The Incomprehensible I AM

 I AM is not a thought.  As a practice it is an avenue to being.  It does not carry any ontological weight as a theory.  It  is purely being present to the self luminous.  No particular thoughts matter because all awareness is pervaded by that presence.   There is no understanding this I AM because you cannot get outside it to comprehend it.  I live it but it escapes my grasp.

The I AM of Nisargadatta Paradox and Practice

 

This focus on ‘I AM’ by Nisargadatta as per the injunction of his guru is not a version of the Cartesian critique.  It is not a reflection on fundamental data out of which we proceed to construct a world, in Descartes’ case by the grace of God who is not a deceiver.  It is primarily a practice and not an epistemological or ontological position.  Yet it can appear to be so and Maharaj (Nisargadatta) often in his elucidations veers close to a subjective position. My view is that this interpretation is due to the action of the very potent mind virus that is Subjective Idealism.  Realism seems too naive; a mind independent world falls before the fact of illusion, the state of our brain is the state of the world and so forth.  All this purports to be the thinking man’s position.

Q:When I wake up in the morning, the world is already there, waiting for me. Surely the world comes into being first. | do, but much later, at the earliest at my birth. The body mediates between me and the world. Without the body there would be neither me nor the world.

M:The body appears in your mind, your mind is the content of your consciousness; you are the motionless witness of the river of consciousness which changes eternally without changing you in any way. Your own changelessness is so obvious that you do not notice it. Have a good look at yourself and all these misapprehensions and misconceptions will dissolve. Just as all the little watery lives are in water and cannot be without water, so all the universe Is in you and cannot be without you. (Chapter 44 I AM THAT)

Nisargadatta recognises the realism position of the Questioner in this chapter and  by challenging it with a seemingly subjective idealist position attempts to prod him towards a deeper analysis. It proceeds by the usual adhiropa/apavada dialectical method which is the primary procedure of Advaita.  Each understanding is sublated by a subsequent one.  You have to dwell where you are and only move via insight.  You can’t just intellectually claim  a new understanding, you must feel the force of it.

In this case the authority of the guru challenges the standard realist position, a naive common sense one, infra philosophical as Etienne Gilson puts it.  Is there a way that both can be simultaneously true, this world as mind dependent and a real mind independent world?  Nisargadatta asserts:

In other words, the absolutely material and the absolutely spiritual, the totally objective and the totally subjective are identical, both in substance and essence.

How this ‘identity’ is to be understood is explicated in the ‘Vedanta Paribhasa’ of Adhvarindra. cf topic

Seneca: Letters on Ethics

 Reading Seneca is like reading a classical self help book something like the seven secrets of successful selling or ‘how to take command of your life: A beginner’s guide, that sort of thing but in ancient Rome.  He’s not an agony uncle but rather:’ your agony what is it saying to you and if you were to die tonight would it contaminate your last hours’?  I fear that the aura of gravitas and solid wisdom is due to its chilly elegance.  The translation by Margaret Graver reads smoothly and one feels its crisp expression captures the original well.  

And so, dear Lucilius, do what your letter says you are doing: embrace every hour. If you lay hands on today, you will find you are less dependent on tomorrow. While you delay, life speeds on by.  Everything we have belongs to others, Lucilius; time alone is ours. Nature has put us in possession of this one thing, this fleeting, slippery thing—and anyone who wants to can dispossess us. Such is the foolishness of mortal beings: when they borrow the smallest, cheapest items, such as can easily be replaced, they acknowledge the debt, but no one considers himself indebted for taking up our time. Yet this is the one loan that even those who are grateful cannot repay.

Those two things that the Stoics do well, fleetingness and stasis, appear frequently.  We only have this moment and good or bad it will pass.  That is true yet the continuance and risk of passion give life its savour.  To be forever weighing in the scales of significance each moment is too linear. What we want  is not the single level in which we manage our emotions and the urge of life but the enlargement of context. There is more, there is insight where we leave the rubric.

You are hard at work, forgetting everything else and sticking to the single task of making yourself a better person every day. This I approve, and rejoice in it too. I urge you, indeed plead with you, to persevere. All the same, I have a warning for you. There are those whose wish is to be noticed rather than to make moral progress. Don’t be like them, altering your dress or way of life so as to attract attention.  The rough clothes, the rank growth of hair and beard, the sworn hatred of silverware, the pallet laid on the ground: all these and any other perverse form of self-aggrandizement are things you should avoid.

Here we have the Classical curation of a profile.  Being a serious person takes work and you mustn’t slacken for a moment.   He rejoices in the efforts of Lucillius and recommends moderation in all things. Yes, quite so, you’re only old once and it’s never too soon to start. 

 

'Citizen' by Claudia Rankine

 

A local dog charity shop, Madra, along with the usual books has a good literary section for fifty cents. Buy one get one free.  Too good to leave after me. So ‘All Well that Ends Well’, Citizen by Claudine Rankine, Vol 3 of Brian Friel plays, ‘The Poems of Thomas Hardy: A Critical Introduction by Kenneth Marsden, ‘Queen Lucia’ and ‘Lucia in London’ by Fred Benson.

Claudia Rankine I’d never heard of but the gushing accolades front and back in a pristine copy for 50 cents:  plunge on.  It won a National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry and the Forward Prize for Best Collection.  No I wasn’t brow beaten by Upper Case but you pay attention.  Dipping in and out the curious thing about this work is that it isn’t poetry in the common acceptation of that category of literary production.  It isn’t verse, it doesn’t scan, the drum beat of stress do not progress along the blocks of unheightened prose.  It is no more and no less than a continuous whine from someone whom you would suppose has fetched up at a cosy academic harbour and might be well pleased with herself.  No, no, no, no, not at all; Ms.Rankine lives in that place of threat where people of colour live.

“To live through the days sometimes you moan like deer.  Sometimes you sigh.  The world says stop that.  Another sigh.  Moaning elicits laughter, sighing upsets.  Perhaps each sigh is drawn into existence to pull in, pull under, who knows truth be told, you could no more control those sighs than that which brings the sighs about.”

All serious readers must sigh in solidarity and deplore the affirmative action that elevates this moaniad which does indeed elicit laughter.  True that.

Realism, the Mind/Body problem in Western and Advaitic thought.

 

“Now at the same time it is just those self-same things which his mind, as we say, perceives; and the whole philosophy of perception from Democritus’s time downwards has been just one long wrangle over the paradox that what is evidently one reality should be in two places at once, both in outer space and in a person’s mind. ‘Representative’ theories of perception avoid the logical paradox, but on the other hand they violate the reader’s sense of life, which knows no intervening mental image but seems to see the room and the book immediately just as they physically exist.”  (from ‘Radical Empiricism’ by William James)

In his clear way James has set out the aporia which in Advaita is called the chit jada granthi (the knot between the conscious and the inert).  It is the initial statement of the puzzleShankaracarya deals with in the preamble to the Brahma Sutra Bhasya.  He writes:

“Accordingly, the superimposition of the object, referable through the concept “you”, and its attributes on the subject that is conscious by nature and is referable through the concept “we” (should be impossible), and contrariwise the superimposition of the subject and its attributes on the object should be impossible.”

What he finds to be a difficulty that must be stated before his commentary on the body of the sutras is simply this: how does that out there a material object come to be in here in my mind as a subjective unextended state of awareness.

This is just that very ‘double entry’ problem that under various modalities keeps cropping up.  The problem of universals comes under that rubric, primary and secondary qualities thinking is coloured by it and it may even be that the hard wired moral tenets, the evolutionary adaptive, correspond to the really out there as against the ‘in here’ cultural mores.  To put it at its most general: is Realism a thing?

Aristotle and Plato thought so and got to it in their different ways.  Advaita as I have pointed out mentions the problem and via the pramanas assumes the truth of realism but its discussion of the problem is put to one side by the very practical problem of self-realisation.  That gives a Cartesian critical tinge to its philosophical investigations.  What is ‘kuthasta ‘, unchanging, as firm as an anvil?  It is Consciousness irradiated by self awareness, underlying that advice given by Nisargadatta’s guru - focus on ‘I AM’ and become liberated.

Earnest Advaitic seekers will demur claiming that none of this Western problematic exists.  It does but they are dazzled by the shiny object of confusion, summarised in the snake/rope analogy and are thereby led into interesting problems such as ‘how is error possible’  and the various fata morgana of Idealism.

Sankaracarya stated the central aporia in the preamble and therefore we must assume that the commentary on the sutras is a working out of a solution.  Essentially the answer is non-duality or how you can have non-numerical identity between consciousness and the objective world.  I have written several notes on this for anyone who is interested in following the subject topics/labels.