Anirvachanaya

 I see anirvachanaya has come up as a topic in an advaitic blog which does not welcome ontological pondering so I won’t engage with it there. 

anirvachanaya

  It gets to the anirvachanaya quandary by way of an initial stipulation of  what is really real.

“Sat (Real): That which exists in all three periods of time (past, present, and future) and is never sublated or negated. Only Brahman/Consciousness fits this definition.

1. Asat (Unreal): That which is absolutely non-existent and can never be perceived, such as  “the son of a barren woman” or “the horns of a hare”.

Framing a position by starting from a stipulation is I would suggest a pointless venture.  That quandary about the co-existence of the real and the unreal only arises when conclusions have been reached by other means, down the line as it were.

Ask yourself: How does Sankara open his ontological position on the real?  He accepts sense perception but is puzzled by what the Greeks called an aporia (plural aporiai) : How is perception possible?  How does that out there concrete reality somehow come to be in here in my consciousness as an awareness of the thing as it is.  The concrete and immaterial consciousness are incommensurable.  

I have gone into the nuts and bolts of the progression of Shankara’s  thinking on this subject several times so I won’t repeat it here (follow the topic heads below).  Essentially what allows us to know the object is the unity of the substratum. (vritti - upadhi- adhyasa).  If I may be so bold as to add my own twist on the problem.  Ask why the overall form of awareness, which is ‘I AM’ , does not reflect back on itself instead of reaching the object.  

This is the fundamental transcendental hypothesis as sketched in the Preamble to the Brahma Sutra Bhasya.  I would hold that it dissolves the Real/Unreal dyad by establishing the concept of the non-dual or Advaita.  That division has become factitious.