Confusion not Confounded in Advaita Vedanta

 There is an excellent reason why Vedanta has chosen the apparently paradoxical way of talking about perception using the phenomenon of confusion.  Confusion in Vedanta is taking something to be what it is not. The rope is taken to be a snake, the stump at dusk is taken to be a human form etc.  It is important here to distinguish between this mis-take and the related phenomena of delusion and illusion.  

The point is that there can only be confusion when there is a state of affairs that is the case.  We are thus tied into a reality.  The mental modification (vritti) is not the true reality but that true reality can be found.  

This way of looking at things runs counter to the Western conundrum known as the argument from illusion.  If, it is said, we are mistaken in this instance, may we not be globally in error. This view has its origin in Cartesian doubt.  What we are in contact with is the mental experience.  That there is an external world corresponding to this is due to the mercy of a God who is not a deceiver.  Vedanta is different in that there is an ontological connection between the vritti (mental modification) and the upadhi (limiting adjunct).  They share the same substratum.  They meet on the plane of being.

Advaita and the Paradox of Realism

 Advaita’s paradox is that what makes perception to be a reflection of the real world, what Adhvarindra calls perceptuality, is also that which derealises the evident.  What is true falsifies.  Realism inverts itself.  This is similar to the thought of Plato.  Our personal fire creates the shadow world but when we emerge into the ultimate fire of the sun that shadow world is annihilated in the light of Logos.  

What does ‘mithya’/false mean in the case of advaita?  Is it not false by stipulation if you talk false to mean uncontradicted in the three moments of time, past/present/future.  Like Parmenides they hold that what is changeful is unreal, it never really is or both is and is not.  This rigorism is balanced by the concept of the non-dual.  What is false is a world that is freestanding, self established.  Both levels of reality are symbiotically linked, they flow into each other.  There is the absolute (paramartha) and the relative (pratibhasika) the metaphysical and the conventional reality. 

To controvert that opposed categorisation of conventional and metaphysical you have the moment of supreme insight called akhandadara vritti, the unbroken mental modification which reveals the truth of how perception is possible.  We have, as it were, a window overlooking the metaphysical. It is the one through which we see.  Everything flows together in a unity of being that allows for realism within the bounds of ‘the cave’.Empirically there is always more to know, to find out but knowledge itself has realism as the default position.  Even getting things wrong proves it otherwise ‘wrong’,  pace neo-modernism, is a meaningless concept.  

Here I am weltering in a slough of mixed metaphors and analogies, windows, shadows, snakes, ropes, mirages.  ‘Is this a dagger which I see before me’?  

Recall the tantric saying: What is here is there, what is not here is not anywhere.

 .  

Brahma-Sutra-Bhasya I.i.4

 How is Brahman known?  That is the question asked in a frequently referred to sutra B.S.Bh I.i.4  .The answer is of course through the Vedas.  Does that rule out any other way of knowing Brahman.  The standard answer is yes; what is beyond the ken of the human mind cannot be demonstrated rationally.  Yet at the same time Sankara offers in his counter to non orthodox views various indications of the intelligence inherent in the workings of creation. The world for instance cannot have come out of  insentient pure matter as that would deny what we know of the cosmos and the emergence of consciousness.  That in a sense is an incipient argument from design.Importantly all arguments that state that it is useless to rely on what can neither be accepted or rejected in a worldly empirical way are voided by the fact of realisation.  

“...it is but reasonable that all ideas of duality, involving action, accessories, etc., should be eradicated, because the absolute Brahman is neither acceptable nor 

rejectable.”

Metaphysical indications as are offered by the Thomistic 5 Ways, contingency, motion etc., are not accepted because a generalised inference cannot reach the unknowable. 

Very good it is said: You have heard about Brahman but that does not mean that you now have come to a knowledge of Brahman.  That would be just like having your mistaking of a rope for a snake pointed out to you.  Not so is the reply: hearing, reflection, and meditation on the Self is enjoined.

At this point the Vedantin comes in to summarize and clarify everything.  He mentions the things that are conducive to a state in which the truth of the Vedas will become clear.  The various post mortem fates of those that do good indicate a gradation of achievement.  Of course Sankara points out quoting an Upanisad: “For an embodied being there can be no eradication of happiness and sorrow to be sure”. (Ch.VIII.xii.1)  Embodied in this case means one who is identified with the body.

Taking the Vedantin role Sankara makes clear that unembodiedness is not, and cannot be, achieved, as a result of good deeds.  If you are definitely bodiless, what can this mean?  The only sensible conclusion is that the enlightened one does not consider his identity to be personal.  There is a physical form with perhaps residual karma that may require spectacles to avoid walking into the furniture but his identity is impersonal.  There is no doubt that some students of Advaita find this disembodiedness a sticking point.  They take it quite literally and are puzzled by the groans of pain emitted by a jnani when he stubs his toe or suffers from cancer.

Jnana then is not a sort of good luck/fortune thing (sampad).  It does not depend on that.  It is the direct absorption by reality or the recognition that such was the case all along. “ Brahman is denied to be the object of an act of knowing.”

“By presenting Brahman as not an object on account of its being the inmost Self (of the knower), they remove the differences of the “known”, the “knower”, and the “knowledge” that are fancied through ignorance.”  

My own way of getting this is that you cannot get ‘outside’ the self in order to know it.  You cannot comprehend it which is why the upanisad says ‘neti’, ‘neti’, not this/not this.

Now comes an important epistemological point:

Opponent: Is not knowledge a kind of mental action?

Actually no. Knowledge is an achievement, a state.  Meditation though mental may be done or not as the case may be.  Knowledge is the immediate fruit of a valid means of knowledge.  Might the application of these means of knowledge be an action?  Yes.  So knowledge is then a mental condition but not an act.  But in the case of ‘jnana’ or self-realisation knowledge is not grasped by the mind and it is beyond what can be described because the Self cannot be comprehended by the Self.

As I read this sutra I realise that it places all the important points of Advaita in juxtaposition.  What is its purport, its summum bonum?  How is that achieved and can we even speak of an achievement?  The answer to that would appear to be yes because knowledge is an achieved condition.  Even though knowledge is an achieved condition yet the preparation for that state involves actions which are enjoined in the Upanishads.  

The knowledge of Brahman is said to give rise to unembodiedness.  What can that mean?  Some take it literally but that can’t be right because clearly the sage walks and talks and has a physical presence.  This is a state of knowledge in which the identification with the body ceases.

“…the idea of embodiedness is a result of false nescience.  Unless it is through the false ignorance of identifying the Self with the body, there can be no embodiedness for the Self.  And we said that the unembodiedness of the Self is eternal, since it is not a product of action.”

Karma has ended for the sage but for the rest of us hearing, meditation and contemplation  are used to bring on that state of enlightenment. (sravana, manana, nididhyasana)

Tangential to 'The God who may be' (pace Richard Kearney)

 Reading Richard Kearney on Anatheism and ‘God who may be’ I find myself to be the perfect example of naiveté. I know nothing about the quarrels within the phenomenological family or the importation of theism into the pellucid waters of our immediate awareness.  

Do we see clearly into the depths or are the refractive indices too baffling? The naive person has an advantage over the savants. His only difficulty is to stay in the present moment and not be distracted by shiny objects.

There is the natural or sahaj samadhi. I suppose it is the end or goal of the God that may be the God that is allowed to manifest in every moment. Every moment in this sense is your last. Is this the sense of eschatology that R.K. wishes to remind us of? Probably it is something else, a technical term.

You have to decide. Do I want this or not? If I allow this will I end up having lost all my friends and be bracketed with snake handlers by polite society?

Nearby is the domain of the Imaginal (Henry Corbin) the country of no place.

The place where Ludwig Feuerbach starts, the expansible consciousness, could be an entry into the core of Sanathana Dharma but not being aware of this he misses his exit and continues down the highway of materialism.

What is it that arises out of the immediacy of awareness? What is it that brings on the experience of connatural ity, that is founded on actual connaturality? Is it not perceptuality.

Exodus 3:13 – Evil is Going away from the being of God who is. Living in the not-being, draining reality.

Q: How does one approach the Being of God?

A: Through consciousness which is ‘pratibodha videtam’ known in every state

of awareness.

Perception in Gaudapada and David Hume - Paradoxes of Idealism

 II.15 M.K.: Those objects that appear as obscure inside the mind and those that appear as vivid outside, are all merely created by imagination.  Their distinction is to be traced to the difference in the organs of perception.

If there was ever an indication that Vedantins aren’t from Mars it is this.  The tendency to idealism brings to the fore the notion that it is only a matter of vividness that marks the difference between the imagination and perception.  This is to be found in Hume.  A similar epistemology will evoke a related  response to the problem of differentiation between the mental and the sensible.  Impressions and ideas together are perception, is how Hume  puts it.  So how does one distinguish them?  By their relative vivacity. 

The notion of vivacity comes up in Sankara’s commentary on the sutra only to be dismissed. 

“The fact that things in the mind, called up by mere mental impressions, have an obscurity, while externally as objects of the sense of sight etc., they have a vividness, (that fact) is not due to the existence of the objects themselves; for this distinction is noticed even in a dream.  To what is it due then?  This is caused by the difference in the organs of perception.  Hence it is proved that the things of the waking state are as much a creation of imagination as the dream objects.” M.K. II.15.

Obviously there is a difference between their views on the  ontological status of perceptions.  Gaudapada holds that because we have perceptions in dreams and perceptions in the waking state the common denominator of being perceptions is their true status.  They thus remain as items in consciousness.  The activity of the senses is also in consciousness. So all being in consciousness and  consciousness qua consciousness resulting from superimposition (adhyasa) all experience is mithya/false. 

Hume  bundles mental and sensible events  into the one category of perception but distinguishes between the constituent impressions and ideas by virtue of their relative vivacity.

It’s interesting to see how the attempts to fix the paradoxes, that arise from the adherence to Idealism, criss cross each other generating  bafflement. 

Advaita and Synteresis/Synderesis: The Spark from Tripura Rahasya

 

What makes or made advaita an intelligible religious philosophy that you could investigate?You could have been born into it of course and have been surrounded by its adherents some of whom seemed ennobled by its teaching.  They impressed you and made it seem a path that to follow even if the ramifications of its epistemology seemed opaque.  You heard the teachings, revolved them in your mind and in the depths of quiet meditation they sunk into your spirit giving a life meaning and direction.

The curious thing is that philosophers who deal in arguments continuously have rarely taken up religious faith on that basis.  Some impulse deeper than that has moved them towards God by whatever name you call him/her/it.    They feel that it is the natural direction, they are at home in it.   Having found themselves involved their natural predilection for clarification begins to be felt. This is the surface play of their minds and separate from true attainment which outruns the mind.

Many years ago I found myself in the presence of the sage of Kanchi.  There was a small group taking his darshan.  I had no idea of his eminence in the world of Vedanta.  From behind the picket fence where he sat with his entourage he took questions.  Then one of them addressed me saying ‘announce yourself’.  I thought he said ‘enhance yourself’ and showing my puzzlement it was explained that I should tell my name and country.  Which I did.  ‘Have you a question for Swami?  I asked: ‘Should I continue my studies? (of philosophy).  Swami replied: Please continue.

Now I was several yards away from where he sat and when he made that gesture peculiar to Indian body language of turning the upheld palms of his hand outward meaning ‘carry on’ I felt a distinct push against my chest which made me almost stumble backwards.

That’s the sort of thing that you don’t argue with, a finger in the chest saying ‘wake up’.  At the same time the ruminative mind wants to chew the cud of argument.  For me this passage from ‘Tripura Rahasya’ is that steel meeting flint.

56-63. “The mind is truly abstracted in sleep. But then its light is screened by darkness, so how can it manifest its true nature? A mirror covered with tar does not reflect images but can it reflect space either? Is it enough, in that case, that images are eliminated in order to reveal the space reflected in the mirror? In the same manner, the mind is veiled by the darkness of sleep and rendered unfit for illumining thoughts. Would such eclipse of the mind reveal the glimmer of consciousness?

“Would a chip of wood held in front of a single object to the exclusion of all others reflect the object simply because all others are excluded? Reflection can only be on a reflecting surface and not on all surfaces. Similarly also, realization of the Self can only be with an alert mind and not with a stupefied one. New-born babes have no realization of the Self for want of alertness.

“Moreover pursue the analogy of a tarred mirror. The tar may prevent the images from being seen, but the quality of the mirror is not affected, for the outer coating of tar must be reflected in the interior of the mirror. So also the mind, though diverted from dreams and wakefulness, is still in the grip of dark sleep and not free from qualities. This is evident by the recollection of the dark ignorance of sleep when one wakes.

Now in many respects ‘Tripura Rahasya’ is a philosophically zany document seriously infected by subjective idealism which would claim that we are directly in contact with mental objects.  ‘We perceive our perceptions’ was Sankara’s rebuttal.  The line between wakeful perception and dream is blurred.  Even so the insights of advaita shine through and dispel this mental virus.

Later in my reading of Advaita I would come across the same argument in the ‘Upadesa Sahasri’ of Shankaracarya his only non commentarial book.  I have posted extensively about this.  Follow the topic links.

Sintering in welding involves bonding together.  It can be traced back to a common root in old German with ‘cinder’.  I wonder if it might not be cognate with ‘synteresis’ /also ‘synderesis'(soul spark: Greek) or the spark from the divine that leads the soul to recognise the good, the dharmic.  This is the first event in the journey to the source.  The philosophical ruminations keep the fire going though in many ways they may be damp second rate fuel.

 

Bhagavad Gita 9:4/5 — Necessary and Contingent

 

You will have been told by those anxious to place Advaita in recognisable categories that it is essentially pantheistic, monistic, panentheistic, or indeed, in the popular formula  - All is One.  The relation between the Creator and the Created is a subtle one in the Bhagavad Gita.  Two citations in Chapter 9 are apposite:

B.G. 9:4

This whole world is pervaded by Me in My unmanifest form. All beings exist in Me, but I am not contained in them!

B.G. 9:5

5. Nor do the beings dwell in Me. Behold My divine Yoga! I am the sustainer and originator of beings, but My Self is not contained in the beings.

What can be taken from these two sutras is the contingent nature of creation.  It might not have been, but it is.  Contingent being requires something more than itself to continue in existence.  That must be a necessary being which sustains by its nature the contingent.  Obviously contingent beings are not one with the necessary.  They are in it by virtue of being but not of it.

In Sankara''s commentary he states that being a thing means being a something distinct from other things.

“Therefore, being possessed of their reality through Me, who am their Self, they exist in me.  Hence they are said to be established in Me.”

Obviously these sutras rule out pantheism or the notion that God and the universe are identical.  Panentheism or the idea that out of the nature of God the universe arose in a quasi necessary way must also fail to pass the advaitic test..

Gaudapada with his ajativada (unborn) doctrine would probably say that contingent being is non-being and that only being exists.  What does not have being of its nature i.e. necessary being, cannot come to pass.  Somewhat annihilating!

Sutra 2:4:11 of Brihadaranayka Upanisad on Body/Mind as jada/inert

 

All the informational pathways that are taken together and experienced as a unified field are mentioned.  They are resolved into their common denominator i.e. consciousness.  This is a progressive form of meditation or a detaching from the particularity of each stage to move on to the next finally ending in the state of absorption in pure consciousness, your fundamental natural state.

When through these successive steps sound and

the rest, together with their receiving organs, are

merged in Pure Intelligence, there are no more limiting

adjuncts, and only Brahman, which is Pure Intelli-

gence, comparable to a lump of salt, homogeneous,

infinite, boundless and without a break, remains.

Therefore the Self alone must be regarded as one with-

out a second.

 

Yes, it might be said, consciousness is one thing but the organs are material, do they just evanesce?

 

"Objection : In everyone of those instances the

mergence of the objects only has been spoken of, but

not that of the organs. What is the motive of this?

Reply: True, but the Sruti considers the organs

to be of the same category as the objects, not of a

-different category. The organs are but modes of the

objects in order to perceive them, as a light, which is

but a mode of colour, is an instrument for revealing all

colours. Similarly the organs are but modes of all

particular objects in order to perceive them, as is the

case with a lamp. Hence no special care is to be taken

to indicate the dissolution of the organs ; for these being

the same as objects in general, their dissolution is

implied by that of the objects.”

 

This is deeply important aspect of Advaitic ontology which has not been extensively commented on due to empirical psychology which regards the brain as the secretor of consciousness. For Advaita the body-mind is not conscious as such.  It is jada or inert until it is pervaded by SatChit or BeingConsciousness.

The ‘organs’ i.e. the body including the senses, is a material entity.  The objects are material entities.  The interaction of both of these is a material interaction which being pervaded by consciousness places itself on the side of the subject.  That is the basic pre-theoretic condition.  ‘The organs are the same as the objects in general’.  There is no event in the brain creating consciousness.  Defects in either the ‘organs’ or the ‘objects’ change the result of the interaction which is taken to be veridical until it fails to confirm our expectations.

The concept of the brain/mind/body as jada/inert or by nature unconscious is a profound one and requires a shift away from the standard dualistic model.

Sutra 2:4:11 of Brihadaranayka Upanisad with Sankara's Commentary

 

Brihadaranyaka Upanisad 2:4:11 

"As the ocean is the one goal of all sorts

of water, as the skin is the one goal of all kinds

of touch, as the nostrils are the one goal of all

odours, as the tongue is the one goal of all

savours, as the eye is the one goal of all colours,

as the ear is the one goal of all sounds, the

Manas is the one goal of all deliberations, as the

intellect is the one goal of all kinds of knowledge,

as the hands are the one goal of all sorts of work,

as the organ of generation is the one goal of all

kinds of enjoyment, as the anus is the one goal

of all excretions, as the feet are the one goal of

all kinds of walking, as the organ of speech is

the one goal of all Vedas."

Here then is the bird’s eye view, the forest view or being high enough up to be no longer in danger of missing the forest for the trees.  Yes I do know that the idiom is ‘missing the wood for the trees’  but in that locution is the germ of a typical equivocation which has consequences if that is not too portentous.  When was I ever afraid of the portentous, God help me.  Wood, as lumber, firewood etc.,  is a product of trees.  A wood is also a large number of trees growing in the same place. A forest is an even larger group of trees, co-located, as in the Black Forest and so forth.  This is the view that I want to focus on.  And while I am talking about ‘views’ let me assert before it is offered as a transcendental hypothesis, the ‘view’ in Sankara’s advaita is a Realistic one.  There is a world and it is independent of our knowledge of it and elements of it wholly unknown too also exist sheltering under the umbrella of being.  Unless that is kept firmly in mind the inquiry due to the pullulation of terms that relate to awareness, consciousness, illusion and so forth can beguile us into a species of Idealism.  In that direction lies Buddhism, Humean/Empiricist epistemology and other sloughs of error.

The forest view is the height of the sutra eye.  When you ignore all the differentiating factors of the modalities of sense you resolve them all into the category of awareness or consciousness.  Notice that this last sentence is the typical stepping off point into the thin air of Idealism.  Don’t walk that plank.  Reflect on the point also made by Sankara that Samadhi, taken to be the sine qua non of enlightenment by yogis, is also but another form of awareness.

Everything is pervaded by or its being is SatChit/BeingConsciousness.

“Moreover, it is not only at the time of its origin

and continuance that the universe, on account of its

non-existence apart from Pure Intelligence, is Brahman,

but it is so at the time of dissolution also just as

bubbles, foam, etc. are non-existent apart from water,

so name, form and action, which are the effects of Pure

Intelligence and dissolve in It, are non-existent apart

from It.” (from Commentary by Sankara on the sutra)

Paradoxically this ‘everything is consciousness/Brahman’ is foundational for the Realism of Advaita as expressed in the preamble to the Brahma Sutra Bhasya (Sankara’s Commentary) and also in succinct fashion by Dharmaraja Adhvarindra in his ‘Vedanta Paribhasa’.  I am referring to the concept of ‘perceptuality’ or the structure that underlies our experience of the ‘external’ world.  We see it as it is .  Error is possible but only from the standpoint of that default view.

That I think is a big enough bite for today.   Dinner will be the ‘chit jada granthi’, the knot between the inert and consciousness.  The ‘mind/Manas’ is not, you see, of its nature conscious.  Tomorrow.  Now I have to mow a lawn, a really real lawn.

Von Hugel and accepting the 'givenness' of things in 'The Reality of God' (Gifford Lectures)

 Amongst the apparent enigmas of life, amongst the seemingly most radical and abiding of interior antinomies and conflicts experienced by the human race and by individuals, there is one which everything tends to make us feel and see with an ever-increasing keenness and clearness. More and more we want a strong and interior, a lasting yet voluntary bond of union between our own successive states of mind, and between what is abiding in ourselves and what is permanent within our fellow-men; and more and more we seem to see that mere Reasoning, Logic, Abstraction,—all that appears as the necessary instrument and expression of the Universal and Abiding,—does not move or win the will, either in ourselves or in others; and that what does thus move and win it, is Instinct, Intuition, Feeling, the Concrete and Contingent, all that seems to be of its very nature individual and evanescent. Reasoning appears but capable, at best, of co-ordinating, unifying, explaining the material furnished to it by experience of all kinds; at worst, of explaining it away; at best, of stimulating the purveyance of a fresh supply of such experience; at worst, of stopping such purveyance as much as may be. And yet the Reasoning would appear to be the transferable part in the process, but not to move; and the experience alone to have the moving power, but not to be transmissible.

(from ‘The Mystical Element of Religion by Von Hugel 1908)

 Yes there is that and it is a noble inquiry but it contains within it the danger of excessive inwardness that leads to metaphysical idealism and a dwelling on the flux of motivation with its tendency to create moral paralysis.  

Adverting to Aquinas, Von Hugel remarks:

Sensible things” (the realities falling under the cognizance of our senses) “from which human reason derives the origin of its knowledge hold within themselves a certain vestige of the imitation of God” (of similitude to Him); and, further on, he speaks of “the true similitude to God that man can collect from within His works,’’ similitudes which are subjectively there. (From von Hugel’s Gifford Lectures on ‘The Reality of God)

Here in his Gifford lectures on the ‘Reality of God’ never given because of his death Von Hugel is reverting to a metaphysical Realism. He further adds to his nod to Aquinas:

True these genuine likenesses to God, present in God’s works because they are His works, do not take us a long way, leave us with but fragments of what we are very sure is a fuller and full truth, and hence he warns us against “the presumption of comprehension or of demonstration”.

A syncretic heretic like myself can easily discern the analogue to the theory of ‘perceptuality’ which is central to Advaitic doctrine as delivered by Dharmaraja Adhvarindra in the 14th.Century. A similar difficulty of demonstration occurs because it is a truth that we realize but cannot know because it is knowing itself. You cannot ‘get round’ i.e. comprehend, that. It is just given.  

Accepting the ‘givenness’ is a life’s work. More anon.

The Really Real in Advaita

  As I have been hinting I have always had a problem with the Advaitic use of the term ‘real’. How does the apophatic, that which outruns the mind, about which we cannot speak, how can it be real or unreal? It is beyond all that. The state of realization is such that mundane life is obliterated by bliss. Well, let it be so, but that does not derealize it. The contrast between the state of the sage and that of the seeker may be such that the one causes the other to lapse into insignificance, mere Maya, a misconception. The deep structure of reality is the truth; all else a veil. In my view it isn’t possible to totalize the use of the polar concepts real/unreal in this fashion. They always occur within a world. ‘Is this real butter's? ‘That is a fake Rolex, but a real watch’. ‘Your fears are unreal’ ‘That’s what I call real hospitality’.

etc., etc., Without labouring the point the use of terms real/unreal are contrasitive.  

This problem is recognised by Sankara who holds that the Vedas themselves become ‘unreal’ for the enlightened to which the objection comes - what use are they then, how can the real be achieved by use of the unreal? The answer which amounts to - you’ll know when you get there, for now keep saying your prayers.

Is this satisfactory if in fact the deep structure of reality underwrites what ‘Vedanta Paribhase’ calls perceptuality? That superimposition is possible as in normal perception is due to the unity of being.  

Swami S.S.S. remarks in his work on the preamble to the B.S.Bh.:

This argument does not hold water here; for the

wisdom of the Unity of Atman is attained only after

sublating all empirical thought. The Sruti also says

, What could one know and with what, when to the

knower, all has become Atman alone?' (Br. 4-5-15).

Sankara himself writes in so many words :-

" Nor is it possible to say that this intuition is use·

less, or that it is a delusion; for we see that it removes

avidya and that there is no other knowledge sublating

it. We _have already stated that it is only before the

intuition of the Unity of Atman, that all conventions

of real and false, obtain." SBh. 2-1-14, pp. 19, 20.

Is not the latter observation by Sankara on the convention of true/false or real/unreal a tacit recognition of what I have been holding. When you are beyond all those pairs of opposites or polar concepts they become useless.

The Wonder of Clay

 I am just the wrong sort of person to take up philosophy. Instead of studying six interpretations of a problem and what is wrong with them and then proffering an acceptable compromise I stand stunned and thunderstruck i.e. stundered by the force of the problem like a duck in a heavy shower. The advaitins use of the term ‘real’ and what it might mean is an example of my stultification. Why is ‘clay’ more ‘real’ than the vessels made of clay. They have been given a name and a form and are thereby relegated to the region of the mutable. How does that work? The humble water pot has being, it exists, it is. This lump of clay though it has no name other than the generic ‘lump’, has a form. Is not ‘clay’ here taking the place approximately of Aristotelian prime matter. It is always associated with substantial form in the existing object even though we can rationally conceptualize it. ‘Clay’ can also be viewed as one of the causes of a vessel made of clay. It is a material cause and not more or less ‘real’ than the vessel itself.

What then is the particular point of ‘real’ clay? Is it an analogy that has run away from home and become a metaphor? Everything is Brahman or so to speak made of Brahman. Pure Being is manifesting as all this congeries of name and form. The ‘clay’ analogy is not an ontological doctrine. Has my wonder ceased?

Truth and Falsity in Advaita

 

In Advaita terms like ‘mithya'/false, avidya/ignorance and their synonyms are sprinkled about with abandon but what is their existential import in the life of a seeker?  When I encounter lies, untruth, falsity in my everyday existence I take, when I am at my best, a moral attitude.  I am affronted, I reject this version of reality, this cannot stand.  Can I accept that adhyasa/superimposition is false in the same manner or do I rather think that it is hyperbolic to do so?Adhyasa may be at the core of the deep structure of reality, the discovery of which I am deeply interested in, yet not be opposed to the validity, in its own terms, of the everyday.  One reality underlies the other without negating it.

Tantric Saying: What is here is there, what is not here is not anywhere.

The Sense of 'I am' as answered by Nisargadatta

 

As  I was saying in my previous post a mistake is a take  by which I mean that the ontological depth out of which perception rises is preserved even when there is error.  The deep structure is maintained.

Nisargadatta’s teaching is an illustration of how Advaita  blurs the distinction between religion and metaphysics.  He uses the standard dialectic of adhiropa / apavada or affirmation followed by qualification and correction.  You move towards the implications of a position and find a resolution to its internal difficulties.

The first dialogue in the book centres on the spiritual practice of keeping the central fact of experience constantly before the mind namely ‘I AM’.

Reading this dialogue it almost seems like a set-up allowing Maharaj to develop his characteristic teaching.

“Questioner: It is a matter of daily experience that on waking up the world suddenly appears.  Where does it come from?”

 May I interject here to ask from the perspective of Western philosophy:

Is this a suggestion that the world exists in consciousness only, a not unknown position in philosophical circles that takes the form of subjective idealism or representationalism?

M. rejects this saying that this ‘sudden appearance’ must have a background for it to appear on.  The experience of change must have a changeless background, one which is not an experience as such because of course experience implies changeability.

The Q. who is caught in the grip of the model of awareness as being simply that of mental subjects and mental objects replies that - “Before waking  up I was unconscious”

M. in an  acute observation brings up the commonplace experience of a loss of memory?  You have no consciousness of that yet  you  do not believe that you did  not exist during that time.  Your existence then is not reliant on being conscious of it.  Similarly on waking from a dreamless sleep ‘I  am’ is an immediate awareness.  I am - a body- in the world can be intellectually broken up but in fact it is a simultaneous awareness.  “A single idea of having a body in a world”.

All states of awareness including memory lapses and deep dreamless sleep are unified by the changeless  background of pure consciousness.  Nisargadatta Maharaj uses the same argument as Shankaracarya in  relation to waking up from Deep Dreamless Sleep.  You know that you have been asleep and that there is a continuity between the individual that is woken up when called and the one prior to falling asleep.

Then he says and this is an intriguing light on the disputed claim made by Jacques Maritain that there is an intuition of being.

 

“On waking up the experience runs: ‘I am - the body- in the world.’   It may appear to arise in succession but in fact it is all simultaneous, a single idea of having a body in a world. Can there be the sense of ‘I am’ without being somebody or other?”

To be continued:

Snake and Rope - Superimposition and Substratum in Advaita.

 Ive been around this rope/snake area before and though it looks to be quite simple it has its complications due to the fact that it is an analogical vade mecum with subtle differences in its deployment.  My latest attempt to grasp its usage I offer for your metaphysical delectation.

It breaks in two, obviously, the snake and the rope or the superimposition and the substratum.  The latter is the reality, in theatrical terms the back cloth upon which the ‘snake’ is painted.  In Sankara’s commentary on the Mandukya  Upanisad he describes it thus.

“No, for an unreal illusion cannot exist without a substratum; for the illusion of silver, snake, human being, mirage, etc., cannot be imagined to exist apart from the (corresponding) substrata of the mother of pearl, rope, stump of a tree, desert, etc.”

There enumerated are the standard examples of confusion.  In a footnote Swami Gambhirananda writes:

“Since an illusion is perceived as soaked in the idea of existence, it cannot have non-existence as its basis.”

The analogy moves into the metaphysical when it is stated that similarly this mundane reality is as it were painted on the back drop of pure being.  As limited contingent being it requires absolute being as its reality.

An analogy is used to express what is beyond human reality:

“For a relation between the real and the unreal does not lend itself to verbal representation, since the relation itself is, unsubstantial.”

That is then the well known general use of the confusion/delusion analogy.  However in the Preamble to the Brahma Sutra Bhyasa Sankara introduces a subtle variation.  Superimposition now becomes an epistomological/ontological method of transferring the really out there, in the ‘external’ world, object into the mind of the subject.  That is possible because the substratum of the consciousness of the subject and that of the object is the same.  This is the core of the non-dual/Advaitic philosophy.  What we have is a non-numerical identity between the subject’s reality and the object’s.  This is the basis of perception what in the the Vedanta Paribhasa of Adhvarindra is called perceptuality.

For the mind of the sage there is no other:

“On the view, however, that like the rope, imagined variously as the snake etc., the Self, too, though one, is imagined in the three states (waking, dreaming, deep sleep) to be possessed of such attributes as consciousness of the internal world etc., there follows the cessation of the phenomenal world of misery simultaneously with the valid knowledge , arising from the negation of such attributes as being conscious of the internal world;  and therefore there remains no need to search for any other means of knowledge or any other discipline (like constant thinking/Manana?)  for the realisation of Turiya/Enlightenment.  This is similar to what happens in the case of the knowledge of the rope where the elimination of the snake from the rope occurs simultaneously with the discrimination between the rope and the snake.” (Sankara's commentary)

Use of Memory as an indication of Personal Identity in Sankara's Advaita

 This is so straightforward and simple an assertion of the rationality of diachronic identity that it requires no gloss and can be reproduced directly. Incidently Sidney Shoemaker has a similar argument in his book ‘Self-Knowledge and Self-Identity’.

Who denies diachronic identity anyway?  David Hume asks himself the question: How is a series of conscious states conscious of itself as a series?  His bundle theory of states of consciousness creates this problem which it is unable to solve.

It is important to note that Sankara is not offering memory as a criterion of personal identity.  He is merely using memory as sufficient to refute the momentariness (annica) doctrine of Buddhism namely that there is no connection between the string of conscious states that are had by a person.  His self identity is pure consciousness itself that remains unchanging through all states of awareness including that of deep dreamless sleep known as ‘sushupti’ in Vedanta. Follow the topic heading on Deep Sleep for more notes on that angle unique to Advaitic Vedanta.

Sankara’s Commentary on the Brahma Sutras in which he refutes Buddhist Realism (B.S.B. II.ii.25)

25. And (a permanent soul has to be admitted) because of the fact of remembrance (i.e. memory).

Moreover, when the nihilist asserts all things to be momentary, he willhave to assert the perceiver also to be momentary. But that is an absurdity because of the fact of remembrance. Remembrance means recalling to mind something after its perception, and that can happen only when the agent of perception and memory is the same; for one person is not seen to remember something perceived by another. How can there be an awareness of the form, "I who saw earlier see now", arise unless the earlier and later perceiver be the same? Moreover, it is well known to all that direct experience in the form of recognition, such as "I who saw that, see this now", occurs only when the agent of seeing and remembering is the same.             

Realism, the Mind/Body problem in Western and Advaitic thought.

 

“Now at the same time it is just those self-same things which his mind, as we say, perceives; and the whole philosophy of perception from Democritus’s time downwards has been just one long wrangle over the paradox that what is evidently one reality should be in two places at once, both in outer space and in a person’s mind. ‘Representative’ theories of perception avoid the logical paradox, but on the other hand they violate the reader’s sense of life, which knows no intervening mental image but seems to see the room and the book immediately just as they physically exist.”  (from ‘Radical Empiricism’ by William James)

In his clear way James has set out the aporia which in Advaita is called the chit jada granthi (the knot between the conscious and the inert).  It is the initial statement of the puzzleShankaracarya deals with in the preamble to the Brahma Sutra Bhasya.  He writes:

“Accordingly, the superimposition of the object, referable through the concept “you”, and its attributes on the subject that is conscious by nature and is referable through the concept “we” (should be impossible), and contrariwise the superimposition of the subject and its attributes on the object should be impossible.”

What he finds to be a difficulty that must be stated before his commentary on the body of the sutras is simply this: how does that out there a material object come to be in here in my mind as a subjective unextended state of awareness.

This is just that very ‘double entry’ problem that under various modalities keeps cropping up.  The problem of universals comes under that rubric, primary and secondary qualities thinking is coloured by it and it may even be that the hard wired moral tenets, the evolutionary adaptive, correspond to the really out there as against the ‘in here’ cultural mores.  To put it at its most general: is Realism a thing?

Aristotle and Plato thought so and got to it in their different ways.  Advaita as I have pointed out mentions the problem and via the pramanas assumes the truth of realism but its discussion of the problem is put to one side by the very practical problem of self-realisation.  That gives a Cartesian critical tinge to its philosophical investigations.  What is ‘kuthasta ‘, unchanging, as firm as an anvil?  It is Consciousness irradiated by self awareness, underlying that advice given by Nisargadatta’s guru - focus on ‘I AM’ and become liberated.

Earnest Advaitic seekers will demur claiming that none of this Western problematic exists.  It does but they are dazzled by the shiny object of confusion, summarised in the snake/rope analogy and are thereby led into interesting problems such as ‘how is error possible’  and the various fata morgana of Idealism.

Sankaracarya stated the central aporia in the preamble and therefore we must assume that the commentary on the sutras is a working out of a solution.  Essentially the answer is non-duality or how you can have non-numerical identity between consciousness and the objective world.  I have written several notes on this for anyone who is interested in following the subject topics/labels.

Can we solve the Mind-Body problem? with Colin McGinn (1983)

If you want to feel the force of the body/mind problem as classically posed Colin McGinn is your only man. He’s the mystery man and though he elaborates his central insight into many pages of very clear and distinct prose it may be expressed as the insuperable difficulty of discovering the property that turns the cerebral events into concomitant consciousness. Unless that property is available as data then all the clever hypotheses such as identity, consciousness as epiphenomenal, as divinely tuned, etc cannot be tested. We are beached on this island of consciousness and we cannot discover how the extended and the unextended interact. This is a brute fact and there is no getting away from it. What he presents (Can we solve the Body/Mind problem ‘1983) is a problem that arises out of a classic Cartesian presentation i.e. Causal closure between the extended and the unextended). Other non-dualistic ways of cutting this knot are dismissed. In a typical footnote:

“I would also classify panpsychism as a constructive solution, since it attempts to explain consciousness in terms of properties of the brain that are as natural as consciousness itself. Attributing specks of proto-consciousness to the constituents of matter is not supernatural in the way postulating immaterial substances or divine interventions is; it is merely extravagant. I shall here be assuming that panpsychism, like all other extant constructive solutions, is inadequate as an answer to the mind-body problem-as (of course) are the supernatural 'solutions'. “

The mystery slays all solutions. Yes fine but there are data points from which to throw out the putlocks to support a transcendental hypothesis. First: we all come from rocks and gas. Second: increase is complexity and diverse capacity of the brain is linked to the evolution of the human mind. Let me just state my point in a nutshell: The human being can talk into his own ear. That is what allows one to raise the problem of the self, the mind and the body. The advaitins cut through what they call the chit jada granthi or the knot between the conscious and the inert by suggesting that the mind is itself inert and that instead of a yoked mind and body we have a bodymind that is pervaded by consciousness. The effect of this pervasion is to give us awareness that is reflective of the level of complexity of the bodymind. The interaction conundrum is obviated and awareness is somatically distributed. Vestigial centres of awareness are the relics of evolutionary development. We are aware in our guts etc because in our passage to our present refined state it was the chief organ connecting us to the world. Find this classic paper here

mystery

Note on A.N. Whitehead's 'Science and the Modern World'.

When you are on a topic everything seems to feed into it. A journalist that reports on the government’s ‘most substantive meeting’ gets you pondering whether there can be a superlative of ‘substantive’. A substance is a free standing thing of which things are said. The expression noun substantive preserves this meaning but I will not bore you with a discussion of the Aristotelian implications of what H.W. Fowler calls a genteelism:

By genteelism is here to be understood the rejecting of the ordinary natural word that first suggests itself to the mind, and the substitution of a synonym that is thought to be less soiled by the lips of the common herd, less familiar, less plebeian, less vulgar, less improper, less apt to come unhandsomely betwixt the wind and our nobility. (Modern English Usage - 1966 ed.)

A. N. Whitehead avoided words that were polluted by a history of discussion that tended to draw the mind down dead ends:

“These transcendent entities have been termed ‘universals.' I prefer to use the term ‘eternal objects’ in order to disengage myself from presuppositions which cling to the former term owing to a prolonged philosophical history. Eternal objects are thus, in their nature, abstract.”

What Whitehead is at here is moving away from that solid thing substance to the realm of the possible which may or may not issue as an entity that is manifest. When they do the eternal objects are evident as ‘actual occasions’. His emphasis is on the nature of the universe as a monistic holistic pattern of interactions which can themselves be ‘eternal objects’. His breaks down mind/body dualism into a dyad of dual aspect:

“Thus the mental cognition is seen as the reflective experience of a totality, reporting for itself what it is in itself as one unit occurrence. This unit is the integration of the sum of its partial happenings, but it is not their numerical aggregate. It has its own unity as an event. This total unity, considered as an entity for its own sake, is the prehension into unity of the patterned aspects of the universe of events.” (from Science and the Modern World)

It is as though we then graft on to that totalising moving through events an ontology of subject and objects.

“The private psychological field is merely the event considered from its own standpoint. The unity of this field is the unity of the event. But it is the event as one entity, and not the event as a sum of parts. The relations of the parts, to each other and to the whole, are their aspects, each in the other.”

How this relates to my understanding of the theory of superimposition in Advaitic Vedanta is a topic for another occasion. �

What its like to be a sage

 What its like to be a sage is a riff on what its like to be a bat.  It controverts it with irony because the bat is not an idealist.  The bat if anything is a non-dualist.  If the bat had it’s own very own special bat feelings, inscrutable and mysterious to the non-bat world then the existence of an external world that was congruent with those feeling would arise.  Of course the bat is a non theoretic creature; the problem of an external world does not arise, there is simply a consciousness and action without a second thought.  Humans do take thought when not immediately pressed by the exigencies of survival and navigation around the furniture of this world.  The human being is a theoretic creature who examines his own reactions and places them within the boundary of an entity called the person.  In essence that is a naturally occurring theory which may be useful for navigational purposes, indeed essential yet as Bergson and the Advaitins hold the forked consciousness is parasitic on a non-dual plenum.  Bergson calls it ‘pure perception’  and allies it to Memory the significant element of Consciousness.  Getting to that state is for the Eastern sage a letting go and letting be, expressed by Ramana Maharshi as ‘effortless effort’.  The Master enjoins ‘Show me the face you had before you were born’ or ‘the sound of one hand clapping’.  There is consciousness in that state but it has not yet migrated per ur-theory to a person.  It is the natural state.  

Janaka in the Ashtavakra Gita explains it thus:

"Janaka said:

I became intolerant first of physical action, then of extensive speech, and then of thought. Thus therefore do I firmly abide.

Having no attachment for sound and other sense objects, and the Self not being an object of perception, my mind is freed from distraction and is one-pointed. Thus therefore do I firmly abide.

An effort has to be made for concentration when there is distraction of mind owing to superimposition etc. Seeing this to be the rule, thus do I firmly abide.

Having nothing to accept and nothing to reject, and having neither joy nor sorrow, thus, sir, do I now firmly abide.

A stage of life or no stage of life, meditation, control of mental functions - finding that these cause distraction to me, thus verily do I firmly abide.

Abstention from action is as much the outcome of ignorance as the performance of action. Knowing this truth fully well, thus do I firmly abide.

Thinking on the Unthinkable One, one only has recourse to a form of thought. Therefore giving up that thought, thus do I firmly abide.

Blessed is the man who has accomplished this. Blessed is he who is such by nature."