Matter

[Guest guest]

Namaste Advaitins,

A General Point first:

The Advaita Makaranda is a short text of some 20 verses. Compared to the

writings of Shankara it is no more than a mnemonic and suffers from the

disadvantages of its brevity. Clearly it is going to lack the close

analysis and painstaking delineation of each step of an argument that one

gets with the longer treatment. Its position then ought to be as a

support for the more extensive treatment or to serve as a summary of the

main points of each argument. A.M. is a medieval document and has the

advantage of being in itself a pure distillation of advaitic thought

unaffected by influences, overt or unconscious. However the modern

interpretation may not be so protected from distorting influence and

because of the shortness and inevitable generality of the text it is all

too easy to read into it what was not there or what was not the intent of

the original writer. Modern philosophical notions can act like viruses

even when the commentator has never encountered the original sources. In

fact it is easier for those sources to infiltrate when there is no

conscious knowledge of them.

 

Shouldn’t it strike one as significant that Shankara has neglected the

notion that the existence of a thing is established by the knowledge of

its existence as a readily available starting point for the demonstration

of Pure Consciousness as the substratum of everything?

 

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Peter-ji wrote:

In Vedanta Paribhasa we have the description of consciousness going out

through the organ of perception (eg the eye) and going to the space

occupied

by the object and being modified into the form of that object. The analogy

is given of water flowing out from a tank into a channel in a field, and

forming itself into the shape of the channel. This modification state is

called a vritti. This view appears to pre-suppose the existence of the

object before consciousness flowed out to that space occupied by the

object.

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Namaste Peter-ji,

Excellent and well taken point.

 

There is also the assumption at work that perception is the only means of

knowledge, that to know means to perceive. There is also the false idea

that existence means determinate existence. There can be things that we

know to exist but that we have very little determinate knowledge of, if

any. The Hadron Collider is a rational enterprise.

 

There are other equally valid means of knowledge, other than perception

,of which VP speaks. Inference is one that is very important for science

as it makes their experiments intelligible.

 

Best Wishes,

Michael.