Mind going out in Advaitic Epistemology

 The vritti is an interesting element of the advaitin theory of perception which they share with the Nyaya school.  If there is direct perception of the object, as against an indirect inferential representation akin to the British Empiricists, does that mean that the mind has to go out to as it were envelop the object. I feel that enveloping metaphor is a leading one as though there were first a sight of the object and then the enveloping could proceed.

A more psychologically based view is that our sensational attention is always on in a muted way.  It is a sort of global awareness.  Who has not had the experience of in a crowded room, everyone talking volubly,  one’s name jumping out of the rhubarb?  In some sense the mind had ‘gone out’ already.  Another example would be the startle we feel when we have withdrawn ambient attention through concentration or meditation and are interrupted by someone.  

Sensation in the form of basic awareness is the global sensitivity to your environment.  It’s like a bare radar screen and then a blip for an object that we should pay attention to.  Vedanta Paribhasa talks about a subtle stream of mind but what is that but another name for attention.  Is not this attention a pale shadow of chaitanaya or Pure Consciousness?

Get Real

 The ‘Real’ as used in metaphysics is a term that I have never been happy with.  I can understand ‘real’ butter, a real Rolex, or  a fake Rolex withal a real watch.  Why should that which is unchanging be taken to be truly real. I can see where the notion might have come from.  A changeful entity both is and is not what it presents.  This is its status as a particular, what it wears upon its face.  As the instantiation of a universal it borrows the clothing of a solid citizen of the substantial republic (res publica).  

Has something gone wrong in our thinking when we subject the world we encounter to such derealisation?  To put it in Platonic terms the flickering world of our projection shares with the realm of Ideas the fact of existence or of being.  Nouns and verbs are the fleeting active personal world pitted against the impersonal ‘real’ world.

This is a mistake

Concerning Self Awareness in Vedanta

 

What ought to be kept a hold of in this discussion is that the mind is by nature non-conscious.

The whole ‘field’ (B.G.13/the Field and the Knower of the Field)  is a plane of physical interaction that

purely by virtue of being/existing is pervaded by consciousness i.e. sat chit. 

‘He shining everything shines after him’ .  Self awareness is a natural result.  Its location in the Body/Mind/Intellect

(Ahamkara) comes as a result of the natural gravitation towards the sensing pole of the interaction. 

This is the distorted image of the self that the anatman doctrine controverts.

'Dracula': The novel as an actual entity.

 A metaphor for the workings of the universe according to the theory of ‘Process and Reality’ would be the novel.  Take ‘Dracula’ by Bram Stoker as an actual entity.  As a whole congealed event the elements in it are happening at the same time intertwined, separable conceptually but single.  The different modes of information are plied linking the characters.  All the apps of the age, stenography, wax cylinder recording, letters, legal instruments and the vade mecum of travel, Bradshaw’s.   The modern 19th.Century is pitted against the malign chthonic forces rising out of the East.  The hope of rationalism that everything can be explained by theory is ‘decided’ which means in the etymology favoured by Whitehead, cut off.  Transcendental sacramentals, holy water, rosary beads, the figured cross, superject their energies.  The congeries that is the novel is drawn from the mind of Stoker-god who is both within and without his novel.   He is sunk in the text and its embodied genius takes him, its putative author, by surprise.  The book becomes energic  when this happens.  It lives, it lives.  

Reading 'Process and Reality' (in my shed)

 

Well then have I definitively given up on ‘Being and Time’? Yes.  My feeling was that the trek was not worth the trudge.  Now I have to look for a ‘hard’ book to read, a challenge that might be worth the slog.  I have lit on ‘Process and Reality’ by A.N. Whitehead.  Published in 1929 based on the Gifford Lectures of ‘27 and ‘28.  I’ve looked at it before on several occasions and have a general idea of the scope and ambition of what is his major work which has given rise to a school of process philosophy and theology.  One major difference between this work and B&T is that when Whitehead gives you neologisms/locutions he details precisely how this new expression serves to distinguish his thought from that which has gone before.  Thus ‘substance’ might be replaced by ‘actual entity’ and ‘universal’ by ‘eternal object’.  That that sentence under advisement.  As I go on my understanding will change.

The coherence, which the system seeks to preserve, is the discovery that the process, or concrescence, of any one actual entity involves the other actual entities among its components. In this way the obvious solidarity of the world receives its explanation.  (pg. 7 ed. Griffin and Sherburne )

He later adds that his process philosophy has a relation to Eastern thought:

In such monistic schemes, the ultimate is illegitimately allowed a final, ‘eminent’ reality, beyond that ascribed to any of its accidents. In this general position the philosophy of organism seems to approximate more to some strains of Indian, or Chinese, thought, than to western Asiatic, or European, thought. One side makes process ultimate; the other side makes fact ultimate.

Nisargadatta in answer to a question about causality responds treating the universe as a single block:

Q: As long as the mind operates, causation is a valid law.

M: Like everything mental, the so-called law of causation contradicts itself. No thing in existence has a particular cause; the entire universe contributes to the existence of even the smallest thing; nothing could be as it is without the universe being what it is. When the source and ground of everything is the only cause of everything, to speak of causality as a universal law is wrong. The universe is not bound by its content, because its potentialities are infinite; besides it is a manifestation, or expression of a principle fundamentally and totally free. (#4 I AM THAT)

Reading 'Being and Time' in my shed.

 To better channel the thought of Martin Heidegger I am reading ‘Being and Time’ in my shed and taking notes with my ‘to hand’ typewriter.  This shed contains an array of ‘to hand’ implements or tools for the garden or being-in-the-garden as he might have termed it. 3 spades, 2 forks, 1 shovel, 1 pick axe, a crowbar, brush hooks, grass hook, mowing machine, tiller, 2 scythes.  The amenities of my shed are much less than those afforded by the hut where M.H. wrote ‘Being and Time’.  

The typewriter is a Royal FP standard (pica font 10 cpi) which I bought in 1983 from the directress of a Shorthand and Typing Academy who was probably going electric at the time.  It works beautifully and gives my direct copy with a quasi objective gloss.  Would that be alienated accessibility?  

But why am I reading ‘Being and Time’?  I’ve been looking at it for years ever since it was left to me by a friend who bought it in 1989 and never cracked it, a stiff Blackwell paperback that requires two handed reading.

Is it a difficult book?  The ideas in it are not, they are straightforward but are compounded into intractability by a convoluted jargon which makes them seem deeper than they are.  Wasn’t it Wittgenstein who said "What can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence".  Experts in the thought of M.H. discover floods of nuance.  One finds 36 shades of meaning in the term ‘occurrence’ (S.E.P.)  In pointing this out the writer of the entry in the Stanford Ency. is guilty of oblique irony.  

Will I continue my ‘read along’?  Probably but with an expectation tempered by his lack of amenability.  Agonistically engaging however.

Descartes' Maxim, Nisargadatta's Sadhana

 Descartes wrote ‘Cogito ergo sum’, I think therefore I am.  Nisargadatta stuck with ‘I AM’ with Being.  That sounds portentous but what did it entail:

My Guru ordered me to attend to the sense 'I am' and to give attention to nothing else. I just obeyed. I did not follow any particular course of breathing, or meditation, or study of scriptures. Whatever happened, I would turn away my attention from it and remain with the sense 'I am'. It may look too simple, even crude. My only reason for doing it was that my Guru told me so. Yet it worked!  

Very good, fine, splendid but how did he carry on his business ventures, his chain of tobacco shops, his family life?  You may as well ask how do animals which have comparatively little powers of intellection manage.  Rote, routine, stimulus/response, habit; all those powers which allow us to navigate  in life in a waking but unconscious state.  In fact I would assert that Nisargadatta’s intuition was enhanced by remaining in that state of immersion in being.  Out of that place comes our capacity for transformation and creative energy.  He writes in his masterwork ‘I AM THAT’:

 My Guru told me: "...Go back to that state of pure being, where the 'I am' is still in its purity before it got contaminated with 'this I am' or 'that I am.' Your burden is of false self-identifications—abandon them all." My guru told me, "Trust me, I tell you: you are Divine. Take it as the absolute truth. Your joy is divine, your suffering is divine too. All comes from God. Remember it always. You are God, your will alone is done." I did believe him and soon realized how wonderfully true and accurate were his words. I did not condition my mind by thinking, "I am God, I am wonderful, I am beyond." I simply followed his instruction, which was to focus the mind on pure being, "I am," and stay in it. I used to sit for hours together, with nothing but the "I am" in my mind and soon the peace and joy and deep all-embracing love became my normal state. In it all disappeared—myself, my guru, the life I lived, the world around me. Only peace remained, and unfathomable silence. (I Am That, Dialogue 51, April 16, 1971).

Martin Heidegger whose ‘Being and Time’ I’m reading at the moment had a similar sense of the importance of being but he I think was overwhelmed by the other element of Descartes' maxim, thinking.  Rapt in that endless rumination he excogitated numerous overwrought expressions of the implications living in the neighborhood of Being brings.  

As I continue reading that baffling work in an agonistic engagement, so to speak, I will have more to say which will be very likely quite mistaken.