Neo-Advaita

What Sureshvara and Sankara are in agreement about is the need for sustained meditation. This is stressed because there is a strain of gnosticism in neo-advaita. Like, you are already there man. Ramana Maharshi speaks of effortless effort which can evolve into the effortless sahaj samadhi, the everyday condition of the enlightened. At this point there are no special states that you dip into and out of for longer or shorter periods of time, there is just the steady diffusion of the divine which passes through the spiritual presence of the form of the master. If they know that nothing has really changed in them how is it I can’t make that claim? True for them ought to be true for me. My sense of why this doesn’t work is because it is a linguistic formula. Language requires metaphors to surpass altereity. They blend and merge and attempt unity in a form which is subjective. The words of a sage are not conversible. Call them pneumatic whistling.

"What we can't say we can't say, and we can't whistle it either."( Frank Ramsey)

Sravana, Manana and Nididhyasana II

One of the things that exercises Swami S.S.S. in his magisterial The Method of the Vedanta is the apparently paradoxical nature of the injunction to Maitreyi by Yajnavalkya in the Bhrhadaranyaka Upanishad:

The Self, my dear Maitryi, should be realised - should be heard of , reflected on, and meditated upon. By the realisation of the Self, my dear, through hearing, reflection and meditation, all this is known.

(Brh.Up. II.iv.5)

The Vedas being a pramana or valid means of knowledge it is vital that it be unequivocal. Apparent conflict with other vedic statements must therefore be reconciled and considerable ingenuity is applied to that end. It is generally wrought by bringing in the contrast between higher and lower teachings. The one is from the general secular perspective immersed in avidya and the other is from the perspective of the realised sage. In one sense to enjoin dwelling on the Self is like telling someone ‘for as long as you live, you should breathe’. For other people that there is a Self comes as news and can be the beginning of the way out of samsara. The essential attitude for Swami S.S.S. is:

For the Veda will be authoritative means of knowledge if it can awaken anyone to the truth of the sole reality of the one Self, a truth inaccessible to any other mean of knowledge.

That is the faithful background out of which the commentors work and it explains the very close analysis which is applied to Yajnavalkya’s injunction.

The highest truth in the words of Swami:

When the Vedic text says There is no other seer ...but He, it means that, from the standpoint of the highest truth, the Self is not an object that can be seen. Even from the standpoint of worldly experience, one subject is never the object of the vision of another subject.

That last slightly gnomic sentence I take to mean that we can never experience what the other is experiencing as the other. The experience of that other self is opaque to us by definition.

About the question whether one could attain realisation on simply hearing - that thou art -Swami remarks that:

Sureshvara in his Brh. Vartika does give the appearance of saying that no one could attain direct and immediate intuition of the Self merely from hearing

Sankara in his Brahma Sutra commentary takes a positive view of sravana (hearing) (B.S.B. IV.i.2) and in fact in Sureshvara’s Naishkarmya Siddhi he is of the same mind. How is this to be reconciled? It seems that in the first statement he is saying that the normal path to realisation is through the hearing of the vedas and their injunctions and then passing on to manana and nididhyasana. The other uncanny alternative is that of the almost perfected person who has faith in the apoureshya (not of human) nature of the Vedas and their truth and who hearing That Thou Art gets it in its full import. I suppose that the way out of that unlikely scenario is that although this individual may have heard it before, he never really heard it.

Again Swami S.S.S. gives no example of such a one so I assume that here is an ideal limit case.

Mandana Misra on Adhiropa/Apavada (from The Method of Vedanta) (adhyaropa/apavada)

The usual understanding of material causality that is offered in advaitin commentary and explication is one that I have questioned in the past. In summary it takes the form - in all the objects made of clay only the clay is real the names of the artefacts are merely names of clay. To put it in Aristotelian terms the substantial reality is clay and the objects that are made of it accidental modifications. My objection was that clay is always instantiated in some form or other, there is no ‘pure’ clay.

Sri SSS in The Method of Vedanta (pg.292/3) writing of the view of Mandana Misra (Sureshvara?) in his work Brahma Siddhi :

The method of false attribution followed by subsequent retraction (adhyaropa-apavada) is also accepted. On this we have the following texts.

(Mandana Misra's view):
A thing can be described in words even when it is not known through any other means of knowledge apart from speech, and when there is no prior knowledge of of its connection with its name......

What is without particulars can be known through revelation. It is highlighted through the very negation of particulars. It is like the essence of gold. The essence of gold is never perceived unconcealed by some particular form, (my italics) whether it be a natural lump or a fashioned artefact like a necklace. And these latter are not the essence of gold. For when any of these forms are lost, the gold persists in another. But the entity that cannot be distinguished in perception from the particular form concealing it can be known mentally through the negation of the particulars and communicated to others. This method of communication is exemplified in the Veda in the text ‘This Self is expressed as “neither this not that”’. And it has been said by one of another school, ‘ When all universals have been eliminated , what remains over is the real’. (Bhartrhari, Vakya Padiya III.ii.21). Others again have said, ‘That which has no plurality is communicated through attribution followed by retraction’. (B. Siddhi p.26)

((Sri SSS adds a significant note))
It should be noted that there is here a certain difference from the doctrine of false attribution followed by later retraction taught by Bhagavatpada Sankara in that it is not taught that the attributions are false.

To put it another way, the concept ‘gold’ can be had without reference to anything given in sense perception. This incidentally is the position of Peter Geach in his classic Mental Acts. The notion of ‘false attribution’ cautioned against in Sri SSS’s note is the one generally offered and it seems to lead to there being a ‘real’ physical, actual clay that has no particular form.