A Vedantin views the Tree in the Yard

 The tree in the yard, that staple of solidity, reality and undeniable fact is sometimes referred to as unreal by the Vedantin.  What can he mean?  

Essentially the rope/snake analogy is being flaunted and asked to do a great deal of work.  We need to pull back a little further to get better focus and ask what the paradigmatic form of error is for the Vedantin.  It is confusion or taking something to be that which it is not.  That is perfectly fine for the everyday physical world.  In poor light we take the stump to be a man, the piece of shell to be silver etc., etc.

That sort of talk does not translate/transfer to the metaphysical however.  The tree is real but we may ask wherein does its perceptuality arise ?  How does that out there physical reality come to be in my consciousness as it actually is.  The short cut answer without going into the technicalities of upadhi and vritti is that there is a unity of the substratum of consciousness, a unity of Being.  What is real on the physical side, a tree that is separate and real for the perceiver is unified on the metaphysical side.  Taking the physical to be the only reality is a mis-take.  This is the world of duality.  Keeping both sides going is the world of non-duality.  

Thus we get the extravagant closing down sale of the world: everything must go.  This is an unreal bargain. 

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?

The First to Stop Crying

Over this
solnit, lrb
irony circles and moves away disconsolate avoiding eye contact, such is the shaming of fabulism by the real. If it were a creation of satiric mischief we might bow to genius. Who living under the monumental plinth of Major public intellectual will be the first to stop crying and what will be ‘pasted’ on them.

I was thinking of the story of the man who was the first to stop clapping:

At the conclusion of the conference, a tribute to Comrade Stalin was called for. Of course, everyone stood up (just as everyone had leaped to his feet during the conference at every mention of his name).... For three minutes, four minutes, five minutes, the 'stormy applause, rising to an ovation,' continued. But palms were getting sore and raised arms were already aching. And the older people were panting from exhaustion. It was becoming insufferably silly even to those who really adored Stalin.

However, who would dare to be the first to stop?... After all, NKVD men were standing in the hall applauding and watching to see who quit first!... At the rear of the hall, which was crowded, they could of course cheat a bit, clap less frequently, less vigorously, not so eagerly - but up there with the presidium where everyone could see them?... With make-believe enthusiasm on their faces, looking at each other with faint hope, the district leaders were just going on and on applauding till they fell where they stood, till they were carried out of the hall on stretchers!...

Then, after eleven minutes, the director of the paper factory assumed a businesslike expression and sat down in his seat. And, oh, a miracle took place! Where had the universal, uninhibited, indescribable enthusiasm gone? To a man, everyone else stopped dead and sat down. They had been saved! The squirrel had been smart enough to jump off his revolving wheel.

That, however, was how they discovered who the independent people were. And that was how they went about eliminating them. That same night the factory director was arrested. They easily pasted ten years on him on the pretext of something quite different. But after he had signed form 206, the final document of the interrogation, his interrogator reminded him:

‘Don’t ever be the first to stop applauding.’

(From The Gulag Archipelago by A. Solzhenitsyn)