Brahma-Sutra-Bhasya I.i.4

 How is Brahman known?  That is the question asked in a frequently referred to sutra B.S.Bh I.i.4  .The answer is of course through the Vedas.  Does that rule out any other way of knowing Brahman.  The standard answer is yes; what is beyond the ken of the human mind cannot be demonstrated rationally.  Yet at the same time Sankara offers in his counter to non orthodox views various indications of the intelligence inherent in the workings of creation. The world for instance cannot have come out of  insentient pure matter as that would deny what we know of the cosmos and the emergence of consciousness.  That in a sense is an incipient argument from design.Importantly all arguments that state that it is useless to rely on what can neither be accepted or rejected in a worldly empirical way are voided by the fact of realisation.  

“...it is but reasonable that all ideas of duality, involving action, accessories, etc., should be eradicated, because the absolute Brahman is neither acceptable nor 

rejectable.”

Metaphysical indications as are offered by the Thomistic 5 Ways, contingency, motion etc., are not accepted because a generalised inference cannot reach the unknowable. 

Very good it is said: You have heard about Brahman but that does not mean that you now have come to a knowledge of Brahman.  That would be just like having your mistaking of a rope for a snake pointed out to you.  Not so is the reply: hearing, reflection, and meditation on the Self is enjoined.

At this point the Vedantin comes in to summarize and clarify everything.  He mentions the things that are conducive to a state in which the truth of the Vedas will become clear.  The various post mortem fates of those that do good indicate a gradation of achievement.  Of course Sankara points out quoting an Upanisad: “For an embodied being there can be no eradication of happiness and sorrow to be sure”. (Ch.VIII.xii.1)  Embodied in this case means one who is identified with the body.

Taking the Vedantin role Sankara makes clear that unembodiedness is not, and cannot be, achieved, as a result of good deeds.  If you are definitely bodiless, what can this mean?  The only sensible conclusion is that the enlightened one does not consider his identity to be personal.  There is a physical form with perhaps residual karma that may require spectacles to avoid walking into the furniture but his identity is impersonal.  There is no doubt that some students of Advaita find this disembodiedness a sticking point.  They take it quite literally and are puzzled by the groans of pain emitted by a jnani when he stubs his toe or suffers from cancer.

Jnana then is not a sort of good luck/fortune thing (sampad).  It does not depend on that.  It is the direct absorption by reality or the recognition that such was the case all along. “ Brahman is denied to be the object of an act of knowing.”

“By presenting Brahman as not an object on account of its being the inmost Self (of the knower), they remove the differences of the “known”, the “knower”, and the “knowledge” that are fancied through ignorance.”  

My own way of getting this is that you cannot get ‘outside’ the self in order to know it.  You cannot comprehend it which is why the upanisad says ‘neti’, ‘neti’, not this/not this.

Now comes an important epistemological point:

Opponent: Is not knowledge a kind of mental action?

Actually no. Knowledge is an achievement, a state.  Meditation though mental may be done or not as the case may be.  Knowledge is the immediate fruit of a valid means of knowledge.  Might the application of these means of knowledge be an action?  Yes.  So knowledge is then a mental condition but not an act.  But in the case of ‘jnana’ or self-realisation knowledge is not grasped by the mind and it is beyond what can be described because the Self cannot be comprehended by the Self.

As I read this sutra I realise that it places all the important points of Advaita in juxtaposition.  What is its purport, its summum bonum?  How is that achieved and can we even speak of an achievement?  The answer to that would appear to be yes because knowledge is an achieved condition.  Even though knowledge is an achieved condition yet the preparation for that state involves actions which are enjoined in the Upanishads.  

The knowledge of Brahman is said to give rise to unembodiedness.  What can that mean?  Some take it literally but that can’t be right because clearly the sage walks and talks and has a physical presence.  This is a state of knowledge in which the identification with the body ceases.

“…the idea of embodiedness is a result of false nescience.  Unless it is through the false ignorance of identifying the Self with the body, there can be no embodiedness for the Self.  And we said that the unembodiedness of the Self is eternal, since it is not a product of action.”

Karma has ended for the sage but for the rest of us hearing, meditation and contemplation  are used to bring on that state of enlightenment. (sravana, manana, nididhyasana)

'Now in November" by Josephine Johnson (pub. 1924)

 ‘Now in November’ by Josephine Johnson is an extraordinary first novel. With it she won the pulitzer prize of 1935 and at the age of 25 she is the youngest ever winner and a very worthy one. It is really quite excellent, deft, precise, impassioned and yet detached, holding back the overarching fear of losing everything again. Father, mother and the 3 girls have fallen back on the feeble security of a mortgaged farm that was in the family but now neglected and overgrown.

The house was old even then, not log, but boards up and down as barns are made. It was overgrown with the trumpet and wild red ivy-vines, twisted and heavy on the porch. Wild grapes were black across the well in autumn and there was an arbor of tame ones over the pump. Father found an old thrush’s nest hunched up in the leafless vines and took it down so that Merle wouldn’t mistake it for a new nest in spring and keep waiting for birds that never came. She filled it full of round stones and kept it up on the mantelpiece, maybe because she thought that the fire would hatch stone birds,—I didn’t know. She was full of queer notions and things that never existed on earth. She seemed older sometimes than even Kerrin who was born five years ahead.

It is Marget who is the narrator, 14 when the novel opens, and writing in retrospect 10 years later. Merle is 10 and Kerin is 15. Time is of the seasons and the years weave about the regular tasks of a mixed farm. Dad who is 57 when he comes back to the farm tries to do a lot, possibly not quite realistically though the girls Merle and Marget help. Internal evidence seems to indicate corn, sheep, cows, vegetable garden, fruit. No profit in any of it merely hard Scrabble survival at a time in America when markets had collapsed. If it was just a matter of feeding yourself you could stick it out but the incubus of mortgage lying heavy on you. The glimpses of beauty and ease are there overlain with crushing fear. Kerin though, intelligent and beautiful, is wild and wrought by an anger which she has taken from her father, an impatient, wrathful man ready to criticize waste or dawdling. She wants his love but they being like one another repel. Her birthday present to him goes awry:

She held it out toward him but kept her fingers still on it, and we could see that it was a folded knife tipped with silver on the end. “This is supposed to be your present, Dad.” She sounded excited and full of pride. “Watch what I’ve learned to do—taught myself how to do it!” She opened the knife and aimed at a brown spot on the wall, a little spot hardly big enough to see and high up across the room. “Look out!” Dad shouted. “Stop!” He shoved back his chair and tried to snatch the knife, but jerked at her arm instead. Merle and I screamed out, and the knife went wild, straight at old Cale’s blind head, and slashed across his nose. “God damn you!” Father shouted. He grabbed at Kerrin and knocked her back against the wall. Merle started to cry and Kerrin screamed out some horrible things. 

Kerin’s instability increases. The great drought comes along to put the final kibosh on things. On and on it goes. Long established oaks die, the land becomes utterly parched:

The fifth month of the drouth began with nothing but clouds and the taunt of an hour’s drizzle. Nothing to soak the ground below an inch deep. September now and the fields more barren than in winter. The pastures where mules and hogs had been not even covered with dying grass. They were eaten to earth and looked like the hide of a mangy hound. Even the ironweed was withered. For a mile around there was nothing but ragweed in the fields, dust-green and heavy-pollened. Locust trees in the south woods died together. Small gold leaves sifted down and were covered with dust. A weird sick acre full of the dying twisted trees, and underneath them the dying ironweed-stalks. The dead elm leaves hung like folded bats.

The girls roam the land away from Kerin's unsettling energy which increasingly begins to haunt the family.  Add to that the need to meet the mortgage.

 I used to think of it sometimes when the orchards started to bloom and changed from a greyness into white fur along the plum branches, and a rose light came in the peaches. And I used to think of it when the apricots began to redden, and you could look down from the hog-lot’s edge into a valley full of white smoke, more like a gulf full of white spray, where the giant pear trees were. I’d scratch my nail along the post and I’d think—when somebody does like this on a scrap of paper, then all these things are gone, and a little scrawl is bigger than trees or valley.

Grim indeed that the scratch of a signature can eliminate a terrain. Is it a misery chronicle? Objectively yes but at our distance as readers we see the indomitable spirit refined by suffering. The writing is beautiful, rolling along with gentle cadence as quiet and self-effacing and noble as its narrator. 

A neglected classic, her most achieved work, the social justice activism seems to have exchanged the creative spirit of primary immediacy for the world of slogans. I’m reading it again.

Tangential to 'The God who may be' (pace Richard Kearney)

 Reading Richard Kearney on Anatheism and ‘God who may be’ I find myself to be the perfect example of naiveté. I know nothing about the quarrels within the phenomenological family or the importation of theism into the pellucid waters of our immediate awareness.  

Do we see clearly into the depths or are the refractive indices too baffling? The naive person has an advantage over the savants. His only difficulty is to stay in the present moment and not be distracted by shiny objects.

There is the natural or sahaj samadhi. I suppose it is the end or goal of the God that may be the God that is allowed to manifest in every moment. Every moment in this sense is your last. Is this the sense of eschatology that R.K. wishes to remind us of? Probably it is something else, a technical term.

You have to decide. Do I want this or not? If I allow this will I end up having lost all my friends and be bracketed with snake handlers by polite society?

Nearby is the domain of the Imaginal (Henry Corbin) the country of no place.

The place where Ludwig Feuerbach starts, the expansible consciousness, could be an entry into the core of Sanathana Dharma but not being aware of this he misses his exit and continues down the highway of materialism.

What is it that arises out of the immediacy of awareness? What is it that brings on the experience of connatural ity, that is founded on actual connaturality? Is it not perceptuality.

Exodus 3:13 – Evil is Going away from the being of God who is. Living in the not-being, draining reality.

Q: How does one approach the Being of God?

A: Through consciousness which is ‘pratibodha videtam’ known in every state

of awareness.

The Claverings by Anthony Trollope

 

If you were to lay down the bare outline of this novel it might seem to have some of the lineaments of the romance novel, a Mills & Boone confection, but it really isn’t though as I read I felt, ‘should I be enjoying this so much’?.  Of all the Trollopes that I have read there was not the slightest sense of the suspense of hiatus or drag at any point.  It just moved along beautifully and the shill I, shall I, of Harry Clavering’s dual engagement, his divided soul, his velleities that required careful marshalling and man’oeuvering by the ladies of the Clavering and the Burton clans is fascinating.  They are the heroines of the flagrantly feminist novel.  The other two ladies Julia Lady Ongar and Florence Burton, bad girl V good girl are in love with vacillating Harry. 

To be clear Julia nee Brabazon has jilted Harry Clavering a fellow of Cambridge whom she traduces by referring to him as an usher i.e. a schoolmaster’s assistant.  She owes too much money, he has not enough.  There seems to be a suggestion that this Harry chap the rector’s son has more than his share of manly beauty, an Apollo no less, but he’s broke, that’s no joke what with the cost of frocks, maids etc, etc.  Lord Ongar, libertine, debauchee, and sot who affects a crow black wig will win fair lady with 60 or 70,000 sterling pounds p.a., a castle a beautiful dower house and 7,000 pa should he predecease her.  Which of course he does attended by a less than desolate Julia, creepy Sophie Gardeloup, and her charmingly sinister brother the Count Paterhoff.

Now she is free and back in London from Florence; alone and shunned by society, trailing vague rumours of infidelity initiated by Sophie and the Count that allow them to control her to some extent.  Her sister Hermione  is married to Lord Clavering, Harry’s first cousin.  Down the park of the great house is the rector whose living and personal money plus his wife’s 800 l p.a. allows him to subcontract the tiresome parts of his cure of souls to a Mr.Saul for 70 l p.a.  He hunts until Bishop Proudie (Barchester) asks him to desist.

This novel is about Famille Clavering so all of them have speaking parts.  One charming sub-plot is the wooing of Fanny Clavering by Mr.Saul who is a gentleman, of course, but not of our kind, country family squire-ish sort.   The cold cruel Lord Hugh is a well drawn portrait of complete authoritarian selfishness, tightfisted, controlling, brutal. Archie his brother is an ex-navy idler fond of a bet willing to take on Lady Ongar also.  His attempt to use Sophie to advance his cause is comedic.

Where’s the energy, the plot dynamo? It’s Harry who somehow manages to promise himself to two women.  The other women who want to rectify the situation come to doubt him as a fine thing and a wonderful capture.  Nevertheless he is the prey of one of theirs and not to be let go lightly.  In another case:

Mrs. Clavering, who knew well how to do such work, was gradually bringing her husband round to endure the name of Mr. Saul. Twenty times had he asserted that he could not understand it; but, whether or no such understanding might ever be possible, he was beginning to recognize it as true that the thing not understood was a fact.

This is one of the stand alone Trollope novels.  It has been described as perfect and really its interweaving of the strands of Victorian life is masterly.  Before I commit any more cliches can I urge you to read it.