Tuesday 27 April 2021

Maya, remarks on

 Sankara’s use of the analogy of perceptual illusion was ontological/epistemological rather than psychological.  In his preamble to the Brahma Sutra Bhasya he considers the puzzle of how the inert unconscious object comes to somehow be ‘in’ the consciousness of the subject.  This is the launch pad for the rest of his transcendental postulate.  The initial question then is - How must things fundamentally be for things to appear as they do?  His  assumption is that what is out there is real and is within us as it actually is and is grasped by perception.  The snake/rope is a focused analogy for the transference/superimposition of the object on the consciousness of the subject.  In a later Advaitic work ‘Vedanta Paribhasa’ this capacity of the object is called its perceptuality.  A single unity of being unites the object and the subject.  They share the same substratum of pure Consciousness.  The limiting adjunct of the object and limiting adjunct of the subject can flow together.  This is the source of the ‘cit jada granthi’ i.e. the knot of the inert and the conscious.

Where does avidya or personal Maya come into this?  It is the natural tendency of the sensing subject to place its identity where it feels it is.

Corne van Nijhus writes maya

“The existence of an object can only be proven when it is perceived. But suppose there is an object that has never been seen. No one would recognize that object as valid!  ! There must first be some consciousness to observe this object, to prove its existence. So every object depends on Consciousness to be validated. So the object is Mithya“

In Advaita the ‘ajnatta satta’, the unknown object, is recognised as a reality.  Perception is regarded as a disclosure or the removal of the darkness veiling an object.  That unknown object is out there awaiting disclosure and is distinguished from the object that is real only during the time that it is being known/experienced.  Fleeting emotions are examples of this.

Thursday 22 April 2021

The Good Person

 That unfashionable thing: an intuition.

Have any of you ever met a good person? A partial aspect of such a one would be their spontaneity. In fact we might be disinclined to grant that accolade if they had to think through options.

Sunday 18 April 2021

Satkaryavada, Sankara & Whitehead

 “This misapprehension is promoted by the neglect of the principle that, so far as the physical relations are concerned, contemporary events happen in causal independence of each other.” (Chap.II. sec.1 Process and Reality).

This might be what Plotinus called the Plenum or Sankara ‘The Field’ (B.G.Bh ch.13).  Here is the pure satkaryavada of the non-difference of cause and effect.  Here suspended in Being, as it were, is the totality of existence.  The sense of contingency as a rational demand is strong as I dwell on this profound insight of Whitehead’s.

Marc Pugliese’s interesting paper on Sankara and Whitehead stresses the immanence of the cause in the effect held by both of them.

Pugliese on Sankara and Whitehead

Monday 12 April 2021

Tapaswiji Maharaj and Shivabalayogi

(repost from 2013)

 When Tapaswiji Maharaj met Shivabalayogi for the first time the yogi was 15 years of age and the elder sage 182. Despite the great disparity in age they hit it off but at their first meeting the younger was deep in samadhi and not available for mundane colloquy. Tapaswiji was an adept in the use of rejuvenating herbs and the esoteric branches of ayuravedic medicine combined with kaya kalpa. At the age of 90 he had undergone this course and become a new man. Previously at the age of 55 he had taken up sanyas after an interview with the last Mughal Emperor. The stories he could tell!


When he came back on another visit Shivabalayogi was in everyday consciousness mode
 but due to his long period of sitting in asana his legs had become fixed like the twisting
 of dried cooked spaghetti and he was forced to drag himself about. Using oils and
 massage Tapaswijmade him limber again. He related to him that he was bound 
to do him service as in a previous  incarnation Shivabalayogi had done him service
 during his tapas back in the day. ‘Now’, he said,
 ‘is there anything more I can do for you, to make you comfortable’.

- Well, said the youth, whom it would be recalled had undergone a great deal of
fhardship at  the hands of louts who at one point had thrown his body into the nearby 
canal whilst lost to  the world in samadhi. He sank to the bottom and then
 popped up again like a cork and back on the bank. After this they had
 let him alone.

- Well, there is one thing that is bothering me,that is a great distraction and an impediment
 to my meditation. There is a window at the back there with a loose catch and when the
 wind is in a certain quarter it rattles. Can you get it fixed?
- Done, said Tapaswiji.

Sunday 11 April 2021

Intensive Meditation Danger

 A teacher I encountered in India had large limestone slabs scattered around the ashram set into the ground like tombstones with short messages painted on to them.  On one of them was the short injunction: START EARLY, DRIVE SLOWLY, REACH SAFELY.  The self torture of Goenka style intensive
goenka risks harpers
 10 hours daily for 10 days meditation would not be recommended for the ordinary seeker.  Meditation there was for 10 minutes after evening hymn singing (Bajans)
The recommended way for the serious aspirant in the tradition of sadhana or spiritual practice in Hinduism is to find a spiritual master, a self-realised saint, and sit at his or her’s feet and allow divinity to guide you.  Just the Presence (darshan) is enough.

That Teacher would have endorsed the way of Bhakti (Devotion) for the vast majority of seekers and approve of the Penny Catechism:

Q: Why did God make you?
A. God made me to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world, and to be happy with Him forever in the next.


Tuesday 6 April 2021

Trope in the 'Dictionary of Untranslatables'

 This may be the indispensable book.  I have said that poetry is what is lost in translation and that what cannot be translated is not philosophy.  Does dipping into this book cure me as I watch for semantic churning?  There, I have uttered a trope, but not a trope as philosophers know it.  In my naive way I see the polymorphic perversity of the development of it.  Tropein/to turn as in heliotrope, heliotropic, ‘entropy’ - en trope/ a transformation.  A figure of speech by an alteration captures our attention.  In philosophy our head is turned as we attend to a quality, an attribute, and generally instances.  This, in the charming French manner of the faintly invidious, is referred to as Anglo-Saxon philosophy.  Sweet the Anglo-Saxon primer.  Press that bulb 12 times, pull the cord  5 times and  you will chain out ‘quality bits’, ‘individualised forms’, ‘unit properties’, ‘particularised qualities’.  There is more, much more and are we to regret this trope on trope?

“Williams’s initiative, further extended by K. Campbell, is clearly unfortunate and all the more inexplicable in that the word “trope,” n English just as in French, refers to a figure of speech. But today it ould be impossible to go against this usage, given the currency of the expression in the philosophical literature.” (Alain de Libera on ‘Trope’)

My last point is pronunciation:  Is it trope/dope or trope/prop to rhyme.  The second is more Greek and correct by the S.C.R.  Both have possibilities as limerick stuff.

As a prop the book could be carried about with tassel-like post-it notes with question marks on them, ‘quite so’, ‘hmm but’, ‘moral idiot’ (Proust).  Flann O’Brien’s Buchhandlung service has advanced reader notes which might be appropriate but dangerous in the wrong hands.  ‘Dismal sciolism’ in red ink on the margins of a note on theory?  Tricky but not impossible.