Advaitin Antinomy and the Witness: I am Brahman

Advaitin Antinomy:

Knowledge is an action which has its source in the intellect.  The Self does not act but it pervades (analogy alert!) the intellect as it were lighting up the intellectual event.

As is asserted, by the hearing (sravana) of the mahavakya, I am Brahman, the ripe seeker can achieve self-realisation.   Avidya (ignorance/illusion) is dispelled by vidya (knowledge).  But as already asserted the Self does not act; only the intellect or body-mind complex acts.  In that case it would seem that the Self benefits by an action i.e. the access of knowledge.  Is the catalyst which precipitates realisation  the immediate comprehension that it is the action of the Self that gives rise to all the modalities of awareness.  Is this the genesis of the concept of the Witness?

#205:  The Witness is known by Itself which is of the nature of knowledge only.  It is the birth of modifications of the intellect pervaded by the reflection of Consciousness that is what is known to be the knowledge of the Self. (from Upadesa Sahasri Chap.XVIII. Thou Art That)

The modifications of the intellect (vritti) are realised as essentially pure consciousness presenting under the limitation of the individual mind.

Professor Hiralal Haldar's Realistic Idealism applicable to Advaita

 The opposition of mind to its object is the very basis of knowledge and without this duality no sort of cognition can take place, If to be is to be perceived it is equally true that to be perceived is to be. In all knowledge the distinguishable but inseparable factors opposed and  irreducible to each other are the the mind that knows, the object that is known and the act or process of knowing. Imagination also has this three-fold character. The imagined world is as much opposed to the imagining mind and its activity as the solid world of perception in time and space. This being so it is the images of the mind, the ideas that are to be brought into line with things and not the latter with the former. The imagined world of perception is quite as objective as the physical world of perception to which we belong. Things therefore are not mental ideas, they are objects of mind. Instead of things being ideas, it is ideas which have the status of things. This truth is clearly realised by the idealist philosophers of India.  Sankara, for example, who is commonly but wrongly supposed to be an illusionist, a thinker who denies the reality, of the world, lays the utmost stress on the opposition of what is known on mind that knows. In the absence of something distinguished from mind and opposed to it knowledge is no more possible than it is possible for a dancer to dance on his own shoulders. Epistemologically, Sankara is a thorough-going realist.  He does not say that the empirical world is in any way dependent for its being on the finite mind.  All that he maintains is that ultimately, from the highest point of view, it has no independent existence apart from Brahman.

(from ‘Realistic Idealism’ by Professor Hiralal Haldar )

Here is a place for that perfectly respectable  term ‘holism’ which unfortunately has been degraded to the status of stuff that is good for you.  Take the subject side as immediate and real and you can fall into the trap of idealism, take the object likewise and realism is embraced and with the focus on the modes of knowing  you fall into Gettier hell from which there is no exit.  Professor Haldar’s clear delineation of a holistic view is applicable to the Advaitic epistemology which is elaborated in full in the ‘Vedanta Paribhasa’ of Dharmaraja Adhvarindra.

Haldar’s essay is taken from the 1936 volume ‘Contemporary Indian Philosophy’.

realistic idealism

Thou art That #159, 160/1/2/3

 #159: It is to the intellect and not to the Self which is immutable, that the knowledge, ‘I am Brahman’ belongs.  Moreover the Self is changeless because it has no other witness.  (Upadesa Sahasri Chap.XVIII)

Here the difference between the intellectual knowledge; our rational conviction, that we are one with the Absolute or the unity of being etc. is being contrasted with actual realisation which is a Self realisation.  A change in knowledge is an action, a new comprehension whereas the Self has no action being immutable.  It is its light which is reflected by the mirror of the mind.

#160: If the agent, the ego, were to feel ‘I am liberated’ freedom from pain and pleasure would not be reasonable with respect to it.

#161/2: The wrong knowledge that one is happy or unhappy due to one’s identification with the body etc., like the pleasure or sorrow due to the possession or loss of an ear-ring, is surely negated by the right knowledge that is Pure Consciousness.

An evidence becoming non-evidence, everything will end in non-existence in the reverse case.

#163:  One feels pain when one’s body gets burnt, cut or destroyed, (because one identifies with it).  Otherwise the Self (which is different from the body) is never pained.  Owing to there being burns etc. in one man another is not pained.

There are many advaitins who take this as stated despite the ample evidence for pain felt by recognised self-realised sages.  Some offer the distinction between suffering and pain.  The jnani feels pain but does not suffer.  Prarabdha karma or that element of karma that must be got through before the body is ‘dropped’ might be a cause of the pain that must be suffered even by the jnani.  In any case there is no identification with the body by an enlightened person.

The other point about enlightenment that has occurred to me is whether one can speak of a time when one became enlightened.  In the histories of saints that attained this state after a period of spiritual practice a time is indicated.  In reality their true nature had never changed.

If asked they might say ‘I am now what I always was, I abide’.

Thou art That #145/6/7/8/9 (Apoha: How Now Brown Cow)

 Sankara’s remarks on apoha (Buddhist Nominalism) which has its source in annica (momentariness) are succinct and of course dismissive.  Apoha is consistent with that ontological theory following through to a tortuous ignotum per ignotius.  I submit that though Buddhism is full of skilful means the alarming complacency of this attempt has a forlorn hope of justification.

#145: Destruction has for its ultimate limit something which is self-existent.  (You say that) destruction is the negation of non-destruction.  A cow is defined according to you as the non-existence of a non-cow.  It cannot be the definition of a cow.

#146: Things denoted by the word ‘momentary’ are also, according to you, only the negation of things that are non-momentary.

The annica theory denies that there can be an unchanging existent ‘cowness’ universal.  Allied to that is the empiricist objection that the universal ‘cow’ is not experienced, only the particular cow now dubbed the non non-cow is experienced.  The obvious objection to this double negation is that lurking under the appelation non-cow is a something that is a something.

#147: (The Idealists).  As there cannot be any difference in non-existence differences are due to names only.  (Reply)  Please tell me how there can be manyness in one  (indivisible non-existence) due only to different names?

#148: How can the negation (of a non-cow) denote a cow if by the word negation the negation of different things is meant?  (Again) no negation distinguishes one thing from another, nor can special properties do it.

By annica nothing is, there is just a mere flux, so the non-cows cannot be negated either as they have no substantial existence.

#149: Just as names, species, etc. (do not qualify Knowledge) according to you as it has no special properties, (so the negation of a non-cow, hornlessness etc. do no qualify a cow).

'Knowledge' referred to there is a pure self-luminous cognition of momentary events.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge on The Vast, The Great, and The Whole.

  For from my early reading of fairy tales and genii, etc., etc., my mind had been habituated to the Vast, and I never regarded my senses in any was as the criteria of my belief. I regulated all my creeds by my conceptions, not by my sight, even at that age. Should children be permitted to read romances, and relations of giants and magicians and genii? I know all that has been said against it; but I have formed my faith in the affirmative.  I know no other way of giving the mind a love of the Great and the Whole.

Those who have been led to the same truths step by step, through the constant testimony of their senses, seem to me to want a sense which I possess.  They contemplate nothing but parts, and all parts are necessarily little.  And the universe to them is but a mass of little things.  It is true, that the mind may become credulous and prone to superstition by the former methods; but are not the experimentalists credulous even to madness in believing any absurdity, rather than believe the grandest truths, if they have not the testimony of their own senses in their favour?  I have known some who have been rationally educated, as it is styled.  They were marked by a microscopic acuteness, but when they looked at great things, all become a blank and they saw nothing, and denied (very illogically) that anything could be seen, and uniformly put the negations of a power for the possession of a power, and called the want of imagination and judgement and the never being moved to rapture philosophy!

(from a letter of Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Thomas Poole Oct.16th. 1797)

John Locke was the man who ‘said against it’ in ‘Some Thoughts Concerning Education’ (1695)

Thou art That #155, #156, #157

 

It has been said before that the benefit derived from (the proximity of) the Self is that it appears conscious like the former.  Being a revealer the intellect, like light and so on, pervades objects such as jars etc.

Just as a jar placed in the sun may be said to be brought to light, so, an object in the intellect may be said to be brought under its cognizance.  This bringing to cognizance is nothing but being pervaded by the intellect.  Objects become pervaded by the intellect one after another.

The intellect pervades an object (and assumes its form) when the object is revealed through the help  (i.e., the reflection) of the Self.  Like time and space the all-pervading Self can have no order or succession (in pervading objects).  (#155, 156, 157 Chap. XVIII ‘Thou art That’ Upadesa Sahasri)

Pervasion being an action must be performed by the intellect.  As previously noted the intellect has action but no consciousness.  That is supplied by the Self which due to its closeness to the intellect reflects consciousness on to it.  Thus the intellect appears to be conscious and directed towards an object.  As the individual subject (Jiva) is located in the material universe of space and time its attention flows sequentially.

In these expressions of the subject/object nexus the analogy of reflection is required to do a lot of work.  The core truth for advaita is that everything is within Consciousness.  There is the tantric saying ‘what is here is there, what is not here is not anywhere’.

Thou art That #141, #142, #143

 Please tell us (Idealists)  what benefit you derive by holding that knowledge depends on other things.  If it is contended that dependence (of knowledge) on the knower is desirable (we reply that) the knower also, according to us, is nothing but Knowledge.

The intellect itself, though indivisible, is looked upon by deluded people as consisting of the division of the knower, knowing, and the known.

Action, agents etc. consist, according to us, (Idealists) of knowledge only.

(Reply from advaitin). You must accept an agent of this knowledge, if you admit its existence and destruction (every moment).   (#141, #142,  #143 Chap. XVIII Upadesa Sahasri)

The locus classicus for a thoroughgoing refutation of Buddhist Idealism (Vijnanavada) is of course Bsb.Bh. II.ii.28.  It is ironic that what is called British Empiricism shares the same view that what we are in contact with is a state of consciousness and anything further is an inference of some kind or native faith.  In other words we perceive perceptions.

Sankara in this comment on Vijnanavada impugns the annica/annata (no-self/momentariness) aspect since the topic of the chapter is the Self.  Holding that there in no knower only knowing implies that the agent of knowing is created and destroyed in every moment.  Thereby they (Buddhist Idealists) contradict themselves.