Consciousness and Remorse

 “It matters little whether the intuition of being resemble the innate gift of an imperial intelligence serenely relying upon its limpid strength and upon the cooperation of a pure and delicate flesh, and of a vivid and perfectly balanced sensibility, as seems to have been the case for Thomas Aquinas; whether, alternatively, it spring unexpectedly like a kind of natural grace at the sight of a blade of grass or a windmill, or at the sudden perception of the reality of the self; whether it proceed from the implacability with which the being of things independent of ourselves becomes abruptly evident to us, suddenly casting our own being back upon its solitude and its frailty; whether I make my way towards it by inner experience of duration, or of anguish, or of certain moral realities which transcend the flow of time—these alternatives, I repeat, are of slight moment.”   (From Existence and the Existent by Jacques Maritain)

First note and put aside for the moment the likeness to the focus on ‘I AM’,  the sadhana of Nisargadatta Maharaj. I ask what does intuition mean in this case?  Is it a sort of immediate knowledge without going through the normal reasoning process, ‘he just knew in that instant’, sort of thing?

‘I AM’ is always there, always cleansed of the past, a pure presence that pervades my present condition, simply illuminating it.  This ‘I AM’ is not my present mental state but the immediacy of my awareness of it demonstrates the self luminous cognition of my contemporary mental contents.  It is as though those states were to flow through it.  Past and present are given now and in every awareness memory shines through.

How are we to get free and live in consciousness as such leaving remorse behind. (Remorse from re-mordere -  re-bite )  Can the past break away and be rendered toothless?

Asparsa Yoga & The Mind going out to the Object of Perception

 Mandukya Karika of Gaudapad IV.26

“Consciousness has no contact with objects; so also it has certainly no contact with appearances of objects.  For according to the reasons adduced, an object has no existence, and an illusory object is not separate from the awareness.”

Here Gaudapada is taking the view as only Pure Consciousness exists in reality and there is nothing but it any division in it suggested by the fact of perception is not ultimately true.  He puts it thus:

“From the standpoint of reality, that is to say, of ultimate Reality. For unlike the existence of a buffalo independently of a horse, a jar does not exist apart from clay, after being recognised as clay that it really is, nor does a cloth exist apart from the yarns, nor the yarns apart from the fibres.  Thus if the reality is pursued successively till words and notions cease, we do not perceive any external occasion for knowledge.”
(Sankara’s commentary on G.K. IV.25)

In that extreme reduction Gaudapada differs from Sankara who held to different levels of discourse that could be separated.  It is important to not that in his Preamble to the Brahma Sutra Bhasya he started out with the natural and inevitable Subject Object division given in experience.  Nevertheless in some discussions of Advaita it is forgotten that conceptual categories alter as the analysis of perception progresses.

Take for example the esoteric conception of perception as the mind going out to the object and taking its form.  The reasoning behind it is that superimposition must be taking place where the object is and as the object is ‘out there’ that’s where the superimposition must be happening.  Here the mingling of two levels is patent.  You have the material and the immaterial, the object and the knowledge of the object.  The knowledge is the immaterial factor.  Recollect that the apparent impossibility of the mingling of the material and the immaterial or the extended and the un- extended is the aporia that launched the preamble discussion to the B.S.Bh.  Recollect too that ‘the immaterial is indivisible’ (Aristotle) and ask yourself what sense is there to the spatial metaphor of the mind going out to anything.  In knowledge there is no distance as it were,  the blending of the upadhis of the mind and the object does not take place in any sort of container.  The vritti or mental modification is the precipitate in the mind of the subject superimposed there and creating the illusion of a permanent self.  

Indeed though Gaudapada’s rigourous approach may be excessive we ought still to alter our categories as our analysis deepens.

Fusion Anomaly

 The channel Fusion Anomaly is still going strong.  Nodes are constantly morphing. Click on the barely visible yellow scratch at mid bottom of your screen.  Dwell on the red orbs, they are but portals. Expect nothing, recieve everything:

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wondrous information

The Mind as Inert (Jada) in Vedanta

 A point I've made before. Here I put it in a compressed form as a reply to a youtube video sketching some differences between Eastern and Western philosophy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWcHlB7mG2w&t=251s

A  good succinct talk, thank you.

Another major difference in my view is that the mind is inert or unconscious or to put it another way the mind is really the body pervaded by pure consciousness and limiting that pure consciousness or expressing that pure consciousness according to its structure.  The impersonal pure consciousness is rendered personal by pervading the individual entity.  Instead of the body/mind problem you have bodymind.  This is the metaphysics behind the Yogic symbolism of the Cakras or centres of awareness throughout the body.  The whole body is minded so to speak.

Introducing Mr.Arabin - Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope

 I’m re-reading ‘Barchester Towers’ by Anthony Trollope  and checking back through my posts I see that I dropped a short note on it about 10 years ago.  He finished it in 1856 and it follows ‘The Warden’ the first in the series about the clerical life around the cathedral city of Barchester.   The spry playfulness that infuses this early novel has the spring of his genius in it.  His addressing of the reader does not interpose the breaching of the pact of disbelief but is just an invitation  to refresh our imagination or to begin again with a cleansed eye to look on the  capers of Barchester clerics and their innocent lapses into worldliness.

Mr. Arabin was tempted by the Scarlet Woman of Rome having been led astray by the charismatic John Henry Newman.  In the end he did not succumb to her gaudy blandishments but for a time he wobbled on the tightrope that spanned the Tiber.  As a fellow of Lazarus a college of Oxford he would have lost his place as no longer subscribing to the 39 Articles and therefore a dubious influence on the young minds in his charge.  A tight spot indeed.  Here Trollope plays the part of the unreliable narrator moving between addressing the reader to make a plea and simultaneously leaving it quite open for us to doubt the proffered interpretation.  Arabin  is promoted as an  unworldly, mystical, poetical sort of man of a high church type. 

Though great things were expected of him by his tutor when an undergraduate somehow in his last years in Balliol that furnace of Scholarment he became something of a controversialist the downfall of many a promising student. 

“He had occupied himself too much with High Church matters and the polemics, politics, and outward demonstrations usually concurrent with High Churchmanship to devote himself with sufficient vigour to the acquisition of a double first.”

As related by Trollope with a wink what bothered Arabin more than anything was the idea that he balked at Rome because he was afraid of losing his fellowship and all that it implied in status, emolument and learned society.  However in a stroke of rationalization he turns this remaining within the Church Established by law into the harder, steeper path.

“He paused and stood silent for awhile, thinking of the time when he had so nearly sacrificed all he had, his powers of mind, his free agency, the fresh running waters of his mind's fountain, his very inner self, for an easy path in which no fighting would be needed;”

This inner recollection takes place during his first conversation with Mrs.Bold the beautiful widow with £1000 a year.  We have also been told about Arabin’s wistful incipient longing for a more gracious, genteel, domestic, life.  He is after all forty years old.  We feel that Trollope may fix him up.

The sense of IAM (3)

 

“Then what am I” Q asks:

Impossible to say. Knowledge is built on what is already known.  You brachiate from tree to tree as it were.  Self realization is not something you can get to know because you already know it.  It cannot be separated out from any state of the mind.  It is known with every state of awareness. “Pratibodha videtam” (known with every state of consciousness) says Sankara in a commentary on Kena Upanisad.

As Maharaj says:

You are nothing perceivable or imaginable.  Yet without you (i.e. true self) 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 without you?”

M.  is adopting the saksin approach to this problem where the pure consciousness that pervades all things is poured so to speak, into the mould of a separate entity, the jiva, the person.  Pure consciousness has taken this form of limitation/upadhi.  Indeed a salient difference in Vedanta is the regarding of brain-body as inert (jada) only becoming conscious as it is pervaded by pure consciousness.  This citta (consciousness) in that form acts as a witness (saksin).

But says Q: Is not this ‘I am’ also an experience?

As M. has been saying- what gives you the core of the experience of identity is this pure consciousness at any one time but the mistake is take the common factor to be an embodied experience.

“Memory creates the illusion of continuity.  In reality each experience has its own experiencer and the sense of identity is due to the common factor at the root of all experiencer-experience relations.  Identity and continuity are not the same.   Just as each flower has its own colour, but all colours are caused by the same light, so do many experiencers appear in the undivided and indivisible awareness, each separate in memory, identical in essence."

How is this supreme awareness to be got?  Essentially what M. says is that you must ‘let it come to you’.  Practice.  You will not become isolated locked in an esoteric delusion, the erosion of separateness will be steady.  The ‘I AM’ practice makes you stick  to the moment and not be carried along.

The Sense of 'I AM' (2)

Our  friend Q, the questioner, reverts to a Humean position.

“I am always somebody with its memories and habits.  I know no other ‘I am’.”

How does a conscious state become conscious of itself as a series, asks Hume, and proceeds not to give a very satisfactory answer.  By implication Maharaj would say to him, ‘perhaps you ought to ask someone who knows the answer  to that conundrum.’  It is after all very important to discover whether you are the body or something else. “Or maybe nothing at all?”  If you could resolve that then you would cease to worry about a great many things that now bother you, namely, friends, health, fortune etc.

This attitude is so outside the scope of the mind of friend Q that he does not see these benefits and in a way he is right.  Going on this adventure into viveka/discrimination on the basis of supposed benefit is a poor approach.  M. implies this by reverting to a recommendation to an open minded practice of ‘I AM’.

“When the mind stays in the ‘I am’, without moving, you enter a state which cannot be verbalized but can be experienced.  All you need to do is try and try again.  After all the sense ‘I am’ is always with you, only you have attached all kinds of things to it - body, feelings, thoughts, ideas, possessions etc.  All these self-identifications are misleading,  Because of them you take yourself to be what you are not.”

More later: