The I AM of Nisargadatta Paradox and Practice

 

This focus on ‘I AM’ by Nisargadatta as per the injunction of his guru is not a version of the Cartesian critique.  It is not a reflection on fundamental data out of which we proceed to construct a world, in Descartes’ case by the grace of God who is not a deceiver.  It is primarily a practice and not an epistemological or ontological position.  Yet it can appear to be so and Maharaj (Nisargadatta) often in his elucidations veers close to a subjective position. My view is that this interpretation is due to the action of the very potent mind virus that is Subjective Idealism.  Realism seems too naive; a mind independent world falls before the fact of illusion, the state of our brain is the state of the world and so forth.  All this purports to be the thinking man’s position.

Q:When I wake up in the morning, the world is already there, waiting for me. Surely the world comes into being first. | do, but much later, at the earliest at my birth. The body mediates between me and the world. Without the body there would be neither me nor the world.

M:The body appears in your mind, your mind is the content of your consciousness; you are the motionless witness of the river of consciousness which changes eternally without changing you in any way. Your own changelessness is so obvious that you do not notice it. Have a good look at yourself and all these misapprehensions and misconceptions will dissolve. Just as all the little watery lives are in water and cannot be without water, so all the universe Is in you and cannot be without you. (Chapter 44 I AM THAT)

Nisargadatta recognises the realism position of the Questioner in this chapter and  by challenging it with a seemingly subjective idealist position attempts to prod him towards a deeper analysis. It proceeds by the usual adhiropa/apavada dialectical method which is the primary procedure of Advaita.  Each understanding is sublated by a subsequent one.  You have to dwell where you are and only move via insight.  You can’t just intellectually claim  a new understanding, you must feel the force of it.

In this case the authority of the guru challenges the standard realist position, a naive common sense one, infra philosophical as Etienne Gilson puts it.  Is there a way that both can be simultaneously true, this world as mind dependent and a real mind independent world?  Nisargadatta asserts:

In other words, the absolutely material and the absolutely spiritual, the totally objective and the totally subjective are identical, both in substance and essence.

How this ‘identity’ is to be understood is explicated in the ‘Vedanta Paribhasa’ of Adhvarindra. cf topic

Kena Upanishad on 'Can Brahman be Known'?

 

3: The eye does not go there, nor speech, nor mind.  We do not know (Brahman to be such and such), hence we are not aware of any process of instructing about it.

4: “That (Brahman) is surely different from the known; and again, It is above the unknown” - such was (the utterance) we heard of the the ancient (teachers) who explained it to us.

(Kena Upanisad I.3, 4 )

There  is what seems a straightforward admission that the logico-empirical method cannot establish the existence of Brahman.  Why might that be so?  If Brahman is the Self then the Self cannot be grasped in the way that any object might be.   The consciousness that is being grasped would have to grasp itself being grasped and that grasping of etc.  Bertrand Russell noted this in a letter to Frege.  There is inevitable infinite regress.  Shankara in his commentary :

Though the mind thinks and determines other things, it does not think or determine itself; for of it, too, Brahman is the Self.  A thing is cognised only by the mind and the senses.  As Brahman is not an object of perception to these, therefore,na vidmah,we do not know.

How then is Brahman to be communicated or taught to a disciple?  Brahman escapes all categories but there is deep wisdom embedded in the realised masters of traditional authority.  Put the disciple in the vicinity of a realised sage and he will begin to resonate with the knowledge of “the Brahman that is immediate and direct - the Self that is within all” (Brhadaranyaka Up. III.iv.1)

In this way, the text, “Thus we heard” etc., states how through a succession of preceptors and disciples was derived the purport of the sentence which establishes Brahman that Self of all which is devoid of distinguishing features, and is the light of pure consciousness.  Moreover, Brahman can only be known through such a traditional instruction of preceptors and not through argumentation, nor by study (or exposition), intelligence, great learning, austerity, sacrifices, etc.....