Advaita’s paradox is that what makes perception to be a reflection of the real world, what Adhvarindra calls perceptuality, is also that which derealises the evident. What is true falsifies. Realism inverts itself. This is similar to the thought of Plato. Our personal fire creates the shadow world but when we emerge into the ultimate fire of the sun that shadow world is annihilated in the light of Logos.
What does ‘mithya’/false mean in the case of advaita? Is it not false by stipulation if you talk false to mean uncontradicted in the three moments of time, past/present/future. Like Parmenides they hold that what is changeful is unreal, it never really is or both is and is not. This rigorism is balanced by the concept of the non-dual. What is false is a world that is freestanding, self established. Both levels of reality are symbiotically linked, they flow into each other. There is the absolute (paramartha) and the relative (pratibhasika) the metaphysical and the conventional reality.
To controvert that opposed categorisation of conventional and metaphysical you have the moment of supreme insight called akhandadara vritti, the unbroken mental modification which reveals the truth of how perception is possible. We have, as it were, a window overlooking the metaphysical. It is the one through which we see. Everything flows together in a unity of being that allows for realism within the bounds of ‘the cave’.Empirically there is always more to know, to find out but knowledge itself has realism as the default position. Even getting things wrong proves it otherwise ‘wrong’, pace neo-modernism, is a meaningless concept.
Here I am weltering in a slough of mixed metaphors and analogies, windows, shadows, snakes, ropes, mirages. ‘Is this a dagger which I see before me’?
Recall the tantric saying: What is here is there, what is not here is not anywhere.
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