, in her maiden bliss,
Worshipped the beloved with a kiss.

What can I give Him, poor as I am?
If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb;
If I were a Wise Man, I would do my part;
Yet what I can I give Him: give my heart.

Wednesday 15 December 2021

Augusto Del Noce and Scientism

 I have been reading in, or letting my mind dapp (fishing technique with dry fly) on ‘The Crisis of Modernity’ by Augusto Del Noce.  How right he is on scientism and the denial of transcendence but it is ironic that the agents of stupidity Marx, Freud and Reich that he castigates are now utterly exploded.  Was it that they had their work to do and having done it they and their works and pomps were dragged down to Hades among the gibbering shades that require footnotes?  Scientism is still dragging its sullen explanations around but during Covid their inadequacy became patent.  True Science should be full of contrary positions but the Follow the Science sort of Science with its one true position must now be seen as foolish.  Of course those clothed in the alb of scientism will never admit that they were wrong and it may be the case that they haven’t realised it yet.  Even philosophers, those village explainers, have been duped or else rendered fatuous by the fear of death.  When this crisis has passed the rump of the mandate friendly thinkers will find their other hand.

Saturday 11 December 2021

The Gnostic Presentism of Charles Dickens - 'Bleak House' and 'Our Mutual Friend'.

 When we think of the world in a frozen static way everything is connected through the present moment.  Not being active means there is no causal nexus but there is information and the shadows of all the characters in a Dickens novel fall on each other.  It is, I would suggest, a gnostic presentism in which the reader is complicit.  We know more than they do because we are aware that this being Dickens there will be an impertinent level of coincidence or so we think but rightly considered coincidence is being in the same universe of the novel at the same time.

“Now the order of the manifestation of the universe is being described.  At the beginning of the creation, the Supreme Lord, aided by the (past) actions of beings, which are the causes of the variety of the universe that is about to be created, as also by the cosmic illusion which is endowed with an unlimited and inscrutable power, first conceives in His mind the entire universe consisting of names and forms and resolves I shall do this ......” (Vedanta Paribhasa of Dharmaraja Adhvarindra)

I find in two of his novels that I am rereading ‘Bleak House’ and ‘Our Mutual Friend’  a suggestion of the Sankhya system of the emanation of the elements, air in the one and water in the other: fog and flotsam and jetsam define them.  Nothing is palpable and you cannot step into the same Thames twice.  In the latter novel the grim, grisly, grotesque, and gruesome flows over us in a torpid slurry.  No one is entirely whole, Wegg sans a leg, Eugene Wrayburn is a light man without a centre of moral gravity, Jenny Wren with a twisted back and legs that don’t work,  the Eponymous friend is a spy, the Boffins foolish, Bella a sullen beauty, the Veneerings circle a sublime satire of the laissez faire let them drown or swim as the case may be.

Who is fixable?  Dickens will do his best but some will have the sad end that we have learned to dread and concur with Oscar Wilde - “Only someone with a heart of stone would fail to laugh at the death of Little Nell”.  Unlike Mr. Venus the creator of articulated skeletons Dickens offers ambulant persons, ‘names and forms’, the nama rupa of his world.

Tuesday 7 December 2021

Negative Facts, Bertrand Russell and Empty Talk

 Negative facts bothered cerebrotonic ectomorph Bertrand Russell.  What sort of acquaintance could you have with them.  His nature abhorred a vacuum.  There was a fine fat emptiness where a fact should be, and not just any fact but one which the Nyaya folk called yogyata or pertinent.  There are an infinite number of items nameable and knowable, just not here in this room, but.  The elephant not in the room was Bertrand’s elephant and he wanted it out of there and in his stall of knowledge.

Bertrand, you are very greatly mistaken if you think that the non-apprehension of the existence of Jumbo is a piece of knowledge.  It is a means of knowledge and it informs your search.  It tells you to look elsewhere.  Can there be a distinction between a means of knowledge and knowledge itself?  Spectacles and what you see with them.  A walking stick and ambulation.  It would seem you can.  Of course those are just analogies, single use conceptual ‘burners’.

Can Jumbo’s absence be translated as ‘It is true that there is no elephant here’.  You have steered away from facts.  Do such locutions make any difference to the order of things that are in this room.  Is it an improvement?  C.K. Ogden in his ‘Meaning of Meaning’ writes that whether they are tied with clear string or knotted parcels are just ‘honest parcels’.

“When we dispute as to whether a fact is positive or negative, or whether there are ‘negative facts’ we are engaged merely in the criticism of rival prose styles.”

Saturday 4 December 2021

Breda O'Brien's Rational Criss Cross Code

 Breda O’Brien is not keeping up to speed on communicability of Covid.

 criss cross code

"I have heard young men express the belief that the risks of getting vaccinated are higher than getting Covid-19, because being young, healthy and fit means that their chances of severe infection are low.

These kind young men, who would help any elderly person to cross the road and then carry the shopping home, cannot seem to internalise that their decision to avoid vaccination imperils the vulnerable.”

 It is now generally agreed that the non-vaccinated infected and the vaccinated with another infection are equal in terms of the capacity to infect other people.  Why then is she pointing the finger at unvaxxed young people who would in normal times help the infirm elderly cross the road saying they are now putting those same people at risk, throwing them under the Covid bus so to speak.   Perfect fear casts out reason.

Each year the flu season packs the hospitals and creates a shortage of beds, ordinary and icu.  By European standards Ireland is under bedded.  Pre-Covid there were 225 ICU beds, now there are 290.  Forty Billion Euros have been spent funding an emergency which has 99% survival rate.  Where are the extra beds which were needed even in the normal year.  Quangos and waffle-meisters are sleeping in feather beds.


Saturday 27 November 2021

Epsilon, Zeta, Theta

Now we have the Botswana ‘omicron’ variant which can only be cast out by a fully qualified witch doctor.  What happened to the rest of the Greek letters between Delta and Omicron eg. Epsilon, Zeta, Theta etc.  It’s all bone pointing now and the culprit is the unvaxxed.  We are invited to kiss a red hot axe and follow the science of voodoo.  Reason and logic have left the building when the vaxxed who can go anywhere are as contagious as the unvaxxed who can go nowhere yet they are the evil spreaders of pestilence. 

Friday 26 November 2021

Vaxx the Kids

 And now that they are going to allow/approve (there’s a nest of weasels in there) the vaccination of children from 5 to 11 in Ireland more and more authoritative voices expressing concern begin to emerge.  This for instance from a British cardiologist:

cardio fears

Why not look on the bright side, the children will be taking on the noble risk of protecting the adults who are already vaxxed to 90%.  If they come down with conditions related to the vaccine then the parents will recoup some of the profits of the pharmaceutical industry.   If they are cognitively adversely affected these children when adults can go into politics.  On the other hand if too grossly damaged for that slight challenge the obvious need for an accelerated program of euthanasia will be apparent.  The cull will be a stern but ultimately compassionate foundation for the future when we build back better.

Here’s a B.B.Better compilation from Irish politicians who are so progressive they are passing themselves out and looking back ‘askance’ at the old them.

Build Back Nios Fearr (better)

Sunday 14 November 2021

Advaitic Realism versus Buddhist Idealism (Vijnanavada/Yogacara)

 I have entered the whole section of B.S.Bh II.ii.28 (below) as it is worth reading in toto but here my focus is on the paragraph beginning ‘This conclusion is not honest’.

The Buddhist has a theory that holds that all cognition is internal  and is immediately self-luminous.  For him this supplies all that is required for experience and the very idea of an external object is a redundant and pointless fabrication that has no grounding in reality.  This is what he means by impossibility.

Sankara then examines this notion by resorting to the ontological position reminiscent of the Scholastic: what is is possible.  How do we discover what is (quid est)?  We ask ourselves whether the valid means of knowledge (pramana) can be applied to it and if so then it is possible (posse est).  What you cannot hold is the converse namely that possibility brings on a quasi existence.  ((Here come Zombies))

Vasubandhu’s (Vijnanavada/Yogacara teacher)  saying “The non-existent is imagined” is a variant of this possibility thesis.

Vijnanavada from B.S.Bh. II.ii.28:

Vijnanavadin:  (External objects are) not non-existent, for perceived.

Advaitin: It cannot be asserted that external things do not exist

Vijnanavadin: Why?

Vedantin: “Because they are perceived.” As a matter of fact such thingsas a pillar, a wall, a pot, a cloth, are perceived along with each act of cognition. And it cannot be that the very thing perceived is non-existent. How can a man’s words be acceptable who while himself perceiving an external object through sense-contacts still says, “I do not perceive, and that object does not exist”, just as much as a man while eating and himself experiencing­ the satisfaction arising from that act might say, “Neither do I eat, nor do I get any satisfaction”?

Vijnavadin:    Well, I do not say that I do not perceive any object, but all that I hold is ‘that I do not perceive anything  apart from the perception.

Vedantin: Yes, you do speak like that, since you have no curb) to your mouth; but you do not speak logically, for some­thing other than the perception has to be admitted perforce, just because it is perceived. Not that anybody cognises a perception to be a pillar, a wall, etc., rather all people cognise a pillar, a wall, etc. as objects of perception. And it is for this reason that all people understand those others (viz the Buddhists) as really assuming the existence of an external thing even while they deny it by saying, “That which is the content of an internal awareness appears as though external”. For they use the phrase “as though” in the clause “as though external” just because they too become aware of a cognition appearing externally in the same way as is well known ‘to all people, and yet ‘they want to deny any external’ object.   Else why should they say, “as though external”? For ‘nobody speaks thus: “Vistumitra appears like the son of a barren woman”. Accordingly, those who accept truth to be just what it is actually perceived to be, should accept a thing as it actually reveals itself externally, and not “as ‘though appearing outside”.

Buddhist. Since no object can possibly exist externally, I  come to ‘the conclusion that it appears as though it is outside.

Vedantin. This conclusion is not honest, since the possibility or impossibility of the existence of a thing is determined in accordance with ‘the applicability or non-applicability of the means of knowledge to it, but the applicability or non applicability of the means of knowledge is not ascertained in a accordance with the possibility or impossibility (of the thing) What is known through any one of the means of knowledge, direct perception etc., is possible, and what cannot be through any one of these means of knowledge is impossible.  In the case under discussion, the external things are known individually by the respective means of knowledge; so how can they be declared to be impossible by raising such alternatives as different, non-different, etc. For external things are perceived as a matter of fact. It is wrong to say that external things do not exist merely on the ground that cognition is seen to have the likeness of an object, because the very likeness of an object is not possible unless the object itself be there, and also because the object is cognised outside. So also it has to be admitted that  the regularity in the simultaneous appearance of the cognition and its object is owing to the relation of causality between them and not owing to their identity. Again, in (such forms of awareness as) “knowledge of a pot”, “knowledge of a cloth’ difference is seen in the two qualifying parts, pot and cloth, but not in the substantive part knowledge, even as in the case “a white cow” and “a black cow” we find that whiteness and blackness alone differ, but not so the cowhood. And the difference of the one (viz cowhood) from the two (whiteness, blackness) stands out clearly, as also the difference of the two from the one. Therefore an object and its knowledge differ. Similar should be our comprehension in the cases of the seeing of a and the remembrance of a pot. Here also the substantives. seeing and remembering differ, but not so the adjectival viz pot; this is just as in the cases of the cognitions, “the smell of milk”, and “the taste of milk”, where the substantives smell and taste alone differ, but not so the adjectival part milk.

Moreover, as regards two cognitions occurring successively, which vanish after self-revelation, there can be no logical appre­hension of the one by the other. And in that case will be nul­lified all the assertions made in the Buddhist scriptures them­selves about the difference among cognitions, momentariness and other attributes, individual characteristics, common charac­teristics, bequeathing of tendency by one cognition to the other, true, false, or mixed attributes arising from contact with nescience, as also about bondage, liberation, and so on.

Again, if one admits a distinction between knowledge and knowledge, why should not one admit external objects such as a pillar, a wall, and so on?

Buddhist:      A cognition is actually perceived.

Vedantin; External things too are perceived, and so they too should be admitted.

Buddhist:      Since cognition is a luminous thing it stands self-revealed like a lamp, but an external object is not like that.

Vedantin:    Then like assuming that fire burns itself, you assume that something can act on itself by itself, which is absolutely opposed to reason; yet you do not admit the well-known fact, bearing no contradiction, that an external object is known through a cognition which is different from the object. What a great display of erudition you make! It cannot be asserted that consciousness is known to itself as something apart from objects for the simple reason that there can be no action on oneself.

Buddhist. If a cognition has to be known by some entity other than itself, that second one will have to be known by another, and that one again by another. This will lead to an Infinite regress. Moreover, since cognition is an illuminator like a lamp, if you should imagine a second cognition (to know it), then since both the cognitions are similar there will be no revela­tion of the one by the other, so that this whole assumption will fall to the ground.

Vedantin: Both these arguments are wrong, for once an awareness of the cognition occurs, no further desire to appre­hend the witness of the cognition can arise; and so there is no possibility of infinite regress.  And since the witness and the cognition are different by nature, there can be a relationship of the perceiver and the perceived among them. Besides, the self-evident witness cannot be denied. There is another consideration. When you assert that cognition shines by itself like a lamp without requiring some other cognition, you virtually say that a cognition is not apprehended by. any other means of knowledge or by anything else, which would be like saying that a thousand lamps shine (unknown) within a massive boulder.

Buddhist:      Exactly so; for cognition being of the nature of an awareness (suggested by you), you have only approved the view that we hold.

Vedantin:      No, for it is seen that some other perceiver. having the eye etc. as his instrument, perceives a lamp etc. So it is understood that since cognition has equally to be revealed by some one else, it can be perceived like a lamp only when a distinct perceiver is present.

Buddhist:      By upholding the theory that the perceiving wit­ness is self-effulgent, you only accept under a different garb of words my own view that cognition shines by itself.

Vedantin:      Not so, for you admit many such distinctions for cognition as origin, destruction, multiplicity, and so on. And hence it is that we establish the apprehension of that cognition by some entity outside it, as in the case of a lamp.

Saturday 30 October 2021

Sankara's Adhyasa Bhasya: Advatic Stone Kicking

A la Samuel Johnson - ‘Thus I refute thee’ of the immaterialism of Bishop Berkeley.  It sounds like that, because in both the translations of the adhyasa bhasya (Preamble to the Brahma Sutra Bhasya) at my disposal the declaration of the foundational externality of perception is declared emphatically.

(a) It being established etc. (Swami Gambhirananda)

(b)It is not a matter requiring any proof etc. (George Thibaut)

Then there is the paradox that this externality, which is so patent that it does not require proof, comes burdened with the aporetic: how does that object out there, a material entity, come to be somehow inside me as a cognition which we intuitively accept as a true picture of what the object is.

No wonder the idealist says ‘stop, there is no outside and externality is an illusion’ and by the great razor of Occam this is the simplest explanation.  That only leaves one with the difficulty of an illusion of something that has never occurred.  A rare beast indeed.

Sankara declares that externality (a) should be impossible; (b) it would be wrong, given the aporia/impasse just detailed.  Nevertheless it is so.  Let us describe what seems to be taking place and work from there towards a transcendental hypothesis which accounts ontologically for it.  This is a ‘saving the appearances’ operation and is begun with the concept of superimposition viz. adhyasa.

More anon.

 

Monday 25 October 2021

Vedanta and Cybernetics

 It’s not surprising that some scholars of Vedanta forget that the mind is inert (jada) or unconscious by nature and only ‘thinks as it were’ (Brh.Up.) due to its pervasion or transfusion by pure consciousness.  The mind then is material interacting with other material entities and objects.  Epiphenomenalism and the causal problem are not a topic in advaita per se and they arise only as controversion.  Why those scholiasts forget the jada nature is probably due to their entrancement by problems spawned by Western epistemology.

That is a very large discussion which I will get to in time.  In this note I consider the materiality of the Body/Mind/Spirit complex and its tendency to therefore fall under the sway of multiple cybernetic factors, feedback loops, the bogus homeostasis of gratified desires and if we want to stay within the purlieus of Vedanta, the good old time gunas.  To get those loops to move in an upward and not a downward spiral requires an admission that struggling at the level of vasanas (tendencies, dispositions) leaves us in the toils of cybernetic control.  Strictly; upwards, downwards and sideways are paths in the maze of maya.   Ironically by using feedback loops we can revert to the source of consciousness which frees.  Pranayama, mantra, prayer and ritual are enabling practices that we are told advance the dawn of knowledge (vidya) but however perfectly performed are not liberating of themselves.   The jnani (enlightened one) can say:

“I am the Self of all, as the intellects of all beings are illumined by Me who am of the nature of the Light of Consciousness only.” (Upadesa Sahasri Chap. XIV on Dream and Memory: #7)

Monday 18 October 2021

Sally Rooney blocks translation of her novel into Hebrew

 If you’re explaining you’re losing.  That’s a poor lookout for ‘hasbara’ which means explanation in Hebrew but they can’t help pleading their case with an unlikely uniformity of scolding accusation which must include anti-semitism and why are we Israelis being singled out when there are some many other bad actors you neglect.  Consider it a compliment that you are open to moral persuasion and the mild sanctions that underline the seriousness of your confiscation and extirpation.

Sally Rooney is blocking the translation of her latest novel into Hebrew on B.D.S. grounds a move that is popular in Ireland.  I wonder why.  I once bought a packet of double edged blades from Israel by mistake.  The good news is that they were useless.

Sunday 17 October 2021

Cutting Sankaracarya, Cutting Advaita

 I’m adapting the saying of Frank Pain from his book ‘Practical Woodturning’ - ‘cut the wood the way the wood likes to be cut’.  How does Sankaracarya cut Advaita and who does he cut it as?  As a Teacher and non-dually straight to the consciousness of the seeker that has come to him:

“with fuel in his hands, he should approach a teacher versed in the Vedas and established in Brahman in order to know the Eternal.”

The earnest disciple with full faith in the wisdom of the Vedas will receive instruction according to the rubric of the mahavakyas.  Dwelling on them and drawing out their implication is his path.   Another type of seeker will be served Vedanta with a helping of rational argument.  Those two types are dealt with in the first chapters of ‘Upadesa Sahasri’

(1) A Method of Enlightening the Disciple

(2) The Knowledge of the Changeless and non-Dual Self.

The latter instruction and explication is heavily epistemological and culminates in the argument for the nature of the Self deduced from the knowledge that we have been in a state of Deep Dreamless Sleep (Sushupti).

Upadesa Sahasri is Sankara’s only authenticated non-commentarial work and we may assume that it covers his classic procedure.  The other work that stands out as an onto-epistemological disquisition peculiar to him is found in the preamble to the Brahma Sutra Bhasya.  This is also known as the adhyasa Bhasya (superimposition).

Those are my thoughts on the shape of an introduction to Sankara.  Follow the tags for more on each topic.

Saturday 9 October 2021

Deep Dreamless Sleep and the Witness (Saksin)

 “How can there be any special property in Me who am changeless by nature and witness the modifications of the minds of all without any exception?  (How can again there be any change in Me) who witness the mind and its functions in the waking state as in dream?  But as there is the absence* of both the mind and its functions in deep sleep, I am Pure Consciousness, all-pervading and changeless.”  (# 3, 4 Chap. XI  Nature of the Witness: Upadesa Sahasri)

*Therefore witnessing the mind and its functions is not in the nature of the Self. (note by translator Swami Jagadananda)

This is a very important observation.  The knowledge in the form of ‘I have been in a state of deep dreamless sleep’ can only arise if there was what I have called a dark samadhi i.e. a perfect non-reflexive awareness which is contentless.   The analogy proposed by Tripura Rahasya is of a mirror coated with tar perfectly reflecting that blackness.  One understands the purport of that image while doubting the physics.  In any case the Witness aspect of Pure Consciousness is a detached knowledge of the mental modifications.  The mind is not conscious, counter intuitive as that is to the avidya (ignorance) stricken.

“It thinks as it were” (Br.Up.)

Monday 27 September 2021

Tripura Rahasya and the Interval between Thoughts

Tripura Rahasya (The Mystery beyond the Trinity) was one of the favourite texts of Ramana Maharshi.  That’s peer review of the first water.  If I were to put it in a category it would be  Advaita with a Tantric face.  It aspires to shock one into insight using a close metaphysical analysis that leads into paradox.  Did you know that samadhi, the aspired to state of transcendental awareness is commonplace but that we are scarcely aware of it.  Those are not the very pure blissful consciousness of merging with the absolute but what the book calls ‘fleeting samadhi’.

85-86. But fleeting samadhi goes undetected because people are not so conversant with it. O Brahmin! Fleeting samadhi is indeed being experienced by all, even in their busy moments; but it passes unnoticed by them, for want of acquaintance with it. Every instant free from thoughts and musings in the wakeful state is the condition of samadhi.

87. Samadhi is simply absence of thoughts. Such a state prevails in sleep and at odd moments of wakefulness.

88. Yet, it is not called samadhi proper, because all the proclivities of the mind are still there latent, ready to manifest the next instant.  (from Chap.XVI)

King Janaka explains to Ashtavakra that these fleeting samadhis are useless but that they do demonstrate the capacity of the mind to become empty of mental modifications and have thus a philosophical value.

4-11. Listen, O Brahmin! The following are instances of that state: When a man remains unaware of ‘in and out’ for a short interval and is not overpowered by the ignorance of sleep; the infinitesimal time when one is beside oneself with joy; when embraced by one’s beloved in all purity; when a thing is gained which was intensely longed for but given up in despair; when a lonely traveller moving with the utmost confidence is suddenly confronted with the utmost danger; when one hears of the sudden death of one’s only son, who was in the best of health, in the prime of life, and at the apex of his glory.

12-14. There are also intervals of samadhi, namely the interim period between the waking, dream and sleep states; at the time of sighting a distant object, the mind holding the body at one end projects itself into space until it holds the object at the other end, just as a caterpillar prolongs itself at the time of leaving one hold to catch another hold. Carefully watch the state of mind in the interval.

.......Anyway, when once interruptions in the stream of Intelligence are admitted, it follows that these intervals between the various modifications of the intellect into objects, would represent its unmodified, original state. O son of Kahoela, know that if one can become aware of these broken samadhis, no other samadhi need attract one.

The casual i.e. fleeting samadhi can demonstrate the nature of the mind and dwelling on this experience for what it reveals can help to create conviction that a prolonged samadhi is possible for the one-pointed seeker.

39-47. Similarly, experience of casual samadhi in the absence of theoretical knowledge does not serve the purpose either. Just as a man, ignorant of the qualities of an emerald, cannot recognise it by the mere sight of it in the treasury, nor can another recognise it if he has not seen it before, although he is full of theoretical knowledge on the subject, in the same way theory must be supplemented with practice in order that a man might become an expert. Ignorance cannot be eradicated by mere theory or by the casual samadhi of an ignorant man.

‘The thoughts of youth are long long thoughts’.  They occur in time.  One train of thought ends and the next begins.  Enlarge the gap between them.  Live there.

Find a copy in all formats at:

tripura rahasya

 

Thursday 23 September 2021

Common Sense on Covid

 Common sense consensus on covid  is that complete elimination is a mirage and moreover it will be a new recruit to the hazards of life to which some will succumb.  It is odd that now at this time the utility of mandates should be urged.  Even philosophers are climbing out of their burrows and shaking their tiny fists at anti-vaxxers and the hesitant.  These are people that are famous for the devising of complex thought experiments which tease out all the facets of moral problems who yet have failed to see what is patent.  Bari Weiss on her ‘common sense’ substack has a range of views on the mandate.  The medical people are dubious about it particularly Vinay Prasad whose cogent analysis breaks the population down into  various groups.  (Vinay Prasad is a hematologist-oncologist and an associate professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco. )

Bari Weiss common sense

For the philosophers in the academy who want to eke some moral maundering out of covidology: some texts.

Lament for the Makers by William Dunbar

The stait of man dois change and vary,

Now sound, now seik, now blith, now sary,

Now dansand mery, now like to dee;

Timor mortis conturbat me.  (extract)

Lament


Aes Triplex by Robert Louis Stevenson:

THE changes wrought by death are in themselves so sharp and final, and so terrible and melancholy in their consequences, that the thing stands alone in man's experience, and has no parallel upon earth. It outdoes all other accidents because it is the last of them. Sometimes it leaps suddenly upon its victims, like a Thug; sometimes it lays a regular siege and creeps upon their citadel during a score of years. And when the business is done, there is sore havoc made in other people's lives, and a pin knocked out by which many subsidiary friendships hung together. There are empty chairs, solitary walks, and single beds at night. Again, in taking away our friends, death does not take them away utterly, but leaves behind a mocking, tragical, and soon intolerable residue, which must be hurriedly concealed.  (opening lines)  (find at: Aes Triplex

‘To Philosophise is to learn how to Die’. by Michel de Montaigne. (no. 20)

His last and very apposite paragraph:

Children are frightened of their very friends when they see them masked.  So are we.  We must rip the masks of things as well as off people.  Once we have done that we shall see underneath only that same death which a valet and a chambermaid got through recently, without being afraid.  Blessed the death which leaves no time for preparing such gatherings of mourners.

Wednesday 15 September 2021

Advaitin Antinomy and the Witness: I am Brahman

Advaitin Antinomy:

Knowledge is an action which has its source in the intellect.  The Self does not act but it pervades (analogy alert!) the intellect as it were lighting up the intellectual event.

As is asserted, by the hearing (sravana) of the mahavakya, I am Brahman, the ripe seeker can achieve self-realisation.   Avidya (ignorance/illusion) is dispelled by vidya (knowledge).  But as already asserted the Self does not act; only the intellect or body-mind complex acts.  In that case it would seem that the Self benefits by an action i.e. the access of knowledge.  Is the catalyst which precipitates realisation  the immediate comprehension that it is the action of the Self that gives rise to all the modalities of awareness.  Is this the genesis of the concept of the Witness?

#205:  The Witness is known by Itself which is of the nature of knowledge only.  It is the birth of modifications of the intellect pervaded by the reflection of Consciousness that is what is known to be the knowledge of the Self. (from Upadesa Sahasri Chap.XVIII. Thou Art That)

The modifications of the intellect (vritti) are realised as essentially pure consciousness presenting under the limitation of the individual mind.


Friday 10 September 2021

Professor Hiralal Haldar's Realistic Idealism applicable to Advaita

 The opposition of mind to its object is the very basis of knowledge and without this duality no sort of cognition can take place, If to be is to be perceived it is equally true that to be perceived is to be. In all knowledge the distinguishable but inseparable factors opposed and  irreducible to each other are the the mind that knows, the object that is known and the act or process of knowing. Imagination also has this three-fold character. The imagined world is as much opposed to the imagining mind and its activity as the solid world of perception in time and space. This being so it is the images of the mind, the ideas that are to be brought into line with things and not the latter with the former. The imagined world of perception is quite as objective as the physical world of perception to which we belong. Things therefore are not mental ideas, they are objects of mind. Instead of things being ideas, it is ideas which have the status of things. This truth is clearly realised by the idealist philosophers of India.  Sankara, for example, who is commonly but wrongly supposed to be an illusionist, a thinker who denies the reality, of the world, lays the utmost stress on the opposition of what is known on mind that knows. In the absence of something distinguished from mind and opposed to it knowledge is no more possible than it is possible for a dancer to dance on his own shoulders. Epistemologically, Sankara is a thorough-going realist.  He does not say that the empirical world is in any way dependent for its being on the finite mind.  All that he maintains is that ultimately, from the highest point of view, it has no independent existence apart from Brahman.

(from ‘Realistic Idealism’ by Professor Hiralal Haldar )

Here is a place for that perfectly respectable  term ‘holism’ which unfortunately has been degraded to the status of stuff that is good for you.  Take the subject side as immediate and real and you can fall into the trap of idealism, take the object likewise and realism is embraced and with the focus on the modes of knowing  you fall into Gettier hell from which there is no exit.  Professor Haldar’s clear delineation of a holistic view is applicable to the Advaitic epistemology which is elaborated in full in the ‘Vedanta Paribhasa’ of Dharmaraja Adhvarindra.

Haldar’s essay is taken from the 1936 volume ‘Contemporary Indian Philosophy’.

realistic idealism

Tuesday 7 September 2021

Thou art That #159, 160/1/2/3

 #159: It is to the intellect and not to the Self which is immutable, that the knowledge, ‘I am Brahman’ belongs.  Moreover the Self is changeless because it has no other witness.  (Upadesa Sahasri Chap.XVIII)

Here the difference between the intellectual knowledge; our rational conviction, that we are one with the Absolute or the unity of being etc. is being contrasted with actual realisation which is a Self realisation.  A change in knowledge is an action, a new comprehension whereas the Self has no action being immutable.  It is its light which is reflected by the mirror of the mind.

#160: If the agent, the ego, were to feel ‘I am liberated’ freedom from pain and pleasure would not be reasonable with respect to it.

#161/2: The wrong knowledge that one is happy or unhappy due to one’s identification with the body etc., like the pleasure or sorrow due to the possession or loss of an ear-ring, is surely negated by the right knowledge that is Pure Consciousness.

An evidence becoming non-evidence, everything will end in non-existence in the reverse case.

#163:  One feels pain when one’s body gets burnt, cut or destroyed, (because one identifies with it).  Otherwise the Self (which is different from the body) is never pained.  Owing to there being burns etc. in one man another is not pained.

There are many advaitins who take this as stated despite the ample evidence for pain felt by recognised self-realised sages.  Some offer the distinction between suffering and pain.  The jnani feels pain but does not suffer.  Prarabdha karma or that element of karma that must be got through before the body is ‘dropped’ might be a cause of the pain that must be suffered even by the jnani.  In any case there is no identification with the body by an enlightened person.

The other point about enlightenment that has occurred to me is whether one can speak of a time when one became enlightened.  In the histories of saints that attained this state after a period of spiritual practice a time is indicated.  In reality their true nature had never changed.

If asked they might say ‘I am now what I always was, I abide’.

Monday 6 September 2021

Thou art That #145/6/7/8/9 (Apoha: How Now Brown Cow)

 Sankara’s remarks on apoha (Buddhist Nominalism) which has its source in annica (momentariness) are succinct and of course dismissive.  Apoha is consistent with that ontological theory following through to a tortuous ignotum per ignotius.  I submit that though Buddhism is full of skilful means the alarming complacency of this attempt has a forlorn hope of justification.

#145: Destruction has for its ultimate limit something which is self-existent.  (You say that) destruction is the negation of non-destruction.  A cow is defined according to you as the non-existence of a non-cow.  It cannot be the definition of a cow.

#146: Things denoted by the word ‘momentary’ are also, according to you, only the negation of things that are non-momentary.

The annica theory denies that there can be an unchanging existent ‘cowness’ universal.  Allied to that is the empiricist objection that the universal ‘cow’ is not experienced, only the particular cow now dubbed the non non-cow is experienced.  The obvious objection to this double negation is that lurking under the appelation non-cow is a something that is a something.

#147: (The Idealists).  As there cannot be any difference in non-existence differences are due to names only.  (Reply)  Please tell me how there can be manyness in one  (indivisible non-existence) due only to different names?

#148: How can the negation (of a non-cow) denote a cow if by the word negation the negation of different things is meant?  (Again) no negation distinguishes one thing from another, nor can special properties do it.

By annica nothing is, there is just a mere flux, so the non-cows cannot be negated either as they have no substantial existence.

#149: Just as names, species, etc. (do not qualify Knowledge) according to you as it has no special properties, (so the negation of a non-cow, hornlessness etc. do no qualify a cow).

'Knowledge' referred to there is a pure self-luminous cognition of momentary events.

Wednesday 1 September 2021

Samuel Taylor Coleridge on The Vast, The Great, and The Whole.

  For from my early reading of fairy tales and genii, etc., etc., my mind had been habituated to the Vast, and I never regarded my senses in any was as the criteria of my belief. I regulated all my creeds by my conceptions, not by my sight, even at that age. Should children be permitted to read romances, and relations of giants and magicians and genii? I know all that has been said against it; but I have formed my faith in the affirmative.  I know no other way of giving the mind a love of the Great and the Whole.

Those who have been led to the same truths step by step, through the constant testimony of their senses, seem to me to want a sense which I possess.  They contemplate nothing but parts, and all parts are necessarily little.  And the universe to them is but a mass of little things It is true, that the mind may become credulous and prone to superstition by the former methods; but are not the experimentalists credulous even to madness in believing any absurdity, rather than believe the grandest truths, if they have not the testimony of their own senses in their favour?  I have known some who have been rationally educated, as it is styled.  They were marked by a microscopic acuteness, but when they looked at great things, all become a blank and they saw nothing, and denied (very illogically) that anything could be seen, and uniformly put the negations of a power for the possession of a power, and called the want of imagination and judgement and the never being moved to rapture philosophy!

(from a letter of Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Thomas Poole Oct.16th. 1797)

John Locke was the man who ‘said against it’ in ‘Some Thoughts Concerning Education’ (1695)

Thou art That #155, #156, #157

 

It has been said before that the benefit derived from (the proximity of) the Self is that it appears conscious like the former.  Being a revealer the intellect, like light and so on, pervades objects such as jars etc.

Just as a jar placed in the sun may be said to be brought to light, so, an object in the intellect may be said to be brought under its cognizance.  This bringing to cognizance is nothing but being pervaded by the intellect.  Objects become pervaded by the intellect one after another.

The intellect pervades an object (and assumes its form) when the object is revealed through the help  (i.e., the reflection) of the Self.  Like time and space the all-pervading Self can have no order or succession (in pervading objects).  (#155, 156, 157 Chap. XVIII ‘Thou art That’ Upadesa Sahasri)

Pervasion being an action must be performed by the intellect.  As previously noted the intellect has action but no consciousness.  That is supplied by the Self which due to its closeness to the intellect reflects consciousness on to it.  Thus the intellect appears to be conscious and directed towards an object.  As the individual subject (Jiva) is located in the material universe of space and time its attention flows sequentially.

In these expressions of the subject/object nexus the analogy of reflection is required to do a lot of work.  The core truth for advaita is that everything is within Consciousness.  There is the tantric saying ‘what is here is there, what is not here is not anywhere’.

Sunday 29 August 2021

Thou art That #141, #142, #143

 Please tell us (Idealists)  what benefit you derive by holding that knowledge depends on other things.  If it is contended that dependence (of knowledge) on the knower is desirable (we reply that) the knower also, according to us, is nothing but Knowledge.

The intellect itself, though indivisible, is looked upon by deluded people as consisting of the division of the knower, knowing, and the known.

Action, agents etc. consist, according to us, (Idealists) of knowledge only.

(Reply from advaitin). You must accept an agent of this knowledge, if you admit its existence and destruction (every moment).   (#141, #142,  #143 Chap. XVIII Upadesa Sahasri)

The locus classicus for a thoroughgoing refutation of Buddhist Idealism (Vijnanavada) is of course Bsb.Bh. II.ii.28.  It is ironic that what is called British Empiricism shares the same view that what we are in contact with is a state of consciousness and anything further is an inference of some kind or native faith.  In other words we perceive perceptions.

Sankara in this comment on Vijnanavada impugns the annica/annata (no-self/momentariness) aspect since the topic of the chapter is the Self.  Holding that there in no knower only knowing implies that the agent of knowing is created and destroyed in every moment.  Thereby they (Buddhist Idealists) contradict themselves.

Friday 27 August 2021

Thou art That #136/7

 “Does substantiation mean being known, being endowed with existence, or anything else?  You should remember the two alternatives spoken of in the previous verse if it means ‘being known’.

As it is well-known that all things come in to existence from their causes no effort ( by way of the application of an evidence ) is necessary for substantiation.”  (#136/137 Chap. XVIII Upadesa Sahasri)

This is a puzzling if not somewhat gnomic verse.  What I understand from it is that the Self is self-evident, ‘pratibodha videtam’ known with every state of awareness and therefore substantiation in the received sense of established by the use of evidence does not apply.

Thursday 26 August 2021

Thou art That #135

 “If the conscious Self Itself is taken to be ignorant an evidence is necessary  in order that It may know Itself to be so.  It is surely necessary in knowing the Self if one  (i.e. the ego) other than It be regarded as ignorant” (# 135 Chap. XVIII Upadesa Sahasri)

The Self is taken to be changeless and as knowledge arising out of the activity of knowing or cognition implies a change the Self is not a knowing subject.

“The intellect has no consciousness and the Self no action.  The word ‘knows’ can, therefore, reasonably be applied  to neither of them.”  (#54 Chap. XVIII Upadesa Sahasri)

The evidence for the Self comes via its reflection in the intellect.  The Body/Mind/Intellect complex is inert matter seeming to be conscious due to its pervasion by the Self.

“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..”

“It (the Self) 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.....”   (Brh.Up. IV.iii.7 Sankara’s commentary)

Wednesday 18 August 2021

Thou Art That # 134

 #134:  Is the Self also substantiated by means of an evidence or not?  Though the Self Itself is independent of evidence, evidence is necessary in order to know It.

Evidence is necessary to know it.  Must that be the case because there are so many theories of the Self some argument must place some evidence, some chain of reasons above the others, more cogent than the others.  How else are we to be persuaded or convinced.  What does evidence mean in this case?  Could you miss it?  It’s all there, all that is to be known but you have missed something, a factor that you have discounted perhaps.

What are the means of knowledge (pramanas) that can precipitate some evidence, some knowledge.  There is the dog that didn’t bark in the night time, the non-apprehension of existence.  Is it something like that, an inference maybe from the immediacy of memory  My memory now is of my experience then.  That indicates the apperceptive unity of experience but not I think the Self in Vedanta.

Sankara is being as usual very condensed, an inspiration to ‘atma vichara’ (inquiry into the Self) and not offering solid answers that give us full marks without true insight.  Substantiation for instance, does that mean establishing that the Self exists?  Our intuition is that the Self is self-evident but is it, so to speak, free standing?  Can the knower be known, can the hand grasp itself?

More anon on #135 etc.

Friday 13 August 2021

Irish Crony Virus generates Bull Variant.

 Lately Ireland has been hit by the recurring , all season crony virus.  The Zappone affair involved a former minister for children and an abortion advocate who had decamped to the U.S. to live out her retirement after losing her seat, proposed herself for the job of special envoy to the U.N. Her remit was to be Freedom of Expression.  She’s 70 so this was a nice little earner for the sunset years.   She was appointed by fiat which annoyed the public greatly sunk as we are in the most repressive covid regime in Europe beset with contradictory guidelines.  No other candidates were interviewed, the job was a pure invention.  As the government was weathering the storm for this stroke it was revealed that she had hosted a garden party for 50 guests two weeks prior to her appointment which had been attended by government figures.  No masks, no covid passports just a general love in with tables for 6 scattered in the ample garden of a posh hotel near the parliament buildings.  What?  The populace are forbidden communion, confirmation and all kinds of celebrations for fear of the ‘plague’.  A priest saying an open air mass for 20 people was stopped by the police and fined 500€.

It’s the small things that catch them out, the stuff that isn’t complicated which refuses to spin.  Bring on the Attorney General who explained that if you looked at the actual emergency legislation an open air gathering of 200 people was permissible so by retrospective legal legerdemain it was all ok.  Why had not this been made clear to all other hotels who didn’t know about this and lost a great deal of revenue through obedience to guide lines which were restrictive.

An ex T.D. (member of parliament)Sean Kyne, now an appointee to the Senate was sent out to meet the media.  He explained -

“The garden party was legal but the guidelines were not followed”.

In the end Zappone resigned the position and is now back in New York.  There’s a saying - “The back of one is the face of another”.

Thursday 12 August 2021

Advaita versus Self-Luminous Cognition

 

“#123: The modifications of the intellect are manifested, known and endowed with existence by another, i.e. the Self which is immediately known and different from them.  It is inferred with the help of the example of a lamp.”  (from Chap.XVIII. Upadesa Sahasri of Sankara)

The lamp is one of those basic analogies in Advaita which act to prime the intellect..  A lamp renders visible both itself and whatever is in its vicinity.  The bodymind is not self luminous as is held by Buddhist and Western philosophy.  It is inert by nature.  In the presence of the Self the modifications of the mind  become apparently self conscious.  This occurs through their superimposition on the Self which is pure consciousness.

In another remark on self-luminous cognition BsBh. II.ii.28 Sankara writes:

“When you assert that cognition shines by itself like a lamp without requiring some other cognition, you virtually say that a cognition is not apprehended by any other means of knowledge or by anything else, which would be like saying that a thousand lamps shine (unknown) within a massive boulder.”

If you think solely in terms of cognition as an ultimate that is its own basis then you accept a cognition without a cogniser or an infinite regress.

Friday 6 August 2021

The Irony of Error in Vedanta

 As I was saying (prev.post), when hieratic realism tries to intellectually resolve the problem of error philosophy is born.  The witty ironism of Vedanta is to analolgise error itself as having the same form as perception.  Error is defanged and sways to the philosopher’s flute.  Whether the rope seems a snake or the snake seems a rope there has been a superimposition (adhyasa) of the object on the subject.  This is the ontological ground beyond which we cannot dig.  The focus on the psychological basis of error severally; memory, faulty sensory input, organic loss of function etc., is very interesting but it does not touch the ontological event.

The next concern must be - what is the nature of the object such that it can come in some sense to be ‘in’ the subject.

Wednesday 4 August 2021

Getting the Real Right

 

I am going to be more than usually tendentious in asserting that Realism is fundamental and Idealism a reaction to it.  What use are sacrifices, mantras, invocations, prayers, rituals etc. unless there is a reality corresponding to the performers intent?  Philosophy begins when that Realism becomes critical and considers the incorporation of error into experience.  Prior to that the fear of error gives rise to an immensely complex congeries of safeguards to prevent the priest from getting the Real wrong.

Tuesday 27 July 2021

Shankara and The Witness (Saksin)

 

The ego which is pervaded by the reflection of Consciousness is called the knower or the agent of the action of knowing.  One who knows oneself, the Witness, to be distinct from all these three is a (real) knower of the Self.

The modifications of the intellect, called ‘right knowledge’, ‘doubtful knowledge’, and ‘false knowledge’, deviate from their existence.  There is one and the same Consciousness in all of them.  The differences are due to the modifications. (paras 118- 120 Upadesa Sahasri)

The Witness?  Who let him in?  The three that it is distinct from are/is the agent, the object and the means of valid knowledge (pramana) ie. perception, inference etc.  How is the Witness distinct from them if it is non-different as Consciousness from Subject and Object?  Can this be an example of the adiropa apavada move or an interim realisation that what remains unchanged is Consciousness as such.  Its self-luminous nature does not change.  Taking that stance towards the deliverances of ‘the three’ i.e. ‘right knowledge’ etc. brings the seeker into the sphere of the Witness.

“Being the witness of all cognitions, and by nature nothing but the power of consciousness, the Self is indicated by the cognitions themselves, in the midst of cognitions, as non-different from them.  There is no other door to its awareness......

As for the explanation, “The expression, pratibodha videtam (known with every state of awareness) means that the Self is known to oneself”, it is possible in a context where the Self appears as a conditioned thing through identification with the limiting adjunct, intellect, so as to have such apparent activities as knowing the Self by the self (jiva).  This is referred to by the texts. “Sees the Self in his own self” Brh.Up. IV.iv.23 - “ O Purushottama, (lit Supreme Purusha, i.e. Being) you yourself know your Self through the self”. B.G. X.15. (from Kena Up. commentary II.4)

 

 

Sunday 25 July 2021

Time and Strange Attractors

 

You have had an odd experience of some sort, a dream that is extraordinarily clear and unconnected to the current mental content of your day.  And then it turns out later to have been a prevision because it, as is said, ‘comes out’.  Is this a time reversal event in which we back into the future or is it that the prevision is a strange attractor which creates the mood of its occurrence.   Prayer yet to be offered might also tweak a present reality; a vertiginous speculation but as prayer is an attempt to attain the eternal the usual sequence of time might be overcome.

Thursday 22 July 2021

Ontic Epistemology in Shankara's Advaita

 #118/119 (Chap. 18/Upadesa Sahasri by Shankara):

Pervaded by Consciousness, mental modification in the forms of objects come into existence.  External objects are what impart their forms to these modifications.  The most desirable of all things ( on the part of the agent ), these external objects are called objects of his action.  One having such a desire is enjoined to perform actions.  The mental modifications in which the forms of external objects are present are called the instruments of his knowledge of objects.

This seems very much like representationalism or mediate realism and might be said to fall to the same objections.  If all you really know is the mental side of things doesn’t the external object drop away as an inference or an unknowable noumenon?  Here is where the advaitic form of realism is like the Platonic.  The mental modification (vritti) / is of the same stuff as the object and thereby can reflect it, on a lower defective level in the Platonic of course.  In advaita the same stuff is Consciousness, the object being a form of limitation of Consciousness and the vritti (mental modification) also being a form of limitation.  The internal/external bridge is thereby obviated.  This is the blend of Ontic epistemology that is central to Advaita.

Tuesday 20 July 2021

Enhancing the Efficacy of Mantra

 There are well known ways to enhance the efficacy of the mantra.  Instead of using a japamala (rosary) of 108 beads to do a round use your hands. Count 9 with your thumb on the right hand using just the joints of the fourth to the index finger.  Count 12 on the left hand with your thumb using the joints and the tips of the fourth to the index finger.  Pause on each joint and finger tip while you move through the joints on the right hand.   That’s 108 repetitions.  In finger symbolism the index is the jiva (individual) and the thumb is Brahman.  When the round is finished jiva and Brahman are joined in the jnana mudra.

Breath in on OM and out on the rest of the mantra while focusing on a chakra.

Wednesday 7 July 2021

The Efficacy of Mantra

 In the one short string we can cover the whole of the seeker’s aim to bring together the immanent and the transcendent.  The components will have OM and the chosen form of divinity brought together as in Om namah Shivaya or Om Sri Ram or Om Namo Narayayana.  The efficacy of mantras is due to the shrinking of the mind down to that restricted compass: apparently restricted compass.   The reality of consciousness shines more in the minute than the extended.  An expatiating mind quickly loses its aim, drifting into reveries and ego enhancing internal dialogue.  In fact though, the nature of consciousness does not change whatever the contents of consciousness may be.

“Everything shines according as He (Brahman) does so; by His light all this shines diversely”

(Mundaka Upanisad II.ii.10)

The reflection of the Self in the intellect becomes regarded as the Self but just as the reflection in the mirror is not the person and yet would not exist without the person in front of it we can claim an intimate connection between them.

“Just as the reflection of a face, which makes a mirror appear like it, is the face itself, so the  reflection of the Self in the mirror of the ego making it appear like the Self (is the Self).  So (the meaning of the sentence,) ‘I am Brahman’ is reasonable.” (para. 109: Chap.  XVIII. Upadesa Sahasri by Shankaracarya)

To emphasise the point: it is the Self that makes the intellect seem to be the Self.  You know the Self in the intellect and in each state of awareness.  Note the contrast between this non-difference and illusionism that is sometimes presented which would say that the Jiva is utterly unreal.

Mantra shelters in this knowledge.

Friday 2 July 2021

'Yesterday'

 I have long practice at suspending disbelief - to any height required.

A gnostic pulse eliminates all memory and existence of the Beatles.  A struggling musician is the only one that remembers their songs and he is tempted to pass them off as his own.    This was in the film ‘Yesterday’ now out on Netflix with Himesh Patel as the singer.  As a device it lured me into the mind of hearing them for the first time and that’s a good trick for feeling the poignancy of the title song.  Why do the cliches affect us? ‘Half the man I used to be’, ‘shadow hanging  over me’ are true reports of a drowning man clinging to useless debris.  For the present we believe in yesterday but that too has gone down with all hands.

Monday 28 June 2021

'Far from the Madding Crowd' by Thomas Hardy

 ‘Worlds in Collision’ could be the subtitle of ‘Far From the Madding Crowd’.  It set the template for much of British fiction.  When you change your social orbit, comedic, tragic events happen, and the clockwork orrery is awry.  Gabriel Oak becomes or has the potential to become landed, a peasant proprietor but by the action of a rogue sheepdog becomes a poor shepherd once more far from the marital considerations of Bathsheba Everdene.  That apparent epicycle (I’m just getting going) or going backwards will be corrected morally, and socially, or you’ve never read a Victorian novel.  True but Hardy’s sadism in relation to his characters is well known so Oak may yet come down in a storm.  There is one and Oak withstands it in a fine set piece of saving the corn from the tempest.  Boldwood (!) loses his and cherchez the same femme.  Bathsheba is considering him, Boldwood, as a suitable candidate but her dry powder meets the flash of Troy and launches a thousand plot parentheses.  They become entangled in a dark wood.  He, the vile seducer, is the result of social miscegenation so to speak being the natural son of an aristocrat and his mother the wife of a doctor.  How on earth did Bathsheba become a spinner of mens’ fates, a Moirae?  By rising in the world through inheritance of a substantial farm which she insists on running herself, a planetary wobble that surely we hope and fear may be catastrophic.  ‘Down here for dancing, up there for thinking’ she cannot manage, of course.  Gabriel Oak can.  He bends but does not break  displaying an annoying lack of manly irascibility.  Bathsheba has a great bench and he accepts that even though he was once a good match he must wait on the sidelines.  It’s a dull business being a Victorian stoic, just you, Marcus Aurelius and mutinous natives.  And that brings me to the comic chorus of the rustics there at all the tragic inflections of the plot.  They like a drink and are full of sententious observations on life’s vagaries.  That hasn’t changed.

Hardy was 34 when this was published.  Melodramatic but not so much as to ruin it and with a poet’s eye for that odd detail that makes us believe.   Placet.

Friday 25 June 2021

Dummkopf

 

Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! What a referee

What a referee! What a referee!

Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! He went and lost his pea

And his little wooden whistle wouldn't whistle

(Billy Cotton band)

The month after the woodworking magazine that I took had a picture of a naked woman  in an ad for a machine, looking very cold ; there were lots of letters with the complaint ' we close the doors on our sheds to work on our hobby and get away from all that'.

But yes the rainbow regime must light up the stadium for the Hungary V Germany game.  Keep going - take the game out of game.  Dummkopf.

Thursday 24 June 2021

Jordan Peterson and Ideology

 When Jordan Peterson is talking about ideology with that uvula swallowing ‘o’ pronunciation,  what is he talking about?  In my view it is simply this -  a philosophy with a distinct human origin often traceable to a single individual or a group emerges, is taken up by philosophes, intelligentzia, right thinking people, bien pensants and so forth.  It is the flavour of the era.  Very quickly it tends to become dogmatic with fixed principles and modes of discourse.  Then is the time of the heresy sniffers and scryers of correctness.  As a human ideational construct it ought to be constantly mutating but it doesn’t. Sublation runs into the sand.  

But isn’t religious belief like that? Is it not also an ideology?  The central difference is that religion is not of human origin and so its tenets are fixed by definition.  Its doctrines do not alter with the intellectual weather.  Mythology is another archetypal domain with an inner mirroring of the human psych which is constant and changeless.   Conservatism is an ideology that allows for slow organic change and resists rapid transitions.  Adaptation comes out of the slow wisdom of what works.  One size does not fit all societies.

Peterson is not an ideologue.  He runs with the archetypal pack.  His maps of meaning are not a personal cartography.

Friday 18 June 2021

Jordan Peterson not talking about the war

 

I encountered two criticisms of Jordan Peterson yesterday.  One of them was from Lewis Waller :then and now on Peterson

and the other was from the indomitable John Waters on his substack account -John Waters Unchained.

johnwaters@substack.com

The former was no surprise given that he jerks and genuflects with a post modernist knee though he affected to find much of value in Peterson’s Rules books.  What he objects to chiefly is the supreme emphasis on personal responsibility.   He parsed it as ‘response-ability’.  If the deck is stacked against you culturally, societally, what can you do, your options are limited.   Indeed, but how much of the truth is it?  The  Hero, a theme of Peterson’s, can turn on a dime.  He makes a space in the thicket of obstructions and decides with a healthy irascibility that this game of soldiers is a dead loss or salvable.   The insight into the interior checks comes from a rigorous ‘agenbite of inwit’  and the sense of divine love that carries you through that lonesome valley which pace Woody Guthrie you do not have to cross by yourself.

What John Waters would probably aver is that there is a lack of congruence with the structure of the human person in the philosophy of post modernism, critical theory and the dismal mephitic swamp of identarianism, viewpoint theory and cancel culture.  There is no joy in any of their liturgy rather misery and ananda deficit.  What the sage said : satyam vada, dharmam chara - speak the truth, follow dharma.  Suddenly that constricted space becomes boundless because as we are told - Being and the True are convertible.

Like the droll Meath man said - You’d wonder’ .  Why has Jordan nothing to say about the Covid  panic barring an irritable bark - ‘take the dam vaccine’.  He puts that foot out and then draws it back claiming that I understand why one wouldn’t want to take it.  Look this won’t do Jordan, too much of your stock in trade has been about resistance to mass movements.  The Shorter O.D. has a beautiful definition of panic:

“A sudden  and excessive feeling of alarm or fear, usually affecting a body of persons, and leading to extravagant or injudicious efforts to secure safety.”

Not talking about the war is talking about the war.  John Waters expresses his disappointment and  his article is well worth reading.  May I offer a defense of Peterson which brings into focus another archetype not spoken of by psychology.  As well as the Hero there is the Saint.  Psychology leaves off its shoes on that holy ground.  Peterson is not a saint who is prepared to martyrise himself.  He knows very well that if he says a word outside the rubric of correctness on youtube, he will be demonitised  and very likely kicked out.  I would not be surprised if he is planning to move to another channel.  The path of the Hero requires cunning.  In my view he came back to the battle too soon before his wounds were healed. And there were wounds which were not patent before he was stricken by multiple hurts any of which might have defeated another.  He was a wounded healer and like the Fisher King needs to drink from the Holy Grail to become whole and hale.