The Problem of Religious Diversity and God's Hiddenness

 

Salience which I have written a note on recently:

salience

has a very interesting etymology.

salient

In other words, what is it that leaps out at you, that impresses by its, to you, obvious prominence.  If you are of a logico-empirical cast of mind then the difficulties presented by those associated problems of the diversity of religions and God's hiddenness will be salient.  This is where the light is and here is the locus of your search though what you seek is in the dark elsewhere.

What do the Marshs miss, what are they not seeing:

diversity paper

Specsavers:

not seeing

They are like the Mulla Nusruddin who was searching under the street lamp for his keys even though he had lost them in the house.  His house was not electrified at the time.

There are several luminaries who are not in the least baffled by diversity, of any kind.  God isn’t hidden, merely that the logico-empirical method can’t find Him.  Shankaracarya does not hesitate in his declaration that the Vedas are part of the superimposition on the Absolute and not the truth.  They are an interim position or a metaphorical projection of the Unknowable, Unnameable. The great modern sage Sri Swami Sadchidanandendra writes:

Thus the means of knowledge called the Veda is ultimateley seen to be an illusion.  And its power to effect release through destroying Ignorance is also an illusion.  And on this basis one might wonder whether direct knowledge of the supreme Self was itself also an illusion, or whether it was real.  If it were an illusion, then the liberation it effected would also be  illusory, and in that case what would be the point in the upanishadic discipline?  If, on the other hand, we say that direct knowledge of the Self is real, then how could real direct knowledge arise from illusory upanishadic texts?

Further down Sri S.S.S. answers this doubt:

Know that the supreme reality is self-evident and self-established.  For superimposed fancies could not sustain themselves for an instant without the supreme reality as their substratum.

So by extension all scriptures are of their nature ways of focusing the mind.  Each has its own internal coherence but the final truth is apophatic and lies under ‘the cloud of unknowing’.

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)

Hypostasis (Reification) in the Pancapadika of Padmapada.

 

This beginningless Ignorance is referred to in the Vedas, Smrtis, Epics and Puranas as Name and Form, the Undeveloped, Ignorance, Maya, Nature (prakrti), Non-perception, the Unmanifest, Darkness (tamas), the Cause, Dissolution, Power, the Great Sleep (mahasupti), Sleep (nidra), the Indestructible, the Shining Ether.  In different places it is spoken of in many different ways.  It is spoken of as preventing the manifestation of Consciousness in its true form as the Absolute and then producing the appearance of the individual soul.  It is spoken of as the wall on which are painted the pictures of the impressions resulting from our meditations, rituals and acquired skills in previous lives.  It is spoken of as that which remains in dreamless sleep as the mere latent impression of its power of projection, concealing the light of Consciousness.  (P.P. pg.98 f./20 - version of Sri Swami Satchidanandendra Saraswati in his 'The Method of the Vedanta)

It is clear from that list of epithets that Padmapada the purported author of the Pancapadika holds to a view of Avidya (Ignorance) that is hypostatic (reifying).   He draws this conclusion based on the Vedic tenet that only Knowledge banishes Ignorance.   There is such a thing as Knowledge therefore there must be Ignorance as its polar opposite.  Sri S.S.S. demurs.  Ignorance is just the very action of superimposition (adhyasa) and not an occult force bringing Ignorance into existence.  He writes:

“The author of the Pancapadika does not use the word Ignorance to designate that phenomenon of superimposition or erroneous cognition, which is well known as being subject to correction and cancellation through knowledge.  Why instead of doing that, he applies the term Ignorance to the Undeveloped Principle, which belongs to the realm of knowable objects, is a mystery.”

To clarify, in my understanding of him, Sri S.S.S. is objecting to an unwarranted expansion of the term ‘ignorance’ to the metaphysical sphere. An analogical use has become a metaphor and treated as an existent entity.