/lit/ - Literature

>>14702814
>B. Consciousness: (i) Conscious is always intentional, i.e., directed towards an object, which is necessarily distinct from “consciousness” as that by which the object is apprehended or to which the object is given.
Not sure exactly what he is trying to say here but Advaita would say that intentions are a mental phenomena which inhere in the mind, and that intentional mental acts appear in the field of or are given to the non-intentional witness-consciousness which registers them and which is separate from the mind.

>(ii) Consciousness is also said to have qualities like eternal and self‐luminous, but this makes no sense unless consciousness is differentiated from those things that lack these qualities. (BS, 20).
Undifferentiated can have two meanings here 1) undifferentiated from a prior state of unity/monism/non-duality/uniformity/etc or 2) A is differentiated from B as being separate from it. Advaita says that in the first sense Atma/Brahman is actually undifferentiated but that in the second sense Atma/Brahman can be differentiated from that which It is not (i.e. Atma/Brahman is not inert and unconcious objects like rocks and hence can be distinguished from them). This seems ridiculous to me but it appears that Ramanuja didn't realize this and thought that Advaita said that the Atma is undifferentiated in the second sense. The Advaitic position is that Brahman as the Atma is eternal non-dual ineffable immutable Bliss-Awareness existing in *an undifferentiated state*, not that Brahman cannot be differentiated from rocks, memory, emotions, food, one's body etc.

>C. Direct Perception: Perceptions are of two kinds, determinate (savikalpa) and non‐determinate (nirvikalpa). The former necessarily involves differentiated objects, as when one sees a cow we see an object qualified by a generic nature or essence: “this thing here has a cow essence.” The first time we see a cow we perceive it together with its generic character, but we don’t differentiate the individual cow and its generic nature because we haven’t see other cows that have the same generic nature. So the individual and essence is undifferentiated, but the object of perception remains differentiated in relation to other kinds of things. So according to Ramanuja, non‐determinate perceptions do not involve apprehension of an object devoid of all attributes, but only devoid of some attributes
This argument appears to hinge on the above misunderstanding. Advaita DOES say that when Brahman is realized in spiritual realization as Itself existing in an undifferentiated state that this realization itself involves a differentiation between what is Brahman and what is not Brahman (i.e. maya etc), in any case the analogy would be fully applicable as the Upanishads stress that Brahman is not an object.

bump

>>13116794
You can order on Amazon the translations of Shankara's Gita commentary done by both Sastry and Gambhirananda. Sastry's translation of it can also be read/downloaded as a free pdf here:

http://estudantedavedanta.net/Bhagavad-Gita.with.the.Commentary.of.Sri.ShankaracharyaN.pdf

Idk if you have yet or not but it helps to have read at least one book on Advaita before reading his commentaries (because they sometimes use a lot of very technical terminology) such as 'The Essential Vedanta' by Deustch or 'Man and His Becoming According to the Vedanta' by Guenon or 'Vedanta: Heart of Hinduism' by Torsten. If you are already familiar with the basics of Advaita or have already read some some short Advaita texts however you might be able to get by just through looking up any words you don't understand.

>>13069553
>thinking anyone in the 18ths century can come up with anything which in any way improves upon the already perfect and complete truth revealed in the esoteric Atma-jnana of the Vedas which emanated from the monad Godhead and was revealed to the Aryans when they live in Hyperborea 10,000 BC, seven or eight thousands before they would venture out and conquer the world and give birth to all subsequent philosophy and religion.
Kant represents a judaic strain of thought and a degeneration of the eternal truth, he exemplifies the foolish nature of people in the Kali Yuga

>>12653586
Rene was not a racist, he did have a funny knack for writing various banter in his books about various cultures and races (I've read in various books of his at one point or another that the Anglos are especially prone to retarded occultism/bland moralism, that the Turks have always relied on the Persians to do their thinking for them, that the Greeks were brainlets aside from a few exceptions, that the Jews were over-represented in Bolshevism and that it's the Arabs and Jews who come up with prohibitions against idolatry because they're particularly prone to mistake worship of the idol itself for the metaphysical principals it is supposed to signify). But at the same time he condemned Fascism/Nazism and solidly agreed with Vedantic and Sufi doctrines that God is really the only 'thing' that exists and that things like race and so on are not actually real (from the perspective of absolute reality).

From the perspective of the metaphysics he agreed with different people including say an African and a European would have had their individual personalities etc qualitatively characterized in different ways by their 'subtle bodies' but at the same time the 'subtle body' is considered to be an ultimately unreal phenomena and he would have considered that everyone's subtle body was observed and animated by the same uniform and undivided Atma/Allah alike; that there are very real differences and aptitudes between various groups on a certain level of the hierarchy of existence but at the highest levels these differences vanish.

>>12654060
>racism is rooted in traditional essentialism
Can you elaborate? Not sure what you mean. Of course the tribal/community-centric attitudes of traditional cultures frequently lends itself to """racism""" (and this is a good thing as it helps a community defend itself and maintain social and cultural cohesion obviously) but insofar as the metaphysical doctrines Guenon writes about as Tradition teach of an Absolute beyond and which transcend any sort of conditioning like race, form, color and name it means that racism pertains to a lower and partial understanding of reality, the exoteric and not the esoteric. I am not sure whether you are talking about his ideas of Traditionalism or something different.

>>12043401
You wrote:

>Any conceptual sense of some Ultimate-Other is dependent on conventionally designated / ultimately unreal phenomena so there is no escaping the relative.
This is completely wrong and reveals an ignorance of basic Vedanta doctine but I don't blame you because most people outside of /lit/ have never heard of it because it's not cool and hip for midwits to read like Zen Buddhism is. A essential element of Advaita teachings is that the Ultimate is can only really be described through negation, that it can never be dependent on anything, that it is not the objection of knowledge not can it ever be; it is the natural state of being and Ultimate reality (which is considered always as, is and will be the Ultimate Now) and when under the instruction of a teacher one is able to negate everything (including mind, ego, thought, personality, memory, sensory data, etc) other than one's state as pure consciousnesses-being one arrives at it, - "The Self seems limited because of ignorance, Destroy ignorance and the limitless Self is revealed like the sun when clouds pass away.” This is considered entry-level stuff in Advaita and is covered in all the Upanishad passages negating everything and those saying 'he who says he knows does not know' etc, this is discussed in multiple of the principle Upanishads including several pre-Buddhist ones. It's quite possible to arrive at the Ultimate by negating the unreal and this is discussed in multiple non-Madhyamika Buddhist schools as well as in many other traditions and faiths including Sufism.

>Nirvana is Samsara.
Yeah and Brahman is coextensive with Maya and all that is within and without, give me a break I've heard all these basic Buddhist 101 conceptualizations of ideas found in every tradition a million times already. The source of that idea was already in pre-Buddhist Upanishads describing an eternal infinite all-pervading Lord that is the Self which is coextensive with the Maya that makes it appear to have difference.