Rumination on Creation

 

The central fact is that this cosmos is within the living power of God as Being, Consciousness, Boundless reality.  Theories of how this operates in terms of the attention of the Divine  to history occur, an absurdly adventitious word, in this eternity.  Nevertheless I admit I like to play in the purlieus of the apophatic.  Lately I have been thinking about the Catholic concept of ensoulment, the idea that early in the life of the person a rational soul is infused into the physical reality.  At what point in the development of the foetus is a point that is disputed by causuists trying to discern the weight of the sin of abortion.  ‘All good fun’, as your mother used to say, ‘until someone loses an eye’.  What interests me is that this intuition lines up with the Vedantic one of nature as ‘jada’/inert.  It must be pervaded by consciousness and have the capacity for this pervasion, to reflect soul light in the form of the human person.  All nature/prakriti/urstoff reflects this light according to individual structures.

Indic cosmogenesis is cyclical passing from pralaya/dissolution to pralaya via the four ages/yugas.  The Christian believes in an historical unfolding, a progress towards the last days.  How both of those doctrinal views cohere with Darwinian evolution can result in paradox and puzzlement.  Karma, an Indic fundamental, must be beginningless.  That collides with pralaya.  The historically based doctrines have to cope with the great question of the arrival of the human being and whether we can distinguish between that creature and the rational ensouled person.  At what point did this ensoulment commence, with a group of hominids or a single couple.  Orthodoxy likes the latter and it is admittedly a beautiful subject for art.  The first chimp tea party is not.

Truth and Falsity in Advaita

 

In Advaita terms like ‘mithya'/false, avidya/ignorance and their synonyms are sprinkled about with abandon but what is their existential import in the life of a seeker?  When I encounter lies, untruth, falsity in my everyday existence I take, when I am at my best, a moral attitude.  I am affronted, I reject this version of reality, this cannot stand.  Can I accept that adhyasa/superimposition is false in the same manner or do I rather think that it is hyperbolic to do so?Adhyasa may be at the core of the deep structure of reality, the discovery of which I am deeply interested in, yet not be opposed to the validity, in its own terms, of the everyday.  One reality underlies the other without negating it.

Tantric Saying: What is here is there, what is not here is not anywhere.

Superimposition/Adhyasa in the Preamble to the Brahma-Sutra Bhasya.

 

I’m going to write about the development of the idea of superimposition (adhyasa) and mutual superimposition in the preamble to the commentary by Adi Sankaracarya on the Brahma Sutra Bhasya.   It starts off with the classic aporia: how does that out there the object, material and limited come to be in here in my consciousness which is immaterial and therefore unextended as such.  To develop the theory that he proposes he offers the analogy of confusion ie. a rope coming to be seen as a snake.  The snake is superimposed on our consciousness.  To use the example of confusion as an example of what happens during normal veridical perception is to say the least paradoxical and asking for trouble.  Anyway that is the first adhyasa example, two ‘external’ objects are confused.  I have ‘external’ in quotes to remind you that Sankara is a realistic thinker and that there is no truck with the contrast between ‘external’ and ‘internal’.

Moving on from that there is the development of what I am going to call the second adhyasa, the ‘internal’ one in which the qualities of the mental and physical are superimposed on the self and the nature of the self is superimposed on the physical and mental.  This is objected as not being a true superimposition which involves two external objects.  If it were really superimposition in the first sense the self and the mind/body/ would cancel each other out.  The dialogue between the Master and the Disciple in Sankara’s ‘Upadesa Sahasri’ Chap.2: #54/#55 develops this debate.

My analysis of what must have been a common impasse in the acceptance of the teaching is that the second/mutual superimposition analogy is developed on the basis of the first which is a natural phenomenon and therefore germane to standard perception whilst the second is to do with a spiritual and simultaneous event, the classic form of avidya/ignorance.  In the first adhyasa the items supplant each other, in the second adhyasa there is interpenetration.  It’s like the famous cartoon of the duck/rabbit.  Which is it, both or neither?

“The teacher said: “Listen.  It is true that the Self and the body are well-known, but they are not well-known to all people to be the objects of different knowledges, like a human being and a trunk of a tree.  (Question: How are they known then?) (Reply) (They are always known) to be the objects of an undifferentiated knowledge.  For no one knows them to be the objects of different knowledges saying, ‘This is the body’ and ‘This is the Self’.  It is for this reason that people are deluded about the nature of the Self and of the non-Self and say, ‘The Self is of this nature’ and ‘It is not of this nature’.  It was this peculiarity with reference to which I said that there was no such rule  (viz. only well-known things could be superimposed on each other.)” (Ch.2:#54 ‘Upadesa Sahasri’.)

The focus of the first adhyasa is on the real transfer that occurs between the object and the mind of the pereceiver, that of the second adhyasa is on the unreal transfer between the Self and the body.

I suppose what I’m trying to express is that when you move from the normal conventional reality of the First Adhyasa you move into the apophatic reality of the Second Adhyasa where language cannot go and knowledge is impossible because there is no other.

 

'Night and Morning' by Edward Bulwer-Lytton (pub. 1841)

 

Being bothered by an excess of coincidence debars you from the enjoyment of the fiction of Lord Edward or is it Edward Lord Bulwer-Lytton.  In ‘Morning and Night’ pub. 1841 he strains your tolerance of a characteristic Victorian novel hazard to the ultimate point.  Add in the melodrama of lost marriage lines, multiple changes of fortune from extreme wealth to extreme poverty, walking on the wild side with coiners and con men and all dressed in fustian with periodic excursions into euphuism.  A slugging brew which you can admire for its insolence as you suspect that he may be trifling with you to see how much you can take.  I happen to enjoy that sort of excess.  Anything may happen and it usually does.  The point of this novel is the study of character; don’t let the cumulative unlikeliness put you off.  There are great portraits of evil, the sort that stays within the bounds of the law and also that which is outlawry to the uttermost.  The latter is represented by William Gawtrey:

"William Gawtrey was one of those men who are born to exert a certain influence and ascendency wherever they may be thrown; his vast strength, his redundant health, had a power of themselves—a moral as well as physical power. He naturally possessed high animal spirits, beneath the surface of which, however, at times, there was visible a certain undercurrent of malignity and scorn. “

The man that is saved by him from the Bow Street Runners is Philip Beaufort aka Philip Morton the issue of a secret marriage to Catherine Morton the daughter of a tradesman.  The uncle of Philip père is a stickler for the separation of the classes and would cut him off without a penny and leave everything to his brother Robert Beaufort.

"“If ever,” said he, and he looked grimly at Philip while he spoke, “a gentleman were to disgrace his ancestry by introducing into his family one whom his own sister could not receive at her house, why, he ought to sink to her level, and wealth would but make his disgrace the more notorious. If I had an only son, and that son were booby enough to do anything so discreditable as to marry beneath him, I would rather have my footman for my successor. You understand, Phil!”

 After many years of keeping this marriage secret the uncle finally dies leaving everything to Beaufort senior and the two boys Sidney and Philip are set to be scions of the aristocracy with £20,000 income a year.  Having secured in a good hiding place the marriage lines not telling anybody where and also just about to solemnise the union before the eyes of the world, Papa has to go and get killed by a fall from a horse.  Robert the younger brother who has been promised a goodly cut of the legacy beyond his legal entitlement according to the will:

"Well, to return to Arthur. Don’t trouble yourself about his education—that shall be my care. He shall go to Christ Church—a gentleman-commoner, of course—and when he is of age we’ll get him into parliament. Now for yourself, Bob. I shall sell the town-house in Berkeley Square, and whatever it brings you shall have. Besides that, I’ll add L1500. a year to your L1000.—so that’s said and done. Pshaw! brothers should be brothers.—Let’s come out and play with the boys!”

Arthur is Robert’s son, a pleasant if insipid sort of chap being generally good but weak and easily led by false friends when without the marriage lines the estates fall into his brother’s hands who reverts to type cutting off the widow and her putative bastards with £200 a year.

The character of Robert Beaufort is described thus:

“Mr. Robert Beaufort was generally considered by the world a very worthy man. He had never committed any excess—never gambled nor incurred debt—nor fallen into the warm errors most common with his sex. He was a good husband—a careful father—an agreeable neighbour—rather charitable than otherwise, to the poor. He was honest and methodical in his dealings, and had been known to behave handsomely in different relations of life. Mr. Robert Beaufort, indeed, always meant to do what was right—in the eyes of the world! He had no other rule of action but that which the world supplied; his religion was decorum—his sense of honour was regard to opinion. His heart was a dial to which the world was the sun: when the great eye of the public fell on it, it answered every purpose that a heart could answer; but when that eye was invisible, the dial was mute—a piece of brass and nothing more.”

All the evil characters are given the same degree of attention and one cannot doubt their efficacy in pursuit of their ends.  This brings in that crushing irony which we call coincidence.  If Lytton were to speak to us he might say:

' I’ve made it silly enough even for you, complacent bourgeois, consumer of three volume novels that under the penumbra of Mudie must be fit for the maiden aunt with a serious aspidistra habit, of course it must, but you my true reader know that this is precisely what does not happen; the coach with its quarterings is not spotted in the fog and the naive girl is fallen into the clutches of a libertine lord to be used and then discarded, worn out bedizened frailty of the night.

Now do you get it.  Solicitor Blackwell is a sink of turpitude.  Bow Runner Sharp is blunted by contact with soveriegns.  Good solicitor Barlow is not overwhelmed with work, naturally, so he can pursue righteousness to the ends of the kingdom.

But you know all this because you complained bitterly about the sordid Newgate novels and I wrote preface after preface defending my portrayal of a society that swallowed up the weak and deprived the orphan of his due portion’.

It all came out right in the end.  Justice is done, of course it is.  Excellent novel.  When you wear your irony glasses euphuism becomes penetrating satire.