Belief is knowing a lot of things and loving only some of them. Viveka is seeing through everything while loving all of it.
Two is old-time religion. One is into the mystic. Zero is postmodern deconstruction.
Nonduality is the reality of satcitananda.
What Śaṅkara means here is that of the string of four words in the nominative case in the Upanishad text ‘satyam jñānam anantam brahma’, Brahman (brahma) is the subject and the other three words constitute three separate predicates applied to it.
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In other words the phrase represents in contracted form three separate statements of the nature of the Absolute, ‘The Absolute is Reality’, ‘The Absolute is Knowledge’ and ‘The Absolute is Infinity’. We are not being confronted with the statement that the Absolute has three separate characteristics, but with three separate statements of the nature of the Absolute.
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Śaṅkara regarded the definition of the Absolute at present under consideration as concerned with the nature (svarūpa) of the Absolute, no words have power to characterize it positively. To do this is beyond the power of words.
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Śaṅkara was only concerned with words in so far as they can be used to promote immediate experience (anubhava) of the Absolute.
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All the various modifications of Being have a beginning and an end, but Being itself undergoes neither birth nor destruction. Hence the purpose of the present Taittirīya Upanishad text in ‘characterizing’ the Absolute as ‘Reality’ is the negative one of excluding all its apparent modifications.
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However, if the matter were suffered to remain there, we would be left with the Absolute constituting the material cause of the world of effects or modifications.
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If the Absolute is ‘Knowledge’, then it cannot be a material cause in the same sense as the material causes we observe in the world, which are invariably objects of our knowledge and therefore not themselves knowledge.
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Similarly, if the Absolute is ‘Reality’ and ‘Infinity’ it cannot be ‘knowledge’ in the sense of a particular act of cognition or any factor of such an act, such as the knowing subject conceived as agent in the act of knowing.
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Each of them, however, when taken as modified by contiguity with the others, still refers to the Absolute and indicates its nature negatively by marking it off from what it is not. It is that which is not unreal, not non-conscious and not finite, and that is the most we can say about it.
~Alston, Absolute, p.213
In the case of a unique entity like the Absolute, definition is achieved not by marking it off from others of its class but by marking it off from everything else whatever. And from this other points arise.
When we mark a particular individual off from others of its class by mentioning the particular characteristics which it has but they do not have, we 'characterize' it. We treat it as a substance having such and such attributes which we can enumerate.
But the phrase 'Reality, Knowledge, Infinity' is not a 'characterization' (viśeṣana) of the Absolute but merely a 'definition' (lakşaņa) of it.
Where there is characterization, the empirical characteristics attributed to the individual characterized must belong to it as attributes. But where there is only definition, it is enough if the characteristics merely serve to debar the mind from thinking of anything other than the unique entity being defined.
They may indicate the whole nature (svarūpa) of the unique entity negatively, by debarring the mind from all else, without characterizing it positively as a substance possessed of such and such attributes. They may thus 'define' it, in the Indian sense of the term, while leaving it transcendent.
Śańkara admits that the words 'Reality, Knowledge Infinity' do, formally speaking, attribute characteristics to the Absolute. But he claims that the purpose of the phrase is not to attribute empirically knowable attributes to the Absolute, but only to mark if off from anything that has empirically knowable characteristics.
~Alston, Absolute, p208
as the principle of existence meeting
the ground of pure awareness is
the spacetime of self-awareness
occupying spacetime is the
definition of a person
Words are for the world. Dancing is for me.
The principle of existence and the ground of consciousness are silent and still.
Self-awareness is the bell of tattvamasi.
The rishis say the mind knows nothing but existence and itself. Self-awareness is the bliss of knowing that is one.
Without that deep pacific godhead, where would my island be? This universe is the manifestation of that satcitananda.
I started off with transcendentalism but soon I hit the harder stuff: Shankara equals Shankaracharya minus acharya.
It takes an infinity of dreamworlds for that nondual self-awareness. I am happy to play my part. Who am I?
Reality isn’t objective. Facts are mostly objective. Truth is absolutely subjective.
Intuition is the only known link between this objective world and that subjective self.
This intuitive nonknowing is the other side of effortless nondoing. Nondoing and nonknowing is the way.
Wise minds stopping on the way avoiding decompression sickness building something finer for a deeper neti neti.
If it walks, talks, touches, tastes, or smells like the truth, it isn’t. You can’t feel intuition but you know how it feels.
The most profound knowledge of God is that which recognizes the utter inadequacy of all finite conceptions, and this can only be reached by the ‘Via Negationis’, the path of the negation of all the finite.
But only a few courageous souls can face the aridity of this path from the outset, and for minds of a devotional cast the ‘Via Eminentiae’ may be more appropriate, the path in which laudable characteristics that fall within human comprehension are ascribed positively to the deity, but with the clear recognition that they are but imperfect indications of His nature, since He transcends finite comprehension.
According to a third path, the ‘Via Causalitatis’, the mind fingers, as it were, the various causal principles that it can conceive as operating in the world, and attempts to mount through speculation of this kind to some conception of the deity as the first cause, and yet as that which lies beyond any causal principle that can be determinately conceived and from which all such principles proceed as effects.
According to a fourth path, the deity is sought to be perceived as the light present within the human intellect, illuminating its knowledge of truth.
According to a fifth path, the mind tries to mount up from things that are good and desirable for some particular end to that which is itself the supreme end, lying beyond all particular ends, and which is desirable for its own sake, the highest value and supreme good
Something parallel to, though not identical with, these various paths can be found in Śaṅkara’s texts. As we have already seen, he gives preference to the path of negation and regards it as indispensible for the final knowledge which confers liberation from ignorance and death. ...How tentative, for Śaṅkara, all positive conceptions of the Absolute are.
Śaṅkara conceived the upanishadic wisdom as consisting essentially in negation. The Absolute cannot be denoted through speech, and negation is the fundamental process which leads to ‘viveka’ or discrimination of the true nature of the Self from that with which it is falsely overlaid, the highest goal of the Advaita discipline.
The process Śaṅkara has in mind is not one of brute reiterated negation but of a gradually ascending series of successive affirmations.
The texts of the Upanishads are not exclusively negative. They give many and varied positive accounts of the Absolute and of its relation to the world and the individual, which alternate with passages in which all empirically knowable qualities are denied.
The various positive accounts of the Absolute are only approximations which have the function of bringing it down, so to speak, into the universe of discourse, so that the student can acquire some idea of it which can be corrected in the light of subsequent negations.
If the opening passage of Chapter III of the second Book of the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upanishad teaches that the five great elements that emanate from the Absolute are a reality, then the Absolute can initially be conceived as the cause from which they proceed.
But the purpose of the passage as a whole is not to teach that the Absolute is the cause of the world. The aim, rather, is to present the Absolute first in the guise of the cause of the world so as to give the student some idea of it.
When some conception of the Absolute is once in his mind, then it can be purified by the later text ‘Not thus, not thus’, which negates all empirically knowable characteristics of the Absolute, including that of being the cause of the world.
As we have already seen, Śaṅkara did not invent this method of interpreting the texts, but inherited it from earlier Teachers such as Gauḍapāda and Draviḍa. It is known as the method of false attribution and subsequent denial (adhyāropa and apavāda).
~Alston, Absolute, 165
Satcitananda is the principle of existence, the ground of consciousness, and the bliss of self-awareness. These are not attributes of Brahman. That satcitananda is the nondual nature of Nirguna Brahman.
In Saguna Brahman, I Am is the god of existence, I Know is the demigod of consciousness, and I Know I Am is the love song of self-awareness.
This manifestation of self-awareness may feel like samsara and look like space-time to an unwise mind but is actually the nondual nature of that transcendental light.
The Paradox of Self-awareness
Beyond life is the principle of existence. Beneath mindfulness is the ground of consciousness. Transcending love is the bliss of self-awareness.
Scientific materialism doesn’t have the ground of consciousness to stand on. It’s like this house of cards in the middle of an old-fashioned hurricane.
Religions give birth to billions of babies while scientific materialism throws out the baby with the bathwater. Advaita liberates that which is unborn, I'm just saying.
Call Me Moby
From existence to awareness happens in the blink of an eye.
In the name of effortless nondoing and intuitive nonknowing.
Call me Satcitananda.
The fundamental principle of Shankara’s teaching is that the pure, innermost ‘Self’ is the ultimate reality. This Self (which must not be confused with the ‘ego’) is a spiritual kernel of the same kind as Brahman or Godhead, the ultimate reality.
When a man overcomes ignorance or ‘avidya’ (the word has a very wide connotation which will be explained later) and grasps intuitively that the Universe is merely an external phenomenon, and realises the identity between the Self and Brahman he becomes a ‘liberated’ soul waiting only for his final liberation from the body by death.
The Self or Brahman cannot be described because it has no ‘qualities’ in the ordinary sense though it is sometimes said to be of the nature of pure being pure consciousness and pure bliss.
The material universe of forms and things is grounded in Brahman, but its formation therefrom cannot be described or formulated.
It functions on the basis of the law of ‘karma’ that is of cause and effect; but its ultimate cause is Brahman which has created the material world and started the process of change that we see occurring in that world, all creation is, however, ‘Maya’ or the power of illusion.
Within the realm of maya the universe exists and can be conceived as a creation of Brahman, who can also be conceived as a personal God; though from the standpoint of ultimate reality even a personal deity is a product of maya.
The causal law itself is ultimately unintelligible, because it is an illusory concept of name and form. There is no more essential difference between effect and cause than between a moulded pot and the clay from which it is made.
The world as caused by Brahman is an illusory superimposition (adhyasa) of phenomenon on the basic reality—like a rope which is mistaken for a snake or the mirage-lake seen on the desert sand.
It follows logically therefore that Shankara should urge the renunciation of transitory things and the acquisition of ‘right knowledge’ as the only means of attaining ‘liberation’.
~Y. Keshava Menon, "The Mind of Shakaracharya"
