Glimpses of Advaita in unusual contexts
Russell came close to Advaita when he speculated that the existence of an object cannot be proved independent of subject. It is the subject which gives validity to the object and not the other way. Our existence is meaningful because of the subject. The subject transcends the object. Advaita tells us that all that exists is the subject. The subject is one and the variety we observe is only an appearance.
Safi Al-Hujwiri: When a man becomes annihilated from his attributes he attains to perfect subsistence, he is neither near nor far, neither stranger nor intimate, neither sobre nor intoxicated, neither separated nor united; he has no name, or sign, or brand or mark (Kashf al-Mah-jub).
‘. .. what we see as contradictions on the surface are in fact different but complementary aspects of the same reality, and that ever shifting balance between them is the kaleidoscopic nature of Oscar Wilde. (Merlyn Holland)
‘In art there is no such thing as universal truth. A Truth in art is that whose contradictory is also true.’ Oscar Wilde.
When Besso died in the spring of 1955, Einstein wrote of his friend’s passing. “That signifies nothing. For us believing physicists, the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”
Einstein’s statement was not merely an attempt at consolation. Many physicists argue that Einstein’s position is implied by the two pillars of modern physics: Einstein’s masterpiece, the general theory of relativity, and the Standard Model of particle physics. The laws that underlie these theories are time-symmetric — that is, the physics they describe is the same, regardless of whether the variable called “time” increases or decreases. Moreover, they say nothing at all about the point we call “now” — a special moment (or so it appears) for us, but seemingly undefined when we talk about the universe at large. The resulting timeless cosmos is sometimes called a “block universe” — a static block of space-time in which any flow of time, or passage through it, must presumably be a mental construct or other illusion.
Reading an essay of T.S.Eliot, my mind compared it to Advaita:
Look at these passages:
“The point of view which I am struggling to attack is perhaps related to the metaphysical theory of the substantial unity of the soul: (ekam, adviteeyam)”
“The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all. Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.”
(Parallel with Advaita: Advaita is not about a new discovery but finding the truth in ordinary existence. It is necessary to analyse and weed out what is not Brahman to arrive at what is Brahman.)
Eliot acknowledges his tending to Vedanta:
“This essay proposes to halt at the frontier of metaphysics or mysticism.”
This essay by itself has nothing to do with Vedanta:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69400/tradition-and-the-individual-talent
Vedanta in turn is not like any knowledge and is life knowledge which must travel with us wherever we go and whatever we do.
“Amalric of Bane argued that God and the creation are one.”
“Averroism: There is only one immortal soul, the ‘active intellect’ of the cosmos, of which the individual soul is a transitory phase or form.”
“Maimonides (1135-1204)
Things exist only because God, their source and life, exists. His existence is identical with his essence. A thing which has in itself the necessity of existence, cannot have for its existence any cause whatever. Since God is intelligent, He must be incorporeal; therefore all Biblical passages implying physical organs or attributes of God must be interpreted figuratively. In fact, we cannot know anything of God except that he exists. .. We can never define him; we must not ascribe to Him any positive attributes, qualities or predicates whatever.”
“Spinoza hailed the great rabbi as ‘the first who openly declared that scripture must be accommodated to reason.”
The above 4 quotations are from Age of Faith by Will Durant.
Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari
“In reality, there is only a stream of consciousness, and desires arise and pass away within this stream, but there is no permanent self that owns the desires.
The soul is a story that some people accept while others reject. The stream of consciousness, in contrast, is the concrete reality we directly witness every moment. It is the surest thing in the world. You cannot doubt its existence. .. To be frank, science knows surprisingly little about mind and consciousness. .. Indeed, 99% of bodily activities, including muscle movement and hormonal secretions, take place without any need for conscious feelings.”
"Only wisdom based on self-understanding, not piety, will save us." Edward O. Wilson in "The meaning of Human existence.”
"1 represents unity, the absolute being and 0, null the transient human being. I am amazed how together these have created everything. 1 and 0 together have created the world." Leibnitz
“..the heavens, the`water, his rock, the tower, the golden sand banks, the swollen sails, the sea mews, the ebb and flow of the tide, - all form a mighty unity, one enormous mysterious soul ...that he is sinking in that mystery, and feels that soul which lives and lulls itself.” Henryk Sienkiewicz
“Just to be is a blessing. Just to live is holy.” Rabbi Abraham Heschel.(from TOI puzzles section)
That is in brief sat (to be)-chit (to live consciously)-ananda (blessing).
"With every continuous symmetry of a physical system, there exist certain corresponding quantities that are conserved, meaning that they do not change in time." Noether's Theorem
Perhaps, the whole universe is a physical system with continuous symmetry, and the non-changing entity of it is Brahman.
“There is no picture- or theory-independent concept of reality.”
“A theory is a good theory if it is an elegant model, if it describes a wide class of observation, and if it predicts the results of new observations. Beyond that, it makes no sense to ask if it corresponds to reality, because we do not know what reality is independent of a theory.”
Stephen Hawking.
From ‘Happiness’ by Frederic Lenoir
There is an extraordinary kinship between Spinozist metaphysics and Advaita Vedanta, particularly developed by Sankara. According to Advaita Vedanta, God does not exist outside the world; the world and God are part of the same substance; everything is in God, and God is in everything. Spinoza draws a distinction between three types of knowledge. 1. Opinion and imagination: this binds us. 2. Universal reason: enables us to discern, distinguish, know and order our affects (emotions, feelings, desires, etc.) 3. Intuition: through which we can grasp the relation between a finite thing and an infinite thing. This intuitive grasp gives us the greatest felicity, the most perfect joy, since it enables us to be in harmony with the whole universe.
Sankara says that the Advaita path is a more profound expression of reality than the dualist path (worship of a deity). The realization of being, the ultimate aim of all human life, implies the cessation of all duality. It is because they have escaped duality that sages become liberated while still alive (jivan mukta), for whom there is nothing left other than ‘the complete felicity of the pure consciousness, which is One’ (sacchidananda). Thus, deliverance is the result of coming to awareness both intellectual and intuitive (pragna), which closely resembles Spinoza’s third type of knowledge, and which brings supreme happiness, unbounded joy.
However, there is one major difference. While Sankara accepts the existence of an immortal soul that realizes it is Brahman on attaining gnana, Spinoza rejects it.
“To find the right road out of this despair civilised man must enlarge his heart as he has enlarged his mind. He must learn to transcend self, and in so doing to acquire the freedom of the Universe.”
“To be happy in this world, especially when youth is past, it is necessary to feel oneself not merely an isolated individual whose day will soon be over, but part of the stream of life flowing on from the first germ to the remote and unknown future.”
Bertrand Russell
“People are like children.” Hermann Hesse.
This passage is from "Man's Search for Meaning' by Viktor E Frankl describing experiences in German concentration camp:
“This young woman knew that she would die in the next few days. But when I talked to her she was cheerful in spite of this knowledge. "I am grateful that fate has hit me so hard," she told me. "In my former life I was spoiled and did not take spiritual accomplishments seriously." Pointing through the window of the hut, she said, "This tree here is the only friend I have in my loneliness." Through that window she could see just one branch of a chestnut tree, and on the branch were two blossoms. "I often talk to this tree," she said to me. I was startled and didn't quite know how to take her words. Was she delirious? Did she have occasional hallucinations? Anxiously I asked her if the tree replied. "Yes." What did it say to her? She answered, "It said to me, 'I am here - I am here - I am life, eternal life.'”
“Breath and body are not two dichotomous entities, nothing like spiritual substance wedded to inert matter; they are more like the drum and the drummer, an intimate independent pair.” David Shulman.
KANT: Space, time and cause are modes of perception, which must enter into all our experience, since they are the web and structure of experience. All dilemmas arise because of supposing that space, time and cause are external things independent of perception. We shall never have any experience which we shall not interpret in terms of space, time and cause; but we shall never have any philosophy if we forget that these are not things, but modes of interpretation and understanding.
Charles P. Steinmetz: Time and space exist only so far as things or events fill them, that is, they are forms of perceptions.
.”I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my eyes and all is born again.” -Sylvia Plath, poet.
“There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance.” “Know thyself.” “Prefer knowledge to wealth, for the one is transitory, the other perpetual.” “True wisdom comes to each of us when we realize how little we understand about life, ourselves, and the world around us.” “The mind is everything; what you think you become.” Socrates
“The absolute world is of so different a nature, that the relative world, with which we are acquainted, seems almost like a dream.” “..we are not fully equipped by our senses for forming an impersonal picture of the world.” “There are two parties to every observation - the observed and the observer. What we see depends not only on the object looked at, but on our own circumstances - position, motion, or more personal idiosyncrasies. Sometimes by instinctive habit, sometimes by design, we attempt to eliminate our own share in the observation and so form a general picture of the world outside us, which shall be common to all observers.” A.F.Eddington in a book on relativity.
“One is led to a notion of unbroken wholeness which denies the classical idea of analysabilty of the world into separately and independently existing parts- Rather we say that inseparable quantum interconnectedness of the whole universe is the fundamental reality, and that relatively independent behaving parts are merely particular and contingent forms within the whole. .. The general nature of reality, as Bohm says, is then not one of what is to what is not. On the contrary, it is a relationship of certain phases of what is to other phases of what is, that are in different phases of enfoldment.” David Bohm
"Reality is one, available within every human being. The one-ness that the Hindu mystics refer to is conveyed by the mystics and saints of all religions. Christ has said ‘if thine eye be single, they whole body shall be full of light’, and elaborated saying that this ‘singularity’ becomes evident as we purify our mind of all the evils or selfishness lying within it. By doing so, we don’t change our religion, but become a better human being, whatever religion we have been born in. Our own Jalaluddin Rumi conveyed this so beautifully:
The lamps are different, but the light is the same- it comes from beyond.If you keep looking at the lamp, thou are lost – For thence arises number and plurality.
(attributed to a Sufi in a story).
Max Planck: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibrate and holds this minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. The mind is the matrix of all matter.
“The perennial philosophy is expressed most succinctly in the Sanskrit formula – ‘tat twam asi’(That art thou); the Atman, or the immanent eternal Self is one with Brahman, the Absolute principle of all existence; and the last end of every human being, is to discover the fact for himself.” - Aldous Huxley
In 1965, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, two young radio astronomers at Bell Labs, NJ, accidentally found Gamow’s predicted microwave relic of the Big Bang. They kept hearing a hissing sound from the speakers, .. it was the energy of creation itself, and this energy is everywhere. Niels Bohr: A particle has no absolute properties, but is whatever it is measured to be, and in this sense, it cannot even be assumed that it exists until it is measured.
“Nothing enters consciousness whole. There is no direct experience of reality. All the things the mind perceives- all thoughts, feelings, hunches, memories, insights, desires, and revelations- have been assembled piece by piece by the processing powers of the brain from the swirl of neural blips, sensory perceptions, and scattered cognitions dwelling in its structures and neural pathways.” Andrew Newburg
Writing about brain science: “There seems to be within the human head, an inner, personal awareness, a free-standing observant self .Neurology cannot completely explain how such a thing can happen – how a nonmaterial mind can rise from mere biological functions; how the flesh and blood machinery of the brain can suddenly become ‘aware’.” “(The heightened consciousness) is not necessarily created by the brain, but the brain has the ability to access the vast universal consciousness that underlies all of reality. Consciousness is primary to matter, and hence biology. The brain has consciousness like anything else in the universe and merely has a more sophisticated manner of experiencing and expressing it.” Andrew Newburg
“The laws of quantum theory could not be formulated in a fully consistent way without reference to consciousness.” Eugene Wigner:
“What we call real time is just a figment of our imagination and what we call real is just an idea that we invent to help us describe what we think the universe is like.” Hawking:
“If a theory called holographic principle is proved correct, we and our four-dimensional world may be shadows on the boundary of a five-dimensional space-time. .. One could say: “The boundary condition of the universe is that it has no boundary.” The universe would be completely self-contained, and not affected by anything outside itself. It would neither be created not destroyed. It would just BE.” Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mladinow
“The material world is seen as a dynamic web of interrelated events. None of the properties of any part of this web is fundamental; they all follow from the properties of the other parts, and the overall consistency of their inter-relations determines the structure of the entire web. .. The rhythm of creation and destruction is not only manifest in the turn of season and in the birth and death of all living creatures, but is also the very essence of inorganic matter. According to quantum field theory, all interactions between the constituents of matter take place through the emission and absorption of virtual particles. More than that, the dance of creation and destruction is the basis of the very existence of matter, since all material particles ‘self-interact’ by emitting and reabsorbing virtual particles. Modern physics has thus revealed that every subatomic particle not only performs an energy dance, but also is an energy dance, a pulsating process of creation and destruction.” Fritjof Capra
Kevin Nelson, a leading proponent of brain-based theories says that his work irks some die-hard atheists because it inextricably links spirituality with what it means to be human and makes it an empirical part of us, whether our reasoning brain likes it or not. ‘Understanding the neurological foundations of spirituality is necessary for a contemporary understanding of what it means to be human.’
1.From Will Durant’s magnum opus
The god was identified by Xenophanes with the universe. All
things, even me, are derived from earth and water by natural laws. Water once
covered nearly all the earth, and at some future time water will probably cover
the whole earth again. Nevertheless all change in history, and all separateness
in things, are superficial phenomena; beneath the flux and variety of forms is
an unchanging unity, which is innermost reality of god.
2.From a book on Quantum Physics (QP)
Everything we know about the world
must be filtered through the senses. We know in so many cases where our senses
can be fooled (hologram e.g.).
There may even be a
connection between the mysteries of QP and mysteries of consciousness. It seems
natural for us to want to understand ourselves, and this could explain our
curiosity about the natural world. .. All of us are part of the same universe. Perhaps
we are all just the universe trying to figure itself out.
“Spirituality is based on consciousness, religion on cognition. Spirituality is universal, whereas cultures have their own forms of religion. .. The most important contrast is that spirituality is genetic, while religion is based on culture, traditions, beliefs and ideas. .. An individual feels a sense of wholeness and unity with everything and everywhere. There is an effortless letting go of the ego, a going beyond the self.” Dr. Dean Hamer, a geneticist
“The same elements compose my mind and the world. This situation is the same for every mind and its world, in spite of the unfathomable abundance of “cross-references” between them. The world is given to me only once, not one existing and one perceived. Subject and object are only one. The barrier between them cannot be said to have broken down as a result of recent experience in the physical sciences, for this barrier does not exist.’
“You are a part, a piece, of an eternal, infinite being, an aspect or modification of it… This life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of this entire existence, but in a certain sense the whole… This, as we know, is what the Brahmins express in that sacred, mystic formula which is yet really so simple and so clear; tat tvam asi, You are That…
The plurality that we perceive is only an appearance; it is not real. Vedantic philosophy…has sought to clarify it by a number of analogies, one of the most attractive being the many-faceted crystal which, while showing hundreds of little pictures of what is in reality a single existent object, does not really multiply that object…
I insist upon the view that ‘all is waves’. The multiplicity is only apparent. This is the doctrine of the Upanishads. And not of the Upanishads only. The mystical experience of the union with God regularly leads to this view, unless strong prejudices stand in the way. Multiplicity is only apparent, in truth, there is only one mind…
The self is not so much linked to its ancestors, it is not so much the product, and merely the product, of all that, but rather, in the strictest sense of the word, the same thing as all that: the strict, direct continuation of it, just as the self aged fifty is the continuation of the self aged forty. No self is of itself alone. It has a long chain of intellectual ancestors. The “I” is chained to ancestry by many factors … This is not mere allegory, but an eternal memory. Nirvana is a state of pure blissful knowledge… It has nothing to do with the individual. The ego or its separation is an illusion.”
~ Erwin Schrödinger, Quantum Physicist
“The world of any moment is the merest appearance.” Ralph Waldo Emerson
(Michael Chandra Cohen : Sounds like good Advaita Vedanta - The Einstein Upanishad)
Ken Anirudha Van Skaik
Here are some inspiring words from Albert Einstein:
“I didn't arrive at my understanding of the fundamental laws of the universe through my rational mind.”
“Concerning matter, we have been all wrong. What we have called matter is energy, whose vibration has been so lowered as to be perceptible to the senses. Matter is spirit reduced to point of visibility. There is no matter.”
"Time and space are not conditions in which we live, but modes by which we think.
Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, determined by the external world."
“Time does not exist – we invented it. Time is what the clock says. The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”
“I think 99 times and find nothing. I stop thinking, swim in silence, and the truth comes to me."
"The intellect has little to do on the road to discovery. There comes a leap in consciousness, call it intuition or what you will, the solution comes to you and you don’t know how or why.”
"A human being experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."
"Our separation from each other is an optical illusion."
“When something vibrates, the electrons of the entire universe resonate with it. Everything is connected. The greatest tragedy of human existence is the illusion of separateness.”
“Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.”
“We are souls dressed up in sacred biochemical garments and our bodies are the instruments through which our souls play their music.”
“When you examine the lives of the most influential people who have ever walked among us, you discover one thread that winds through them all. They have been aligned first with their spiritual nature and only then with their physical selves.”
“The true value of a human being can be found in the degree to which he has attained liberation from the self.”
“The ancients knew something, which we seem to have forgotten.”
“The more I learn of physics, the more I am drawn to metaphysics.”
“One thing I have learned in a long life: that all our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike. We still do not know one thousandth of one percent of what nature has revealed to us. It is entirely possible that behind the perception of our senses, worlds are hidden of which we are unaware.”
“I’m not an atheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books.”
"The common idea that I am an atheist is based on a big mistake. Anyone who interprets my scientific theories this way, did not understand them."
"Everything is determined, every beginning and ending, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for the insect, as well as for the star. Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper."
“The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. It will transcend a personal God and avoid dogma and theology.”
“Energy cannot be created or destroyed, it can only be changed from one form to another.”
“Everything is energy and that is all there is to it. Match the frequency of the reality you want and you can not help but get that reality. It can be no other way. This is not philosophy. This is physics.”
"I am happy because I want nothing from anyone. I do not care about money. Decorations, titles or distinctions mean nothing to me. I do not crave praise. I claim credit for nothing. A happy man is too satisfied with the present to dwell too much on the future."
“Our world has indeed arisen out of an earlier one that was not yet divided. and this undivided whole is really still there and underlies all our cognition.But the transition from an undivided to a multiple world did not happen at the beginning of cosmic time. it took place in our childhood, when we, each of us, individually crosses symbolic threshold.” Johannes Bronkhorst, an Indologist
“The whole of the universe is flooded by a sea of energy – a clear light if you like (the ‘self-luminosity’ of Sankara) that fills what is known as the quantum vacuum. It is a light so pervasive that we would, in truth, only be able to ‘see it’ if it were not there. The entity that created it, the Brahma of both science and spirit, is an event more wondrous and perplexing thing to contemplate, for it is a single point and at all points. .. In pre-space, the potentialities of consciousness and the primary field are united through mutual participation on a universal scale. Put another way, the essence of the implicate order is the one source that enables both the primary field (the common source of at least everything physical) and consciousness. Based upon this thesis, it would be logical to infer that the one source of the world’s great spiritual traditions is grounded in scientific theory.”
This is on science and is a mail from a friend and an extract from an interview. It shows how bewildering physics is, which deals with the universe susceptible to observation by senses and instruments, and how there are parallels with Advaita about the illusory nature of the world -space-tme, and what we make out in a world that is fleeting.
Mail from friend
"The lady who won the Nobel in physics, Katie Mack; "Recent advances in particle physics theory suggest space and time as we think of them are'nt what we believe they were, and there's some deeper abstract reality to the UNIVERSE."
She has been contemplating the expected results of a certain particle collusioning and what it means to live in a Universe where Space and Time are not "fundamental."
She says the latest developments in Particle Physics have caused a new look and understanding of existing conceptions in nature of the cosmos. (Smolin and Bohm assert the same conclusion; that SPACE AND TIME are not REAL.)
She says that there is a DEEPER ABSTRACT math reality to the universe and since space and time are really illusions which we simply perceive. She says our wiring of the brain is not sufficient to get to the heart of existence: what is really out there.
Before Einstein came along with relativity theory, it was thought that Space and Time were not only real but immutable. WE believed that time ticks along for the same for everyone, Space is just a giant invisible grid thru which we move. But relativity created the possibility that Space and Time are malleable and intertwined, affecting each other in counterintuitive ways. How you move thru space affects Time and Space themselves since space changes shape as time passes.
Mack says that when you calculate the expected results of particle collisions, there is one way to do so, but there is also so weird an abstract geometrical object which does not require the existing concepts of Space and Time at all. She suspects that there is a new geometry: it suggests a DEEPER STRUCTURE of the universe that is better described by the new geometry. She speculates that Space and Time do not exist at all.
Is Universe a convenient illusion built upon something ELSE- something more powerful and fundamental and untouchable, that can't be perceived? It appears that time gets distorted as we try and make sense of what we observe!
There has to be a different perspective and REALITY appears to be a sliding scale. Some say Space/Time is not real and others say it is real but not fundamental.
So what is the real structure of the Universe? If it exists how do we state it? We have conceived of our ideas based on our experiences and here the mind is not wired to understand the conundrum stated above.
Possibly the best way to think of Space/Time is as an emergent phenomenon - something that is automatically written into the structure of reality, but. appears in our universe anyway, not so much as an illusion, but as an unexpected circumstance we happen to find ourselves in. Writing it off as unreal does not make it go away, after all. Ack.that there is more going on than we can see and control, might give us insight we need to work on.
Smolin says that firing electrons at slits and then seeing where each ends up, depends on how we observe and which slit each electron passes thru, will disappear if a device is set up to view each electron. Different conceptions in QM view reality show experiments show that particles behave differently.
Bohr/Heisenberg suggestion that an electron takes all possible pathways and interfere with each other to produce the wave pattern.But, accepting that a particle can be in all paces at the same time is possible except when it is watched.
Pilot Wave theory De Broglie, Bohm. "The electron only passes thru one of the slits, but, is directed by an undetected entity called a Pilot Wave. This requires accepting that there are many hidden features of the universe incl. empty 'Ghost Waves" with no particles to guide to account for all possible outcomes"
Many Worlds Theory Hugh Everett: "The experiment forces the universe to split into parallel universes, each of which accounts for one possible path the electrons might take. In this theory, there are hidden structures or particles that are in multiple places at once. But it requires belief that at every moment countless new parallel universes are being born".
“The end of all science is only to teach us to become aware of the unity and the movement that surrounds us. Seeing is the first essential step. You have done it, what you lack to cross the wall that you feel before you is to go to the next degree: Love. Love the world!” Teilhard de Chardin to Ella Maillart
Spinoza
(The excerpts are from
Will Durant’s “The Story of Civilisation”. The parenthetical comments are my
adhika-prasangam).
1. “Of all the things that are beyond my power, I value
nothing more highly than to be allowed the honour of entering into bonds of
friendship with people who sincerely love truth. For, of things beyond our
power, I believe there is nothing in the world which we can love with
tranquillity except such men.”
(This
forum is such a satsang.)
1. “After experience had taught me that all things that
frequently take place in ordinary life are vain and futile; when I saw that all
the things I feared, and which feared me had nothing good or bad in them save
in so far as the mind was affected by them, I determined at last to inquire
whether there may be anything which might be truly good and able to communicate
its goodness, and by which the mind might be affected to the exclusion of all
other things.”
He felt that
riches could not do this, nor fame, nor the pleasures of the flesh; turmoil and
grief are too often mingled with these delights. “Only the love towards a thing
eternal and infinite feeds the mind with pleasure … free from pain.” (Ananda. This may as well be an introduction to Adhyasa
Bhashya).
2. “The greatest good is the knowledge of the union which
the mind has with the whole of nature … The more the mind understands the order
of nature, the more easily it will be able to liberate itself from useless
things.” Spinoza
“Here is Spinoza’s first
phrasing of the intellectual love of god – the reconciliation of the individual
with the nature of things and the laws of the universe.” Durant.
(Here is the idea of the unity
of the individual self and the universal self.)
3. “His definition of substance is fundamental.
“Substance is that which is in itself and is conceived through itself, i.e. the
conception of which does not depend upon the connection of another thing from
which it must be formed. It is close to the literal meaning of the Latin root –
‘that which stands under, underlies, supports’. In other words, he identifies
substance with existence or reality. It is the essential reality underlying all
things."
(Substance
corresponds to what we call adhishtanam or Sat and give it a name for discourse
as Brahman. Brahman is independent and is the source of the world, rather
indistinguishable from it. Brahman is the reality and the world view that we
adopt by a desiring and corrupting mind is illusion.)
4. This reality is perceived by us in two forms: as
extensions or matter, and as thought or mind. These two are ‘attributes’ of
substance; not as qualities residing in it, but as the same reality perceived
externally by our senses as matter, and internally by our consciousness as
thought. These two aspects of reality – matter and thought – are not distinct
and separate entities; they are two sides, the outside and the inside, of one
reality; so are body and mind; so is physiological action and the corresponding
mental state. Spinoza defines an attribute as ‘that which the intellect
apprehends of substance as constituting its essence,’ we know reality, whether
as matter or as thought, only through perception or idea. .. Substance and its
attributes are one; reality is a union of matter and mind; and these are
distinct only in our manner of perceiving substance. (In a way, it corresponds
to Brahman being the only reality and our perception projecting multiplicity.
Spinoza did not feel the necessity to find a reason for such a split.)
5. All things are in some manner animate. .. There is
some form or degree of mind or life in everything. The world is in every part of it alive.
(Sat-chit is universal)
6. God is not identical with matter – Spinoza is not a
materialist.
God is not
identical with mind – Spinoza is not a spiritualist.
God and
substance are identical with nature and the reality of all being –
Spinoza is
a pantheist.
(Sarvam
kalvidam brahma.)
7. God is self-caused. .. We can know the existence of
god but not his real nature in all its attributes. .. Most of the qualities we
ascribe to god are conceived by analogy with human qualities. .. God is not a
person. .. God is ‘the indwelling, not the transient, cause of all things.’
‘There is no creation, except in the sense that the infinite reality –
matter-mind – is ever taking new individual forms or modes. .. He does not act
from freedom of will; all his actions are determined by his essence i.e. all events
are determined by the inherent nature and properties of things (svabhava).
There is no design in nature in the sense that god desires some end. He has no
desires or designs. , except as the totality contains all the desires and
designs of all modes and therefore of all organisms. (योsकामो निष्काम आप्तकाम आत्मकामो B.U.) .. There are no miracles, for the
will of god and the fixed and unchanged order of nature are one; any break in
the chain of natural events would be a self-contradiction.
8. Man is only a small part of the universe. Nature is
neutral as between man and other forms. We must not apply to nature or to god
such words as good or evil, beautiful or ugly; these are subjective terms, as
much so as hot or cold; they are determined by the construction of the
essential world to our advantage or displeasure.
9. Order is objective only in the sense that all things
cohere in one system of law; but in that order a destructive storm is as
natural as the splendour of a sunset ot the sublimity of the sea.
10. Knowledge originates in impressions made upon us by
external objects, but human mind perceives no external body as actually
existing save through ideas of modifications in its body. Perceptions and
reason, two forms of knowledge, are derived from sensation; but a third and
higher form, intuitive knowledge, is derived not from sensation but from a
clear, distinct, immediate, and comprehensive awareness of an idea or event as
part of a universal system of law. (Sarvatrika anubhava or anubhava, third
component of Sankara’s method besides Sruti and yukti?)
11. Since reason postulates nothing against nature, it
postulates, therefore, that each man should love himself, and seek what is
truly useful to him, and desire whatever leads him to a greater state of
perfection (purnatvam), and each one should endeavor to preserve his being as
far as in him lies. (B.U. 4.5.5 ‘Verily the husband is dear to the wife not for
the sake of the husband, but for her own sake,’ etc.)
12. Can we free ourselves from the bondage and become in
some measure the masters of our lives? Never completely, for we remain part of
nature, subject to the nature of things. (Jivanmukta who is subject to the
needs of the body but unmindful of it).
13. In so far as the mind is a series of temporal ideas,
memories, and imaginations connected with a particular body, it ceases to exist
when the body dies; this is the mortal duration of the mind. But in so far as
it conceives things in their eternal relationships as part of the universal and
unchanging system of natural law, it sees things as in god; it becomes to that
extent part of the divine eternal mind, and is eternal. (This happily
reconciles how Brahman is beyond mind, part of mithya, but through mind only we
realise Brahman, when mind and Atman/Brahman become indistinguishable).
14. The endeavour to understand is the first and only
basis of virtue. .. Knowledge is power; but the best and most useful form of
that power is power over ourselves. Merely sensory knowledge leaves us too open
to domination by external influences; rational knowledge gradually frees us
from bondage to the passions by letting us see the impersonal and determined
causes of events; and intuitive knowledge – direct awareness of the cosmic
order – makes us feel ourselves part of that order and one with god. (Sadhana
chatushtayam leading to jiva-brahma aikyam, as it were!)
15. The life of reason must be inspired by the
intellectual love of god. Since god is the basic reality and invariable law of
the cosmos itself, this intellectual love of god is not abject propitiation of
some nebular sultan, but the wise and willing adjustment of our lives and
conduct to the nature of things and the order of the world (satyam and rtam).
.. Love toward a being eternal and infinite fills the mind completely with joy.
.. The highest good of the mind is the knowledge of god, and the highest virtue
of the mind is to know god (Jnana is Ananda).
16.
Reason can indeed
do much to restrain and moderate the passions, but the road which reason
herself points out is very steep (kshurasya dhara, razor’s edge vide
Katopanishad and B.U.); so that such as persuade themselves that the multitude
can ever be induced to live according to the bare dictates of reason must be
dreaming of the golden age or of some stage play. ( BG 7.3: Amongst
thousands of persons, hardly one strives for perfection; and amongst those who
have achieved perfection, hardly one knows Me in truth.)
Nader: Consciousness is all
there is
Some points:
Consciousness is a field independent of whether we know it
or experience it fully or partially, idependent from physical, material aspect
of life, or any physicality, physiology, or nervous system.
We have a range of consciousness at the surface level
(Consciousness with c), which human beings, animals, plants and even elementary
particles have in varying degrees – the ability to experience the field
partially. Consciousness with C is the total field, the Ultimate Reality. It is
like the electromagnetic field which is beyond space and time, with electron
being a specificity in it.
The infinite or absolute consciousness does not undergo any
change.
There is this view that the physical universe arose from
physical base and consciousness is an offshoot of it. There is the other –
called extreme idealism that consciousness does not create anything but itself
and the universe is just an appearance. I like to call it monistic idealism
which means that there is only one reality.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9nxFFTlfzE&t=792s
Can Advaitins
draw any lesson here?
Excerpts:
Emanuele
Coccia concludes not only that plants have
self-identity but that the self is ‘above all, a vegetable’1:
“To be an ‘I’
we do not need to have a brain, sense organs, eyes, ears, nose. To have an ‘I’
it’s enough to have a living body, and a body whose main characteristic is the
fact of being born … If we ask plants to explain to us what an ‘I’ is, their
answer is that the ‘I’ is originally and constitutionally decerebrated, without
brain, and without organs, but remains the main plastic force of a living body.
The ‘I’ is the property of a body (there is no ‘I’ without a body) capable of
growing and shaping itself.”
19th-century
abstract painter Hilma af Klint:
“Thinking and
feeling are united in the solemnity of every stone.
Warmth and
feeling bubble within every living plant.
Behind the
agility of every animal rests the power of thought.”
Consciousness
does not live in some dusty garret of the cranium. It follows a winding
shadowed path through the forest of the body, it is snagged in every briar,
spun and winnowed like the filaments of a fleece, some aspect carried even at
the scale of the single cell.2
If we can
accept the possibility that consciousness is distributed throughout our bodies
and the rest of the world, that we ourselves are part-animal, part-vegetable
and part-mineral in nature, and that what we call animals, vegetables and
minerals are not lesser beings than we are, perhaps then we can begin to undo
the violence we have done – are still doing – to each other and to the evolving
ecosphere of which we are an inextricable part.3
- It may be
the same as a human being identifying himself with body-mind for ‘I’.
- Universality
of consciousness?
- Reality is
a whole.
To be sure,
consciousness here is biological, not Advaitic, but every lesson of Advaita is
drawn from the body-mind-intelligence complex.
https://aeon.co/essays/why-we-must-abandon-the-vegetative-state-diagnosis?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=efe533fff5-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2023_04_14&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-e7995480d9-%5BLIST_EMAIL_ID%5D
Einstein: “For us believing physicists, the distinction
between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”
“As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they
are not certain; and and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to
reality.”
[Wheeler] was very radical,” says Zeilinger. “He talks
about the participatory universe, where the observer is not only passive, but
the observer in certain situations makes reality happen.”
From the Tao of Physics:
“One of the most bizarre premises of quantum theory, which
has long fascinated philosophers and physicists alike, states that by the very
act of watching, the observer affects the observed reality.”
“Our language and thoughts have evolved in the three
dimensional world and therefore we find it extremely hard to deal with the
four-dimensional reality of relativistic physics.”
“Because our representation of reality is so much easier to
grasp than reality itself, we tend to confuse the two and to take our concepts
and symbols for reality.”
“Depending on how we look at them, they (sub-atomic units)
appear sometimes as particles, and sometimes as waves.”
“Modern physics has confirmed most dramatically one of the
basic ideas of Eastern mysticism; that all the concepts we use to describe
nature are limited; thst they are not features of reality, as we tend to
believe it, but crearions of mind; parts of the map, not of the territory.”
“When we are healthy, we do not feel any separate parts of
our body but are aware of it as an integrated whole, and this awareness
generates a feeling of well-being and happiness. In a similar way, the mystic
is aware of the wholeness of the entire cosmos which is experienced as an
extension of the body.”
Some views I read in the interview of Lisa Feldman
on reality:
Those are ideas (citizen, nation, etc.) that we impose on
reality and make them real. And then they have very, very serious and real
effects, physical effects on people.
Humans are the only species that use ideas and words to
regulate each other. .. Words are, in a
sense, a way for us to do mental telepathy with each other.
Your brain doesn't react to things in the world. .. It's predicting all the time, it's constantly
talking to itself, constantly talking to your body, and it's constantly
predicting what's going on in the body and what's going on in the world and
making predictions and the information from your body and from the world really
confirm or correct those predictions. The only information it receives is from
your body and from the world, through the sense organs, which we call
interceptive, as opposed to Xterra Assumptive, which is the world around you.
It is receiving sense data, which are the effect of some set of causes; the
brain doesn't know the cause of these Sensata. Your brain has to solve what
philosophers call an inverse inference problem. .. Your brain has one other
source of information available to it, which is your past experience; it can
reconstitute in its wiring past experiences, and it can combine those past
experiences in novel ways, call it memory, perceptual inference, simulation,
conceptual knowledge or prediction.
Your brain learns and it updates its storehouse of
knowledge, which we call an internal model, so that you can predict better next
time. And it turns out that predicting and correcting, predicting and
correcting is a much more metabolically efficient way to run a system than
constantly reacting all the time.
The brain creates experiences for us. It lures you to
believe that those experiences actually reveal the way that it works. But it
doesn't. So you don't trust your own intuition and not really. .. Your ability
to understand the sounds that I'm making and attach them to ideas is based on
the fact that you have years of experience knowing what these sounds mean in a
particular statistical pattern. ..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbdRIVCBqNI&t=883s
Bertrand Russell was a genius and an agnostic. His writing
stimulates thought. He critiques Bergson’s ideas on intellect and
intuition.
Bergson’s advocacy of ‘intuition’ as against ‘intellect’ in
Russell’s words:
“There are, he says, “two profoundly different ways of
knowing a thing. The first implies that we move round the object: the second
that we enter into it. The first depends on the point of view at which we are
placed and on the symbols by which we express ourselves. The second neither
depends on a point of view nor relies on any symbol. The first kind of
knowledge may be said to stop at the relative; the second, in those cases
where it is possible, to attain the absolute.” 4 The
second of these, which is intuition, is, he says, ‘the kind
of intellectual sympathy by which one places oneself within an object
in order to coincide with what is unique in it and therefore inexpressible’. In
illustration, he mentions self-knowledge: “there is one reality, at least,
which we all seize from within, by intuition and not by simple analysis. It is
our own personality in its flowing through time—our self which endures’.”
“Bergson maintains that intellect can only deal with things
in so far as they resemble what has been experienced in the past, while
intuition has the power of apprehending the uniqueness and novelty that always
belong to each fresh moment.”
(This looks like realization and negation of the ‘observed’
world!)
But, Russell is not convined that intuition is superior to
intellect. He uses intuition in the meaning of instinct or insight, and applies
it to acquisition of worldly knowledge.
He writes
“Insight, untested and unsupported, is an insufficient
guarantee of truth, in spite of the fact that much of the most important truth
is first suggested by its means. … Instinct, intuition, or insight is what
first leads to the beliefs which subsequent reason confirms or confutes; but
the confirmation, where it is possible, consists, in the last analysis, of
agreement with other beliefs no less instinctive. Reason is a harmonising,
controlling force rather than a creative one. Even in the most purely logical
realm, it is insight that first arrives at what is new.”
“The fact is, of course, that both intuition and intellect
have been developed because they are useful, and that, speaking broadly, they
are useful when they give truth and become harmful when they give falsehood.
Intellect, in civilised man, like artistic capacity, has occasionally been
developed beyond the point where it is useful to the individual; intuition, on
the other hand, seems on the whole to diminish as civilisation increases. It is
greater, as a rule, in children than in adults, in the uneducated than in the
educated.”
“Does intuition possess infallibility? The best instance of
it, according to Bergson, is our acquaintance with ourselves; yet
self-knowledge is proverbially rare and difficult. .. It is true that intuition
has a convincingness which is lacking to intellect: while it is present, it is
almost impossible to doubt its truth. But if it should appear, on examination,
to be at least as fallible as intellect, its greater subjective certainty
becomes a demerit, making it only the more irresistibly deceptive.”
The full writing on the subject:
https://users.drew.edu/~jlenz/br-ml-ch1.html
While this does not cover intuition (anubhava) as discussed
in Advaita in this forum, the question how reliable intuition is troubles my
mind.
How is my personal experience of ‘I am’ reliable and a
pointer to something that is unborn and undying, and a whole that is
all-inclusive?
From an AEON article:
Science tends to view life
as an empty, soulless place, an inert, unspiritual void. Even when it
recognises irrational forces, it aspires to tame them by placing them inside a
model, keeping the primal beast imprisoned behind the iron bars of knowledge. But,
for an expert professional, real life is quite otherwise. The expert’s mind is
not binary, nor is it wholly amenable to understanding through knowledge gained
piecemeal in research. Instead, it is permeated by invisible waves that can
only be sensed by the inner faculties. It is full of mysterious streams and
tensions that constantly touch and enliven each other. Intuition is just
another name for this heavenly harmony.
Excerpts that seem to resonate with Advaita
“To Wheeler we are not simply bystanders on a cosmic stage;
we are shapers and creators living in a participatory universe.”
“Our observations in the present can affect how a photon
behaved in the past.”
“The moment you say that the universe exists without any
observers, I cannot make any sense out of that. I cannot imagine a consistent
theory of everything that ignores consciousness.” Linde
https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/does-the-universe-exist-if-were-not-looking
Sir James Jeans in ‘The New Background of Science’:
“We find that space
means nothing apart from our perception of objects, and time means nothing
apart from our experience of events. Space begins to appear merely as a fiction
created by our own minds, an illegitimate extension to Nature of a subjective
concept which helps us to understand and describe the arrangement of objects as
seen by us; while time appears as a second fiction serving a similar purpose
for the arrangement of events which happen to us”.
‘The electron ceases altogether to have the properties of a
“thing” as conceived by common sense; it is merely a region from which energy
may radiate’. (Outline of Philosophy by Bertrand Russell). The following is the
conclusion Bertrand Russell draws: “Now owing chiefly to two German physicists,
Heisenburg and Schrodinger, the last vestiges of the old solid atom have melted
away, matter has become as ghostly as anything in a spiritualist seance”.
Dr. Eddington: “The frank realization that physical science
is concerned with the world of shadows is one of the most significant
advances....In the world of physics we watch a shadow-graph performance of the
drama of familiar life. The shadow of my elbow rests on the shadow table as the
shadow ink flows over shadow paper”.
I read this in Bertrand Russell
Only Pascal was given to see
beyond logic and to experience the ineffable. (Obviously his experience is
limited).
Wittgenstein: Logic
(tautological) is devoid of empirical content. There’s no fundamentally right
and absolute logical system or linguistic framework.
Husserl later championed a form
of phenomenology called "transcendental phenomenology" where the
"Ego" or consciousness is seen as actively constituting the world and
its fundamental categories like space, time, numbers, and colors, by actively
structuring and meaning-giving to experience; essentially, the world is
not simply given to us but is built up through our consciousness.
In Husserlian phenomenology,
the "Ego" (or self) is not a static entity but itrinsically linked to
its lived experience and the world around it. This means the Ego's
personal history and identity are shaped by its interactions with and within
its environment. The Ego is not isolated, but rather is constituted
through its experiences and relationships within a world that is itself
historical and intersubjective.
Here is an interview of Dr. Susan Blackmore.
It is important, I believe, to know the ongoing thinking on
consciousness to appreciate Advaita.
Excerpts:
• Materialism
is hopeless because as soon as it confronts the problem of consciousness it
becomes dualist. Dualism is hopeless because it cannot explain the close
relationship between matter and experience.
• Panpsychism
may, or may not, help but has certainly not proved itself yet.
• You might,
for example, imagine that you are some kind of inner self that has
consciousness and free will, that “you” can direct your consciousness to some
things and not others, that some processes in your head are conscious ones and
others are unconscious, that you need consciousness to do some things and not
others, that consciousness has powers and effects, and that it must have
evolved for a purpose. There are excellent reasons for rejecting every one of
these very natural assumptions. In other words, consciousness, as normally
imagined, is an illusion.
• Everything a
human being does is caused by underlying processes we cannot see, and that the
self that seems to be in charge is not.
• Our amazing
existence is not the result of chance—at least not just chance. .. Chance on
its own obviously cannot produce our improbable existence; natural selection
can and did.
• (On effect
of meditation) I think I am happier, less caught up in stupid thoughts and
worries, more flexible about life and (maybe and most importantly) less
troublesome to other people.
• As far as I
have learnt, enlightenment is not a “state of permanent mystical awareness”;
it’s not a state at all. Rather it is a loss of, or seeing through, or letting
go of, the delusions of self and agency, and the acceptance of impermanence,
suffering and nonself.
• Human nature
makes us incapable of utopia.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-to-be-a-mystical-skeptic/?fbclid=IwAR2YBAju9UGSbnKIYyI4X3Jzfalv6sBaYsel8UKw4C4Mg_XVR9wPy2s_vEQ
Carlo Novell:
“REALITY is not as it appears to us; every time we glimpse
a new aspect of it, it is a deeply emotional experience. Another veil has
fallen.” “The flow of TIME emerges not in the context of an exact description
of things as they are. It emerges rather in the context of statistics and
thermodynamics. The present does not exist in an objective sense any more than
‘here’ exists objectively.
Our meaning and our conscience are built on the statistical
phenomena. For a hypothetically supersensible being, there would be no
‘flowing’ of time; the universe would be a single block of past, present and
future. But due to limitations of our consciousness we perceive only a blurred
vision of the world and live in time.”
Carl
Jung: collective unconscious mind is shared by everyone as a product of
ancestry. It includes archetypes (innate universal concepts) such as matter,
God, hero, and so on and we detect their influences in the form of myths,
symbols and instinct.
Illusions
occur when sensory data clashes with our assumptions about the way things are.
The brain attempts to make the information fit.
(Mithya
and how the same mithya encompasses all minds which have had a common ancestry
seem to find an outline).
Carlo Novelli
The present does not exist in an objective sense any more
than ‘here’ exists objectively.
Our memory and conscience are built as these statistical
phenomena. For a hypothetically supersensible being, there would be no
‘flowing’ of time and the universe would be a single block of past, present,
and future. But due to the limitations of our consciousness we perceive only a
blurred notion of the world and live in time.
The images we construct of the universe live within us, in
the space of our thoughts. Between these images and the reality of which we are
part, there exist countless filters: our ignorance, the limitations of of our
senses and of our intelligence. The very same conditions that our nature as
subjects, and particular subjects, imposes upon experience.
(All changes are partial experience and not real, it
suggests. What we experience is a construct of the mind.)
One of the things we understand least is about ourselves.
.. We are nodes in a network of exchanges through which we pass images, tools,
information, and knowledge. But, we are also an integral part (a small part) of
the world we perceive.
(Sarvam Brahma-mayam, and know the knower.)
If we are good enough we will get it right and will find
what we are seeking.
(The genuine seeker shall find the truth.)
The strange, multi-coloured world that we explore, where
space is granular, time does not exist, and things are nowhere – is not
something that estranges us from our true selves, for this is only what our
natural curiosity reveals to us about the place of our dwelling.
Here, on the edge of what we know, in contact with the the
ocean of the unknown, shines the mystery and beauty of the world. And it’s
breathtaking.
(Brahmanandam.)
I happened to come across this interview (vide link at the
end).
Maybe I am obsessed with Vedanta, it seems to echo Vedanta
to me.
The illusory nature of physical reality is set in the
language of science. I feel that there is sense in the statement “A philosopher
who doesn’t think about science is not willing to engage with the knowledge we
have.”
His statement “Our community has wasted a lot of time
searching after speculative ideas. What we need instead is to digest the
knowledge we already have.” reminds me of SSS. The post-Sankara philosophers
have churned out a lot of speculative ideas. Sruti and the bhashya of Sankara
draw on our experience and posit Brahman as the Sole Reality that is no
different from us. Sankara is relevant because his is the oldest available
commentary which explains several knotty points against a framework which has been
worked out jusl like physical laws are abstracted from observed facts.
Ultimately, it is a reality which is self-luminous and theories are redundant,
something that becomes clear only after a lot of diligent effort.
I am aware that the Reality science seeks is different from
what it is in Vedanta, but the nature of the physical reality is also inferred
from Vedantic statements.
Excerpts
“How does the world work? We have two main theories that
work incredibly well for different domains: general relativity and quantum
mechanics. When I learned about these theories in school, I was impressed by
how radical they were. They both challenge very foundational conceptions that
we have about the world around us — of space as an empty stage where objects
exist, and of time as a steady linear flow. They resonated with this idea I had
that if you really want to understand reality, you have to be ready to be
radical.
My intuition is that the overall flow of time really could
be like the rotation of the sky every day. It’s a majestic, immense phenomenon,
but it’s actually an illusion. This is a totally perspectival understanding of
the second law of thermodynamics. It’s real in the same sense that the rotating
sky is real, but it’s real only with respect to us.
All properties of an object — its color, location, size,
etc. — are in principle only definable in relation to another system. We need
to give up the idea that there are material things which we’re describing from
the outside. The best way of conceptualizing reality in light of modern science
is in terms of the relative information that pieces of nature have about one
another.
We can only say how the world looks from our limited,
biased perspective. This is very radical, because you can no longer say, “This
is a list of things in the world, and this is how they are.” We have to live
with this lack of total description over reality.
If this leaves you with a sense of emptiness about reality,
that’s fair. But it’s precisely by knowing that our knowledge is limited that
we are able to learn. Between absolute certainty and ignorance there’s all this
interesting space in which we live.
A philosopher who doesn’t think about science is not
willing to engage with the knowledge we have, and that’s just silly. ..
All scientific revolutions have been strongly influenced by philosophical
ideas. Copernicus, Galileo and Newton were all philosophers themselves.
Einstein very explicitly credited his insights to philosophers like Immanuel
Kant, Ernst Mach and others. And Erwin Schrödinger was likely influenced by his
reading of the Upanishads, the sacred Hindu texts, when he came up with wave
mechanics.
Our community has wasted a lot of time searching after
speculative ideas. What we need instead is to digest the knowledge we already
have. And to do that, we need philosophy. Philosophers help us not to find the
right answers to given questions, but to find the right questions to better
conceptualize reality.”
Link to the interview:
https://www.quantamagazine.org/carlo-rovellis-radical-perspective-on-reality-20251029/
The article in AEON (vide link below) may have a bearing on
Advaita discussion.
Excerpts:
Ontology is the study of being in general: not just every
material and conceptual entity in the world but the essence (from the Latin
esse, ‘to be’) that unites them all and allows us to say of each one that it
‘is’. Ontology asks: what actually exists and how do we know? An investigation
of fundamental reality, it also opens onto questions about language and thought
and their access to (or obstruction of) that reality – that is, the relation
between logos and onta.
Ludwig Wittgenstein: ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one
must be silent.”
Parmenides was the first to explicitly take on being
itself.
Parmenides’ fragmentary epic poem On Nature traces the
journey of a philosophical initiate under the guidance of an unnamed goddess.
The goddess leads ‘the young man’ away from the way of Doxa (Opinion), the
world we live in and our deluded beliefs about it. This is a world of transient
phenomena (objects and appearances – the Greek word phainomena signifies both)
and the ambiguous names we give them: ‘there will be a name (onoma) for all
things, as many as mortals have established, believing them to be true: to be
born and perish, to be and not to be, to change place and to alter their bright
colour.’ Leaving this unstable world of appearances, the young man ascends the
path of Alētheia (Truth) that leads to being. In contrast to the impermanent
objects of human language and belief, being is ‘ungenerated and indestructible,
whole-limbed and untrembling and without end’. Compared with a perfect sphere,
it is unitary and homogenous, eternal and unchanging.
This great orb of presence Parmenides names – with stunning
simplicity – ‘being’ (eon) or, more simply still, ‘is’ (esti)*. He makes
unprecedented use of the participial form (eon in his dialect) and the
third-person present indicative (esti) of the verb ‘to be’ (einai) to create
new names for a new concept. The verb in these forms has no subject: it is
being without a specific be-er, abstract and absolute ‘is-ness’. (Advaitam?)
(How close to asti or asi!)
With this verbal innovation, Parmenides in effect invents
ontology, positing not only being but also the possibility of a logos about it.
The Greek verb einai conjoins a notion of reality and of true claims about it.
Esti encapsulates that union (between language and being), collapsing what
exists and what can be said about it into a single word. ‘Is’ is – a pure and
perfect logos of on (must be eon, being).
The atomists adopted Parmenides’ conception of being as
singular and unchanging, but they attempted to reconcile this with the
empirical experience of plurality and change. First, they pluralised
Parmenides’ eon in the form of the atom, those ‘little beings boundless in
number’. Like Parmenidean being, atoms are eternal: they neither come to be nor
pass away. Unlike Parmenides’ monadic being, they are infinite in number and
diverse in shape and size. Joining and separating, they produce the Universe
and all the things in it. (Creation and dvaitam?)
Like Parmenides, Democritus differentiates between the
pseudo-being of human experience and the true reality that lies beyond it. On
the other hand, since phenomena and their qualities are nothing but the effect
of atomic interactions, they are intrinsically tied to that deeper reality: for
the atomists ‘what appears (phainomenon) is what is true,’ as Aristotle
complains in On the Soul.
https://aeon.co/essays/how-nothing-has-inspired-art-and-science-for-millennia?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=18a18700a3-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2025_10_03&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-19d630b572-70807295
स्थितप्रज्ञस्य लक्षण
The
terminal slokas of chapter 2 of Bhagavad Gita define and describe a
sthitaprajna (a oerson of equanimity). Rudyard Kipling sets it out in practical
terms, to my mind.
If....
If
you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If
you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too:
If
you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or
being hated don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too
wise;
If
you can dream — and not make dreams your master;
If you can think — and not make thoughts your
aim,
If
you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same:.
If
you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or
watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out
tools;
If
you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And
lose, and start again at your beginnings,
And never breathe a word about your loss:
If
you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And
so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them:
"Hold on!"
If
you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings — nor lose the common
touch,
If
neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,3
If all men count with you, but none too much:
If
you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours
is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And which is more: you'll be a Man, my son!
We are so dependent on sleep, not only biologically, but
from Vedantic angle too. I saw this article on sleep. Scientists confess that
they understand little of sleep unlike Vednatins. But this idea runs close to
Vedanta:
“Sleep is there not simply for recovery or rest, but could
be, in fact, our default state of being. Perhaps we evolved to spend most of
our lives asleep, in a plant-like vegetal state, waking only when necessary to
satisfy essential, vital needs, and then regressing back to our ancestral,
primal condition.”
Possibly, the day they arrive at a consensus on nature of
sleep, they would understand Tat Tvam Asi!
https://aeon.co/essays/two-billion-humans-are-doing-something-bizarre-right-now-sleeping?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=b4f9018bd8-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2025_10_17&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-19d630b572-70807295
Bertrand Russell was a genius and an agnostic. His writing
stimulates thought. He critiques Bergson’s ideas on intellect and
intuition.
Bergson’s advocacy of ‘intuition’ as against ‘intellect’ in
Russell’s words:
“There are, he says, “two profoundly different ways of
knowing a thing. The first implies that we move round the object: the second
that we enter into it. The first depends on the point of view at which we are
placed and on the symbols by which we express ourselves. The second neither
depends on a point of view nor relies on any symbol. The first kind of
knowledge may be said to stop at the relative; the second, in those cases
where it is possible, to attain the absolute.” 4 The
second of these, which is intuition, is, he says, ‘the kind
of intellectual sympathy by which one places oneself within an object
in order to coincide with what is unique in it and therefore inexpressible’. In
illustration, he mentions self-knowledge: “there is one reality, at least,
which we all seize from within, by intuition and not by simple analysis. It is
our own personality in its flowing through time—our self which endures’.”
“Bergson maintains that intellect can only deal with things
in so far as they resemble what has been experienced in the past, while
intuition has the power of apprehending the uniqueness and novelty that always
belong to each fresh moment.”
(This looks like realization and negation of the ‘observed’
world!)
But, Russell is not convinced that intuition is superior to
intellect. He uses intuition in the meaning of instinct or insight, and applies
it to acquisition of worldly knowledge.
He writes
“Insight, untested and unsupported, is an insufficient
guarantee of truth, in spite of the fact that much of the most important truth
is first suggested by its means. … Instinct, intuition, or insight is what
first leads to the beliefs which subsequent reason confirms or confutes; but
the confirmation, where it is possible, consists, in the last analysis, of
agreement with other beliefs no less instinctive. Reason is a harmonising,
controlling force rather than a creative one. Even in the most purely logical
realm, it is insight that first arrives at what is new.”
“The fact is, of course, that both intuition and intellect
have been developed because they are useful, and that, speaking broadly, they
are useful when they give truth and become harmful when they give falsehood.
Intellect, in civilised man, like artistic capacity, has occasionally been
developed beyond the point where it is useful to the individual; intuition, on
the other hand, seems on the whole to diminish as civilisation increases. It is
greater, as a rule, in children than in adults, in the uneducated than in the
educated.”
“Does intuition possess infallibility? The best instance of
it, according to Bergson, is our acquaintance with ourselves; yet
self-knowledge is proverbially rare and difficult. .. It is true that intuition
has a convincingness which is lacking to intellect: while it is present, it is
almost impossible to doubt its truth. But if it should appear, on examination,
to be at least as fallible as intellect, its greater subjective certainty
becomes a demerit, making it only the more irresistibly deceptive.”
The full writing on the subject:
https://users.drew.edu/~jlenz/br-ml-ch1.html
