There is no self to understand but only the thought that self creates. I hate how happy and unhappy the world is yet accept it as truth. Just knowing it doesn’t choose to change and isn’t even cutting what accepting this truth was toward understanding infallibilities and what’s honest. To understand truth creates happiness just in a sense that it’s accepting to the self.
That unhappy person is not who you really are.
I understand that
So according to Advaita, in reality, there are not two things. Reality is non-dual. We are actually consciousness itself. There are other non-dual philosophies such as Zen and Taoism. Christianity, Islam, and Judaism also all have non-dual branches. Advaita accepts that we ordinarily perceive and understand our experience dualistically and begins teaching from there.
Metaphysical idealism is compatible with Advaita Vedanta in so far as it views consciousness as the substratum of the universe. For anyone indoctrinated into modern metaphysical materialism, this comes as a shock and a paradigm shift.
What is more, it means that, contrary to materialism, wherein your consciousness is a hard problem and a mere epiphenomenon of the material world, the consciousness that you are, not matter, is the fundamental substance. In ordinary experience consciousness is filtered through the finite mind like light through a prism. Thus, the one seems to become many. Consider the possibility of seeing the many become one again and that one being who you really are.
In addition to Schopenhauer, the German philosopher Schelling also posited immediate perception of absolute unity of subject and object which he called the Absolute or God. This immediate perception he called “intellectual intuition.” the unity of everything in God—a thought he shares with Spinoza. Schelling notes that philosophy usually arrives at the Absolute by reasoning. But, Schelling arrives at it as the center of all that is— the One, absolute unity. This I find to be consistent with not only neoplatonism, and ancient hermeticism, and Parmenides but with the symbol of the Self as found in the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita. The archetypal symbol of the Self is also the core symbol in Jungian analytic psychology. Schelling conceptualization differs from the God of traditional metaphysics in so far as it can never actually literally be perceived as an object as in the case of God as the first cause. The One is the non-difference or identity of subject and object prior to separation in human subjective perception and things in the phenomenal world. It is reflected in the human mind. Prior to objective reflection, there is absolute oneness. “The image of the object in the mind of the subject corresponds to or is the same as the object or thing perceived.” Schopenhauer read translations of Vedantist text in Latin. I don’t think that Schelling did. But, I find his characterization of the Absolute consistent with pure consciousness—the goal of Vedanta.
The German idealists thought they knew what God as the Spirit was doing in the world. Jung and Kastrup follow them in this proposition. Spirit, they say, as pure consciousness is not self-aware until it becomes so in the human being. That gives humanity a reason for being and propels history.
I reject that proposition based experience. So-called self consciousness is an illusion that arises due to ignorance of absolute consciousness. History is an illusion that dissolves with the dissolution of the ego. Critics of Hegel like Kierkegaard recognized this about his system. But, did they realize it about their own points of view?
In God language, non-dual consciousness means “God is; all else is illusion.” Nevertheless, in the big dream that is the life there are laws which apply beginning with time, space, and causality. Karma is causality in the moral sphere.
In theology karma has been dismissed as an illusion based on statistical probability. But, time space and causality are all illusions. Like karma, they are illusions that persist in waking life. Throw in the illusions of desire, free will and matter you have the necessary ingredients for the cake called egoic existence. Desire is what the life force feels like from the inside. Inside and outside are constituting projections.By Identifying with the inside the ego is born.
Although I understand that at a deeper level, we find that all we believed to exist dissolves into absolute consciousness, but if you reject the “proposition based experience” that self-awareness emerges through consciousness being restricted within the physical body, doesn’t that question everything about our existence? Even if the underlying reality is different to how it appears to our senses, surely it is necessary to acknowledge our a priori experience for survival purposes and to prevent a split personality, which is never sure where they are?
I am acutely aware of being neurotic in the sense that I cannot accept what my environment accepts as normal because it is completely insane. I follow the cause of this insanity back to the inability of people to acknowledge the unity I see, but to survive, I have to play along to some degree, even if I see the destructive tendency of their illusion. It is even worse when you notice that the immoral and supposedly moral are both wrong, when you see how there is no distinguishing good and bad, but only in context, which is often ignored.
For all our idealism, either we engage with the world or we disengage, which has its serious consequences, one of the least of which would be an inability to have this conversation.
[quote=“Bob, post:87, topic:79481, username:Bob”]
Although I understand that at a deeper level, we find that all we believed to exist dissolves into absolute consciousness, but if you reject the “proposition based experience” that self-awareness emerges through consciousness being restricted within the physical body, doesn’t that question everything about our existence? Even if the underlying reality is different to how it appears to our senses, surely it is necessary to acknowledge our a priori experience for survival purposes and to prevent a split personality, which is never sure where they are? [/quote]
When meta-conscious is approached from the standpoint of evolution, it’s a step up. When approached from the standpoint of absolute consciousness it’s an infinite step down. The proposition that God needs human beings to achieve meta-consciousness is a mistake, IMO. Jung makes it in Answer to Job, where he concludes that God had to incarnate in order to evolve morally. Jung was probably influenced by Hegelian evolutionary thinking on this. Kastrup doesn’t usually approach idealism from a perspective of explicitly German idealism. But, I would be surprised if the influence is not there.
“Indian philosophy insists that the sphere of logical thought is far exceeded by the mind’s possible experiences of reality. To express and communicate knowledge gained in moments of grammar-transcending insight metaphors must be used, simile and allegories. These are then not mere embellishments, dispensable accessories, but the very vehicles of the meaning, which could not be rendered, and could never have been attained through the logical formulae of normal verbal thought. Significant images can comprehend and make manifest with clarity and pictorial consistency, the paradoxical character of the reality known to the sage: a translogical reality, which, expressed in the abstract language of normal thought, would seem inconsistent, self-contradictory, or even absolutely meaningless. Indian philosophy, therefore, frankly avails itself of the symbols and images of myth, and is not finally at variance with the pattern and of mythological belief. “ Heinrich Zimmer, Philosophies of India, page 25.
Zimmer contrasts this with Western philosophy. “The Greek critical philosophers before Socrates, the Pre-Socratic thinkers and the Sophists, practically destroyed their native mythological tradition” . Heinrich Robert Zimmer (6 December 1890 – 20 March 1943) was a German Indologist and linguist, as well as a historian of South Asian art. Zimmer began studying Sanskrit and linguistics at the University of Berlin in 1909. He earned his doctorate in 1914. When he was a student , the term Indian philosophy was usually regarded as self contradictory. Nevertheless there was one lone enthusiast, Paul Deussen, a follower of Schopenhauer, who regularly delivered lectures in Indian philosophy. If St. Augustine , St. Thomas Aquinas and Pascal are accepted as religious philosophers, then Sankara and Ramanuja—who with a fully fledged scholastic technique expounded the philosophical foundations of orthodox Vedantic theology—cannot be left aside. And the moment you recognize Plotinus or Meister Eckhart as a philosopher, Lao-tse cannot be ignored, nor the masters of Hindu and Buddhist yoga.
In ancient Greece as in Western philosophy since the Enlightenment, traditionalism based on revelation has been discredited. Indian philosophy, on the contrary, has remained traditional. “Supported and refreshed not by outward-directed experiment, but by the inward-turned experiences of yoga practice, it has interpreted rather than destroyed inherited belief, and in turn been both interpreted and corrected by the forces of religion.” The ends and goals of Indian philosophy are “precisely those that inspired Plotinus, Scotus Erigena, and Meister Eckhart, as well as the philosophical flights of such thinkers of the period before Socrates as Parmenides, Empedocles, Pythagoras, and Heraclitus.”
The chief aim of Indian thought is to unveil and integrate into consciousness what has been thus resisted and hidden by the forces of life. The supreme achievement of Indian philosophy was its discovery of the Self as an independent imperishable entity, underlying the conscious personality and the body. Everything we normally know, and express about ourselves belongs to the sphere of change time and space, but the Self is forever changeless beyond time beyond space beyond causality, and beyond the senses. The goal of Indian philosophy is to know this Self and make the knowledge effective in human life.
In the beginning was only Being, One Without a second.
Out of himself, he brought forth the cosmos and entered into everything in it.
There is nothing that doesn’t come from him.
Of everything he is the Self supreme.
You are that, (enter your name here), you are that.
The Chandogya Upanishad 2.2-2.3
Master: “Each ego may be likened to a pot. Suppose there are ten pots filled with water and the sun is reflected in them. How many suns do you see?”
Devotee: “ Ten reflected suns. Besides there certainly exists the real sun.”
Master: “Suppose you break one pot. How many suns do you see now?”
Devotee: “ Nine reflected suns. But certainly exists the real sun.”
Master: “ All right. Suppose you break nine pots. How many suns do you see now?”
Devotee: “ One reflected sun. But there certainly exists the real sun.”
Master: “What remains when the last pot is broken?”
Devotee: “That real sun, sir.”
Master: “ No, what remains cannot be described. What IS remains? How will you know there is a real sun unless there is a reflected sun?
‘I-consciousness’ is destroyed in samadhi (oneness). A man climbing down from samadhi to the lower plane cannot describe what he has seen there.“
Raja Janaka was fast asleep one night, when he was woken up by his sentry with news of an enemy’s attack on his kingdom. The king hastily summoned his generals and soldiers and proceeded to the battlefield. There ensued a fierce battle in which Raja Janaka was eventually defeated and captured. The wounded Raja Janaka was dragged before the enemy king who said, ‘I have captured your kingdom but I won’t kill you. Instead I will exile you.’ Now what could the poor, defeated and exiled Raja Janaka do? Exhausted, bleeding and depressed, he somehow started to walk. People from his own capital city refused to give him food or water because they feared the new king. ‘The new king is very cruel,’ they said. ‘If he finds out that we helped you, we will be punished.’ Hungry and thirsty, he continued walking and it took him two days to reach the border of his kingdom. As he crossed the border to the next kingdom he reached a place where the poor were being served food. He joined the line and as soon as he approached the front of the line and was about to be served, servers ran out of food and announced, ‘No more food.’ Janaka was exhausted, depressed and in great pain. Seeing his condition, the server offered him the starch stuck at the bottom of the utensil, which Janaka readily accepted as the last respite. The server handed him a bowl of starch but before he could lift it to his lips with his trembling hands, a kite circling above swooped in and knocked it off his hands and the bowl went rolling into the dust. Seeing this, Raja Janaka was overcome with misery and collapsed on the ground and wept. As he was crying, he suddenly heard a voice. ‘Maharaja, what happened?’ Hearing this he woke up. With chest pounding, and body covered in sweat, he sat on his bed, when the sentry said again ‘Maharaja, you were crying, what happened?’ It was all just a nightmare! But since Raja Janaka was a philosopher-king, he had an analytical mind. He asked , ‘Was that true or is this true?’ ‘Yeh sach, yaa woh sach?’ Unable to comprehend the king’s question the sentry called the minister to whom Raja Janaka repeated, ‘Was that true or is this true?’ When the minister failed to understand, the Queen came to speak with him, but he kept repeating, ‘Was that true or is this true’? No one could understand what he meant! During this time, Ashtavakramuni, the great sage, was visiting the city. While he was in the marketplace he learned about Raja Janaka’s condition and went to the court to inquire after him. The king, surrounded by his ministers and queen, repeated, ‘Was that true or is this true?’
Ashtavakramuni, being an enlightened sage, immediately understood what the king meant. He asked the king, ‘Raja Janaka, when you were rolling in the dust, bleeding, defeated, depressed and crying, during those moments were all these there–your power, your ministers, your court?’ Raja Janaka said, ‘No, there was only defeat and depression.’ Ashtavakramuni asked again, ‘And now you are here sitting in your court with your courtiers. Those wounds and defeat that you experienced, are they here?’ The king once again said, ‘No, they are not here.’ Then Ashtavakramuni said to the king, ‘Then, Raja Janaka, neither this is true nor that is true.’ Raja Janaka was shocked to hear this and wondered aloud, ‘Is nothing true then?’ Ashtavakramuni asked again, ‘Raja Janaka, were you there on the battlefield?’ ‘It may be false but yes, I experienced it,’ replied the king. ‘And now, here in your court are you not experiencing all this? Then, Raja Janaka, neither this is true, nor that is true, but you, the witness of both, you alone are the truth!’
Swami Sarvapriyananda, “Who am I?"
Yes Bob, I would like to make some comments, as per my own ongoing and beginning recollections drive me to a singular revision that involves the literal interplay between revision and recollection of ideal structural relationships between the uni and the multiverse outlook with aschopenhauer’s structural countour (shape)
Primarily , I surmount He (Schopenhauer) was looking toward, or inspired by two concurrent factors, one which had to do with perceptible limitations of the Malthus type European limits to the explanation beyond national bounderies, and two, the overcoming of the quick descent of faith and identifiable relation with the oncoming geophysical crisis, as such limits imposed on tradition in an ever expansive mood , during and toward the enlightenment past the darkest of then ages
This is not a professional specific attempt, apparently way out of its intent, but a guide in assessing the general tone and mood of growth of the pessimism associated with the original ideal, particularly in the land of growing protestations, Germany.
That I am commenting inversely, from the last post toward the first, hoping will not put you out , since it shows an honest , ubiquous attempt to re-organize the plasticism toward it’s singularity of coming apprehension, from Platon toward it’s Eastern manifestation; fearing be it over ambitious a projecr
Schopenhauer understood that the world as we perceive it is a projection of the mind. What makes human experience universally possible to begin with without exception is the perceiving mind. Schopenhauer appropriates Kant’s forms of sensibility (space, time, and causality) and expands them into what he calls the ‘understanding’. Our very perceptions are completely intellectual and subjectively determined.
“ the will proclaims itself primarily in the voluntary movements of our own body, as the inmost nature of this body, as that which it is besides being object of perception, representation. For these voluntary movements are nothing else than the visible aspect of the individual acts of will, with which they are directly coincident and identical, and only distinguished through the form of knowledge into which they have passed, and in which alone they can be known, the form of idea.” (Schopenhauer, First Aspect—the objectification…(11))
The will is nature. It is ineffable in itself, immediately intuited, pre-rational.”Felt” intuitives say, but it is cognitive. It is that mode of being Schopenhauer and Jung referred to as the unconscious, a misleading term. It is rather unreflected consciousness. All phenomenal consciousness is representational. Meta-consciousness is re-representational.
Phenomenal consciousness is that about which Janaka in the previous story asks, “was that real or is this real?” There were two different worlds represented in his experience. Janaka doesn’t know how to “re-represent” them. Janaka’s dilemma is our daily experience as we pass from waking to dreaming to sleeping. Each state negates the other. It is so natural and ineluctable that we don’t question it. As the archetypal philosopher, Janaka does ask the question. Are any of the modes of experince that split experience into different self/worlds real? Ashtavakramuni reasons that since both modes of experience are temporary, neither world is real.
Only what which is always present and unchanging is really real. That is the consciousness what you are. You are always present and you never change. Whatever qualities superimposed on you by the mind, are objects of you the subject. All that awaits you of the realization of your own ultimacy. Christianity symbolizes this as the parousia. Call it the Universal Awakening when the universe awakens and realizes that it is what it had ever and always been eternally divine—God!
What is here is also there; what is there, is also here. Who sees multiplicity but not the one indivisible Self must wander on and on from death to death. Only the one pointed mind attains this state of unity. There is no one but the Self. That thumb-sized being enshrined in the heart., ruler of time, past and future, to see whom is to go beyond all fear, is the Self. For this Self is supreme!
The Katha Upanishad 2.1.10-12
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Jung in his seminar on Nietzsche’s Zarathustra grapples with this as a problem. The superman symbol was Nietzsche’s way of imaging the human spirit in a post-theist world. The writing was an expression of Nietzsche’s experience. Nietzsche became Zarathustra which is like Schopenhauer without the pessimism. Then he went catatonic. But he had already pronounced “amor fati”, which is the best advise the ego can get.
Too much spam. They close and lock the doors of their minds due to the storm of tainted media.