/lit/ - Literature

>>16337340
>> in advaita, how can there be knowledge? if there is no change, like for Parmenides, then how we acquire knowledge (implying a change)?
The Supreme Self (Paramātmā) is the enduring absolute reality which provides the eternal ground of being wherein knowledge of limited things can occur. By the unlimited light of the Self's awareness, the minds of multifarious beings gain the capacity for action just as the wind rustles the leaves. This Self as the omniscient and omnipotent Lord of all always effortlessly wields It's own beginningless power to cause the worlds and the beginningless existence of the beings in them for all eternity, without ever changing or truly acting, just as the sun shines without deviating. There is truly no change only in the supreme reality of the Self or God, but the minds of those ignorant beings who are to still subject to the Self's artful power of māyā, they have the subjective experience of being an embodied being experiencing change. We acquire knowledge of change etc through participation in the māyā-world sustained by God.
>> like in all monistic systems; Spinoza, Barkeley, etc; how does AV differentiate between God and the world?
The world is a transient manifestation of God's powers in His own consciousness. The world consists of the insentient elements and the ether etc, which are created and sustained by God's power as a physical plane wherein physical creatures interact, and this physical plane continues existing as a shared realm of experience outside of the individual cognitions of those creatures. However, God's power never actually materializes into physical objects which existing *as objects* floating in the unlimited, luminous space of Awareness, but it just forms the basis which appears to do so to the beings still subject to ignorance. It is out of God's omniscience and omnipotence that his power of māyā causes there to be a shared realm of perception among beings without that power ever actually forming into physical objects. Causality etc and other relations involving limitation and multiplicity are not truly existent or real in the supreme unfettered reality of the Supreme Self, they seem empirically real to us and they appear to structure the continent existence of our universe, but in the supreme reality of God which far transcends the universe none of these events and relations are really taking place, and ignorant beings only experience these relations and interactions in the māyā-world in a ordered manner because of them proceeding from God's power, as in occasionalism.

>>16192178
Your Consciousness is already separate from your physical form, the issue is not one of extrication but that of misidentification. The body and the mind appear in Consciousness as It's objects, people in ignorance misidentify with that which they observe, believing "I am this body", "I am this mind", instead of knowing "I am the Consciousness which observes them".

Consciousness is already immortal, beginningless and undecaying. When people misidentify with the body and mind, they superimpose the status of being an embodied doer and agent on their Consciousness, and consequently seem to suffer birth, death and transmigration without realizing that the Consciousness in which these phases appear is Itself unconditioned and unchanging.

If immorality were achieved as a result which was produced by another cause, it would come into existence as a produced thing, but produced things by definition cannot be immortal. If something were truly immortal it would already exist eternally. If something that was non-existent came into existence as a contingent effect it would be liable to decay and destruction. Hence, the only way immortality could be achievable would be that if it were already a fact, i.e. if the soul was already immortal. The only way an already pre-existing fact about oneself or one's soul (immortality) could be 'achieved' were if that fact were obscured via ignorance and that ignorance removed through knowledge, which is why the Upanishads inculcate knowledge of the Supreme Self, or Consciousness.

>>16123601

Our study has highlighted some distinctive ways in which Advaitic themes were reconfigured by Mukerji, Raju, Shrivastava, and others, through a critical interrogation of a variety of Hegelian idealisms. Given the declining fortunes of Hegel in many Anglophone philosophical circles during the second half of the last century, these figures are rarely studied today because of their association with Hegelian idioms. However, several reassessments of post-Kantian idealisms have pointed to the continuing significance of Hegelian themes in both the ‘analytic’ and the ‘continental’ traditions (Dunham, Grant, and Watson 2011). The term ‘idealism’ itself, it is pointed out, is not equivalent to some form of Berkeleyeanism, for the trajectories of post-Kantian thought, involving figures such as Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, were shaped by a wide range of idealisms such as material idealism, empirical idealism, critical idealism, transcendental idealism, and absolute idealism (Altman 2014: 4).

The precise characterization of Hegel’s ‘idealism’ too has been an intensely debated topic in Hegel scholarship, with some interpreters arguing that it is a misreading of Hegel to understand him as propounding a metaphysical-religious view in which reality is constituted of Spirit which is actualized in the world (Wartenberg 1993: 102–129). In the light of these recent evaluations, we can view the philosophers we have discussed as engaged in diverse modes of interrogating and appropriating elements of post-Kantian idealisms mediated through Green, Caird, and Bradley. By positioning Śaṁkara vis-a-vis Hegelianisms, they became participants in contemporary Indo-European philosophical conversations and added a significant chapter to the ongoing receptions of the ‘idealism’ of Śaṁkara in modern Advaita.

source:

The Absolute of Advaita and the Spirit of Hegel: Situating Vedānta on the Horizons of British Idealisms
Ankur Barua
Journal of Indian Council of Philosophical Research volume 34, pages 1–17(2017)