Sat Cit Ananda

[Guest guest]

pramana [NonDualPhil]

 

Advaita is ideally nonceptuality,

but necessarily conceptual as a

teaching in practice, as are all

teachings.

The trail eventually takes us over

the cliff where even the teacher

dissolves into Self. Nothing can be

done about those ironies inherent in

any conceptual truths. "

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Hi Phil,

Can I offer for your consideration the perhaps novel hypothesis that the

mental process is itself nondualistic. It is nondualistic because it is

only through connaturality that we have any knowledge whatsoever. You

might recall on the list the idea that was bruited concerning the

subjective impasse created by the mind's 'inevitable' direct

acquaintance with its own ideas. The conclusion drawn from this was

that the 'external' object is at best merely an inference.

 

Opposed to this is the metaphysical theory that the mental modifications

and the object are isomorphic, the one being substantive and the other

conceptual. There are various versions of this: give me your broadest

brush, I have a big house to paint. In the Platonic what you know in

the individual is the universal, in the Aristotlelian the formal or

intelligible is that which is grasped by the intellect as actualised in

material things. In Advaita you have the " perceptuality of objects such

as a jar, consists in their not being different from (Consciousness

associated with the) subject. " It is the same Pure Consciousness (Sat

Cit Ananda) that is associated with the object as well as with the

mental modification of the subject. This is the connaturality that

allows the one to pass over to the other as it is.

 

This is why Perception is regarded as a pramana or a valid means of

knowledge. The image is offered in Vedanta Paribhasa of the mind;

light, subtle and transparent going out to its object and assuming its

shape. It can assume its shape because fundamentally they are one and

the same or have the same substratum. An intuition that I had once is

that the subject's consciousness is not in the subject but somehow in

the middle between the two(subject and object) and that it is placed in

the subject as a type of superimposition. This needs more work my inner

tutor tells me.

 

Here again you have the achievement which Plato sought viz. the saving

of the appearances.The advaitin sadhaka is always in the middle and though 'the

map is not the territory' he can fall through the map at any time.

 

Michael,