Addendum to "A Tree in the Yard' 17/7/26

 It is important to distinguish between the object which can be grasped by the senses I.e. the tree in the yard and the metaphysical reality which makes that perception possible.  That reality is not itself perceptible but it can be realized.  That realization does not refer to a special mental condition or continuing experience.  Sankara in BSBh rejects the notion that samadhi is equivalent to the highest realization.  He regards it as just another state of mind.

What meaning then can we give to the notion of realization?  It is of course an unshakable belief in the unity of Being, the I AM that Nisargadatta focussed on during the time of his sadhana.  It creates a transformation in the qualities of the person, those that can be experienced by others.  It must be said that a penchant for the collection of Rolls Royce cars and high end watches is a counter indication of realization.  Spontaneous compassion and immediate insight into the spiritual condition of others is an essential indication.  Being in the presence of a sage can raise one’s own awareness to the point that instruction seems to come from within. I’m not sure that faith in him is even necessary.  It's a matter of spiritual harmonics.

The Incomprehensible I AM

 I AM is not a thought.  As a practice it is an avenue to being.  It does not carry any ontological weight as a theory.  It  is purely being present to the self luminous.  No particular thoughts matter because all awareness is pervaded by that presence.   There is no understanding this I AM because you cannot get outside it to comprehend it.  I live it but it escapes my grasp.

McGinn and the Presence of a Sage

 When I use the expression ‘pervade’ of the inert body/mind that is pervaded by consciousness I do not wish to imply that consciousness is an external force that lights up the inert.  The being of things is consciousness.  To be is to be conscious.

This is counter to the idea of consciousness as an emerging power.  What is of its nature conscious has nothing but complexity of structure added to it to gain in awareness.  The self luminous awareness of man is the pinnacle of this evolution.  

Going back to McGinn it must be admitted that this is also a mystery overcast by the cloud of unknowing.  All that the seeker can do is put themselves in that luminous darkness which he realises by his being but which he cannot know in an objective sense.  The comprehension is rather transformative and not apodeictic.  Put yourself in the presence of a sage.  That helps. 

The Disappearance of the World in Advaita Vedanta

 

It’s important to read the Upanishads carefully and distinguish between literal and metaphorical utterances.  They were not written in the manner of philosophical documents which carefully make these distinctions.  Certainly we are at the very edge of language, the apophatic, that is a given; yet if we hold that on realisation the world disappears because the organs of perception are trumped then we stray into nonsense.  Swami Satchidanandendra observes:

“For once the true nature of the Self is known, there can no longer be any more experience of the true nature of the Self is known, there can no longer be any more experience of the means and objects of empirical cognition.  For the final means of knowledge put an end to the condition of the Self as a knower whose knowledge comes through the empirical means of knowledge. And in putting an end to this condition, the final means of knowledge itself ceases any longer to be a means of knowledge, just as the means of knowledge, present in a dream cease to be such on waking. (B.G. Bhasya II.69)

Realisation of the Absolute is not anywhere found either to destroy or create any reality.  What it is invariably found to do is to put an end to Ignorance.  So here also, the sense of not being the Absolute and the sense of not being the totality of all that exists, which are induced by Ignorance alone, should be put to an end by realisation of the Absolute.  (Brhad.Up. Bhasya: I.iv.10)

(from ‘The Method of the Vedanta’ pgs. 62/3)

The imputation here is not that all ordinary means of knowledge are transformed into clairvoyance or clairaudience.  The organs remain intact but now there is no identification of the Self as the agent.  ' Only the Gunas are acting’ (B.G. 14.19)

I AM realisation

 Further to the ‘I AM’ inquiry which Nisargadatta was instructed in by his guru I find that there is a universal aspect to this realisation.  Jacques Maritain in his book ‘Degrees of Knowledge’ mentions a couple.

One who is very near to us one day gave us the following testimony of such a knowledge: “Before receiving the faith,” that person (his wife Raissa ?) told us “it often happened that by a sudden intuition I experienced the reality of my own being, of the deepest, first principle that placed me outside nothingness.  It was a powerful intuition and its violence often frightened me; that intuition gave me, for the first time, knowledge of a metaphysical absolute”

Maritain in a footnote to this witness:

In Jean-Paul’s autobiography mention is made of a like intuition:

“ One morning, while I was still a child, I was standing on the threshold of my house and looked to the left, towards the wood-shed, when suddenly the idea came to me out of the sky like a bolt from the blue:I am an I  and from that moment it never left me; my ego had seen itself for the first time and for ever.”

Lord Alfred Tennyson :

A kind of waking trance I have frequently had, quite up from boyhood, when I have been all alone. This has generally come upon me through repeating my own name two or three times to myself, silently, till all at once, as it were, out of the intensity of the consciousness of individuality, the individuality itself seemed to fade away into boundless being, and this not a confused state, but the clearest of the clearest, the surest of the surest, utterly beyond words, where death was almost a laughable impossibility, the loss of personality (if so it were) seeming no extinction but the only true life… I am ashamed of my feeble description. Have I not said that the state is beyond words?

Absorption, Pralaya, Deep Sleep and Samadhi

Reflections on Brahma-Sutra-Bhasya II.i.9:
When we speak of material cause and effect in the classical examples of clay and vessels or gold and chains, rings etc made of gold we need to distinguish between the different senses of cause and effect that are used in sentences such as - The fungus on your bathroom wall is caused by condensation or smoking cause lung cancer and so forth. In the one you have matter taking different forms but viewed simply as matter it remains unchanged. There is no question of their being a reversal of effect back into cause, matter will always have a certain form even it is not conventionally recognised as such. Effects in the other cases such as condensation causing fungus remain as an advancement of a situation, there is a temporal aspect which is irreversible.

There is an analogical connection between the different examples of cause and effect but none of them in my view is the central paradigmatic case. Vedanta seems to make material cause/effect the paradigmatic one particularly in relation to cosmological speculation. However a hedging locution is employed when cause and effect are said to be non-different. They are claiming ground between the ‘same’ or ‘identical’ and ‘different’ or ‘separate’.

You could say that this is a monist view to be contrasted with the setting in motion of a Cosmos by a creative act. But when you consider the Doctrine of Divine Conservation the intimate connection between pure being and contingent being swings back towards non-difference.

Shankaracarya in his commentary on the Chandogya Upanishad proposes the idea that form is true in name only (i.e. this is a cup, pot etc), the reality is the clay itself which is unchanging. Here in the B.S.B. he offers the distinction between creation and creator as a mere appearance due to superimposition/adhyasa:

The way that the objection has to be met there (during continuance/creation) by holding that the cause is not affected by the product and its characteristics, these being superimposed on the cause by nescience, is equally to be followed in the case of dissolution as well.

How Nescience/Avidya (personal) or Maya (cosmic) ignorance arises is an interesting question that divides advaitins. In the right hand corner Tula Avidya and in the left hand corner Mula Avidya. That is a topic for another post.

In this commentary on B.S.B. II.i.9 Shankaracarya is more interested in the concept of absorption when the cosmos is reabsorbed into absolute pure being in the mode of pralaya. For the reasons given he holds that there is no difference in it. Resorption itself would be an impossibility if the effect should persist in the cause together with its peculiarities.

That brings him to consider personal experiences of absorption. We drop from the personal state of dreaming into deep sleep and our personal consciousness becomes impersonal and undifferentiated. The yogi in meditation can have a conscious experience of this absorption. What Shankaracarya has to say about this runs counter to the goal of yogic practice.

As in natural slumber and samadhi (absortion in divine consciousness), though there is a natural eradication of differences, still owing to the persistence of the unreal nescience, differences occur over again when one wakes up, similarly it can also happen here.

If samadhi is not realisation, what is? Only knowledge can eradicate ignorance. We must somehow come to know that we always are what we are and spinach doesn't help.