Advaita Vedanta is the most failed mysticism

[Anonymous No.18573962]

In all mysticisms you hear about salvation of the soul, mystical love, union with the Absolute...

In Advaita Vedanta, liberation is realizing that you are not your person (your ego) but your True Self.
Except that your True Self has always been God.
So there is never any mystical union or salvation: your True Self was always immortal, and your mortal person in search of salvation remains mortal and damned.
This is a mysticism that literally saves no one: God (the True Self) remains God, unites with nothing and no one, and suffering people in search of salvation remain mortal, nothing changes.
They can only console themselves by saying that deep down, a True Self, different from them, has always been saved while they were suffering.
Isn't it beautiful?

How can we not see the nihilism of this metaphysics? This is what happens when one denies any real (and not illusory) otherness between God and creatures: no union, no salvation, no love. God remains God, persons remain persons, nothing changes, nothing saves.

>But no, the atman stops its false identification with the ego and does not suffer anymore!

The atman perceives the false identification and the suffering, he does not suffer and does not identify himself. So the atman has always been the brahman, and the jiva will always remain the jiva. No one is saved.

[Anonymous No.18574022]

>>18573962
Soulless bug oriental mysticism has never appealed to me. The westernizers who get into it usually abused drugs.

[Anonymous No.18574041]

>>18574022
this, it's frankly embarrassing when white people adopt this nonsense

[Anonymous No.18574077]

>>18573962
this just sounds like christian hermeticism

[Anonymous No.18574145]

>>18574077
half baked pseudo esoteric mysticism? sounds right

[Anonymous No.18574177]

>>18574145
no like the total identification of man and god & absolute idealism. like hegel & blake

[Anonymous No.18574216]

(Unbiased, non-committed, half-baked) Questions regarding Advaita (from a sincere seeker)

It would seem that Advaita is atheistic. Sure it pays lip service to Ishvara/God, but ultimately it claims nothing exists safe Brahman. But Brahman is impersonal whereas Ishvara/God denote personality. Therefore Advaita is atheistic.

It would seem that Advaita professes nominalism. Nominalism is the doctrine according to which only individuals exist and universal forms or essences are mere conventional names. Advaita says that if you remove the clay fromt the pot, the pot ceases to exist. It is merely a name; what ultimately exists is just the clay (in contrast with the Aristotelian-Thomist tradition, according to which the form of the pot has real existence, not in name only). Therefore Advaita professes nominalism. But if nominalism is right whereof existence, consciouness and bliss? These are universals, or mere names; therefore Brahman is also composed of namarupa (name and form); therefore Brahman is not absolute.

Furthermore, it would seem that Advaita professes materialism. Because it compares the clay to Brahman and the pot to the world. But the clay is the material cause of the pot. When Advaita says that only the clay is real, it is equivalent to saying that only the material cause is real. Therefore Advaita professes materialism.

It would seem that Advaita professes many consciounesses. Because if there were only one consciouness, every sentient being would experience the same things, and when any one sentient being got liberated, every other would be liberated. Therefore Advaita professes many consciousnesses. But if many consciousnesses, then reality is plural, not non-dual.

[Anonymous No.18574294]

>>18574216
Yeah, advaita is atheistic and crypto-dualist.

[Anonymous No.18574301]

>>18574022
>>18574041
What is the alternative? As >>18574077 says Christian mysticism is pretty much the same

[Anonymous No.18574331]

>>18574301
>As >>18574077 says Christian mysticism is pretty much the same

Hegel and Blake are in no way representative of Christianity, or Christian mysticism.

[Anonymous No.18574409]

>>18574331
How is Christian mysticism different from what OP describes?

[Anonymous No.18574418]

I would be careful about reading Advaita Vedanta interpretations such as Shankara's as a commentary to the Upanishads, they are extremely reliant on Buddhist philosophy (Shankara is called a "cryptobuddhist" by most Hindus, and most scholars agree). If you want to read the Upanishads, work through them with editions and commentaries that aren't sectarian, or at least read an interpretation that is closer to the original meaning of the Upanishads, rather than Shankara's 9th century AD quasi-buddhism.

[Anonymous No.18574450]

>>18574216
>It would seem that Advaita is atheistic. Sure it pays lip service to Ishvara/God, but ultimately it claims nothing exists safe Brahman. But Brahman is impersonal whereas Ishvara/God denote personality. Therefore Advaita is atheistic.

Kind of. From the limited perspective of the jiva, God (Ishvara), does exist, but from the Absolute perspective, It does not. Atheism is the categorical refusal that any God or gods exist, period, so the label doesn't fit so well with Advaita, thought it's true Advaita's view of God doesn't mesh so well with Abrahamic theism.

>It would seem that Advaita professes nominalism. Nominalism is the doctrine according to which only individuals exist and universal forms or essences are mere conventional names. Advaita says that if you remove the clay fromt the pot, the pot ceases to exist. It is merely a name; what ultimately exists is just the clay (in contrast with the Aristotelian-Thomist tradition, according to which the form of the pot has real existence, not in name only). Therefore Advaita professes nominalism. But if nominalism is right whereof existence, consciouness and bliss? These are universals, or mere names; therefore Brahman is also composed of namarupa (name and form); therefore Brahman is not absolute.

This is true, and is admitted point blank in the Ashtavakra Gita.

>Furthermore, it would seem that Advaita professes materialism. Because it compares the clay to Brahman and the pot to the world. But the clay is the material cause of the pot. When Advaita says that only the clay is real, it is equivalent to saying that only the material cause is real. Therefore Advaita professes materialism.

Dumb. Taking an analogy very literally. Brahman is being compared to clay, but this does not mean Brahman is physical like clay.

>It would seem that Advaita professes many consciounesses. Because if there were only one consciouness, every sentient being would experience the same things, and when any one sentient being got liberated, every other would be liberated. Therefore Advaita professes many consciousnesses. But if many consciousnesses, then reality is plural, not non-dual.

Wrong. There aren't many sentient beings, any more than placing several empty pots upside down means several spaces have been created. Space, like Atma, is indivisible.

[Anonymous No.18574565]

>>18573962
>In all mysticisms you hear about salvation of the soul, mystical love, union with the Absolute...
Advaita isn't mysticism but it is a metaphysical doctrine as Guénon correctly points out. Mysticism is essentially passive, the mystic "gives himself" to mystic states and feelings, he mentally prostrates himself and "lets it" happen to him. Metaphysical realization is active in nature and involves an intense investigation into the very nature of existence, whereupon a door is opened and the light of realization or gnosis shines through. Mysticism is tinged with emotion and sentiment, whereas pure metaphysical realization is intellectual, or if one prefers supra-intellectual (the jumping-off point viz. the doctrines one contemplates involves the intellect, but the subsequent dawning of gnosis/jñāna itself is supra-intellectual). Advaita seems like a "failed" mysticism to you because it's not mysticism to begin with but something of another order entirely, and you're comparing apples to oranges and going "wtf these apples don't taste like oranges, something's wrong".

see:
>We shall remind the reader that we have already pointed out the most essential difference between a metaphysical doctrine and a religious dogma; whereas the metaphysical point of view is purely intellectual, the religious point of view implies as a fundamental characteristic the presence of a sentimental element affecting the doctrine itself, which does not allow of its preserving an attitude of entirely disinterested speculation; this is indeed what occurs in theology, though to a degree that is more or less strongly marked according to the particular branch under consideration. This emotional element nowhere plays a bigger part than in the "mystical" form of religious thought.... The influence of sentimental elements obviously impairs the intellectual purity of the doctrine, and it is only right to say that it does in fact represent a certain falling away from the standpoint of metaphysical thought
- René Guénon, Introduction to the Study of the Hindu Doctrines

>In Advaita Vedanta, liberation is realizing that you are not your person (your ego) but your True Self.
>Except that your True Self has always been God.
>So there is never any mystical union or salvation: your True Self was always immortal, and your mortal person in search of salvation remains mortal and damned.
It is correct that mokṣa is not a union (two things becoming one or one thing merging into another), and it's not salvation (someone being eternally preserved in heaven) either. Advaita is quite explicit about this and doesn't hide this, Advaita doesn't claim to be a doctrine that purports to do this anyways, not does it claim to be a mystic doctrine connected with sentiment and emotion which it then fails to live up to by propounding mokṣa instead of mystic union or salvation; in other words this is a feature and not a bug.

[Anonymous No.18574573]

>>18574565
It's completely incorrect though as you write that "your mortal person in search of salvation remains mortal and damned". This is not true in Advaita, this is only true if you assume certain Christian doctrines as already true to begin with, and then imagine the implications of combining Advaita teachings with them. If you just evaluate Advaita teachings on their own though, without presupposing as true certain extraneous notions which are not taught by Advaita Vedānta, then this criticism is not actually true. It's a strawman criticism because it's imputing notions to Advaita and then attacking them as reasons for why Advaita is bad even though Advaita doesn't teach them to begin with.

In Advaita, when you attain liberation, the body and mind are no longer "yours", you identify yourself correctly with the Atman of consciousness, instead of incorrectly identifying yourself with the unconscious body and mind. You don't identify yourself wrongly anymore with the body anymore than you identify yourself with a table or tree right now. So, you don't continue to "have a mortal person" which undergoes problems because the body and mind *aren't you*, your point would be like complaining "I've become enlightened and fulfilled all desires but I still own a table that isn't enlightened!" The table is irrelevant and extraneous to the spiritual perfection that one has reached, whatever happens to the table in no way impacts oneself or detracts from one's spiritual perfection, in the same way for the Advaitist the body and mind become extraneous and irrelevant as well. So it's not an issue or problem in any way that the body continues to live on the physical plane after the Advaitist has attained gnosis. The body and its extensions in the subtle domain isn't "damned" but it comes to an end naturally just like all things do that have a beginning, consciousness (the Soul) isn't affected by this.

There is no "mortal person" separate from consciousness, since consciousness itself is the primordial person (Puruṣa). You, the Person, Puruṣa are like a pure crystal, and the mind and the emotions, beliefs, attitudes, tendencies, etc which characterize the mind are like a colored cloth place behind the crystal which seems to impart its color to the crystal from the perspective of the viewer, even while the physical crystal itself is not changed by the image appearing through it. The Person is eternal, unborn, unchanging and undying. What you call the "mortal person" is confusing the crystal and the colors appearing in it as the same thing, but in actuality the colors (mind, emotions, tendencies) are extraneous to the Person and belong to the individuality.

[Anonymous No.18574581]

>>18574565
>>18574573
Didn't read. Advaita is nihilism

[Anonymous No.18574586]

>>18574573
There is no separate continuing "person" aside from the Atman-Brahman who continues and suffers after enlightenment, because the enlightened man has realized their own Person as eternal, unchanging, free from suffering, and as different from the extraneous individuality, which has no life or consciousness of its own. This is the same Person you are right now, but right now you just can't realize it according to Advaita. This same Person that you are right now, continues after enlightenment, but without the confusing and misidentification that made you take the individuality for your Person, your Self, this misidentification is why you don't perceive this Person as your Self right now, even when It truly is.

Eternal things have no beginning, it's not logically sound to say "If I just believe in God and do XYZ I can enjoy eternal life in heaven or mystic union forever", for the double reason that the Abrahamic conception of the human as soul as something that is created in time means that it by definition can't be eternal, and the same argument exposes the flaw in the concept of eternal mystic union, if mystic union has a beginning when the soul enters into it from a prior state of not being inside union, then since that union has a beginning it can't truly be eternal. Hence, in order to maintain that you can truly have eternal existence in heaven or enjoy eternal mystic union you have to throw out the meaning of eternal and say "well it can just be true because God can do whatever I say He can", you can see how this relates to Guénon's point about the sentimental component of the theological/religious point of view compromising the pure intellectuality of the metaphysical point of view.

>This is a mysticism that literally saves no one: God (the True Self) remains God, unites with nothing and no one, and suffering people in search of salvation remain mortal, nothing changes.
It saves nobody because there is nobody to be saved; "In this universe the Swan, the Supreme Self alone exists" - Śvetāśvatara Upaniṣad 6.15, God remains the only truly existent Being, and by His own power He projects the unreal beings and endows them with a semblance of sentience that is only an imperfect reflection of His own sentience, everything within the universe takes place through this same power of God, including when in response to the instruction of their teacher and the revealed scriptures those beings overcome their ignorance and stop regarding their own self as a limited thing that is separate from the infinite Supreme Being, their intellects realize that the formless supernal light illumining that very intellect is the same all-pervasive light that illumines the whole universe and the intellect of all creatures, and they forever after experience themselves and know themselves as this light.

[Anonymous No.18574588]

>>18574586
What a bunch of convoluted annihilationist bullshit.

[Anonymous No.18574592]

>>18574586
Those intellects being illuminated by that light are not a being which needs to be saved to begin with. Deprived of the light of the consciousness which illumines it and allows it to function, the intellect is as lifeless and insentient as a rock. When you realize that only the light of Consciousness is truly alive and sentient, the intellect/mind and body no more need saving than a rock or table does, they are all alike insentient and lifeless changing phenomena which are presented to unchanging living Awareness as things which are irreducibly different from It, they only appear because they are projected by the inherent power of this very Awareness, they were never a separate and truly existing entity that needed saving to begin with. When you understand all of this you peacefully abide as the Infinite, without any false belief that there are other separate and truly existing sentient beings needing to be saved.

>They can only console themselves by saying that deep down, a True Self, different from them, has always been saved while they were suffering.
It's not different from them because it's the very core of their identity and being, upon which everything else is layered as extraneous and false additions.

>How can we not see the nihilism of this metaphysics?
It's not nihilism because it's not saying that nothing matters (attaining Self-knowledge leads to the end of suffering and the attaining of eternal bliss, which does matter) and it's not nihilism in the sense of saying that nothing exists whatsoever, because Brahman exists absolutely forever as the eternal Being who is Saccidānanda (truth, consciousness, bliss), or as the Taittirīya Upaniṣad says Satya, Jñāna, Ananta (truth, knowledge, infinite).

>This is what happens when one denies any real (and not illusory) otherness between God and creatures: no union, no salvation, no love. God remains God, persons remain persons, nothing changes, nothing saves.
God remains God, and His eternal liberation becomes one's own experience that is directly known.

>But no, the atman stops its false identification with the ego and does not suffer anymore!
>The atman perceives the false identification and the suffering, he does not suffer and does not identify himself. So the atman has always been the brahman, and the jiva will always remain the jiva. >No one is saved.
Jiva does not always remain the jiva because the jiva ends the false understanding or ignorance that causes it to identify itself as a limited entity. The light of awareness illuminating the jiva from within reveals itself as the true self of the jiva, and after this there is nobody left who needs saving but Awareness just enjoys the bliss of eternal freedom.

[Anonymous No.18574757]

>>18574216
The other anon already answered most of your points, but I wanted to add on a few things myself

>Therefore Advaita professes nominalism. But if nominalism is right whereof existence, consciousness and bliss? These are universals, or mere names; therefore Brahman is also composed of namarupa (name and form);
Advaita isn't nominalist (many schools of Buddhism are) because for them Brahman is the highest universal, Brahman is the ultimate universal essence underlying and sustaining everything. Advaita also denies that Brahman is composed of name and form, but for Advaita Brahman is totally different from name and form. In his Brihadaranyaka Upanishad bhasya, Shankara cites the following two Chandogya Upanishad passages to show that Brahman is different from name and form; ‘Ākāśa (the self-effulgent One) is verily the cause of name and form. That within which they are is Brahman’ (Ch. VIII. xiv. 1), and also ‘Let me manifest name and form’ (Ch. VI. iii. 2). Advaita doesn't mean to say that existence, consciousness and bliss are three names which combine our notions of these three words into a composite entity called Brahman who is the combination of these three notions of the intellect, but rather that these are really just symbols or verbal supports used to signify the same undivided reality from different angles, a reality which can only be fully known and experienced directly in a non-conceptual spiritual realization which doesn't involve discursive thought about names and their corresponding meaning in the intellect.

>Because if there were only one consciouness, every sentient being would experience the same things, and when any one sentient being got liberated, every other would be liberated.
The sensation of being liberated is something that happens to the intellect/mind and the reflected consciousness (chidabhasa) that the intellect is considered to be a receptacle for, this is the revealing of the light of the actual Consciousness as the ground of one's being and mental activity, Consciousness itself undergoes no change and is no impacted in any way when this happens though, just as the expanse of three-dimensional space isn't affected or changed in the slightest when the pot that is placed inside it shatters, leaving just the space that was already there existing inside and outside the pot. This is why not every sentient being experiences the same thing and don't share each others liberation. When you isolate all the contents of awareness from awareness and are left with pure awareness, there is no longer any indication that it's different from anything else, it's just a pure unity of reflexive awareness/presence. Even the mental sensation of bondage and liberation relative to that bondage are just more content exterior to this pure awareness. These exterior phenomena are incapable of inducing any change in this underlying Awareness, and so one jiva's phenomena don't impact the Awareness it and other jivas share.

[Anonymous No.18574852]

Holy shit it seems advaita vedanta really is atheistic after all, honestly the comebacks were satisfying.

[Anonymous No.18575026]

>>18574852
It just depends on your conception of God. In order to say that Advaita is atheist in my opinion you have to arbitrarily claim that only one certain understanding of God satisfactorily meets the conception of the word. Do you consider God to be an eternal, undying, uncreated, completely unchanging sentient Being, the uncaused cause of everything else, the Entity who sustains the entire universe and who is responsible for space and time while remaining transcendent to time and space? Then Advaita isn't atheist because they affirm that all these are true of Brahman.

It's only if you arbitrarily say "well God isn't God unless he is characterized by volition like human minds and chooses to actively intervene in the universe and has specific likes and dislikes etc" that allows you to claim that Advaita is atheism. But this is just presupposing that a very narrow conception of God is the only thing that God can be, so it's not really demonstrating that Advaita is atheism. In the most basic sense of denying the existence of a transcendent Being who is the source of the universe, Advaita is definitely not atheism.

If you hold to this latter view in the second paragraph it would make Plotinus an atheist for example, as he denied that consciousness and will (volition) can be attributed to the One, i.e. God.

>The Neo-Platonic God of Plotinus (204/5-270 A.D.) is the source of the universe, which is the inevitable overflow of divinity. In that overflow, the universe comes out of God (ex deo) in a timeless process. It does not come by creation because that would entail consciousness and will, which Plotinus claimed would limit God.
https://iep.utm.edu/god-west/#SH2a

[Anonymous No.18575031]

Why is he sitting on an emoji in that thumbnail?

[Anonymous No.18575050]

bro you know nobody reads your walls of text right

[Anonymous No.18575234]

>>18575026
>who is responsible for space and time
Not advaita.

[Anonymous No.18575327]

>>18574216
In Advaita there's only one consciousness (the first-personal givenness, immediacy of experience), so it is similar to the theory of Open Individualism of personal identity. It does not mean that "every sentient being would experience the same things", it just means that every experience in every sentient being exists in the same way, namely, subjectively. It has the same first-personal givenness, that is you, in every being. Advaita may be completely wrong in other respects, but it is surprisingly correct about this notion of for-me-ness of experience, this experiential presence. Read Fasching (below) for more info, his articles are just excellent.

https://pastebin.com/JRYesiKm

[Anonymous No.18575426]

>>18575234
>>who is responsible for space and time
>Not advaita.
Yes, even in Advaita Brahman is responsible for time and space. Brahman doesn't directly participate in a causal relationship with time and space and cause them like potter causes the formation of a pot, but Brahman remains outside of the nexus of causal relations while His power maya is the source of causation, time and space. Shankara affirms that Brahman is responsible for the (conditional) existence of space in his Brahma Sūtra Bhāṣya

>In the last two sūtras (BSB II. 3. 6-7), these arguments are successively refuted by Śaṇkara, the paramasiddhanta, who concludes that ākāśa must be considered as a created element. In the first of these sūtras, Śaṇkara resorts to śruti to defend his position. It is maintained that the real import of the statement "That by knowing which all that ... is not known becomes known" is that all the things to be known must originate from Brahman. For example, only those things that are made of clay become known when clay is known and not the potter, neither the different tools used in the production of vessels, et cetera. The "all-knowingness" resulting from the knowledge of Brahman must be understood "in conformity with the logic of the non-difference of the material and its products." Thus, if ākāśa is not considered to be a product of Brahman, it will remain unknown even when Brahman is known. The simile with milk and water is also not tenable. The knowledge of water acquired through the knowledge of milk is not complete knowledge, for water is known only indirectly through the knowledge of milk. The water may be there, but there is no way to be sure. The all-knowingness referred to in the śruti entails that a//existents are creations of Brahman, and so ākāśa must be taken to be created.

[Anonymous No.18575434]

>>18575426
>In the last sūtra, Śaṇkara resorts to logic in order to demonstrate that ākāśa is an effect, a creation of Brahman. The sūtra - yāvadvikāraṃ tu vibhāgo lokavat - states that all products in this world - a pot, a pitcher, a jar, et cetera - are separate entities. Śaṇkara simply extends this reasoning to ākāśa. Since ākāśa can be conceived as something separate from earth and other elements, it must be taken as a modification (vikāra) of Brahman. This argument brings much clarity with regard to the way ākāśa, as material space, was understood by Śaṇkara. It is argued here that ākāśa is a product since it is separate from other material bodies, such as earth and other elements. This suggests that ākāśa is conceived as something comprehensible in relation to other bodies. Conceptually, it cannot be emptied of bodies because its existence is intimately related to, or dependent on, them. Despite its abstract nature, ākāśa is thus considered to have a quite reified existence in this school of thought, as is the case with Vaiśeṣika and Sāṃkhya. Yet, ākāśa also presents important metaphysical connotations in Advaita. Being the first element to emerge from Brahman, it is often approximated to Brahman or even taken as one of its synonyms (BSB 1.1.22, 3.14, 3.41).

>Śaṇkara then refutes the various arguments raised by the siddhānta ekadeśī. He first argues against the Vaiśeṣika claim that the nature of ākāśa that is by definition incompatible with any causal dependence. According to the Vaiśeṣikas, any inherent cause (samavāyi) leading to the production of an effect consists in a variety of materials of the same class (e.g., many cotton threads produce a cotton fabric). It is argued that we cannot find such a cause in the case of ākāśa. But, it is argued, this rule is not universally true since, in certain instances, an effect can be produced from materials belonging to different classes (e.g., a rope made of cotton yarn and cow's hair). Moreover, it is possible that an effect can be produced from a cause consisting of a single material, such as curd produced from milk alone. For these reasons, it is logical to argue that ākāśa evolved out of Brahman alone, which is at once the efficient and material cause of the world.

[Anonymous No.18575441]

>>18575434
>Śaṇkara then refutes the claim that since there can be no distinction between the nature of ākāśa before and after its creation, ākāśa cannot be created. He points out that in the Vaiśeṣika philosophy itself, sound is considered to be the specific quality (viśeṣaguṇa) of ākāśa. Since sound did not exist before creation, the nature of ākāśa after its creation necessarily differs from that before. This is also justified by the śruti that declares Brahman to be anākāśam (BrU 1 1 1. 8. 8), that is, free from the characteristic of space. In his next argument, Śaṇkara dismisses the view that ākāśa has no origin because it is all-pervasive while other created elements are not. For Advaitins, Brahman is the only all-pervasive entity, not because it is in physical contact with all entities - which is impossible, for it is relationless - but because it is the cause and essential nature of every entity that exists. In this specific sense, ākāśa cannot be all-pervasive though it is in a purely spatial sense. Finally, it is argued that ākāśa is impermanent because it possesses impermanent qualities, such as sound. For Advaitins, the relation that exists between substance and quality is that of "identity-indifference" (tādātmya). Sound is essentially non-different from its substratum, ākāśa, and therefore one must accept that ākāśa is as impermanent as sound.

IS SPACE CREATED? REFLECTIONS ON ŚAṆKARA'S PHILOSOPHY AND PHILOSOPHY OF PHYSICS
Jonathan Duquette and K. Ramasubramanian
https://www.jstor.org/stable/40926862

[Anonymous No.18575487]

>>18575426
If it is responsible there must be will, otherwise it is not responsible. If the world came out of brahman then either it was willed or brahman is powerless.

[Anonymous No.18575494]

>>18575441
Thanks for the article. Here's another interesting paper on this topic

On the Ontology of Spacetime: Substantivalism, Relationism, Eternalism, and Emergence
https://philarchive.org/archive/ROMOTO-2v1

[Anonymous No.18575610]

>>18575487
>If it is responsible there must be will, otherwise it is not responsible.
That’s an unjustified and sophistic assertion. The meaning of “responsible” does not only apply exclusively to beings possessing volition. The word is often used to denote the causal relation between things that both lack volition, like a fire being responsible for a column of smoke.
>If the world came out of brahman then either it was willed or brahman is powerless.
That’s incorrect, because the meaning of “power” and “will” aren’t synonymous but are entirely separate things. Batteries have battery-power but no volition, lighting involves an immense discharge of electrical power without volition. Your argument is incorrectly presuming that power and will are synonymous or dependent on each other when this is far from being true.

[Anonymous No.18575881]

>>18575610
>The meaning of “responsible” does not only apply exclusively to beings possessing volition
Now this is sophistic.

>battery power
inanimate, it was charged from without and so willed.

>lightning
natural processes which corespond to its intimate power/energy

you confuse will with free will

[Anonymous No.18576520]

>>18574450
>These are universals, or mere names; therefore Brahman is also composed of namarupa (name and form); therefore Brahman is not absolute.
>This is true, and is admitted point blank in the Ashtavakra Gita.
wtf

[Anonymous No.18576531]

[Anonymous No.18576538]

[Anonymous No.18576556]

>>18574216
You are correct about everything. Advaitins will try to sell you nonsense about the "conditional" existence of things they need to exist for their philosophy to make sense, but can't admit really exist because then they are not true advaitins.

It is a confused religion for people who never get past the first stages of mysticism.

[Anonymous No.18576569]

>>18576556
Remember mayavada (advaita) is simply mahayana buddhism with Brahman added. Shankara and his teacher Gaudapada loved Buddhism but did not want to give up Vedic culture so they disguised buddhism as hinduism.

But mahayana buddhism is an epistemological method not an ontology. By hypostatizing its negative dialectics into an absolute reality, mayavada becomes nihilism worship.

[Anonymous No.18576583]

>>18574565
>It is correct that mokṣa is not a union (two things becoming one or one thing merging into another), and it's not salvation (someone being eternally preserved in heaven) either. Advaita is quite explicit about this and doesn't hide this, Advaita doesn't claim to be a doctrine that purports to do this anyways, not does it claim to be a mystic doctrine connected with sentiment and emotion which it then fails to live up to by propounding mokṣa instead of mystic union or salvation; in other words this is a feature and not a bug.
I use the term salvation in a broad sense, replace it with liberation if you want. I'm not talking about Christian salvation, you are making a straw man.

>In Advaita, when you attain liberation, the body and mind are no longer "yours", you identify yourself correctly with the Atman of consciousness, instead of incorrectly identifying yourself with the unconscious body and mind.
WHO identifies himself? Not the atman: the atman perceives the identification. The atman does not identify itself with anything, it is always God. It is the JIVA who identifies.

Which is exactly what I said:

>>18573962
>This is a mysticism that literally saves no one: God (the True Self) remains God, unites with nothing and no one, and suffering people in search of salvation remain mortal, nothing changes.
>They can only console themselves by saying that deep down, a True Self, different from them, has always been saved while they were suffering.

[Anonymous No.18576598]

>>18574573
>There is no "mortal person" separate from consciousness, since consciousness itself is the primordial person (Puruṣa). You, the Person, Puruṣa are like a pure crystal, and the mind and the emotions, beliefs, attitudes, tendencies, etc which characterize the mind are like a colored cloth place behind the crystal which seems to impart its color to the crystal from the perspective of the viewer, even while the physical crystal itself is not changed by the image appearing through it. The Person is eternal, unborn, unchanging and undying. What you call the "mortal person" is confusing the crystal and the colors appearing in it as the same thing, but in actuality the colors (mind, emotions, tendencies) are extraneous to the Person and belong to the individuality.
This is exactly why it is not the atman who identifies with himself or with others. It is the crystal in front of which the identification is put. It is the jiva that identifies itself. Liberation consists therefore in the jiva reassuring itself by identifying itself with the amtan, which it is not. The suffering being remains suffering and the atman was already God. Nothing changes, nothing is liberated.

[Anonymous No.18576613]

>>18574586
>This is the same Person you are right now, but right now you just can't realize it according to Advaita. This same Person that you are right now, continues after enlightenment, but without the confusing and misidentification that made you take the individuality for your Person, your Self, this misidentification is why you don't perceive this Person as your Self right now, even when It truly is.
Identification is a phenomenon that the atman perceives, it comes from the mind. again, it is the jiva that identifies. so liberation cannot come from identifying with the atman or not. whether the jiva identifies with the atman or with himself, he remains the jiva, the atman remains the atman, the suffering being is never liberated, God is God, and nothing changes.

[Anonymous No.18576622]

>>18573962
Mysticism is passive and cringe.
Liberation is above salvation.
Cope harder.

[Anonymous No.18576629]

>>18574216
>atheistic
This is sort of a misnomer. In Shankara's original formulation, you're absolutely right, and he got called out for it immediately. "Pure" Advaita Vedanta results in a literal enlightenment by one's own intelligence (he rejected the idea of long-term meditation or devotion; spiritual advancement is purely by assention to propositions and understanding of doctrines). Having said that, Smartism (a form of Hinduism focused on the five-way worship of Shiva, Vishnu, Surya, Ganesha, and Shakti) DOES use his philosophy as a way to justify their five-God pantheon. They need a way to justify five-gods-being-one without Avatar theory (too aligned with Vishnu sectarianism) and without the Shaivist "everyone is just Shiva wearing a mask" card.

Whether this is "true" Advaita Vedanta or not is really up to you. For what it's worth, the far more popular schools of Ramanuja and Madhvacharya were both firmly Vaishnavist at conception, but have been happily turned towards Shaivism and Shaktism by later thinkers.

You're correct on the nominalist part; your statement would also describe Buddhism, but a Buddhist would happily state that there is no absolute (positing an infinite historical past).

I disagree with what you're doing with the materialism bit; you're correct, but I don't think that "material" in the sense that you're using it should be used when talking about non-dualistic teachings (it's not really what we Westerners mean by "materialism" if "souls" and "Happiness" are both "material").

Shankara argues that everything that we could use to differentiate one and man consciousnesses doesn't actually exist. It's a form of trivial solution to the one-and-many problem: there's only one thing, Atman=Brahman, everything else doesn't actually exist. "Experience" doesn't actually exist, as does sentience. The only thing that exists is Atman=Brahman, and it is constantly illuminating itself via it's own translucent self-reflexive auto-contemplation that occurs by virtue of its opacity. There is only one thing, and not in a Parmenidean sense, but in a "no really, everything but Atman=Brahman literally does not exist" sense.

[Anonymous No.18576639]

>>18576556
>You are correct about everything. Advaitins will try to sell you nonsense about the "conditional" existence of things they need to exist for their philosophy to make sense, but can't admit really exist because then they are not true advaitins.
yeah
the "exist but dont at the same time" of maya is the key problem

[Anonymous No.18576652]

>>18576569
I would like you to respond to adi shankara's arguments one day
because I find his arguments in favor of the atman more convincing than all the buddhist theses on consciousness
for everything else I find Buddhism more convincing in its analysis (dukkha, anicca)

[Anonymous No.18576681]

>>18575881
>Now this is sophistic.
No it's not. Moral responsibility is separate from causal responsibility. The word "responsibility" has an accepted definition which can be applied to causal relationships between things lacking volition, as Merriam-Webster shows

responsible
>b (1): liable to be called to account as the primary cause, motive, or agent
>a committee responsible for the job
>b (2): being the cause or explanation
>mechanical defects were responsible for the accident

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/responsible

Characteristic of sophism is the attempt to entrap one's opponent into unnecessary and contrived contradictions using verbal trickery and rhetorical sleight of hand. This is what you are doing when you act like only one of the multiple meanings of "responsible" is valid without offering a reason why. If you want to act like only one of the accepted meanings of "responsible" in the dictionary is valid, then you have to provide a reason for why you believe this is correct, "muh feels" is not a valid argument for this claim of yours.

>>lightning
>natural processes which corespond to its intimate power/energy
??? So you are admitting that power can exist in lightning independent of will/volition? Then you are just conceding my point that power and will/volition have different meanings, which can also be confirmed by consulting any dictionary. Hence Brahman lacking volition/will does not mean Brahman lacks power.

>you confuse will with free will
How so? Both refer to the ability to make decisions, either freely or randomly/deterministically, that has nothing to do with my point that Brahman possesses the power of maya but without using volition to make decisions.

[Anonymous No.18576751]

>>18576583
>>18576598
>>18576613
This is exactly why the Buddha is right with his anatta against the atman of Adi Shankara.
Liberation cannot come from identification, as Adi Shankara says: identification is a mental process, of the ego, of the jiva. The jiva who identifies itself with the atman is deluded. The jiva remains the jiva, the atman remains the atman, nobody is liberated.
Liberation can only come from the total stop of all identification, the death of the self, of the ego: anatta.
Then only the absolute remains.

[Anonymous No.18576795]

>>18576751
>This is exactly why the Buddha is right with his anatta against the atman of Adi Shankara.
>Liberation cannot come from identification, as Adi Shankara says: identification is a mental process, of the ego, of the jiva.
Holy based

[Anonymous No.18576828]

>>18576520
I don't think the Ashtavakra Gita point-blank endorses nominalism.

As Richard Brooks notes in his review of a book on the topic, the question of universals and particulars is not mentioned in Advaita writings until later Advaita Dialecticians like Sriharsa and Citsukha attempted to refute the definition of universals by the realist Nyaya school, but this was just part of their method of showing that such systems of logic are ultimately grounded in circularities and fail due to problems like Gettier problem; I don't think it necessarily follows from their refutation of the methods used by Nyaya that they are endorsing nominalism though. Later Advaita philosophers like Madhusudana Saraswati introduced universals into Advaita metaphysics to help explain the nature of the relatively real world. Advaita would reject the notion of using universals as part of some scheme to build a logic-based system of realism like logical positivism from the ground-up due to the circularity of the logic involved, but Advaita doesn't necessarily reject the pragmatic value of them for explaining how different things within the relative universe relate to each other.

Brooks takes the view that there is no consistent doctrine of universals that follows as an implication of Advaita metaphysics, while on the other hand, the scholar Sthanweshwar Timalsina in this page he wrote discussing Shankara's refutation of Yogachara Buddhism contrasts Advaita Vedanta with nominalist Yogachara Buddhism and writes that for Advaita Brahman is the highest universal. Certainly, Advaita admits that Brahman exists independent of the human mind as universals are supposed to.

https://cisindus.org/2021/03/31/adi-shankaras-critique-of-buddhism/

[Anonymous No.18576846]

>>18576751
wtf I'm buddhist now

[Anonymous No.18576852]

>>18576751
guenonians on suicide watch

[Anonymous No.18576878]

>>18576751
>Liberation can only come from the total stop of all identification, the death of the self, of the ego: anatta.
>Then only the absolute remains.
This. Identification is always a determination (I am X and not Y, the atman and not the jiva), therefore a limitation, therefore a conditioning. It is only when all conditioning disappears that one finds the unconditioned.

[Anonymous No.18576910]

>>18576569
>Shankara and his teacher Gaudapada loved Buddhism
Shankara thoroughly refuted Buddhism and Advaita rejects the ontology and epistemology of Buddhism alike.

[Anonymous No.18577006]

>>18576583
>WHO identifies himself? Not the atman: the atman perceives the identification.
The Atman always has the immediate intuition of It's own presence and It's own identity as the Atman. When the false identification of the Jiva ends, the Atman which was already lighting up the mind of the Jiva from within as the foundational Awareness of that Jiva's mind reveals Itself and It's own identity, when this happens you experience yourself as the Atman instead taking yourself for the Jiva any longer.
>The atman does not identify itself with anything, it is always God
The Atman doesn't MIS-identify Itself with anything, It always has intuitive awareness of It's own identity as the Supreme Lord.

>>18576598
>This is exactly why it is not the atman who identifies with himself or with others. It is the crystal in front of which the identification is put. It is the jiva that identifies itself. Liberation consists therefore in the jiva reassuring itself by identifying itself with the amtan, which it is not.
That's wrong, the jiva's false identity is due to ignorance, and when this is ended, the true identity of the Atman which was the real identity already within the Jiva reveals itself and the Jiva realizes that it's true identity had been the Atman all along, and not the Jiva. The real identity of the Jiva had always been the Awareness illumining the Jiva, and this is revealed, when this is revealed the very false notion of being a Jiva instead of the Atman ends and there is just the Atman remaining, this Atman was already present inside the Jiva before as the true Self and true identity within the Jiva, but was previously obscured from the jiva due to ignorance and related misidentification. The jiva realizes what had already been within itself forever already.

>The suffering being remains suffering and the atman was already God. Nothing changes, nothing is liberated.
No, there is no longer any suffering because suffering is only possible when you identify yourself with the body and mind, but when there is no longer any egoistic identity left and the only identity left is the Atman identifying with itself, then there is no identity or being left who is identifying itself with the body and mind who could suffer to begin with.

[Anonymous No.18577022]

>>18576681
Responsability comes from the latin respondeo, implying a subject and agency.
Even in your definition of MW, see what is written there: ''agent''. This is the primary sense of the word, all others are derived from it, be it personal or impersonal.

>So you are admitting power can exist in lightning independent of will
No, power and will are basically the same. A dog has as much will as humans and eletrons have as much as those as well.

>Both refer to the ability to make decisions
Wrong.

Anyway, brahman-maya duality is implied in all of your explanations removing conscious will (and even will itself), not to mention that the nature of brahman is an atheistic oneness of full black nothingness like other people already commented.

[Anonymous No.18577113]

>>18577006
how can I have siddhis?

and what do u think of covid vaccines?
will they kill my spiritual soul? my third eye?

[Anonymous No.18577118]

>>18576613
>Identification is a phenomenon that the atman perceives, it comes from the mind. again, it is the jiva that identifies. so liberation cannot come from identifying with the atman or not.
You are misunderstanding, the jiva doesn't continue existing and then identify itself with the Atman, it's identify ends and it's revealed that the foundational awareness and true identity of the Jiva was the Atman all along, and thereafter the consciousness illumining the jiva just continues as the pure-consciousness of the Atman-Brahman identifying with itself. There is no separate continuing jiva-identity after liberation.
>whether the jiva identifies with the atman or with himself, he remains the jiva,
No, because in the very moment of liberation the jiva-identity ends, never to arise again
>the atman remains the atman, the suffering being is never liberated
the suffering identity of the jiva is liberated in the moment of the dawning of Self-knowledge, because the Awareness animating the Jiva is revealed as the Atman

>>18576629
>Advaita Vedanta results in a literal enlightenment by one's own intelligence
Wrong, it results from the message imparted by the scripture, one's own intelligence just determines whether you are capable of receiving and grasping this truth which they reveal and which the teacher clarifies. The scriptural teaching is the source of the enlightenment and not one's own intellect.

>he rejected the idea of long-term meditation or devotion;
In Shankara's metaphysics they are auxiliaries to the eventual dawning of enlightenment, but they don't directly produce it themselves, they just can sometimes help you better position yourself so as to be in the right spiritual and mental state so as to remove all obstructions to this dawning that occurs when the teaching of the scriptures becomes fully grasped.

> "Experience" doesn't actually exist, as does sentience. The only thing that exists is Atman=Brahman,
That's wrong because the very nature of the Atman-Brahman is sentience, which is consciousness, which is awareness. So to say that Atman exists but not sentience is a contradiction.

>it is constantly illuminating itself via it's own translucent self-reflexive auto-contemplation that occurs by virtue of its opacity.
Brahman isn't opaque that's incorrect, opaqueness is mutually exclusive with being translucent so you are contradicting yourself by saying Brahman is both. Advaita Vedanta only says that Brahman is translucent, not opaque.

[Anonymous No.18577123]

>>18576639
>the "exist but dont at the same time" of maya is the key problem
It's not unless you fundamentally misunderstand it

>Again, ‘real’ and ‘unreal* in advaita are used in the absolute sense. Real means ‘absolutely real’, eternal and unchanging, always and everywhere, and Brahma alone is real in this sense; unreal means ‘absolutely unreal in all the three tenses like a ‘skyflower or a ‘barren woman’s son’ which no worldly object is. And in this sense, these two terms are neither contradictories nor exhaustive. Hence the Law of Contradiction and the Law of Excluded Middle are not overthrown. The Law of Contradiction is maintained since all that can be contradicted is declared to be false. The Caw of Excluded Middle- is not violated because, ‘absolutely real' and ‘absolutely unreal are not exhaustive and admit of the third alternative, the ‘relatively real* to which belong all world-objects. Again, since avidya (ignorance) is only a superimposition it vanishes when the ground-reality, the Brahma, is immediately realised, just as the rope-snake vanishes for good, when the rope is known. Avidya can be removed only by the immediate intuitive knowledge of Reality, which is the cause of liberation. Removal of avidya, Brahma-realisation and attainment of moksa or liberation are one and the same, the self-luminous Real.

[Anonymous No.18577138]

>>18577113
>how can I have siddhis?
Don't even bother pursuing them, they are a waste of time. You are better off going full-ascetic, following some householder path involving mediation or devotional worship, or just living a normal life. But to spend all that time and effort just for some stupid power that doesn't produce any eternal result is not worth it.
>and what do u think of covid vaccines?
Garbage, take ivermectin instead, I'm never taking them.
>will they kill my spiritual soul? my third eye?
The Atman can never be killed, they might kill your physical body though

[Anonymous No.18577153]

>>18574216
>Advaita is atheistic.
No. Your just used to thinking in terms of god being personal. Your inability to understand something doesn't mean that something is other than what it is.

[Anonymous No.18577167]

What does this have to do with /lit/?
Do you have any texts that you want to discuss?

[Anonymous No.18577184]

>>18576751
>Then only the absolute remains.
But there is no absolute in Theravadan Buddhism. And to the extent there is in Mayahana the absolute becomes Brahama-Atma again anyway as I see it.

>>18573962
Hinduism has many strains. Check out Vishishtadvaita for instance.

[Anonymous No.18577217]

>>18576751
>This is exactly why the Buddha is right with his anatta against the atman of Adi Shankara.
Shankara refuted Buddha's anatta among numerous other Buddhist doctrines by pointing out how it both violates logic and doesn't accord with the nature of our conscious experience, which attests to the continuous and unchanging nature of our witness-consciousness and its uninterrupted identity from moment to moment.
>Liberation cannot come from identification, as Adi Shankara says: identification is a mental process, of the ego, of the jiva. The jiva who identifies itself with the atman is deluded.
You don't understand Advaita at all and are just repeating the other posters incorrect understanding. Liberation in Advaita does not come from the Jiva identifying itself with the Atman. What Advaita teaches is that when the false identity of the Jiva comes to an end, the true identity of the Atman which had been there all along as the foundation of the Jiva shines forth in the absence of the Jiva-identity like the Sun after the cloud in front of the Sun dissipates.
>The jiva remains the jiva, the atman remains the atman, nobody is liberated.
The Jiva-identity comes to end with the dawning of Atman-knowledge.
>Liberation can only come from the total stop of all identification, the death of the self, of the ego: anatta.
>Then only the absolute remains.
Buddhists don't admit that anything that the being has now continues, it results in an annihilationist extinction whereby nothing we have now continues into the Absolute, Advaita doesn't face this problem since they hold that our consciousness is Itself the Absolute and that our consciousness that we have right now does continue into the freedom of the Absolute.

[Anonymous No.18577263]

>>18577138
>Don't even bother pursuing them, they are a waste of time.
okay, but in theory, how can I achieve siddhis?

>following some householder path involving mediation or devotional worship
I thought that in Advaita Vedanta these practices had no interest
liberation not being a yogic state but a supra-intellectual realization

[Anonymous No.18577285]

>>18577217
it's sad because I'm fucked
I recognize myself much more in Buddhism than in Advaita Vedanta on most subjects
the independence from revelation, the yogic tradition, the morality, the analysis of the world (its emphasis on dukkha in particular, but also anicca)
but I believe in atman-brahman (in a way, I have difficulties with advaita vedanta. I believe in the absolute as consciousness anyway)
rip

[Anonymous No.18577310]

>There is danger certainly; but only if we mistake the part for the whole, only if we mistake our own soul in its timeless unity for the living God. According to the great Muslim mystic, Al-Junayd of Baghdad, this is not only a danger, but a trap that the Lord himself sets for the mystic who has advanced so far that he has put behind him the fear of God -- who has forgotten that "it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God" (Heb. 10. 31). Such a man will mistake his own soul for God, and in very single mystical tradition, whether it be Hindu, Buddhist or Muslim, this will happen; and again in each of these traditions this mistake will be refuted by mystics who have had the two experiences -- that of the "isolation" of the transcendent and timeless "self" or soul and that of the overwhelming eruption into that soul of the love of God. The mistake is so easy to make; indeed, it is almost inevitable, for man was made "in the image and likeness of God", and unless he knows God either by faith or, better still, by experience, he can scarcely fail to mistake the image, once purified by asceticism and a total detachment from all temporal things, from the living God whom the image reflects. This "trap" that God sets for the unwary soul the modern Jewish philosopher and mystic, Martin Buber, discerned and warned against in unforgettable words:...

>... The second type of mysticism is the most strange; it is that described "from his own unforgettable experience" by Buber, and philosophically pin-pointed by the Samkhya-Yoga in India: the experience of the unfractionable oneness of the transcendent self, separate and isolated not only from the world of matter and mind, but also from all other "selves" and from all present knowledge of the living God. This we meet with among the Sufis; it is probably what the Buddhists of the so-called "Defective Vehicle" understand by nirvana. It can be tasted by all men, for this is the "image of God" in the human soul which even Original Sin could not blot out. It is this "image" that the mystic, as Buber saw, is almost bound to mistake for the godhead itself, as the non-dualist Vedantis did, and as Vivekenanda has done in recent times. It is the "trap" that a jealous God puts in the way of the spiritually proud.

[Anonymous No.18577326]

>>18577310
>>There is danger certainly; but only if we mistake the part for the whole, only if we mistake our own soul in its timeless unity for the living God. According to the great Muslim mystic, Al-Junayd of Baghdad, this is not only a danger, but a trap that the Lord himself sets for the mystic who has advanced so far that he has put behind him the fear of God -- who has forgotten that "it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God" (Heb. 10. 31).
this is exactly what it is. this mistake is extremely common in modern advaita vedanta and its followers in the west. they all say "i am god", whereas when the rishi tells you "you are that", what it really means is "god is god". The "I" of their "I am God", the jiva, is not, and never will be, God. To say "I am God" is false. God is God, the speaker remains the speaker.

[Anonymous No.18577334]

>>18577022
>even in your definition of MW, see what is written there: ''agent''
only in the first definition, not in the second definition.

In any case, if you are insisting in a highly idiosyncratic manner, contrary to an accepted usage of "responsible", that things without volition like a fire cannot be causally responsible for the effects of which they are the cause, then that's not demonstrating an actual contradiction in Advaita doctrine, that's not a refutation of an Advaita position, that's just you insisting that I adhere to your idiosyncratic standard how certain words can be used. In that case I could just say that Brahman is the ultimate cause that sustains the relative existence of the world, time and space, but without being "responsible" in the sense you understand the word.

>>Both refer to the ability
>Wrong
I've read multiple contradictory descriptions by different people of how they are different, the semantics of these particular words in the English language have nothing to do with Advaita though, as Advaita doctrines were written in Sanskrit, Brahman is held to not have change/desires/will/volition/decision-making in any sense of these terms. Nitpicking over semantics of how these terms differ is not a refutation of anything.

>No, power and will are basically the same. A dog has as much will as humans and eletrons have as much as those as well.
No, electrons are insentient and insentient things have no will. Power is something totally separate from will, some of the multiple possible definitions of these two words sometimes partially intersect in certain ways but the two words and the concepts expressed by them are by no means identical.

The valid definitions of power that include:
>a source or means of supplying energy
>physical might
>ability to act or produce an effect
have nothing to do with will, volition, free-will etc. Waves, tornados, firestorms etc have no will, volition etc but they have physical might that produces effects and thereby have power. Very few people accept power and will as being completely identical, so many of your arguments end up amounting to highly idiosyncratic usages of words that don't end up refuting anything, there is no substance to any of them.

>Anyway, brahman-maya duality
Wrong, it's not a duality because maya is ultimately unreal and the perception of it as a thing can end and hence it isn't eternal, while only Brahman is eternal. It's only a duality if they are set up as two mutually real independent realities.
>is implied in all of your explanations removing conscious will (and even will itself), not to mention that the nature of brahman is an atheistic oneness of full black nothingness like other people already commented.
That's not true, because the nature of Brahman is pure eternal reflexive Bliss-Consciousness, He has no color but is luminous, self-illuminating, so He is not dark or black, and being eternal Bliss-Consciousness is mutually exclusive with nothingness.

[Anonymous No.18577338]

>>18577310
>In order to realize that primordial Being as the Self it is necessary to turn away from accidental determination and from every particular intellection of the mind—to what? Maritain appears to be on the right lines when he suggests that the Hindu approach to God is by way of recession into the substantial esse of the soul. For that would satisfy the turning away from particular actualizations to a central abiding "act." In the nature of the case I do not think this suggestion goes or can go far enough. It is Thomists with the boldness and padadox of Eckhart who could set these lines in a dimension in which they really arrive where Indian metaphysics are situated. Nevertheless we may note a possibility of transcendence in the very immediacy of God's presence imparting being—esse---to the soul.

>Although the images in the passage I have quoted suggest to us a recession into the material principle, there is in the Indian doctrine no transcending of the individual ego by way of passivity: rather by way of act. Not however, act in the sense of action: and not (and this goes a good deal deeper) by way of act understood by the direct analogy of action. None better than the Hindu understands the passivity which is at the heart of action as such. It is by way of esse in actu primo that the supreme Principle in the Upanishad I have quoted is to be approached. That supreme reality transcends distinction.

>Pure and self-subsistent Being—esse in the illimitable and absolute sense in which it is applied by St. Thomas to the Divine Essence—transcends distinction, as we know, in that each divine perfection, known to us analogously by the distinct perfections of creatures is, in God, nothing else than the Divine Essence. But with regard to the transcendence of distinction there is this consideration too: difference between things is relative to their being components, if you like, of the same world. Without a common ground in which they participate things cannot be said to differ. All things are intrinsically related to God, but God is not related to his creation. If God then is said to be distinct from the creature this distinction is of another order than any distinction of creatures among themselves. To content oneself with expressions which are admittedly little more than babbling, God's transcendence is infinitely more than any difference and because it is infinitely more it is also in some sense infinitely less.

>The creature is distinct from God, yes. But God is not another.
>http://www.studiesincomparativereligion.com/Public/articles/A_Thomist_Approach_to_the_Vedanta-by_Bernard_Kelly.aspx

[Anonymous No.18577343]

>>18577217
>liberation in advaita does not come from the jiva identifying itself with the atma
>it comes when a false identity is terminated and what remains is atman as its foundational identity
how can you be so retarded as to ignore these two claims are literally the same thing?

[Anonymous No.18577348]

>>18577310
Yet when the fana' occurs, when the ego dies, there remains only God, the only one who really IS (wahdat al wujud, al hayyul-l-qayyum) from then on the saint can say like al-Hallaj, and this saying has been taken up by all the shuyukhs of the tasawwuf thereafter: ANA-L-HAQQ.

[Anonymous No.18577356]

>>18577348
take your al'mehds

[Anonymous No.18577364]

>>18577343
He does not notice that he attributes rational activity (identification) to the atman. The atman-brahman is sat-cit-ananda: it is simply the presence of being. It does not identify. Identification is a determination and conditioning, a mental operation of the contingent empirical person (the jiva). The atman perceives identification, it is not identification. Only the cessation of all identification, of all conditioning, of all determination, leaves room for the Whole. This is the teaching of the Buddha.

[Anonymous No.18577372]

>>18574592
>Jiva does not always remain the jiva because the jiva ends the false understanding or ignorance that causes it to identify itself as a limited entity.
Moksha is then the Jiva realising it is actually Atma which is Brahman? It does remain it just overcomes ignorance. I can see why this gets called crypto-Buddhist. Its an empty phrase though as its clearly different than buddhism.

[Anonymous No.18577389]

>>18577356
>The first group is who are on the same track of al-Hallaj, which mean they were also thought, said, and taught the same ideas. They were famous and always related to the idea of wahdat al-wujud. They are sometime called as a group of philosophical Sufism or Tasawwuf fail-safe. The first group was Abu Yazid alBistami, Ibn Farid, Ibn ‘Arabi, Jalal al-Din Rumi, Shaykh Siti Jenar, Hamzah Fansuri, Shams al-Din al-Sumaterani and many others who were inspired by al-Hallaj or inspired him.

>The second group is who agreed and supported his idea but not commonly related to the idea of wahdat al-wujud. They are the defender of this idea. Many of them consider him as one of the Saints or Awliya of Allah. They are such as Ibn Khafif who visited him in jail, al-Shibli who is his student, Abu al-Qasim al-Nasir Abadi, al-Qushayri, Ibn ‘Ata Allah, Ibn al-Hajj, Ibn ‘Aqil – who wrote Juz’ fi nasr karamat al-Hallaj (Opuscule in Praise of al-Hallaj’s gifts), Ibn Qudama, alTufi, Ibn al-Mulaqqin, al-Munawi, al-Sha‘rani, ‘Abd al-Halim Mahmud, etc.

Cope harder

[Anonymous No.18577390]

>>18577334
>highly idiosyncratic manner, contrary to an accepted usage of "responsible"
which is 1) the common and most used sense of the term and 2) the etymological and historical connotation of the term

>things without volition like a fire
again confounding things, fire has will, it wills being fire, it wills to burn

>a fire cannot be causally responsible for the effects of which they are the cause
fire cannot be causally responsible for its own burn? are you retarded?

>electrons are insentient and have no will
refuted by science

>power is totally separate from will
refuted by nietzsche

you say power can be ''ability to act or produce an effect'', how does this have nothing to do with will, volition, whatever? you are the one employing sophistic stratagems in order to restrict what words can mean, to fit your retarded atheistic pseudo-metaphysics, but can't even constrain the most obvious ones and let them escape in your ''valid definitions''.

also im not even going into the crypto-dualism in advaita because it is too obvious and many people here already knows how brahman-maya duality is insurmountable

[Anonymous No.18577393]

>>18574757
Oh yeah. I remember this being explained as: people mistake a rope for a snake (avidya). The rope doesn't change, people just realise the rope is not the snake.

[Anonymous No.18577402]

>>18577364
this is literally what an advaiting would say describing the non-dual consciousness of brahman

[Anonymous No.18577413]

>>18577402
Uh, no. For the advaitin, liberation comes through supreme identification. I explain how it goes through the stop of all identification (anatta).

[Anonymous No.18577439]

The atman/anatman debate is sterile. Both are talking about the same thing.

One describes infinity as one, the other as the zero = in both cases, to signify its non-duality and unconditionality.

It is like a balloon: imagine that its content represents the self. The balloon bursts (liberation). One will say that what was in the balloon is now everywhere (the self is everything), the other that what was outside the balloon now fills everything (the self is gone).

Sat cit ananda = three qualities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_(Dzogchen)#Three_qualities

[Anonymous No.18577443]

>>18577263
>okay, but in theory, how can I achieve siddhis?
I'm not an expert, but certain Tantric texts mention this (I don't know which ones, maybe ask Frater Asemlen or look up a book on Siddhis), I highly doubt that anyone could attain it just from self-studying books though, most likely you would need to move to Asia and devote years to studying under some teacher of Yoga or Tantra while living austerely in a hut by a river or whatever until one day it just happens unexpectedly. And if you are going to go that far then why not just become a monastic and pursue God anyway? Siddhis don't produce lasting contentment or spiritual perfection.

>I thought that in Advaita Vedanta these practices had no interest, liberation not being a yogic state but a supra-intellectual realization
They don't have much interest for a monk pursuing the path of jnana-yoga that involves becoming a monastic, because this path of knowledge is the direct path and doesn't need to rely on indirect methods.

However, Advaita does admit that it's a fully valid spiritual practice for non-monks to pursue these practices, because non-monks cannot fully traverse the path of knowledge which Advaita says is inseparable from renunciation. For householders who retain homes, occupations and families and who remain sexually active etc, Advaita says they are supposed to instead pursue meditation, karma-yoga, bhakti-yoga, hatha-yoga, japa-yoga etc, and that if done properly these spiritual disciplines can lead householders to either very auspicious future lives where they attain liberation more easily, or that these may even lead householders at death to the Brahmaloka, where they have billions of years to focus on attaining liberation while inside the Brahmaloka before the cycle of universal manifestation ends.

Advaita doesn't focus much on the details of what these householders are meant to do though, Advaita writings are mainly meant for monastics on the path of knowledge. A householder being initiated into a non-monastic householder tradition like some kind of Vaishnavism or Shaivism that ostensibly has different metaphysics from Advaita could still lead to that person entering into the Brahmaloka at death if they are pure of heart and spend their life doing yoga etc, according to how Advaita metaphysics works.

>>18577285
>I recognize myself much more in Buddhism than in Advaita Vedanta on most subjects
>but I believe in atman-brahman
Have you ever considered being initiated into both? You could spend some time learning and being initiated into Kagyu, Nyingma Dzogchen, Jonang etc and then later in life travel to India and be initiated into something like Veerashaivism or Śrī Vidyā that accepts the Atman

[Anonymous No.18577445]

>>18577285
same
I don't understand how Buddhists can count consciousness as one of the aggregates

[Anonymous No.18577451]

>>18573962
i think you are just obsessed, its just the same as Fichte, Kant or Plato: the will points himself to a direction which is the Absolute, an ideal impossible but morally and logically necessary, which although you cannot act nor know you acted according to its principles, you nonetheless must still pursue inside of you

[Anonymous No.18577469]

>>18577389
this exotic name dropping means nothing to me

same if you use sanskrit.

[Anonymous No.18577489]

>>18575026
>If you hold to this latter view in the second paragraph it would make Plotinus an atheist
correct, monism in general is atheism

[Anonymous No.18577495]

>>18577310
based
source?

[Anonymous No.18577498]

>>18573962
Advaita was long ago refuted by Ramanuja (pbuh). Read pic related

[Anonymous No.18577511]

>>18577498
what are his arguments?

[Anonymous No.18577536]

>>18577495
R. C. Zaehner - Christianity and Other Religions around page 131

[Anonymous No.18577541]

>>18577343
>how can you be so retarded as to ignore these two claims are literally the same thing?
It's not, the identification of the Atman with itself is continuous, automatic, natural, effortless, unchanging and everlasting. It has no beginning or end. This is not the jiva identifying itself with the Atman, if the Jiva identified itself with the Atman, that would have a beginning which began at liberation, this is not what occurs. Instead, the true and beginningless identity of the Atman with Himself which had been underlying the jiva's false identity shines forth as the underlying reality when the false identity is destroyed. When a pot is shattered and it just leaves the space which had previously existed where that pot was, that's not the beginning of that space. The term "Jivatman" refers to the confluence of the Jiva and the Atman illuminating it, there are two identities here inhering in one being, the "two birds" spoken of in the Upanishads, one of these identities are false and the other is the real underlying one, both are beginningless. One (the unreal one) is ended, leaving the real one which had always been there remaining, when this happens the false identity of the jiva is not identifying itself with the real identity of the Atman, but the false identity of the Jiva simply ends, leaving the real one which had already been there.

>>18577364
When speaking about the Atman identifying with Himself, I don't mean identification in the sense of the egoistic identity that inheres in the mind, the Atman's identity just consists of His non-discursive, direct and uninterrupted intuiting of Himself as Sat-Cit-Ananda or Satya-Jnana-Ananta. He always intuits Himself for what He is, He is never ignorant of what He is, He remains constant in his own identity as Himself. The Atman's intuiting of Himself is eternal, immutable and unconditioned, it being inseparable from His very nature.

>>18577372
>Moksha is then the Jiva realising it is actually Atma which is Brahman?
The Jivatma has two components, the Jiva and the Atma or witness-consciousness (Sākṣī-caitanya), when the false identity of the Jiva ends, the Atma is the only component left remaining. This isn't one component of the Jivatma realizing it's the other.
>It does remain it just overcomes ignorance.
The Jiva has no remaining identity of itself as a Jiva when a man is liberated. The mind and body continue to be known by witness-consciousness until the physical body dies but there is no longer any identification of one's Self with them like how unenlightened people naturally do.

[Anonymous No.18577554]

>>18577511
It’s a lot more theistic than advaita where Ishvara is just a lower form of realization. Matter (acit) and the selves (cit) exist as modes or qualities of the body of Brahman. They are real in the sense that they are not just products of nescience. ‘Tat tvam asi’ is *not* interpreted as atman being ontologically identical to Brahman in every way but as referring to several things in a common substrate. Since Brahman is of the nature of knowledge and consciousness for it to fall under illusion is absurd. Don’t take my summary as the final word of course though, there’s a lot more to Ramanuja than that and I doubtlessly explained things poorly. That book is pretty dense despite its short length so if you want it from the man himself check out Ramanuja’s Gita Bhasya, it is a good way to learn about this stuff.
https://iep.utm.edu/ramanuja/

[Anonymous No.18577556]

>>18577413
>liberation comes through supreme identification
If you mean the jiva identifying himself with the Atman, or any sort of conditioned identification, as opposed to the natural, immutable and unconditioned identity of the Absolute with Itself, then that was explained as wrong here >>18577217 and >>18577541

[Anonymous No.18577557]

>>18577541
perfect, thank you for showing everyone advaita is nihilistic, there is no liberation at all, there is no world, creation all illusion and what remains is the atheistic nondual oneness of pure nothingness aka brahman

[Anonymous No.18577568]

for the advaitin their god is asleep. it is basically atheistic yes

[Anonymous No.18577573]

>it’s another mayavadi crypto-Buddhist thread
Krishna is the Supreme Person. Nothing beats pure bhakti to the Lord

[Anonymous No.18577579]

>>18577568
this

[Anonymous No.18577580]

>>18577573
nobody asked for the vaishavist spergs to chime in

[Anonymous No.18577586]

duuude everything is like one, man, I wanna annihilate my ego and become nothing.. we’re like God brooo

[Anonymous No.18577608]

>>18577390
>which is 1) the common and most used sense of the term and 2) the etymological and historical connotation of the term
But not the only valid one, in any case the hair-splitting over the word "responsible" isn't a refutation of Advaita doctrine as they would mean this only in the sense of "the cause of" and can just as easily substitute other words.
>again confounding things, fire has will, it wills being fire, it wills to burn
How can it do that when fire is insentient? When fire lacks consciousness?
>fire cannot be causally responsible for its own burn? are you retarded?
I'm of the view that fire is causally responsible for its effects (i.e. it is the cause that produces the effects) without having will, volition or sentience, I'm of the view that fire has no will and that only sentient beings have will, as in "the power of control over one's own actions or emotions", "the act, process, or experience of willing" "mental powers manifested as wishing, choosing, desiring, or intending" and so on, in all of these meanings of will, fire and other insentient objects have no will.
>>electrons are insentient and have no will
>refuted by science
What do you mean? Where and how was it proved by science that electrons are sentient and have will/volition? This is seen by most scientists as a completely fringe and unfounded hypothesis. It seems like you are just coping now.
>>power is totally separate from will
>refuted by nietzsche
I doubt that, but what were his arguments which you believe refuted that?
>you say power can be ''ability to act or produce an effect'', how does this have nothing to do with will, volition, whatever?
That's just one definition of power, others which I also accept are simply "physical might", It cannot be denied that a hurricane has physical might and thus power, but there is no evidence that hurricanes are sentient or have will/volition. Hence there is no reason to treat them as the same because we find instances like hurricanes where one is present but not the other, but even in the sense of "ability to produce an effect", that doesn't have any necessary connection with will because that ability can be determined by circumstances and not will/volition, the ability of a hurricane to slay thousands of people depends on the confluence of where it arises, which direction it travels in, how populated that area is etc.
>you are the one employing sophistic stratagems in order to restrict what words can mean, to fit your retarded atheistic pseudo-metaphysics
I'm not the one pretending that inanimate objects, waves, fire, electrons have will/volition despite this being completely against the accepted meaning of the words, that's you who is doing that, nice projection there kiddo.
>also im not even going into the crypto-dualism in advaita
already refuted countless times, your sophistry has never succeeded

[Anonymous No.18577613]

Does arguing about this stuff for hours on end contribute to enlightenment or is it a consequence of it?

[Anonymous No.18577614]

>>18577557
>atheistic nondual oneness of pure nothingness aka brahman
Existence-consciousness-bliss =/= nothingness you brainlet

[Anonymous No.18577615]

>>18577573
Advaita has really gone down in stock on /lit/ this past two years. Or is it just me?

[Anonymous No.18577618]

>>18577613
Philosophy has always been a distraction from self-realization. These people ITT are all very lost

[Anonymous No.18577620]

>>18577615
People are getting sick of Guénon spam and probably look into the other alternatives

[Anonymous No.18577621]

>>18577498
All of Ramanuja's arguments were long ago answered and refuted by Advaitins, and Shankara (pbuh) refuted much of the positions of Ramanuja centuries before he even lived. With that said, Vishishadvaita is an indirect approach to the truth of which Advaita is the direct approach to, so it's not completely invalid. It's like a more accessible form of non-dualism for average-IQ normies.

[Anonymous No.18577627]

>>18577615
advaita is crypto protestantism. everyone is his own ultimate authority. it is the metaphysics of the theosophical society, of new age groups, drug users etc.

advaita must be more popular around people with protestant background in the west.

[Anonymous No.18577630]

>>18577621
Advaita is not even in accordance with the Shruti or Smriti, holy cope

[Anonymous No.18577637]

>>18573962
There is no separate mortal self. That is an illusion of the ego. Enlightenment is the dissipation of that illusion and the realization of the divinity of consciousness itself.

[Anonymous No.18577642]

>>18577637
t. drug-using New Ager

[Anonymous No.18577651]

>>18577554
>Since Brahman is of the nature of knowledge and consciousness for it to fall under illusion is absurd
In Advaita Vedanta, Brahman doesn't fall under illusion, only the imperfect reflections/appearances of Him (they aren't the same as Him) put forth by His own power do. Also, do you not see how it's contradictory and absurd to say at once that Brahman is of the nature of knowledge and consciousness but at the same time is partially comprised by insentient matter (acit) which lacks knowledge and consciousness?

I recommend that people read both Shankara and Ramanuja btw, but if you've read most of Shankara's works it's quite easy to see right through Ramanuja's attacks on Advaita.

[Anonymous No.18577669]

>>18577615
Buddhists, fundie and non-perennialist Christians, devotional Vaishnavas, and atheists are sometimes united in their dislike of it, although not all people of these categories dislike it. As they find that all of their arguments against it fail because of Advaita being irrefutable, they increasingly become more emotionally-distraught over it as time goes by. It's very existence as a subject which people find it interesting to talk about makes them seethe uncontrollably.

[Frater Asemlen !XS8vrClKs2 No.18577685]

>>18577443
>>18577263
Long harsh repetition of wrathful sadhanas, much yoga, much ritualism, all daily. That is the traditional answer. So for example going every night to your local cemetery, meditate for an hour upon the moon, chant the 1008 names of kali, then meditate some more asking the local phantoms to appear before you and speak to you concerning Kali and to teach you.

This is the traditional answer, but I’m telling you now, you’re not going to gain anything but misery if you go into this seeking nothing but power.

[Anonymous No.18577696]

>>18577627
>advaita is crypto protestantism. everyone is his own ultimate authority
That's wrong, Advaita says that only scripture contains the ultimate truth and that independent reasoning without recourse to scripture is fallible because its not rooted in the revealed scriptures, and that the Hindu tradition and its teachings and history of exegesis as formulated in texts like the Brahma Sutras guide the proper interpretation of the revealed scripture.
>>18577630
Yes it is, the Upanishads repeat that Brahman is the inner Self of all beings, that change and multiplicity are unreal, that the Supreme Self i.e. Brahman alone exists as the 'one-without-second', and so on. The Brahma Sutras don't contain the Sanskrit words for 'grace' and 'devotion' once in the entire text, but they do mention maya and appearances.

[Anonymous No.18577699]

>>18577642
Have you ever had a genuine spiritual experience? You don't need drugs.

[Anonymous No.18577712]

>>18577696
you basically explained how advaita is crypto protestantism by its sola scriptura approach

[Anonymous No.18577831]

>>18577712
Advaita says that the Hindu scripture cannot even be fully and properly understood and interpreted without reference to and reliance upon the correct tradition of interpreting it which has been passed down from the time of the scripture. Most Hindu schools say though that only the Sruti texts (Vedic corpus including the Upanishads) are infallible and that the Smriti texts are only inspired but not revealed and infallible, it's not just Advaita who says this.

[Anonymous No.18578101]

>>18574294
How is that crypto-dualist? Would you say the same to dual-aspect monists?

[Anonymous No.18578169]

>>18577557
>what remains is
>pure nothingness
Try again.

[Anonymous No.18578173]

You failed to understand it. The problem lies in you. Rather than Wikipedia, try to understand it through some reliable sources retard.

https://advaitacentre.org/archives/

[Anonymous No.18578174]

>>18577586
Good. Now actually stop being a greedy cunt and prove that you've understood what you've said by living selflessly.

[Anonymous No.18578214]

>>18577712
You basically outed yourself as a pseud.

[Anonymous No.18578227]

>>18577118
wow someone that actually understands what he's talking about. bravo great post

[Anonymous No.18578634]

>>18578101
because it first proof of a "self" is that consciousness is different from the phenomenical world, thus creating a true world for the self and a false world of phenomena
this is a logical error, since it develops a circular reasoning, there's a divine self because consciousness can't exist in the phenomenicla world, but the only proof you have of this trasendental world is the self itself, which can onlt be eternal and outside phenomena if a trascendnetal world exist, which in return can only be again epxlained with a trascendnetal self, which need a tarscendental world to justify itself and so on and so on

[Anonymous No.18578656]

>>18577445
just read modernphilosophy, they arrive at the same place, specially fichte and hegel

[Anonymous No.18578670]

>>18577217
>"A witness is necessary in order to have a cognition of any phenomenon – take the event of your momentariness or flux. A witness can only say something is transitory or momentary. If there is no Witness, who would perceive and who would make a statement?"

Buddhism does not reject this generally, it holds that there is viññāṇa, consciousness or knowing. It just states that consciousness is impermanent, ever changing, and interdependent and so cannot be a "Self".

> "against what standard you measure permanence relative to impermanence? Everything is impermanent relative to what? If everything if temporary, then how would the concept of any sort of permanence even arise? ... But then how do you create your own locus standi for the transitoriness to be perceived? Who is the witness, the spectator? There has to be One. The primordial ground, the eternal essence, which is at the basis of everything and from which the whole world has arisen."

This argument is mistaken. You do not need something to measure against - something permanent - to prove impermanence. Impermanence is proven through an empirical argument in Buddhism, not a rationalist one. If you just observe the world and your mind, you will see it is constantly changing. Everything is constantly in flux. The focus, feel, intensity and phenomenal object of consciousness are always changing. Sometimes you are clearly seeing a visible object, sometimes you are sleepy and you cannot be aware of things clearly, etc. Sometimes you experience suffering and sometimes happiness. The onus is not on the Buddhist to prove impermanence, which is easily observable, it is on the Vedantin to prove that consciousness is permanent (and ever blissful!, a ridiculous claim), while it always appears as ever fleeting.

[Anonymous No.18578676]

>>18578670
>Memory proves impermanence is wrong - "If both perceived object and the perceiver change, there would be no connect – and there would not be any case for memory! "

This is a bad argument too. Memory is just another process, a process which is always in flux. Memory is not a fixed thing, it's always being rearranged and re-built (modern psychology has shown this). That does not mean that there is not something which is remembered, just because something is always changing does not mean that it is totally being wiped out each moment. It only means that parts of it are being lost or changed (which, indeed, is what modern psychological studies of memory show) There is a causal connection between the past and present mental processes and this allows for memory. A river is always changing, but it keeps it's shape for years, for example.

>Something cannot come from nothing

This argument is aimed against a false interpretation of Madhyamaka, that sees it as positing some kind of ontological nihilism, so there's no point in refuting it, because no Buddhist ever held that "nothingness" is an ontological ultimate. Not Buddha, not Nagarjuna, no-one.

[Anonymous No.18578678]

>>18578676
"Everyone has the notion "I am"; no one can deny the self, because when you go to deny – there would be the self of the denier – who would scale up the denial."

The sense of "I am" is not denied in Buddhism, the sense of "I am" is ''asmi mana'', it arises from ignorance and is a cause of suffering. It is an impermanent, interdependent process that arises from grasping at a sense of self. A Buddha has eliminated the sense of "I am."

[Anonymous No.18579231]

>>18577217
>how it both violates logic and doesn't accord with the nature of our conscious experience, which attests to the continuous and unchanging nature of our witness-consciousness and its uninterrupted identity from moment to moment.
give us an example of that

[Anonymous No.18579250]

>>18577439
guenonfag doesn't really care about advaita, he just wanna feel he's fighting the good fight against buddhist for his daddy guennon, just like pol/ with the jews

[Anonymous No.18579259]

>>18573962
why does there have to be a point?
what do you even want when you say you want salvation, or meaning?

[Anonymous No.18579263]

>>18579231
>give us an example of that
At a more basic level, the awareness which reveals other things like thoughts always remains the exact same in every instance of knowing, the differences which can be identified are only in the content. A deeper logical analysis of the implications also shows that consciousness is unchanging, as the folloiwng passage points out:

Consciousness is one and unchanging; it is only when the objects get associated with it that they appear in consciousness and as identical with it in such a way that the flashing of an object in consciousness appears as the flashing of the consciousness itself. It is through an illusion that the object of consciousness and consciousness appear to be welded together into such an integrated whole, that their mutual difference escapes our notice, and that the object of consciousness, which is only like an extraneous colour applied to consciousness, does not appear different or extraneous to it, but as a specific mode of the consciousness itself. Thus what appear as but different awarenesses, as book-cognition, table-cognition, are not in reality different awarenesses, but one unchangeable consciousness successively associated with ever-changing objects which falsely appear to be integrated with it and give rise to the appearance that qualitatively different kinds of consciousness are flashing forth from moment to moment. Consciousness cannot be regarded as momentary.

For, had it been so, it would have appeared different at every different moment. If it is urged that, though different consciousnesses are arising at each different moment, yet on account of extreme similarity this is not noticed; then it may be replied that, if there is difference between the two consciousnesses of two successive moments, then such difference must be grasped either by a different consciousness or by the same consciousness. In the first alternative the third awareness, which grasps the first two awarenesses and their difference, must either be identical with them, and in that case the difference between the three awarenesses would vanish; or it may be different from them, and in that case, if another awareness be required to comprehend their difference and that requires another and so on, there would be a vicious infinite.

[Anonymous No.18579266]

>>18579263
If the difference be itself said to be identical with the nature of the consciousness, and if there is nothing to apprehend this difference, then the nonappearance of the difference implies the non-appearance of the consciousness itself; for by hypothesis the difference has been held to be identical with the consciousness itself. The non-appearance of difference, implying the non-appearance of consciousness, would mean utter blindness. The difference between the awareness of one moment and another cannot thus either be logically proved, or realized in experience, which always testifies to the unity of awareness through all moments of its appearance.

It may be held that the appearance of unity is erroneous, and that, as such, it presumes that the awarenesses are similar; for without such a similarity there could not have been the erroneous appearance of unity. But, unless the difference of the awarenesses and their similarity be previously proved, there is nothing which can even suggest that the appearance of unity is erroneous. It cannot be urged that, if the existence of difference and similarity between the awarenesses of two different moments can be proved to be false, then only can the appearance of unity be proved to be true; for the appearance of unity is primary and directly proved by experience. Its evidence can be challenged only if the existence of difference between the awarenesses and their similarity be otherwise proved. The unity of awareness is a recognition of the identity of the awarenesses, which is self-evident.

[Anonymous No.18579270]

>>18579266
Woah so Advaita was Buddhism all along huh? What a plot twist!

[Anonymous No.18579411]

>>18577541
>The Jivatma has two components, the Jiva and the Atma or witness-consciousness (Sākṣī-caitanya), when the false identity of the Jiva ends, the Atma is the only component left remaining. This isn't one component of the Jivatma realizing it's the other.

The Jiva is mortal and suffers, he is the one who makes the spiritual path
The Atman is always God and free
After the identification of which you speak
The Jiva remains the Jiva
The Atman has always been the Atman
The one who needed help does not find it
How is this a liberation

[Anonymous No.18579416]

>>18577568
asleep and blind, he doesn't even perceive the world
that's the ultimate consciousness lol

[Anonymous No.18579425]

>>18577685
have you ever seen a siddhi or a miracle, something that contradicts physicalism? I'm talking about something objective, not just a subjective experience like astral travel

[Anonymous No.18579440]

>>18578670
>>18578676
>>18578678
we are waiting for the advaitin's answer

[Anonymous No.18579518]

>>18579411
>The Jiva remains the Jiva
No, the jiva-identity comes to an end when Self-knowledge arises, this has already been explained in this thread. When enlightenment happens, the jivatma loses the jiva component of the jiva-identity and the Atma component remains as Atma. The mind and body of the jiva don't have any continuing identity or sense of being a limited being but the witness-consciousness that was illuminating that mind just continues onwards. The body and mind of the former-jiva identity don't suffer because there is nobody or no being identifying with them.
>How is this a liberation
This jivatman is like confusing yourself for the reflection of yourself in the mirror, when it's revealed that the reflection was just an insentient image and you are the intelligent presence being reflected while being different from the reflection, the false sense of regarding yourself as the reflected image is immediately ended and it never arises again. This is roughly comparable to the relation between the Atma and the Jiva, although it's not exact. It is a liberation because the Jiva stops covering up the already-present unchanging Supreme Reality with it's ignorance. When it's revealed that the innermost Self of the Jivatman was the Atman all along and was its true identity, the Jivatman can be considered liberated in a sense because the false identity of the Jiva ends and the true Self of the Jivatma alone remains. The Atma itself is already forever liberated by nature but for the Jivatma this is experienced as the Jiva being liberated from its ignorance, which then reveals the already eternally-liberated true Self of the Jivatma.

[Anonymous No.18579548]

>>18576583

>I'm not the one making a straw man you are!!!

go away

[Anonymous No.18579656]

>>18573962

I don't want to be offensive but you misunderstood a lot of things.

Advaita does not deny salvation. Salvation is like removing the clouds from the sky to see the moon: the moon was always there, it just has been covered. Jiva is basically the clouded moon, it exist only in a relative sense and disappears completely after enlightenment.

"Knowledge of Atman-Brahman" has not to be intended as discoursive knowledge, but as self-evident awareness. You reach that by practicing Jnana Yoga, Karma Yoga, Bhakti Yoga and Raja Yoga.

[Anonymous No.18579897]

>>18578670
>taking loosely paraphrased arguments as detailed in a random Quora post as the arguments against which you are defending instead of citing the actual written sentences by any actual Advaitin philosopher or any statement from any book about Advaita by an expert
cringe

> It just states that consciousness is impermanent, ever changing, and interdependent and so cannot be a "Self".
There is no evidence of this, change can only be predicated of things that appear *to* consciousness, interdependence can only be predicated of things that appear *within* consciousness. There is no empirical evidence that can be adduced of consciousness being dependent on anything else because it invariably reveals itself as well as the contents or present status of the mind, and this fact never changes. In every instance of knowledge, there is the pure light of awareness that shines invariably, and the changing contents that appear within it and are illuminated by it.

This awareness is completely partless, formless, undivided and cannot be reduced down to its constituents because its not comprised of separate constituents. In order to say that consciousness is changing, one has to observe some fact of the mind, and say "this is consciousness and I am observing a change in it, therefore consciousness is changing", but this argument always fails, because anything and its change which is identified in this way is not consciousness but is always a non-conscious thing which is being presented to consciousness as its object. The very fact that one is aware of that change shows that it's something different from that which registers it. This shows that consciousness cannot be found to be changing in any way, any attempt to show it's changing fail.

And we have positive confirmation that it's unchanging because of how our conscious experience is always one smooth and uninterrupted continuum from moment to moment, the same luminous presence remains in-between thoughts and in-between sensory perceptions which is what allows us to witness their arising and falling. If it wasn't the same from moment to moment we wouldn't be able to observe the arising and falling of specific thoughts and sensory perceptions because this observation requires the same presence be there when they arise, when they are illumined by awareness, and when they dissipate. Memory alone without a persisting observer cannot explain this because this process is too fast and always going-on for to us to consult our memory every single time we have a change of thought or sensory perception. These happen so fast and constantly that to rely on memory to recognize change would require us to do nothing but constantly spend our time remembering which isn't how we experience the mind.

[Anonymous No.18579900]

>>18579897
>You do not need something to measure against - something permanent - to prove impermanence. Impermanence is proven through an empirical argument in Buddhism, not a rationalist one. If you just observe the world and your mind, you will see it is constantly changing.
The world and the mind are not consciousness, so your argument fails right from the beginning. This was already addressed above, if you are aware of an object of awareness, whether it changes or not doesn't show that the light of awareness illuminating it changes.
>b-b-but I don't accept that mind is observed by a consciousness which is separate from mind
This is proven by how the alternatives lead to unacceptable contradictions and don't align with our experience. It's also indicated if we infer on the basis of empirical experience, just as exterior objects like trees are invariably known by something which differs from them, mental sensations like emotions, memories, thoughts empirically seem to be known by a presence which differs from them, this is what allows us to recognize and describe them as observed contents of our awareness.

If you say that consciousness doesn't observe the mind as a separate thing then the mental ideations like thoughts have to observe themselves. They can either be 1) self-illuminating and self-aware or 2) be not self-aware but constantly observing the previous one in a chain. We can tell that 1) is incorrect because self-aware thoughts that rise and fall in moment would not be able to generate the unity of experience we have whereby multiple types of sensory data and thoughts are all known simultaneously in the same moment, because while a thought is being thought about a certain subject that thought itself cannot at the same time see sight, hear sound and smell scents, as these are all totally different types of mental sensations from thoughts. We can tell that 2) is incorrect because it leads to an infinite regress that makes it impossible to know anything.

[Anonymous No.18579907]

>>18579900
>Everything is constantly in flux. The focus, feel, intensity and phenomenal object of consciousness are always changing.
Wrong, because qualities that can be described can only be described because they denote the objects of consciousness appearing to it as something which is different from it. Nagarjuna and Chandrakirti both reject the premise that reflexive relations are possible and they reject and argue against the premise that consciousness can reflexively observe or know itself anyway. So if you were actually being consistent, consciousness is completely incapable of directly observing its own change because this is a reflexive relation, which for Madhyamika is impossible. Buddhist logic is totally inconsistent though so you ignore this important point made by Nagarjuna and Chandrakirti when you want to argue consciousness is changing, if your logic was actually consistent (which its not) then you would admit that it's impossible for consciousness observe its own alleged change.

>Sometimes you are clearly seeing a visible object,
the mind seeing an object is an act of the mind illuminated by formless awareness, that's not a change in consciousness
>sometimes you are sleepy and you cannot be aware of things clearly, etc.
Sleep is a state of the mind illuminated by formless awareness, that's not a change in consciousness, moreover it's impossible for you have empirical evidence of being unconscious while in deep sleep, because doing so would require that you be conscious to observe it, hence you wouldn't actually be unconscious.
>Sometimes you experience suffering and sometimes happiness.
more changes in the mind being illumined by formless awareness, that's not a change in consciousness
>The onus is not on the Buddhist to prove impermanence, which is easily observable,
Observed qualities don't inhere in the observing awareness.
>it is on the Vedantin to prove that consciousness is permanent
We never have the conscious experience of consciousness not being there, for this is a contradiction in terms, hence we only have empirical evidence of it being permanent. At most we only have gaps in memory when arising from sleep, but this isn't showing that it's not there in sleep

[That Nigga No.18579972]

>>18573962
The paradoxical non-salvation of salvation is salvation itself. It's not unique to Vedanta, but is present explicitly in some form or another in all the eastern soteriological traditions, as well as, with a moderate amount of exegesis and interpretation, in the Christian ones. The fusion of egoconsciousness with the Godhead is a denial of otherness to the extent otherness is constitutive of the divide in the first place. You logically cannot have the one without the other, if you pose salvation as a problem of delusion. The only tradition I can think of which preserves otherness, albeit in a minimal form, is the Christian Gnostic wherein the soul is of the Father's essence and imaged on Him, but never strictly identical.

>>18574216
>Advaita is atheist, materialist
Shankara wrote hymns to the qualified deity. There is always a clear distinction between dry soteriological doctrine and the associated metaphysical precepts, and the mythopoetic worship which make up the former's inspiration. It is clearly religious, and the clay anecdotes are metaphorical and already material, used to try sketch the nature of a higher reality. To think a material re-interpretation in this context has truth value is to misunderstand the goal of the metaphor. Advaita moreover also only equates the consciousness(es) of the differentially constituted Jiva with the Brahmic consciousness to the extent it is not caught up in delusion. It is a mistake to think Brahmic consciousness as one with qualities. In Western terms, Advaita is solipsistic and its metaphysics concern reality as it presents itself to the subject. I'm reminded somewhat of Husserl's phenomenology. The problem of multiple consciousnesses hasn't found an entry into Eastern soteriology, and its focus on individual self-realization has remained rather pure. As a personal speculation I would say that might be the mark between Occidental and Oriental philosophy, the extent to which intersubjectivity is understood to be constitutive of phenomenal reality. Descartes really did a number on us.

[Anonymous No.18579980]

So Advaita was Buddhism all along, huh? What a plot twist!

[Anonymous No.18580052]

[Anonymous No.18580087]

>>18580052
LMAO
this this this this this this this this this this this this this this this this this this this this this this this this this this this

[Anonymous No.18580118]

>>18579900
>The world and the mind are not consciousness
i thought everythin was brahman?

[Anonymous No.18580128]

>all this word salad just to say 'you don't exist'
Advaita is gay af.

[Anonymous No.18580157]

>>18580128
but muh nihilismvada philosophyidiva of non existenceyuna. you can't say that distinctionata is realguna

[Anonymous No.18580247]

>>18580157
bruh just say 'sunya'

[Anonymous No.18580263]

>no salvation
why do you fags always wanted to be saved

[Anonymous No.18580283]

>>18580247
NOOOOOOOOOOO YOU CAN'T JUST SAY A WORD AND BE DONE WITH IT, WHERE'S THE LOGICAL SYSTEMATIZATION OF THE EPISTEMIC MAHABHARAPRAMANAVYAHARISHIVADA?

[Anonymous No.18580288]

>>18580263
>why men want good
start with the greeks

[Anonymous No.18580294]

>>18580283

[Anonymous No.18580299]

Wow. Imagine caring about poo metaphysics.

[Anonymous No.18580306]

>>18580299
Worse yet, imagine actually studying that garbage, at taxpayer's expense.

[Anonymous No.18580338]

>>18580299
why poo? it dropped from 77% to 25%. it might be open defaction free by 2050

[Anonymous No.18580350]

>>18574301
Don't do mysticism at all (including "metaphysics" in the sense of Guenon).

[Anonymous No.18580387]

>>18580338
The Toilet Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the Indian race

[Anonymous No.18581223]

>>18580118
>i thought everythin was brahman?
No, Shankara clearly explains in his works that this isn’t so. This is a common misconception of people who haven’t read through his writings. The Atman-Brahman is only identical with Himself, and with nothing else. Everything other than the Atman-Brahman is just an appearance of the Atman-Brahman engendered by His own power, but the appearance isn’t identical with the Entity it is an appearance of. The Atman-Brahman is the underlying reality which sustains all things.

Brahman is eternal, formless, immaterial, colorless, odorless, soundless and completely unchanging. Things within the universe have visible forms, are made of different materials, are subject to change etc and so they cannot be considered as identical with Brahman. Everything within the universe is a part of Brahman’s body in Vishishtadvaita, but not in Advaita.

>>18580128
It’s more like, ‘only you, which is the same ‘you’ inside everyone, exists’

[Anonymous No.18581251]

>>18577445
All eastern philosophy is just retarded annihilationism because these people hate life

[Anonymous No.18581265]

>>18580128
At least buddhists are honest about annihilation, advaitins are insincere

[Anonymous No.18581518]

So /lit/ is finally turning against the advaita psyop.

How will guenonfag samefag his way out of this?

[Anonymous No.18581527]

>>18581265
It’s not annihilation, because your consciousness continues on forever, your sentience is immortal and indestructible
>b-b-b-but if this other stuff aside from my sentience, the very core of my being, isn’t also eternal that’s annihi-
Wrong, that’s not what the meaning of annihilationism is, annihilationism means a complete extinction

[Anonymous No.18581617]

>>18581527
>because your consciousness
Wrong, Shankara refuted this in his Mulamahabrahmanishtatka sutra commentaries. "Your" consciousness is just illusion, emanated from Brahman. It's made of nothing and doesn't exist. The only thing that exists is Brahman's reflexive self-illumination.

>continues on forever
False, in his Vashkajivashudshudmaha sutra commentaries Shankara demonstrates that time is an illusion and does not exist because of Brahman's translucence.

>annihilationism means a complete extinction
Wrong, Shankara demonstrates in his commentaries on the Srisribonipeepeepoopoo sutra that nothing exists except the Atman that is Brahman, by virtue of its opacity and his demonstration that a knife cannot cut itself unless it is opaque.

[Anonymous No.18581659]

YOOOOOOOOOO Advaita seems pretty fucking based. Schopenhauer said the same things too.

But why the fuck process of individuation happens? Any Avaita bros could answer this question? How could I lift this weight of my Ego? Is asceticism only way?

[Anonymous No.18581707]

>>18581617
>Wrong, Shankara demonstrates in his commentaries on the Srisribonipeepeepoopoo sutra
KEK.

[Anonymous No.18581713]

>>18581659
>YOOOOOOOOOO

go back to your ghetto

[Anonymous No.18581723]

who's winning?

[Anonymous No.18581743]

>>18581713
It's gesture of excitement. I had it in my mind that some fag will try to throw shit at me for using that words.

Wittgenstein won again.

[guenonfag No.18581757]

>>18581723
guenonfag is winning

[guenonfag No.18581807]

>>18580338
they're losing their tradition because they turn away from shankaracharya (pbuh) and towards dualism

[Anonymous No.18581850]

>>18581527
Don't care about your sophistry, annihilationist.

[Anonymous No.18581853]

>>18581757
guenonfag is whining

[Anonymous No.18581864]

Anyone know some good books on non-annihilationist mysticism?

[Anonymous No.18581964]

>>18581864
josef pieper

[Anonymous No.18581997]

>>18581864
>annihilationist
is this the new counter-initiation?

[Anonymous No.18582003]

Any books on tibetan buddhism?

[Anonymous No.18582020]

>>18581997
No, it's just a rejection of pajeet cryptonihilism

[Anonymous No.18582053]

>>18573962
>no union, no salvation, no love. God remains God, persons remain persons, nothing changes, nothing saves.

Are you objecting to this for any reason other than the perfidious Catholic ideas that are analogous to, if not synonymous with, Materialism?

[Anonymous No.18582063]

>>18581864
>non-annihilationist mysticism
oxymoron

[Anonymous No.18582068]

>>18582063
No you're a moron

[Anonymous No.18582121]

>>18582053
nice samefag, guenonfag

[Anonymous No.18582138]

>>18582068
rude

[Anonymous No.18582571]

>>18574301
Read The Mirror of Simple Souls, intense Christian mysticism, the author, Marguerite Porete, was burnt at the stake for writing it

[Anonymous No.18582814]

>>18580052
This
The vedantins cant answer it lmao

[Anonymous No.18582836]

>>18582571
what are some other good Christian mysticism books? any with a specifically Catholic perspective?

[Anonymous No.18582871]

>>18581617
>Wrong, Shankara refuted this in his Mulamahabrahmanishtatka sutra commentaries. "Your" consciousness is just illusion, emanated from Brahman. It's made of nothing and doesn't exist. The only thing that exists is Brahman's reflexive self-illumination.
What

[Anonymous No.18583043]

>>18582814
The Brahman-Atman cannot be obstructed from Himself, the jiva can obstruct the Brahman-Atman from revealing Himself to the jiva via the jivas ignorance. That obstruction only affects the jiva and not the Brahman-Atman though, its like a man putting on a blindfold which blocks the light of the ever-present sun

[Anonymous No.18583051]

>>18582871
He is just making random stuff up, none of those texts are real, and nor does what he say correspond to real Advaita doctrines

[Anonymous No.18583152]

>>18580052
based

[Anonymous No.18583170]

>>18579972
>In Western terms, Advaita is solipsistic and its metaphysics concern reality as it presents itself to the subject. I'm reminded somewhat of Husserl's phenomenology. The problem of multiple consciousnesses hasn't found an entry into Eastern soteriology, and its focus on individual self-realization has remained rather pure. As a personal speculation I would say that might be the mark between Occidental and Oriental philosophy, the extent to which intersubjectivity is understood to be constitutive of phenomenal reality. Descartes really did a number on us.
interesting please elaborate

[Anonymous No.18583274]

>>18583043
so the only point of this philosophy is to get the jiva to kill itself because it sucks, and nothing is even improved because brahman is already perfect? damn sign me up, I too hate myself

[Anonymous No.18583296]

>So there are jivas
>Correct
>So the jivas exist
>No they don't exist
>So there aren't any jivas
>No, there are jivas
>Why are there jivas
>Because they haven't realized they don't actually exist
>So they don't exist
>Correct
>So there are no jivas
>No, there are jivas
>Where are the jivas
>Nowhere, there is only brahman
>So there are no jivas
>There are jivas
>Why are there jivas
>Maya
>So there is maya
>Yes
>But there is only Brahman
>Yes
>So maya is a part of Brahman
>No
>So Brahman is experiencing Brahman
>No
>So there is no maya
>No that's wrong, there is maya
>And Brahman created everything that is?
>Yes
>So Brahman created maya
>No
>So there is no maya
>No, there's maya
>So who is experiencing maya
>The jivas
>So the jivas experience maya
>No only Brahman experiences
>So Brahman is experiencing maya and jivas don't exist
>No, jivas don't exist and Brahman does not experience maya

[Anonymous No.18583310]

>>18583296
LMAO

[Anonymous No.18583316]

>>18583296
>>18580052
lmfao

[That Nigga No.18583398]

>>18583170
It's like Alan Watts' idea of the east/west divide except cuturally constitutive in effect and foundational in extent. You might find it rewarding to read him though he delimits it to the psychological.

[Anonymous No.18583632]

>>18583274
>is to get the jiva to kill itself because it sucks,
No, the physical body of the jiva doesn't die. The point is to stop regarding yourself as something which it's not. Right now, it's like you are so engrossed in a video game that you regard yourself as the character in the game, or you are so engrossed in your reflection that you believe yourself to be your reflection. It's just about waking up, realizing who you truly are, and enjoying the state of freedom and bliss that this entails

[Anonymous No.18583720]

>>18583632
but the atman is already in pure bliss, so who cares about any of this?

[Anonymous No.18584075]

>>18582836
The aforementioned book
Anything by the mystic Anna Catherine Emerich
Scivias by St. Hildegard of Bingen
The writings of St. Mary Magdalena dei Pazzi
Anything by John of the Cross
Also check out Meister Eckhart

[Anonymous No.18584142]

>>18581617
Protip: Although your simulacrum of guenonfag is dangerously based, hindu scholastics typically do not write sutras. You are more likely to come across bhasya, which is commentarial literature, shastra, which are original treatises, or karikas, which are in verse and often meant to be mnemonic. You should check out the Mahapugdalalamkarabhasya for more on how jivas are just brahman sniffing his atmans.

[Anonymous No.18584480]

>>18583720
> so who cares about any of this?
The mental ideations including thoughts, concerns, desire, cares, hopes, memories, emotions and other functions of the mind are changing objects of awareness which arise and fall and come and go as they are projected within the infinite all-pervasive formless eternal space-like presence of self-intuiting awareness that contains everything else within Its limitless expanse, being the foremost limit of subtleness, remaining totally unaffected by these appearances of thoughts etc just as the formless expanse of space within which fire is situated is not burnt, harmed, or otherwise changed by the fire contained in it.

That, "which is above heaven and below the earth, which is this heaven and earth as well as between them, and which they say was, is and will be, is pervaded by the unmanifested ether." - (Bṛ Up 3.8.4), and this unmanifested ether is itself pervaded by Brahman - (Bṛ Up 3.8.11), under the mighty rule of this Brahman, "the sun and moon are held in their positions ... the heaven and earth maintain their position and days and nights ... fortnights, months, seasons and years are held in their respective places" - (Bṛ Up 3.8.9).

[Anonymous No.18584483]

>>18583720
>>18584480

For the living being He is the "light with the heart" - (Bṛ Up 4.3.7), that only "assumes the likeness" of the intellect and "thinks, as it were" and "shakes, as it were" - (ibid). As the underlying substratum and foundation of unchanging awareness which illuminates all the acts of the mind, for the living being when the self-revealing light of His awareness lends its light to the mind, He is "never seen but is the Witness; It is never heard, but is the Hearer; It is never thought, but is the Thinker; It is never known, but is the Knower" - (Bṛ Up 3.8.11), or more accurately, because He is separate from those particular acts of witnessing, hearing and thinking as the unchanging eternal reality of pure Awareness that is not subject to change, He is the "witness of vision ... the hearer of hearing .. the thinking of thought ... the knower of knowledge" - (Bṛ Up 3.4.2), the "Brahman that is immediate and direct—the self that is within all.; everything else but this is perishable." - (ibid).

The whole time He remains immutable all-pervasive ever-liberated Bliss-Awareness, and is eternally free from ignorance, decay, heat, cold, hunger, thirst, pain, sin, death and birth, unaffected by the mind which He illuminates, just "as the sun, which helps all eyes to see, is not affected by the blemishes of the eyes or of the external things revealed by it, so also the one Self, dwelling in all beings, is never contaminated by the misery of the world, being outside it." - (Ka Up 2.2.11.)

This indwelling Self is not really an entity which performs the act of hearing, seeing, thinking, caring etc, because these are merely the mental acts separate from Him, the Immortal unchanging Entity, who when He lends His light to them, is viewed by living being as associated with these separate particular aspects and "People do not see It, for (viewed in Its aspects) It is incomplete When It does the function of living, It is called the vital force; when It speaks, the organ of speech; when It sees, the eye; when It hears, the ear; and when It thinks, the mind. These are merely Its names according to functions. He who meditates upon each of this totality of aspects does not know, for It is incomplete, (being divided) from this totality by possessing a single characteristic. The Self alone is to be meditated upon, for all these are unified in It." - (Bṛ Up 1.4.7). That same Self, the "Supreme Ruler, the inmost Self of all beings" - (Ka Up 2.2.12), that is "the eternal Reality among non−eternal objects" - (Ka Up 2.2.13), of Him, the Self, "Eternal happiness belongs to the wise, who perceive Him within themselves−not to others." - (Ka 2.2.12.).

[Anonymous No.18584574]

>>18579897
>of how our conscious experience is always one smooth and uninterrupted continuum
it's not tho, a "reflection" of how be perceive reality give us this notion of a perfect continumm of consciousness but that's not how be actually perceive reality, which in reality is an amaglamation of factors with tons of loop holes on it, what you think is how we perceive reality is in fact memory, a recolection of data which then present itself as pure consciousness, buddh aproved this, kant also porved this, modern psychology also proved this, advaitas fail again and again to refute this point without falling into their crypto dualism of a "true self" that reside outside of phenomena, which can't be proved or be deomostarted logically without doing a fallacy of circular reasoning

[Anonymous No.18584581]

>>18579900
>The world and the mind are not consciousness
nice dualism you have there, i tought advaita was nondualistic tho

[Anonymous No.18584654]

>>18579897
>There is no evidence of this
wrong,sleep, memory loss and most importantly death

[Anonymous No.18584670]

>>18581223
>Atman-Brahman is only identical with Himself, and with nothing else. Everything other than the Atman-Brahman is just an appearance
>Everything other than

nice crypto dualism you have there bro, go read some spinoza and realise how ilogical all of this bullshit really is

[Anonymous No.18584721]

>>18583296
I'm not sure if you are trolling or if you really are this clueless. Most of your mistakes and supposed contradictions are the result of trying to describe all of existence with a binary "unreal not happening" and "real, happening empirically" division. This is not how it works in Advaita, they divide things up into at least 3 major categories see without violating either the law of contradiction or the law of the excluded middle as this quote here explains >>18577123, sometimes some additional minor sub-categories are added. If you understand it from this Advaitic perspective there are no contradictions.

There is:

(A) the real - Absolute reality is considered what's actually real, "real" in Advaita means absolutely real, unchanging, and eternal, not subject to decay and without end or beginning. These things are true of our innermost self-shining Awareness, but not of the objects illuminated by it. Things which have their relative existence completely and utterly dependent on Absolute Reality, God, are not real like He is the Real. If he removed His support, they would vanish in an instant.
(B) the unreal - It means completely unreal, totally non-existent, never encountered in experience even as illusion.
(C) maya, The neither real nor unreal. Between these two, belongs the status of the empirically-experienced objects of consciousness which as part of maya are empirically experienced and hence not non-existent like nothingness, but they are not absolute real, with their own independent eternal unchanging existence like God's but the empirical experience of them is caused and sustained by something above them, and so in the above sense of these two words, it is neither real nor unreal. Once the Absolute is known, it's realized that the maya never truly ever actually existed but was only an appearance engendered by God's power. This maya is also referred to as 'conditional reality'. It's conditionality makes it not the true reality, but only an appearance of that reality.

[Anonymous No.18584724]

>>18584721
>>18583296
>So there are jivas
>Correct
The correct answer is only in the conditional reality and not in absolute reality where there is only Brahman alone.
>So the jivas exist
>No they don't exist
The correct answer is that they do exist in conditional reality, but not in absolute reality
>So there aren't any jivas
>No, there are jivas
Again, only in conditional reality
>Why are there jivas
>Because they haven't realized they don't actually exist
There are jivas even now because their minds are laboring under a beginningless ignorance of the existence of Absolute reality, that they are doing so in conditional reality is caused by Brahman as part of Him projecting the maya of conditional reality while He abides in Absolute reality
>So they don't exist
>Correct
No, they just don't exist in Absolute reality where Brahman abides by Himself, they do in the conditional reality which is inseparable from the maya that is power of the Supreme Lord which He wields effortlessly and without any volition involved and which springs naturally out of it being His inherent nature to express His omnipotence that way.
>So there are no jivas
>No, there are jivas
No jivas in Absolute reality, not in conditional reality
>Where are the jivas
within the maya projected by Brahman
>Nowhere, there is only brahman
There is only Brahman *in Absolute reality*
>So there are no jivas
>There are jivas
see above
>Why are there jivas
>Maya
>So there is maya
>Yes
Maya doesn't belong to the category of the "Real, immortal, eternal" that Brahman alone does, nor does it belong to the category of the "unreal" like a barren woman's son, because it appears within Awareness and is observed, unlike a barren woman's son. It's only perceived as real until the dawning of the Self-knowledge, and when the body of the enlightened man dies, Awareness continues onwards eternally, without even the appearance of maya, and that appearance of maya never arises ever again.

[Anonymous No.18584730]

>>18584724
>But there is only Brahman
>Yes
In Absolute reality
>So maya is a part of Brahman
>No
No is correct, for Brahman is partless (Śv Up 6.5 & Śv Up 6.20).
>So Brahman is experiencing Brahman
>No
No, Brahman does not experience maya, only the jivas do via their reflected consciousness (Chidabasa) in the intellect. Brahman remains as the foundation of and provides the light for this reflected consciousness of the jiva to experience maya, while in Absolute reality Brahman does not observe maya or what the jiva does, because He is alone there without maya and jivas.
>So there is no maya
>No that's wrong, there is maya
Maya isn't present in Absolute reality. Brahman, while remaining alone there projects it as the conditional reality out His omnipotent expression of His inherent nature.
>And Brahman created everything that is?
>Yes
Creation has no original beginning in time, time itself is a part of maya, Brahman remains outside time while projecting it.
>So Brahman created maya
>No
There was never an original creation of maya, it is beginningless like Brahman is while remaining ontologically dependent upon Him, it is not eternal like Brahman is though, because it can be ended.
>So there is no maya
>No, there's maya
There is only maya in conditional reality
>So who is experiencing maya
>The jivas
>So the jivas experience maya
>No only Brahman experiences
Only the jivas experience maya, Brahman provides the foundational awareness for that experience without being subjected to the illusion of it Himself. The jivas through the light imparted to them experience maya.
>So Brahman is experiencing maya and jivas don't exist
>No, jivas don't exist and Brahman does not experience maya
Brahman exists in absolute reality, jivas only exist in conditional reality, jivas experience maya there, while maya and jivas alike and the experience of maya are not in Absolute reality where the ever-liberated Brahman alone is.

[Anonymous No.18584750]

why humans are not born with knowledge of Brahman from the very beginning ? Why Brahman chooses to make human suffer?

[Anonymous No.18584761]

>>18584750
He is the demiurge and guenonfag is one of his archons, that's why wasting his time in these threads is truly admirable work.

[Anonymous No.18584768]

>>18584581
>nice dualism you have there, i tought advaita was nondualistic tho
Mind-body dualism or consciousness-body/mind dualism is not ontological dualism. Ontological dualism means the setting up of two equally real realities. For Advaita, the mind and body are not as equally real as consciousness, the Atman is, they are non-eternal and the perception of them can at a certain point permanently end, while the Atman is eternal, so it's not ontological dualism.
>>18584670
>nice crypto dualism
Its not dualism because only one is eternal and actually real (see above)
>go read some spinoza
God cannot be identical with the world as Spinoza posits if He is eternal, because truly eternal things don't change while the world includes things that change.
>>18584654
>wrong, sleep, memory loss and most importantly death
That's wrong, sleep in a change in something (the mind/intellect) that is extraneous to consciousness. Consciousness undergoes no change whatever in sleep, only the mind that consciousness illuminates does. Prajna =/= Turiya. You can't have empirical experience of your consciousness being non-existent in sleep if that's what you believe happens, because then you'd actually be consciousness. You have no empirical evidence or proof, but infer it alone on the absence of memory. Even when you wake up, waking up when the mind springs into action happens to a presence who is already there.
>memory loss
memories are something that is illuminated by consciousness and hence are different from it, changes in memory provide no indication whatsoever of any changes in the awareness that knows memory, it only shows changes in the things that the light of awareness falls upon.
>death
Nobody has any empirical evidence or proof that you consciousness doesn't continue on when the body dies, because that would require you to death and be conscious of not being conscious which is a contradiction and an impossibility.

[Anonymous No.18584771]

So what's stopping me from killing myself to achieve the unification with Brahman?

[Anonymous No.18584775]

>>18584724
>>18584730
incredible how you reproduced all the dialogue only with a few different words

[Anonymous No.18584789]

>>18584768
Why I was born then? Why do my separate individual self arose out of the singularity?

[Anonymous No.18584797]

>>18584750
>why humans are not born with knowledge of Brahman from the very beginning?
It's just Brahman's nature to project maya that way, if Brahman was impelled to do that because of something that was other than His inherent nature then He would be subject to causation in the form of that reason, and He wouldn't be the uncaused author of causation who remains transcendent to it.
>Why Brahman chooses to make human suffer?
That they are in maya is because of His inherent nature. Whether living beings suffer or experience pleasure and wholesome things in their lives is dependent upon their own actions, inclinations, karma etc, Brahman is the impartial cause which sustains all beings like rain giving water to all plants, while the (karmic) seeds of that plant determine how it will grow, thus Brahman is not evil or cruel, cf. Brahma Sutras 2.1.21-2.1.36

[Anonymous No.18584821]

>>18584771
Your subtle body will just transmigrate to another life if you die without becoming enlightened, another option is reaching the Brahmaloka which lasts billions of years, but you get there through devout participation in religion and meditation/yoga etc and not through killing yourself.
>>18584789
>Why I was born then?
The why for all beings is that it's Brahman's very nature to do so. see>>18584797
>Why do my separate individual self arose out of the singularity?
It never was in singularity and then arose out of it in a beginning, but it's *seeming* estrangement was beginningless, and returning to singularity involves realizing That which has been with you this whole beginningless time, without you ever realizing it before previously, to realize and know That is to attain singularity by waking up to the already eternally-present singularity of one's own Self.

[Anonymous No.18584826]

>>18584821
>Your subtle body will just transmigrate to another life if you die without becoming enlightened, another option is reaching the Brahmaloka which lasts billions of years, but you get there through devout participation in religion and meditation/yoga etc and not through killing yourself.
why does this sound exactly like buddhist stuff but with different names

[Anonymous No.18584852]

>>18584574
>Its not tho, a "reflection" of how be perceive reality give us this notion of a perfect continumm of consciousness but that's not how be actually perceive reality,
There is no reason to assume this, see >>18579266 "But, unless the difference of the awarenesses and their similarity be previously proved (which cannot be done), there is nothing which can even suggest that the appearance of unity is erroneous. It cannot be urged that, if the existence of difference and similarity between the awarenesses of two different moments can be proved to be false, then only can the appearance of unity be proved to be true; for the appearance of unity is primary and directly proved by experience. Its evidence can be challenged only if the existence of difference between the awarenesses and their similarity be otherwise proved."
>what you think is how we perceive reality is in fact memory,
memories don't observe themselves, they like thoughts are illumined by the light of an awareness which remains the exact same in the each instance of knowing.
>a recollection of data which then present itself as pure consciousness
There is no reason to think this, present themselves to whom? Something that's not witnessing-consciousness? Data don't know themselves but need they witness of them in order for them to be known and for this to give rise to a united experience as humans have.
>buddh aproved this,
Buddha was refuted by Sri Shankaracharya (pbuh) and he can be disregarded
>kant also proved this,
Then Kant was refuted by Sri Shankaracharya (pbuh) too and so he can also be disregarded
>modern psychology also proved this,
using reductionist fallacious methods which try to deconstruct the reality of consciousness, and so their position was refuted, if anyone in any era ever accepts this faulty position, they refute themselves with their own errors
>advaitas fail again and again to refute this point without falling into their crypto dualism of a "true self" that reside outside of phenomena, which can't be proved or be demonstrated logically without doing a fallacy of circular reasoning
That's wrong, because the alternatives lead to interminable contradictions and don't align with our actual experience of things, as detailed here >>18579900

[Anonymous No.18584856]

>>18584821
>Your subtle body will just transmigrate to another life if you die without becoming enlightened, another option is reaching the Brahmaloka which lasts billions of years, but you get there through devout participation in religion and meditation/yoga etc and not through killing yourself.
I don't remember shit so by what means I should believe in reincarnation?

>It never was in singularity
How so? There was time when time didn't exist then something happened a big bang or some shit and things kept happening and then came evolution and all that jazz. I am talking about the singularity of the time before time. Why do shit happened?

[Anonymous No.18584861]

>>18584826
>why does this sound exactly like buddhist stuff but with different names
Because countless Buddhist doctrines were ripped off from the Upanishads by Buddha who modified many of them only a little. The attainment of heaven (Brahmaloka), transmigrating from life to life and the attainment of eternal liberation as three separate paths are all talked about in the Upanishads and earlier Vedic layers from centuries before Buddha.

[Anonymous No.18584882]

>>18584856
>I don't remember shit so by what means I should believe in reincarnation?
You can study Hindu philosophy and believe in it or not, that's your choice and people believe in such things for different reasons, it's not my responsibility to prove to or convince you or every single little thing, no offense.
>How so? There was time when time didn't exist then something happened a big bang or some shit and things kept happening and then came evolution and all that jazz.
According to Vedanta this is just one part of a beginningless cycle of universes doing this over and over, there was never an original beginning to this cycle of universes expanding into and being withdrawn from manifestation, although it's fundamentally contingent on God sustaining this through His power.
>I am talking about the singularity of the time before time. Why do shit happened?
Brahman remains outside time, and His projection of time has been without a beginning. It happened for the reason that it's Brahman's inherent nature.

Well, it's time for me to go to bed.

[Anonymous No.18585175]

>>18582571
Same question as >>18582836 but for orthodoxy if anyone knows

[Anonymous No.18585289]

>>18583296
>>Why are there jivas
>>Because they haven't realized they don't actually exist

Yes.

[Anonymous No.18585818]

This thread was moved to >>>/his/11483889