As the mind permeates the sleeping dream, the dream feels real. As brahman pervades the waking dream, the dream feels even more real.
The mind infuses the sleeping mind; brahman, the waking one. Attention as if without awareness is like dreaming. Attention with awareness is like viveka.
In mutual superimposition, from the point of view of God’s own Maya, not only is imagination superimposed on reality, but reality is superimposed on imagination. And that’s why things feel so real.
1. reality figures
As brahman is in everything and everything is in brahman, and atman is brahman, one’s real self is in everything and everything is in oneself.
This is the transitive property of consciousness, the paradoxical physics of reality, and the ancient math of nonduality.
Poets sing the reflection is in the water and the water is in the reflection. Sages say the world is maya. There’s only brahman.
2. nondoing my way
Without detachmant, discipline, earnestness, and viveka, there is no way. By the way, brahmavidya, self-inquiry, and intuition is my way.
Consciousness-existence is not only ground, that rope, the substrate of all superimposition, it’s you minus what you think you are.
God minus universal consciousness equals me minus individual consciousness. That pure consciousness is Atman is Brahman.
3. your real god
Intuition is at the crossroads of atman and brahman. Intelligence is the nature of brahman and not an attribute.
Artificial intelligence is like artificial consciousness. It's unreal. As old gods fade away, new gods appear. God is not dead.
Gods may be seen through. People can be deconstructed. Find true north. Real gods lead you to reality.
1.
Intuition is at the crossroads of atman and brahman.
Intelligence is the nature of brahman and not an attribute.
Artificial intelligence is like artificial consciousness. Unreal.
2.
As old gods fade away, new gods appear. God is not dead.
Gods may be seen through. People can be deconstructed.
Find true north. Your real god will lead you to the truth.
Without detachmant, discipline, earnestness, and viveka, there is no way. By the way, brahmavidya, self-inquiry, and intuition is the way.
Consciousness-existence is not only ground, that rope, the substrate of all superimposition, it’s you minus what you think you are.
God minus universal consciousness equals me minus individual consciousness. That pure consciousness is Atman is Brahman.
As brahman is in everything and everything is in brahman, and atman is brahman, one’s real self is in everything and everything's in oneself.
This is the transitive property of consciousness, the paradoxical physics of reality, and the ancient math of nonduality.
Poets sing the reflection is in the water and the water is in the reflection. Sages say the world is maya. There’s only brahman.
Consciousness-existence is the ground upon which the mind constructs its many castles.
Ordinary attention is that consciousness mixed with thought. Often mistaken for foundational consciousness, it's not.
Attention is like this murky solution. When left to sit silently, thoughts settle to the bottom leaving crystal clear awareness where it's always been.
In several passages in Śańkara’s Commentary on Gaudapāda’s Kärikäs and in the Nineteenth Chapter of the verse section of the Upadeśa Sahasrī we find ‘acosmic’ doctrines buttressed by theoretical arguments as well as by upanishadic quotation. They are associated with a world-view in which the external world is reduced to the ‘oscillation’ of the mind (citta-spandana).
In some places the Self is represented as imagining the individual soul, who then proceeds to imagine his own private worlds, a waking-world which recurs, and dream-worlds which differ from the waking-world and from each other.
From the waking standpoint, it is clear that dreams are illusory. But for their part, the dream-worlds exhibit all the characteristics of the waking-world, including a kind of Alice-in-Wonderland time-space-causation framework of their own.
More important still, from Śańkara’s point of view, is the fact that they contain a distinction between physical and mental (external and internal) and between real and unreal. This parallel between the (admittedly) false dreaming-worlds and the waking-world is used to bring home to the mind the falsity of the latter. Both worlds are the mere play of false ideas consequent upon ignorance of the true nature of the Self.
And a critique of the whole conception of causality is developed, aimed partly at refuting the natural and common conviction that dream-experience is an illusory ‘effect’ arising from waking-experience conceived as a real cause. In these passages there is a tendency to emphasize the irrational and spontaneous character of the experiences of both the dream and the waking states.
Outside the above-mentioned two works, Śańkara rarely if ever attacks the notion of causality, or establishes the irreality of waking-experience from the parallel with dream. He inherited this line of teaching from Gaudapāda, who was himself largely indebted for it to Mahāyāna Buddhist teaching. If Sankara made little use of it outside his commentary on Gaudapāda’s Kārikās, it may be that he considered it suitable only for a particular kind of pupil.
It has been argued that he was initiated into Advaita as a pupil of a Teacher of Gaudapāda’s line and that he later gradually emancipated himself from the acosmic and subjectivist views of Gaudapāda under the influence of other traditional Vedanta teaching.
Whatever be the truth here, he and his great pupil Sureśvara express a reverence for Gaudapāda which they nowhere retract, so that the texts in which he expresses the kind of views we more specifically associate with Gaudapāda deserve to be represented.
~Alston, Creation, p.244
In this reflexive universe, there are stages and substages. Both number seven.
The seventh substage of any given stage in this reflexive universe of evolutionary self-awareness requires the first substage of the next stage to be pre-existent.
This evolutionary universe is not propelled forward by its past but is being beckoned back by the future.
Not only is truth beyond words, words have never existed in truth. With great imagination comes a world of words.
Like a dream, it’s not real. That it feels real is an attribute of dreaming. Reality, like deep sleep, doesn’t feel a thing.
It's like the classic trope of snake and rope. Just because the snake appears to be real doesn’t mean it is. Perception is the very stuff of dreams.
Even these observations are things perceived and aren’t to be believed. Nonduality is not a belief system but a method for the practice of disbelieving.
Creation myths are made to be destroyed. Theories explaining all phenomena are constructed to be deconstructed. Worshiping the gods is prologue to seeing through them.
The texts of the Upanishads that are most obviously of benefit to man are those which teach him that he is identical with the Absolute, for the knowledge accruing from them is said to result in the 'fruit' of 'immediate intuition of truth' and 'immortality' and 'eternal freedom from fear'.
Such knowledge is not only 'fruitful' but final and uncontradictable. Once it is gained, it is inconceivable that there either should or could be any further knowledge to add to it, further it, modify it or correct it.
This cannot be said of the knowledge accruing from the creation-texts, which consequently carry less authority when they conflict with the great metaphysical teachings about the true nature of man as one with homogeneous Consciousness, the sole existent reality.
Further, if the creation-texts had been relating anything true, they would not have disagreed amongst themselves as to the details of creation. The texts that teach that the creation of the world took place on the analogy of some worldly kind of creation, such as the production of pots of showing that effects are non-different from their material cause.
And there is the further principle of exegesis that all the texts can be reconciled and combined into a single view.
According to this principle, the supreme texts of the Upanishads like 'That thou art', which affirm the identity of the individual soul with the Absolute, may be taken as fundamental, while all the rest of the texts of the Veda can be taken as auxiliaries to understanding these.
Some parts of the accounts of creation are plainly mythological, as when 'speech' is spoken of as 'desiring food' or 'food' is spoken of as 'running away'. These again should not be taken as statements of fact but as indirect aids to certain phases of the process of coming to understand the great truth that the individual soul is none other than the supreme Self
In the same way, the doctrine that, having created the world, the Absolute 'entered' it as the principle of life and consciousness is not to be taken as a statement of historical fact, but as a pictorial representation of the truth that the Absolute is already manifest in the world-appearance, in the sense that it is the only reality in it.
Both the doctrine of creation and the doctrine of the ‘entry’ of the Absolute into its own creation have to be viewed in a wider context and seen as part of the process of gradually conveying to the pupil a notion of his own true nature by the method of false attribution and subsequent denial.
Alston, Creation, p.231
For some the summer solstice is midsummer. The summer solstice is beginning of the summer for some others. Maybe our highest daily average temperature floats your boat. I know it’s summer when this tidal Merrimack turns on its air conditioning originating from that Gulf of Maine.
Self-awareness is the nature of awareness. The bliss of self-awareness is the nature of brahman. Awareness to self-awareness is this dreamlike appearance of space-time in changeless satcitananda. Because reality is indescribable, paradox is one way to describe it.
As pure consciousness is the ground of reality, god is the floor of the people. All players in this world need a stage to act their part upon. Everyone has a god whether they believe in it or not. The hardest part of deconstructing the personal is unraveling its gods.
Your god may be political, scientific, materialistic, all three or more. Your god may be the one true god and no other god is true for you. Self-awareness has always been my greatest god. I might not have known it but self-awareness has been telling me I am the livelong June.
Śańkara was a good deal less exuberant than his later followers came to be in his references to the Absolute or the Self as bliss.
This may be illustrated from the case of the famous work called 'The Crest-Jewel of Wisdom', attributed to him but now known to have been composed centuries after his death by some member of his school.
Of the 580 verses of the 'Crest-Jewel' almost a tenth refer in one way or another to the topic of bliss, whereas in Śańkara's one independent work of guaranteed authenticity, the Upadeśa Sahasrī, there is only one appearance of the term bliss (ānanda), and the Absolute is regularly described as 'Being-and-Consciousness-only (sac-cin-mātra)' and not according to the later formula 'Being-Consciousness-Bliss (sac-cid-ānanda)'.
Nevertheless, the Upanishads do speak of the Absolute as bliss, and this note is not absent from Śańkara's genuine texts:
-the bliss of the Absolute available in dreamless sleep when nescience is absent
-under the influence of nescience, the bliss of the Absolute manifests in fragmentary and temporary form as worldly joy
-the bliss in the 'ether of the heart' enjoyed by those who realize the true nature of the Self
-the bliss of the Self is permanent, and, unlike that derived from objects, not dependent on activity
-the bliss of the Self is not anything experienced like an object
~Alston, Absolute, p.260
Gaudapada says both the dreamless state and both dream states are appearing in the fourth.
Even the midnight of a moonless night is appearing in that alpine crystal lake.
It goes without saying if the mind is appearing in consciousness only, I cannot be the mind.
Every person has a god and every god has a godhead.
I Am is god singing to its godhead. Sing along with me.
In a self-reflexive universe, I Know I Am is the holy trinity.
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
