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17661408 No.17661408 [Reply] [Original]

Now Advaita is clearly unscriptural crypto-Buddhism, but what is superior Dvaita or Vishishtadvaita. Where does one best begin to take the Madhva-pill or the Ramanuja-pill?

>> No.17662198

>>17661408
please please stop larping for the love of visnu

>> No.17662319

>>17661408
>what is superior
Not wasting your time on orientalism, getting out of your dimly lit room and going for a walk in nature

>> No.17662589

>>17661408
Are you really just pathetic you have to make the same thread 5 times a day for more than two years?

>> No.17662590

>>17661408
And to respond to your question, Dvaita and Vishistadvaita are unscriptural copes made to justify a bhakti-centric spirituality. Advaita is the true spirit of the Upanishads.

>> No.17663692

>>17662590
>implying advaita isn’t incoherent

>> No.17664204

>>17661408
Ramanuja's commentary on the Bhagavad Gita
https://www.mediafire.com/file/t21gt434d7z9g5q

Ramanuja's commentary on the Brahma Sutras
http://www.mediafire.com/file/o9gsefhca2jj6u9

The Principal Upanishads with notes according to Rangaramanuja Muni (a later teacher of Vishishtadvaita)
https://archive.org/details/principalupanishadsaccordingtosrirangaramanujamunivol13drnsanantharangacharyavaishnavaedition/mode/2up

>> No.17664415

>>17663692
It isn't.

>> No.17664444
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17664444

>>17664415
Guenonfag says it is

>> No.17664489

Dvaita is for chads

>> No.17664523

>>17661408
Does vishishtadvaita claim that all souls are merged or something, rather than being eternally differentiated from each other like dvaita?

>> No.17664548

BG 2.23:
>The soul can never be cut to pieces by any weapon, nor burned by fire, nor moistened by water, nor withered by the wind.
How can the total souls substance be split into the various jivas that we currently see?
>it’s not split
It is, otherwise I would have consciousness of everything instead of just consciousness that’s limited to my own body. So I am separated. If this is not an eternal quality then how did it come about?

>> No.17664551

>>17664523
Distinctions exist, but all souls are brahman in the sense that they are part of the body of God, although the soul is not identical to brahman or God.

>> No.17664564

>>17664551
Is the distinction eternal or do we have some sort of merging once moksha is achieved?

>> No.17664675

>>17664564
Everything is a mode of God, eternally dependent on Him. The individual self (jivatman) is a mode of the supreme self (paramatman), and it is liberated from the cycle of rebirths through religious devotion to God, meditation on God, and total surrender to God. Moksha is eternal bliss, united with God in his heaven, but not identical to God. The distinction is maintained.

>> No.17664713

>>17664675
But is this Dvaita or Vishishtadvaita?

>> No.17664722

>>17664713
Vishishtadvaita. Dvaita would say that jivatmans are totally distinct from God and are not a mode of him.

>> No.17664766

>>17664548
Not sure if guenonfag larp, but this is a totally fallacious reading of that verse. Krishna is saying that immaterial selves cannot be damaged by material actions and objects, because the material objects exist within the self. Just like his thinking of someone shooting you doesn’t actually kill you, because it’s a mode of your mind. God the intelligence of this board is going farther down everyday

>> No.17664826

>>17661408
Advaita Vedanta is not Buddhism, rather, Adi Shankara thoroughly refuted Buddhism. Among other arguments he rightfully pointed out that dependent origination is unable to account for the existence of itself and samsara, and also that the Buddhist denial of an unchanging witness-conciousness or Self fails to align with our experience of having a persisting locus of awareness.

>>17662590
This, the primary Upanishads rarely speak about devotion, they instead present Self-knowledge as the primary means to liberation. The primary Upanishads talk about Maya, illusion and ignorance much more than they do devotion. The Vaishnavite Vedantins like Ramanuja and Madhva had to synthesize the Upanishads with the works of the Tamil Alvars because there wasn’t enough of a clear basis for devotional Theism in the Upanishads themselves. Devotional meditation and meditating on the qualified Brahman still leads to Brahmaloka and so the path of devotion can still indirectly lead to liberation, but the direct path to liberation is the path of knowledge, as worked out in the Advaita exegesis of the Upanishads.

>> No.17664828

>>17664722
In the Gita it is said that maya is impregnated with the jivatmans by Krishna. Wouldn’t this imply that the individual jiva comes from Krishna? The whole thing about “modes” just seems like semantics

>>17664766
Guenon is advaita isn’t he? I am not (I posted that).
I’m just making a point about the apparent differentiation of the jivas.
>the material objects exist within the self
How is this? By self do you mean the jivatman or paramatman? If the material world only exists within one individual then how can two individuals experience the same seemingly-external material world at the same time? E.g we are both reading the same post on 4chan: does this forum exist within your self or my self?

>> No.17664834

>>17664444
No I don’t, Advaita is logically consistent and internally coherent, unlike Buddhism

>> No.17664857

>>17664826
>devotion
Doesn’t it just come down to the matter of fact about whether or not the individual soul is a distinct and eternally separate entity from the supreme soul? Your opinion on devotion is dependent on your answer to this question, isn’t it?
If you think they are the same then devotion is a bit silly, but if you think they are different then devotion makes more sense.

>> No.17664943

>>17664548
>It is, otherwise I would have consciousness of everything instead of just consciousness that’s limited to my own body.
Only the objects of awareness are individual, consciousness itself is non-individual and non-dual. When you say, “my consciousness is split”, you are not really talking about consciousness but rather you are speaking about the individual intellect which is illumined by consciousness. Once you isolate and distinguish your underlying self-knowing sentience from the intellect and other things that appear in it, sentience reveals itself as boundless and undivided.

>> No.17664964

>>17664834
It's hard to claim Buddhism is a complete worldview in the first place, because the Buddha refused to answer any of the most basic metaphysical questions. see: Parable of the Poisoned Arrow

>> No.17664971

>>17664828
Material worlds exist within the the paramatman and by extension the individual. The world I exist in may be connected to yours by similarity and because it belongs to the same Super-Self but because I won’t ever experience being you, I only exist within my own world, and you within yours. If you want this to make more sense think about how a net has a multiplicity of holes but it’s only like that because it’s just one rope woven in a certain way to make it appear as such

>> No.17664977

>>17661408
Monism is cringe

>> No.17665019

>>17664828
That's perfectly compatible with Vishishtatvaita. All souls are part of God (Vishnu for Vishishtadvaitins) and are totally dependent on Him. Maya is God's supernatural creative power through which he emanates the universe, also part of himself. The mode terminology is used because the individual self is not identical with God, just a part if God.

>> No.17665055

>>17664857
>Your opinion on devotion is dependent on your answer to this question, isn’t it?
Not exactly, there is a long history of Advaitins from Shankara onwards reconciling devotional practices with Advaita, some of them write about “devotion to Self-knowledge”, others speak about devotional practices as a preliminary practice which help prepare oneself for the dawning of knowledge. In his commentary on the chapter of the Gita dealing with Bhakti-yoga Shankara writes about Bhakti-yoga from an Advaita perspective. Just because Advaita rejects Bhakti as the primary means to moksha doesn’t mean that they think it has no validity ever.

>> No.17665070

>>17664204
>The Principal Upanishads with notes according to Rangaramanuja Muni
Do you know anywhere I can order a complete set of those in English?

>> No.17665096

>>17664943
> you are not really talking about consciousness but rather you are speaking about the individual intellect which is illumined by consciousness
Yes, but how is this portion of consciousness (me) bound to this particular intellect? Why can’t I shift over and illuminate a rock or a squirrel the same way I can shift my focus from one hand to the other? I can never be conscious of what’s going on inside another person’s head the same way that they can. Even if I read their mind with special powers I am still not having the same experience as the one that is illuminating them.
Do you have he ability to do this? To look through another persons eyes as if they were your own and feel everything that that person feels?
> sentience reveals itself as boundless and undivided.
How do you have this experience of boundlessness and unity? If you truly separated yourself from the body like that then you would experience omnipresence, wouldn’t you? Sure you can imagine the whole universe but that is a faculty of your mind. Empathy is also a material-based faculty. Your mind and intellect are what is conceiving these sensations and your consciousness is just perceiving it, but it’s all happening in your head.
Even if you astrally projected or something like that, why doesn’t your consciousness ever blend in with any of the other consciousness? Why does it always come back to your personal body rather than getting stuck in a tree? Why doesn’t it merge with another consciousness or break into multiple pieces? Is there some sort of shell or body of your consciousness that keeps it from evaporating into other things?

>>17665019
So dvaita says that god and his children are separate because they’re not the same thing, and vishishtatvaita says that they are NOT separate because the children come from god?

>> No.17665122

>>17664964
>It's hard to claim Buddhism is a complete worldview in the first place
I never said that it did, just that Buddhism makes philosophical or metaphysical claims which are illogical. Buddhism doesn’t have to claim to be a complete worldview in order for it to also make other claims which Hindus or Jains or whoever can refute for being illogical.

>> No.17665138

>>17664564
It’s eternal

>> No.17665150

>>17665122
You're extremely based my man, please never stop posting.

>> No.17665173

>>17665122
what are these illogical parts of buddhism? i'm extremely curious

>> No.17665198

>>17665055
When I say devotion i’m talking about devotion to Vishnu or Krishna, or some other deity like Shiva. If you think that these entities are just temporary illusions and everything is equal then what reason is there to devote yourself to these entities? They’re no better than you are. However, if you think that there is an entity that is supreme then it makes more sense to devote yourself to such a thing. That is the point I was making. To be devoted to something there has to be something worth being devoted to.
Even being devoted to self knowledge as an advaitin, why is self knowledge different from ignorance? Where do these value judgements come from? Is it just a type of hedonism for the spirit that is the motivator of these activities? So moksha is valuable only because it is the most spiritually pleasing? What is the motivation for anything?
Also, what stops you from getting popped back into this embodied maya scenario once you supposedly achieve moksha?

>> No.17665471

>>17665096
>Yes, but how is this portion of consciousness (me) bound to this particular intellect?
Advaita says the ‘why’ is that all jivas exist in a state of beginningless spiritual ignorance due Brahman’s maya, and the ‘how’ is that this ignorance causes them to superimpose the unreal (in an absolute sense) intellect and duality onto the underlying non-dual consciousness, these superimposed things seem to impart their characteristics to it, like how a cloth placed behind a crystal ball seems to impart its color to the ball, and then people are unable to distinguish their underlying non-dual sentience from the intellect that appears in it.
>Why can’t I shift over and illuminate a rock or a squirrel the same way I can shift my focus from one hand to the other?
Because your karma from previous births led to you or the jiva that appears in your consciousness taking birth as a human.
>I can never be conscious of what’s going on inside another person’s head the same way that they can.
Yes
>Even if I read their mind with special powers I am still not having the same experience as the one that is illuminating them.
Their ‘experience’ that differs from yours in the things appearing in sentience, but insofar as you and them both have a pure, transparent, immediate and self-revealing sentience that lacks any distinguishing characteristics its the exact same. Once you isolate this from the things that appear in it there is nothing left to indicate that this pure self-revealing sentience inside you is different from that in anyone else. In both cases, the sentience is not observing different things, because non-dual sentience does not observe other things and instead always non-dual and self-knowing, the illumination of the thing appearing in sentience is part of the illusion whereby the sentience appears to be characterized by that which appears in it. Sentience is not the subject in relation to the objects, but sentience transcends subject-object and instead the subject-object distinctions of the intellect appear within and falsely appear to delimit sentience, similarly space is all-pervasive but appears to be delimited by the objects within it and appears to have apertures because of this when it doesn’t.

>> No.17665477

>>17665471
>Do you have he ability to do this? To look through another persons eyes as if they were your own and feel everything that that person feels?
No
>> sentience reveals itself as boundless and undivided.
>How do you have this experience of boundlessness and unity?
through realization of the Atman
>If you truly separated yourself from the body like that then you would experience omnipresence, wouldn’t you?
Advaita says your soul or consciousness already is omnipresent, one just has to distinguish it from the reflection of consciousness in the intellect
Empathy is also a material-based faculty. > Your mind and intellect are what is conceiving these sensations and your consciousness is just perceiving it
The Atman is not revealed to the mind or intellect as their objects, but it reveals itself to itself. It always does this but when the jivas superimpositions are removed this shines forth like the sun that was always there shining forth after the clouds obscuring it vanish
> Is there some sort of shell or body of your consciousness that keeps it from evaporating into other things?
Yes, the Jiva is constituted by the gross body, the subtle body and the causal body.

>> No.17665850

>>17665471
You use the example of a cloth placed behind a crystal ball, yet this situation implies dvaita, doesn’t it? A crystal ball is not boundless like you claim the jivatman to be. A crystal ball is finite and differentiated from its surroundings. It is not the same as the cloth or another piece of crystal somewhere else. Wouldn’t the advaita example be more something like a cloth placed inside a swimming pool? And the water in front of the cloth is the supposed individual jiva taking on some of the color of the cloth, but the individuality is an illusion because the cloth isn’t actually there - it is also made of water because for there to be both cloth and water implies fundamental differentiation and separation.
This one doesn’t jive with your overall sentiment because the water in front of the cloth would be in flux with the water in other areas - so the consciousness associated with one bodily experience would constantly be in flux with other consciousness. If you say it’s like bubbles forming in the water then that just implies forms and bodies. If you can make a bubble then you can make a stack of bubbles and a machine of bubbles and so on, giving rise to even more forms, so the idea of bubbles forming in this infinite unified consciousness doesn’t make sense either.
How can this illusion exist in the infinite ocean of consciousness if there is no form there? The illusion of form is still a type of form. The presence of illusion in general is a type of differentiation. If you have a formless mass with nothing else, yet there is illusion present, then either the “with nothing else” part is untrue because illusion is a separate thing (unless you think that this material illusion is all there is), or the “formless” part is untrue because the illusion contains form (which it clearly does).
>>17665477
>the soul already is omnipresent
Then why isn’t my consciousness inside of all the trees and stones outside?
>because it’s not distinguished
How can consciousness be distinguished? The soul cannot be cut to pieces by any weapon, burned by fire, etc, so how can the intellect have this power to trap the consciousness and cut away this one portion from the rest? That’s what the word “distinguished” means, right?
>The Atman is not revealed to the mind or intellect as their objects, but it reveals itself to itself. It always does this but when the jivas superimpositions are removed this shines forth like the sun that was always there shining forth after the clouds obscuring it vanish
So you can experience the consciousness of a rock then? You cannot. You have a conscious awareness of other peoples’ consciousness and whatnot in the same way that pearls strung in a thread are connected and aware of each other, but that doesn’t mean they’re the same thing. Only the paramatma is omniscient and omnipresent, but it is never divided.

>> No.17665862

>>17665173
Well, for one thing, the Buddha gave his doctrines in Pali, which is inferior to Sanskrit because non-Brahmins could understand his teachings.

>> No.17665864

>>17665850
>the Jiva is constituted by the gross body, the subtle body and the causal body.
How can the total consciousness be affected by matter this way? Again, the jiva cannot be cut by any weapon, etc. so it only makes sense if the jiva has always been eternally separate, otherwise how can it be cut off by these three material bodies? You can put a crystal ball into a body and it can have association, but you cannot put water into a basket underwater, because then you would basically be putting a basket in the water and there’s no association between individual portions of the water and the inside of the basket. The only way for association would be if the basket was an airtight container that cut off a portion of the water, but the jiva cannot be cut.

>> No.17666103

>>17665862
And you are a vile English speaker, pronouncing doctrines in an untouchable language. You will never be an atman.

>> No.17666302

>>17665173
Would you rather read a translation of the actual arguments themselves which are several dozen pages or would you rather read a summary of them?
>>17665150
thank you
>>17665198
>If you think that these entities are just temporary illusions and everything is equal then what reason is there to devote yourself to these entities?
They are still just as real as the physical world and so they have can still have effects upon one’s life in the empirical world, in terms of placing obstacles or boons in ones path. The Avadhuta Gita says that it is by the grace of God that people are inspired to become interested in non-dualism to begin with. With that said though Advaita doesn’t place a big emphasis on doing so, although some Vaishnavite Advaitins like Madhusudana Saraswati make Advaita-style bhakti a major focus of some of their writings. For classical Advaita there are multiple ‘indirect paths’ aside from the direct path of knowledge and some of these correspond to different dispositions that people have and so on.
>However, if you think that there is an entity that is supreme then it makes more sense to devote yourself to such a thing.
I agree
>That is the point I was making. To be devoted to something there has to be something worth being devoted to
Until one attains moksha though one is still the jiva, even if one grasps on an intellectual level that one is Brahman. So even if you view the Absolute as your own true Self, you can cultivate devotion to it with respect to one’s current status of seeming estrangement from and inability to know it, devoting oneself to the eventual dawning of one’s true self.
>Even being devoted to self knowledge as an advaitin, why is self knowledge different from ignorance?
One (self-knowledge) is real and the other (ignorance) isn’t
>Where do these value judgements come from?
The Upanishads
>Is it just a type of hedonism for the spirit that is the motivator of these activities?
No, the Upanishads enjoin renunciation and dispassion
>So moksha is valuable only because it is the most spiritually pleasing?
It is valuable because it is the end of all sorrows and the highest aim that man can aspire to, viz. union with God and eternal bliss.
>Also, what stops you from getting popped back into this embodied maya scenario once you supposedly achieve moksha?
Because once the root of ignorance is pulled out the plant dies and cant grow back

>> No.17666648

>>17666302
>The entities are still just as real as the physical world and so they have can still have effects upon one’s life in the empirical world
>self knowledge is real and ignorance isn't
ignorance is still just as real as anything else in the physical world, so ignorance is just as real as entities like vishnu and shiva, yes? what reason is there do differentiate in terms of value? aren't the various forms of these entities just manifestations of ignorance?
>Until one attains moksha though one is still the jiva
>implying the jiva joins with the rest of the total spirit substance
how could the jiva have been cut away in the first place? even just by illusion, that is still a degree of separation. how does ignorance have this power to cut the jiva away from the rest of the spirit and keep it trapped?
>once the root of ignorance is pulled out the plant dies and cant grow back
what is this plant, and how can it exist in a formless homogenized mass? and why does each jiva have a designated plant? shouldn't one of these plants apply to all consciousness, just as a drop of poison in a glass of water affects the entire glass? why does it only affect one tiny portion of the water (the jiva)? how can if differentiate from one jiva to the next and not get mixed up?

>> No.17666664
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17666664

>guenonfag has tricked someone into the maya is real + maya is not real argument with him again

>>17666648
You will be here until bump limit and he will never say anything more than he has already said

>> No.17666690

>>17666666

>> No.17666757

>>17665096
Vishishtadvaita says individuals souls and the world are evolved from God and are inseperable from Him, though distinct. Ramanuja uses the analogy of individual souls and world as the body of God. Liberation is achieved through absolute surrender (prapatti), achieved via God's grace. Every soul is capable of liberation in this way. In Aristotelian terms, God is both the material and efficient cause.

Dvaita says souls and the world are eternally separate from God though dependent on Him. God is ruler of the world and souls but they did not evolve from Him. There are three classes of souls: good souls, the only ones which can reach heaven; indifferent souls, which will be reborn forever; and evil souls which will be eternally condemnded to hell. In Aristotelian terms, God is only the efficient cause.

>> No.17666778

>>17666302
Gimme the actual arguments. I got plenty of time.

>> No.17666840

>>17666302
>No, the Upanishads enjoin renunciation and dispassion
Like how Yajnavalkya enters a debating competition just because he wants to win some decorated cows, or how they literally include rites for having sex and for cursing your wife's lover (Brihadaranyaka 6.4)

>> No.17667016

>>17666778
This should automatically open at the right page, but if it doesn’t then just scroll to page 380 (in the book, not the archive.org page count) and start reading until the Buddhism section ends and the section attacking Jainism begins. In here Shankara refutes mainly Sarvastivada and Yogachara Buddhism, although some of his attacks extend beyond them, for example his refutation of pratityasamutpada in the Sarvastivada section refutes all schools of Buddhism which accept dependent origination including Madhyamaka

https://archive.org/details/BrahmaSutraSankaraBhashyaEnglishTranslationVasudeoMahadeoApte1960/page/n421/mode/2up

>> No.17667504
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17667504

>>17665850
>You use the example of a cloth placed behind a crystal ball, yet this situation implies dvaita, doesn’t it?
No, because in the case of Advaita the cloth is the transient manifestation of Brahman’s maya, it doesn’t subsist as an eternal and equally real principle which is opposed to the Atman-Brahman in a duality, but its eventually sublated so its not dualism.
>A crystal ball is not boundless like you claim the jivatman to be.
The Atma is boundless, the jiva is not
>A crystal ball is finite and differentiated from its surroundings. It is not the same as the cloth or another piece of crystal somewhere else.
The only purpose of the analogy is to illustrate how something can seem to impart its characteristics to something else while that thing itself remains unchanged.
>Wouldn’t the advaita example be more something like a cloth placed inside a swimming pool?
maybe, but I try to stick to the metaphors they use in the literature,
>This one doesn’t jive with your overall sentiment because the water in front of the cloth would be in flux with the water in other areas - so the consciousness associated with one bodily experience would constantly be in flux with other consciousness.
I’m not going to try to defend metaphors which are not even used by Advaita, which which are phrasing things in a way that they would disagree with, I’ll answer if you rephrase your question to just ask about the point you are trying to ask about without shoehorning the point into a metaphor which Im supposed to defend despite me not accepting the metaphor as valid to begin with.
>so the idea of bubbles forming in this infinite unified consciousness doesn’t make sense either.
That’s not how Advaita explains it, although if you want to rephrase your question in a straightforward way and ask again I’ll answer it.
>How can this illusion exist in the infinite ocean of consciousness if there is no form there?
Because it stems from Brahman who is omniscient wielding His own power, He effortlessly projects His power within the infinite span of His own consciousness, this power appears to us as form and matter

>> No.17667509

>>17667504
>The illusion of form is still a type of form.
It is the appearence of form
>The presence of illusion in general is a type of differentiation.
It can appear to be, but if that differentiation is an illusion that means that there was never any non-illusory (i.e. real) differentiation at all.
>If you have a formless mass with nothing else, yet there is illusion present, then either the “with nothing else” part is untrue because illusion is a separate thing
That’s wrong, because the “with nothing else” refers to absolute reality, not to the empirical ‘reality’ of jivas laboring under ignorance. In absolute reality there is just Brahman alone, without maya, with “nothing else there”. Brahman remains alone in absolute reality while permitting the maya to exist only at the lower contingent and conditional existence of the jivas, but not in absolute reality, so the complete non-duality remains intact at the level of absolute reality.
>(unless you think that this material illusion is all there is), or the “formless” part is untrue because the illusion contains form (which it clearly does).
Consciousness doesn’t really have anything for its contents, that it does is part of the maya-illusion. In any case consciousness being formless would not be contradicted by form appearing within it, because the appearances within consciousness are not identical to consciousness, so there is no inherent problem in saying they have mutually exclusive attributes.

>>the soul already is omnipresent
>Then why isn’t my consciousness inside of all the trees and stones outside?
It is, they are already contained in the infinite span of consciousness which is you, you don’t directly perceive them because due to your present status as a jiva there is one specific intellect which you are aware of, and so if that intellect is not directed at certain things then you wont perceive them, without the interface of the intellect acting as its medium or tool consciousness doesn’t perceive the things that it is inside (really they are within consciousness). Consciousness never actually directly perceives anything but its inherently non-dual which precludes it from ever participating in any sort of subject-object relation, ‘perceiving’ things that are other than consciousness is the result of the ignornace-caused superimposition of the intellect over the underlying non-dual consciousness, while consciousness always has the continuous revelation of itself and is self-knowing in this manner, when the intellect is superimposed over consciousness by the Jiva it obscures from the Jiva the self-revealing of consciousness to Itself and instead to the Jiva it seems that consciousness is the subject who thinks and sees and smells instead of being pure unchanging continuous self-revealing presence without any object.

>> No.17667516

>>17667509
At the same moment (and at all moments) that to the Jiva their consciousness is wrongly seen as the subject who perceives objects, at that same moment that consciousness is still the same unchanged non-dual conciousness, but only the Jiva has the delusion of otherwise, the Atman Itself is not fooled.
>because it’s not distinguished
How can consciousness be distinguished?
When someone who adopts the right prerequisites (Sādhana Chathushtaya Sampatt) studies the teachings of the Sruti and properly assimilates them through the help and guidance of one’s teacher, it eliminates ignorance, when ignorance is eliminated there is no superimposition, when there is no superimposition the Atman reveals itself, whens its revealed there is no longer indiacrimination

>The soul cannot be cut to pieces by any weapon, burned by fire, etc, so how can the intellect have this power to trap the consciousness and cut away this one portion from the rest?
Consciousness is completely 100% forever and ever unaffected by the delusions of the intellect/jiva. Whatever you try to point as an example of otherwise will just be the intellect, or what Vedanta calls the ‘reflected consciousness’ (Chidabhasa) in the intellect, when the intellect acts as a receptacle for the light of the Self and falsely seems to take it on and become sentient and self-luminous, like the moon catching the sun’s light and using it to light up the night sky when the sun is hidden. The Jivas can remain in ignorance because they are subject to Brahman’s power who is the Lord of everything. The intellect does not trap or cut away consciousness/soul, the intellect can obscure or not obscure the Atman from the Jiva, but the Atman remains unchanged and unaffected by what the intellect does.

>So you can experience the l consciousness of a rock then? You cannot.
I didnt say you could, there is only ever one underlying consciousness that is never its own object because consciousness is non-dual and free from the distinctions of subject and object

>You have a conscious awareness of other peoples’ consciousness and whatnot
You infer that they have consciousness, but you or anyone has never directly perceived someone else’s consciousness as a object of knowledge grasped through the sensory organs because consciousness has no form that can be grasped.

>> No.17667829

>>17665864
>How can the total consciousness be affected by matter this way?
It's not
>Again, the jiva cannot be cut by any weapon, etc.
The Atman cannot be cut, the jiva includes the gross (physical) body which can be harmed
>>17666648
> so ignorance is just as real as entities like vishnu and shiva, yes?
According to Advaita everything that is not the absolute reality of the non-dual Supreme Brahman is maya/ignorance (which are really the same thing). Maya/ignorance is anirvachaniya which means neither complete non-existence nor real existence, it is indeterminable and inexplicable as the appearance of the Real.
>what reason is there do differentiate in terms of value?
Because things within the realm of ignorance have empirically-real effects on other things within that realm. Unless you have abandoned everything and become a monk then it sorta presupposes that you still care about this realm and making value judgement within it.
>aren't the various forms of these entities just manifestations of ignorance?
Yes
>implying the jiva joins with the rest of the total spirit substance
You are not really the jiva, but it's due to an error of misidentification that people believe themselves to be the jiva, until one attains moksha one has this error of misidentification, and it's to this that I refer when I say "you right now are the jiva", even though as the Atman you really are not the jiva in reality. The jiva does not join anything, moksha is the end of the misidentification. When you realize that you are not the face appearing in the mirror that reflection in the mirror does not join anything.
>>how could the jiva have been cut away in the first place?
It was never originally 'cut away' and lost its status to begin with but all the jivas are beginningless, because they are images of Brahman who is beginningess
>what is this plant, and how can it exist in a formless homogenized mass?
Because that formless homogenous mass of pure consciousness is the Paramisvara and He is sentient and possesses power which He wields, this permits the plant of ignorance/maya to exist
>and why does each jiva have a designated plant?
The same maya causes all the individual jivas to obscure the Atman with their own superimpositions
>shouldn't one of these plants apply to all consciousness, just as a drop of poison in a glass of water affects the entire glass?
That's is what it's like, Brahman wields maya, and then the jivas as a collective experience the effects of that. I wouldn't make the mistake of thinking that every metaphor Advaita uses perfectly corresponds to every other aspect of their metaphysics in every way, they use metaphors for certain purposes, to illustrate certain points, but there is no one all-comprehensive metaphor that perfectly captures and sums up everything

>> No.17667846

>>17667504
>the jiva is not boundless
how can the jiva have bounds? if it has bounds then that's dualism, isn't it? if if temporary, for a bound to be established the jiva must have been cut from the atman, which is not possible.
>>17667509
>it's not the illusion of form; it's the appearance of form
is there form or is there not form? if there is not form and it's only an illusion/appearance of form then that still constitutes a differentiation
>if that differentiation is an illusion that means that there was never any non-illusory (i.e. real) differentiation at all.
if you have a real thing and a fake thing then that still counts as multiple things.
>absolute reality is different from maya
how does the maya manage to single out one piece of absolute reality (the jiva) from the rest of the absolute reality?
>Brahman remains alone in absolute reality while permitting the maya to exist only at the lower contingent and conditional existence of the jivas, but not in absolute reality, so the complete non-duality remains intact at the level of absolute reality
so if the jivas are not separate from this brahman then how can the jiva be subject to maya while the rest of the brahman is not under its spell? if the jiva is nondual and undifferentiated from the rest of brahman then why doesn't the ignorance float to the other parts like a poison floating around a glass of water? inb4 smallbrain can't interpret metaphors
>my consciousness IS inside all of the trees and stones outdoors
no it isn't. if it was then i would be conscious of them, which i am not. this is silly. my consciousness is separated from the consciousness inside the rock. no matter how you look at it that is still a type of differentiation. one part of brahman being separate from another. if you have a pool of water molecules then the molecules on one side of the pool are separate from the molecules on the other end, aren't they? you still haven't explained how a jiva can be walled off from brahmin like this if it's all the same unified thing.
>the water is walling off the water and the water inside the water can't be conscious of the water outside the water because the total water is using illusory water energy to give the appearance that the water inside the water is different from the water outside the water
water can't do that because it is constantly in flux. there is nothing available that can wall of water like this, and the water can't wall off itself either.

>> No.17667853

>>17667516
>how can consciousness be distinguished
the same way anything else can be distinguished. the same way a fish is distinguished from the water and the other fish. the same way a grain of sand is distinguished from another grain of sand in the same desert.
>Consciousness is completely 100% forever and ever unaffected by the delusions of the intellect/jiva. the intellect does not trap or cut away consciousness.
>the intellect can obscure or not obscure the Atman from the Jiva
how can something material (intellect) obscure one part of the brahman from another part? the moon can obscure the rays of the sun only because they are both material, but the brahman is not material and should not be able to have any part obscured from another part.
if an individual water molecule is removed from the pool then nothing is changed. it is obscured from the rest of the pool but the molecule was already separate to begin with. however, if the pool is a unified substance then no part can be removed. it is impossible to obscure any part from one another. the only way would be for the unified substance to be split or have a piece broken off somehow.
>i didn't say you could experience the consciousness of a rock
in your previous post you explicitly said that my consciousness already is inside all of the trees and stones. which is it?
>consciousness has no form that can be grasped
and yet the jiva is isolated to an individual material body

>> No.17667876

>>17666840
>Like how Yajnavalkya enters a debating competition just because he wants to win some decorated cows,
The mention of cows are simply to eulogize the knowledge that the debate is concerned with. In verse 3.5.1. the Brihadaranyaka says "Knowing this very Self the Brāhmaṇas renounce the desire for sons, for wealth and for the worlds, and lead a mendicant life.", and there are multiple other mentions of monasticism/renunciation in the same Upanishad
>or how they literally include rites for having sex
That's a part of the early portion of the Upanishad which does not discuss Self-knowledge but which discusses various rituals and practices for attaining lower goals and ends, just like the Vedas do. The Sruti imparts information with respect to human ends, for people who want lower ends the Sruti imparts intruction on rituals etc to attain those things and for people who desire liberation the Sruti imparts Self-knowledge. The beginning of the Brihadaranayaka also discusses attaining the status of Viraj/Prajapati but makes it clear that this is inferior to Brahman. The middle and the later half of the Upanishad are where it discusses knowledge of the Atman-Brahman.

>> No.17667891

>>17667829
>you are not the jiva
yeah, i'm also the consciousness in the tree outside even though i'm split from it except i'm not actually split from it because we're connected except i cannot perceive the tree's consciousness because of ignorance but ignorance doesn't actually have the power to differentiate one portion of consciousness form another because the notion of differentiation is also illusion.
i get it now.

>> No.17667921
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17667921

>>17667891
Get in the Atmangelion, Shankara-kun

>> No.17667923

>>17667891
from*
not form

>> No.17668442
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17668442

>>17667846
>how can the jiva have bounds? if it has bounds then that's dualism, isn't it?
The jiva has bounds because it's a contingent being which is bound by such delimitations as time and space, if the jiva has bounds, that does not make Advaita a dualism because the jiva is part of the ultimately unreal maya which is sublated as ultimately non-existed, leaving the Atman-Brahman abiding alone in absolute reality without any second thing like maya. Advaita says that the Atman and Brahman are non-dual in the sense that they are the exact same thing, Advaita does not say that the jiva and Brahman are non-dual. The Atman of consciousness that 'indwells' the jiva is different from the jiva. once the error of misidentification with the jiva is over the Atman that was already immortal and eternally liberated and intrinsically different from the jiva continues on freely just like it has always been doing already even while the jiva was deluded. The jiva is not even conscious, deprived of being illumined by Atman it is as insentient as a rock, but because it has a subtle body, intellect etc unlike inert objects the jiva can have a reflection of the Atman's luminous sentience within its intellect, this allows the light of the self-knowing Atman to illumine the subject-object distinctions of the intellect, those distinctions of the intellect and things like thoughts, emotions etc are all insentient, they are all insentient things appearing within sentience just as much as rocks are. Even though the real doesn't actually have any real relationship with the (ultimately) unreal, from the jiva's perspective it is like they are co-mingling, existing within eachother, with the result that when Self-knowledge is attained, for the jiva the dawning of Self-knowledge amounts to the realizing of something that had always been there all alone eternally liberated the whole time.
>if if temporary, for a bound to be established the jiva must have been cut from the atman, which is not possible.
The jiva and everything else within the universe are all equally separate from the Atman because they are all insentient, without self-knowing awareness, which the Atman alone possesses; "He shining, everything shines after Him. By His light all this is lighted." This is because the jiva and everything else within the universe are just Brahman's power of maya (which is insentient) appearing to exist as something other than Brahman.

>> No.17668447

>>17668442
>is there form or is there not form? if there is not form and it's only an illusion/appearance of form then that still constitutes a differentiation
The form exists as an appearance in conditional reality, but not in absolute reality. The Atman does not perceive the delusions of the Jiva but instead It's just non-dual and self-knowing, so it's not a differentiation for the Atman existing by Himself in absolute reality. Nothing which exists alone in conditional reality but not in absolute reality will ever constitute a real differentiation, duality, bondage etc.
>if you have a real thing and a fake thing then that still counts as multiple things.
The fake thing doesn't really exist ultimately so it doesn't count as multiple things, it appears to exist as something separate because it stems from Brahman's omniscience, which He retains as His nature that is inseparable from Himself even within absolute non-dual reality where there is no maya.
>how does the maya manage to single out one piece of absolute reality (the jiva) from the rest of the absolute reality?
How does the wind manage to pick up and move so many leaves in different directions simultaneously? Maya constitutes everything within the manifested universe, as well as the whole range of unmanifested possibilities. Brahman wields maya, it is firmly under His control, and out of His omniscience it functions perfectly. To ask this question is really to question how God or Brahman can be omniscient, if you accept that He can then it's no longer relevant to ask.
>so if the jivas are not separate from this brahman
they are, just as much as everything else within maya is, just like the insentient is intrinsically different from sentience
>then how can the jiva be subject to maya while the rest of the brahman is not under its spell?
the jiva is part of maya, the 3 (gross, subtle, causal) bodies of the jiva and its 5 sheathes or kośas of the Taitirriya Upanishad are all maya and are not the Atman-Brahman.
>if the jiva is nondual and undifferentiated from the rest of brahman then why doesn't the ignorance float to the other parts like a poison floating around a glass of water?
the jiva is not non-dual to Brahman, the Atman is. The jiva is not the Atman. Ignorance is the same as maya, both are (i.e. the same thing is) under the Atman-Brahman's control, who is omniscient.

>> No.17668453

>>17668447
>>my consciousness IS inside all of the trees and stones outdoors
>no it isn't. if it was then i would be conscious of them,
That's wrong, because they don't have intellects and it's only through the body having an intellect that you seem to be seated as consciousness within it, the reason why the same doesn't occur within insentient objects like rocks is because they don't have subtle bodies, intellects and so on.
>my consciousness is separated from the consciousness inside the rock.
How do you know that if your consciousness is not graspable as an object of the senses? If you cannot see where it ends because its not an object of knowledge then you can't say how far it extends, its boundaries are not determined by that which appears within it (i.e. as humans we have the appearance within consciousness of one body and its intellect), because they are intrinsically different from consciousness itself and so they don't provide any information about it, if all we have to indicate the extent of consciousness is the things different from it and appearing within it like the intellect, then it's like that intellect becomes a lamp and the consciousness becomes a vast space, and past the extent of the space of consciousness within with that lamp appears and which that lamp lights up, we can't say or know in our present state how far it extends, beyond the range of that one intellect or lamp because all we have to measure it by is something appearing within it.
>no matter how you look at it that is still a type of differentiation.
if something is sublatable then it can never be a real differentiation that would compromise the the non-duality of Brahman.
>one part of brahman being separate from another.
Advaita Vedanta, following the declaration of the Sruti that Brahman is without parts (Svetasvatara Up. 6.5 & 6.20), says that Brahman is partless. Vishishtadvaita doesn't and they say that Brahman has parts. Maya in Advaita Vedanta and everything within Brahman are not parts or a part of Brahman.

>> No.17668459

Why do all Indian words have to be jibberish like vadradugadharmapatta? Why can't the shit be enjoyable to read?

>> No.17668460

>>17668453
>if you have a pool of water molecules then the molecules on one side of the pool are separate from the molecules on the other end, aren't they? you still haven't explained how a jiva can be walled off from brahmin like this if it's all the same unified thing.
This example of them being a unified thing in your metaphor only is true of the Vishishtadvaita doctrine, and not in the doctrine of the Advaita Vedanta where the jivas/maya are not parts of Brahman in the sense of all being different water in the same pool
>the same way anything else can be distinguished. the same way a fish is distinguished from the water and the other fish. the same way a grain of sand is distinguished from another grain of sand in the same desert.
In all of those examples you mentioned in each example two objects of knowledge grasped through the sense organs, consciousness is not graspable by the sense organs so consciousness cannot be distinguished in the manner you described, this is why words like Agrahya, Avyanga, and Athindriya are listed as names of Lord Vishnu in the Vishnu Sahasranamam.
>how can something material (intellect) obscure one part of the brahman from another part? but the brahman is not material and should not be able to have any part obscured from another part.
Brahman in Advaita is partless
>>i didn't say you could experience the consciousness of a rock
>in your previous post you explicitly said that my consciousness already is inside all of the trees and stones. which is it?
I should have been more careful with my words in distinguishing between consciousness and the experience, mind etc. For the answer to this question see above where I explained how the intellect acts as the medium for consciousness to seem to experience things like the intellects subject-object delusions. Even though your consciousness is omnipresent and so inside everything you don't ever experience the world from the perspective of the rock because they have no intellect and thus no doorway for you to seem to experience the world from inside them. Other organisms also have intellects etc but the jiva as an image of Brahman is essentially a complex of ignorance which has its own unique experiences that are different from other jives because at a more deeper level Brahman's omniscient wielding of maya perfectly limits each's jivas experience to one living being at a time so that each works out their liberation without confusion of results. The infinite consciousness of Brahman never has any real relation anyway with the maya-objects including the intellects of jivas, the apparently real relation is sublated when its revealed that maya never really existed in truth and that there was Brahman alone the whole time.

>> No.17668526

>>17667891
>yeah, i'm also the consciousness in the tree outside even though i'm split from it except i'm not actually split from it because we're connected
It's all the same infinite consciousness which is continuous, the body and intellect are not consciousness and so their appearance within consciousness tells you nothing about where consciousness also exists
>except i cannot perceive the tree's consciousness
You cant perceive the trees minds because they don't have intellects that think, you don't perceive anyone's consciousness even living people because consciousness is formless and not graspable by any of the senses, you don't perceive the minds of other people because the Lord decreed that the universe would function so that the jivas have only one body at a time and not multiple. The Atman doesn't actually observe the jivas so there is never a question of 'why doesn't my Atman (i.e. consciousness) observe the minds of multiple bodies', the "observer" is just the subject-portion of the intellect's subject-object distinctions, it's an insentient and unreal maya-object which sentience is intrinsically different from.
>because of ignorance but ignorance doesn't actually have the power to differentiate one portion of consciousness form another
The Upanishads state that Brahman is without parts, i.e. without portions.
>because the notion of differentiation is also illusion.
Yes the Chandogya Upanishads in verse 6.1.4 says as much when it says

"O Somya, it is like this: By knowing a single lump of earth you know all objects made of earth. All changes are mere words, in name only. But earth is the reality."

>> No.17668559

>>17668459
long gibberish words sound intellectuals and midwits really like intellectualism.

>> No.17668604

Hindus have no explanation about how their luminous primordial mind turned into ignorance which needs to be eradicated to go back to the prime gnosis

>> No.17668795

>>17668604
>luminous primordial mind turned into ignorance
It never did and so the question just reveals your own ignorance, the Conciousness of Brahman is unaffected by the illusion, the appearance of it is just the beginningless expression of Brahman's power who has been expressing His own power eternally without any beginning, this is a good explanation for samsara. We cannot say the same of Buddhism, since it contains inherent logical contradictions to say that beginningless pratityasamutpada is the cause of the universe or samsara as the Buddhists do. Shankaracharya pointed this out and explained why pratityasamutpada cannot exist in the absence of anything above it like God or Brahman who is causing it, which Buddhists cannot admit without practically becoming Hindus, so Buddhism refutes itself, there is an final in-built contradiction which brings the whole edifice of sophistry crashing down like a pile of cards.

>> No.17669337

>>17668795
Why is he expressing illusion eternally?

>> No.17669384

>>17668795
>beginningless pratityasamutpada is the cause of the universe or samsara as the Buddhists do
Buddhist's don't say this btw. Pratityasamutpada is the process of samsara, not the cause. It's entirely meaningless from a linguistic point of view to say pratityasamutpada is the 'cause' of anything. Its like saying the cause and effect is the cause an effect.

>> No.17669401

>>17667876
>verse 3.5.1
Yes, that's Yajnavalkya saying that, in order to win the debate and get the cows!

>The beginning of the Brihadaranayaka also discusses attaining the status of Viraj/Prajapati
It doesn't mention Viraj, that's Shankara's speculation, and his reasoning is quite weak in that regard. Similarly, in many places where the text says Brahman, without qualifying it, he says "oh that actually means Hiranyagarbha"

>The middle and the later half of the Upanishad are where it discusses knowledge of the Atman-Brahman.
There is no such neat division. The sex rites are in the Khila Khanda (supplemental section) the LAST division of the Upanishad.

>> No.17669432

>2500+ years to say 'you aren't you'
Hindus are lost

>> No.17669441

good thread

>> No.17669445

>Let him meditate on speech as a cow. Her four udders are the words Svâhâ, Vashat, Hanta, and Svadhâ. The gods live on two of her udders, the Svâhâ and the Vashat, men on the Hanta, the fathers on the Svadhâ. The bull of that cow is breath (prâna), the calf the mind. -8th Brahmana, Brihadâranyaka Upanishad

lol and this is supposed to be 'elegant' upanishads? please...

>> No.17669494

>Now follows the udgîtha of the dogs. Vaka Dâlbhya, or, as he was also called, Glâva Maitreya, went out to repeat the Veda (in a quiet place). A white (dog) appeared before him, and other dogs gathering round him, said to him: 'Sir, sing and get us food, we are hungry.' The white dog said to them: 'Come to me tomorrow morning.' Vaka Dâlbhya, or, as he was also called, Glâva Maitreya, watched. The dogs came on, holding together, each dog keeping the tail of the preceding dog in his mouth, as the priests do when they are going to sing praises with the Vahishpavamâna hymn. After they had settled down, they began to say Hiṅ: 'Om, let us eat! Om, let us drink! Om, may the divine Varuna, Pragâpati, Savitri bring us food! Lord of food, bring hither food, bring it, Om!' -12th Khanda, Chandogya Upanishad
the funny part about this verse, apart from the insanely silly imagery within a supposedly holy book, is that the upanishad sages were calling vedic priests and the beneficiaries of hotars 'dogs' for reciting vedic formulas during yajna, a charge they attribute to the idea that priests did not 'internalize' vedic hymns and simply recited them (as was tradition since the earliest records).

>> No.17669504

>>17662590
This. Ramanujacharya and Madhavacharya just wanted to maintain social superiority for Brahmins because they feared that Advaita would lead to caste equality (see Manisha Panchakam). Their bhakti had no basis in metaphysics, but only aimed to maintain their religious superiority.

>> No.17669517

>>17669384
of* an effect

>> No.17670228

>>17669504
>see Manisha Panchakam
In his Brahma Sutra Bhasya Shankaracharya affirms that only the twice-born castes have the right to study the Vedas, and in his Gita bhasya he says that the Vedic system of castes and ashramas leads men to liberation and is good for the welfare of mankind. He was not someone to tried to end caste, for him the whole Vedic scheme of caste and ritual are still valid and good for people living in the world, and that it is only for people who enter into sannyasin that they become no longer important.

>> No.17670302

>>17668447
>How does the wind manage to pick up and move so many leaves in different directions simultaneously?
the leaves are distinguished from the wind. a leaf is also not made of wind.
>>17668453
intellect is material and therefore not necessary for conscious experience. why do you keep conflating the two like this?
>>17668460
>the jivas/maya are not parts of Brahman in the sense of all being different water in the same pool
i wasn't implying that. but you don't see all of brahman in one single jiva. the jiva is only a small portion of the total brahman. why the differentiation? portion mean differentiation, even if it's only a temporary portion. even if it's just the appearance. the appearance of something is still something. it is not all of brahman illuminating this body all at one. the body is only illuminated by a portion of the total brahman.
>This example of them being a unified thing in your metaphor only is true of the Vishishtadvaita doctrine
yeah, because that's the only way it makes sense, dummy. if you make the example to fit with advaita (i.e. the water is not made up of molecules but is practically a single object - either fixed or fluid yet homogenized), which you didn't seem to pick up on, it doesn't make any sense. for maya to only be within a portion of that brahman is not possible unless it is able to cut it.
leaves can be in wind because the wind is being broken up by the leaves. there is no wind in that space that the leaf is occupying. therefore a leaf is able to cut air. brahman cannot be cut though, so if it were as you describe it then it would not be able to contain leaves because it would not be able to contain anything, even illusion/ignorance. brahman wouldn't be able to interact with such things either (a crystal ball with a piece of cloth behind it only takes on the color of the cloth because the crystal is being pierced by the light coming off the cloth. brahman cannot be pierced by anything) .

>> No.17670308

>>17668526
>the body and intellect are not consciousness and so their appearance within consciousness tells you nothing about where consciousness also exists
hypocrite, why are you able to type out this message telling all about consciousness and where it exists? your mind that came up with it and your fingers that typed it are material. how did they learn about consciousness? the mind and intellect know about consciousness because the consciousness interacts with them (the body is illuminated by consciousness the same way the universe is illuminated by the sun) - but only one single portion of consciousness illuminates the single living entity. it is not the totality of brahman that is informing you about consciousness; it is only the small portion of brahman that is associated with your person, otherwise you would have information about everything rather than just what that single portion knows. you can pick up information from the rest of the spirit substance in the same way that a radio picks up various signals, but this is like a pearl gathering information of the other pearls that are strung on the same thread. the pearls are not connected directly.
also, for a pearl to be illuminated by light in the same way the sun illuminates the universe, the pearl (material body) must be pierced by light (consciousness). if the pearl is just sitting in a pool of light it means there is no portion of light that is designated to the pearl, and that one piece of light might be in this pearl at one moment and then that same portion of light can come to a second pearl at another moment. no light is bound to any pearl, meaning that at any moment the pearl could change drastically (being illuminated vs not being illuminated, or being illuminated with light of different karma). this implies that a human could just die at any moment because the unbound illuminating substance could shift away to another body.
for one, this doesn't make sense according to your doctrine because you cannot have one portion of brahman singled out to be designated to an individual pearl. you cannot single out a portion of brahman unless brahman has parts (as light has photons), which you claim it doesn't. this is also talking about light rays and not even mentioning the implied source of these rays.

>> No.17670319
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17670319

>>17668526
>By knowing a single lump of earth you know all objects made of earth. All changes are mere words, in name only. But earth is the reality
this does not imply advaita because he is clearly taking a lump from the earth. this is one portion of earth being distinguished from the total earth substance. if one piece of brahman could not be separated from another piece of brahman then this metaphor would have zero relevance.
it is true though that in one sense brahman cannot be separated, just as earth cannot be separated (in practical terms). the total earth substance can be split into smaller and smaller quantities of soil until you down the individual dirt molecule which, in practical terms, is the smallest part and this cannot be broken up. so earth can be broken up (by distinguishing a lump of earth) but also cannot be broken (the single mineral molecule cannot be broken down further)
the brahman can be broken down into it's individual parts. the molecules of individuated atmans are the smallest portion and these cannot be broken down further. paramatma is present everywhere but it is never divided. you can take out a handful of atmans from the total mass of all consciousness but the individuals cannot be cut to pieces.
your interpretation is that the total brahman substance is just a single molecule of soil. if this planet was just a single undifferentiated piece of earth then it would not be possible to take a single lump of earth. there would be no "lump" of earth, because a lump is differentiation. there is no lump to know. there is only the single earth molecule and it cannot contain anything or be affected by anything. it has no internal or external - if it is to be compared to your conception of brahman.
the same applies if it is a homogenous liquid rather than solid earth.

>> No.17670320

>>17661408
Is NEET-ism vedanta approved?

>> No.17671541

bump

>> No.17671902

I love how every Guenonfag thread in the last year has been
>why does illusion about brahman occur
>it doesn't, it's only illusory
>then why does that illusion exist
>it doesn't, it's only illusory
>then why does that illusion exist
>it doesn't, it's only illusory
and he doesn't even mind it, he embraces it. He writes spontaneous, multi-post walls of text just to say "it doesn't, it's only illusory" to any person whatsoever who stumbles by and renews the cycle with a "wait, but then why does illusion exist if there is only brahman."

He's finally found his nirvana, and it is an infinite unresolved dialectic generated by his neovedanta's own confused cryptobuddhist logic.

>> No.17671918

>>17671902
Who cares
All these autistic arguments miss the whole point. /lit/ buddhists and vedantins are fucking retarded

>> No.17671941

>>17671902
I laughed 1 minute at this post for some reason

>> No.17672065

>>17671902
wow……namo buddhaya…namo dharmaya….namo nama……
namo tassa bhagavato arahato samma sambuddhassa……….i hope one day to achieve this perfect enlightenment that both guenonfag and his spiritual predecessor, the Buddha, have. amen

>> No.17672143

>>17672065
>wow……namo buddhaya…namo dharmaya….namo nama……
>namo tassa bhagavato arahato samma sambuddhassa………
The fact some westerners actually say this stuff unironically makes me physically cringe

>> No.17673536

>>17671902
>why does illusion about brahman occur
Because Brahman wields his power
>>it doesn't, it's only illusory
illusory doesn’t mean its not occurring as an appearance
>>then why does that illusion ( in conditional reality) exist
Because Brahman wields his power
>>it doesn't, it's only illusory
illusory is not mutually exclusive with existing only in conditional reality
>>then why does that illusion exist
because Brahman wields his power
>>it doesn't, it's only illusory
Yes, that’s what illusion means anon

>> No.17673547

>>17669401
>and his reasoning is quite weak in that regard
lol, as if you would know better than him

>> No.17673633

seriously how do hindus answer the problem of evil?

how do they cope with brahma creating illusion?

>> No.17673646

>>17661408
I'm not a "New Ager", but the most coherent framework to understand reality by that I have encountered is the monistic and consciousness-centric one given here:

lawofone.info

I recommend any here to give it a chance. The terminology is fairly insular, so you'll have to take some time to understand it. But it makes non-dualism a lot easier for me to believe in, even if I still have my own difficulties reconciling certain parts of it.

Don't look at the exterior trappings of the document and reject it on that basis, such as it claiming to be "channeled" for example. Focus on the framework outlined, see if it makes sense to you, and only consider the claims of its extraterrestrial origin after this. I only believed in the whole "channeled" aspect of it after finding the contents themselves to be so comprehensive, consistent, and original.

Figure there are at least some Advaita-anons here, who would appreciate the material linked above.

>> No.17673681

>>17670302
>the leaves are distinguished from the wind. a leaf is also not made of wind.
Brahman is distinguished from the jivas, the jiva is not made of Brahman
>intellect is material and therefore not necessary for conscious experience. why do you keep conflating the two like this?
I’m not conflating them, if I say one there is a reason for it, I’m not using them interchangeably
>>17668460 #
>the jivas/maya are not parts of Brahman
>i wasn't implying that. but you don't see all of brahman in one single jiva. the jiva is only a small portion of the total brahman.
No it’s not that’s wrong. The jivas are not portions or parts of Brahamn in Advaita Vedanta, they completely reject this. Saying it again doesn’t make it true.
>why the differentiation?
Samsara/maya is not a differentiation but its just Brahman’s power appearing as not Brahman. Maya would only be a differentiation of Brahman if Brahman changed from an undifferentiated into an undifferentiated state, but this does not happen. Brahman wields maya while remaining unchanging and undifferentiated the whole time.
>portion mean differentiation, even if it's only a temporary portion.
Brahman is without portions
>even if it's just the appearance. the appearance of something is still something.
And that something is just Brahman’s power
>it is not all of brahman illuminating this body all at one. the body is only illuminated by a portion of the total brahman.
The Sruti and Advaita both teach that Brahman is without portions/parts, so what you said here is wrong

>> No.17673691

>>17673681
>This example of them being a unified thing in your metaphor only is true of the Vishishtadvaita doctrine
>yeah, because that's the only way it makes sense, dummy.
No, that doesn’t make sense. The relationship of parts and whole is inherently contradictory and was refuted by Shankaracharya in his Brahma Sutra Bhasya; if things were parts of a greater whole ; then, were this whole to exist anywhere, then it must necessarily exist in the parts of which it is made, because if it did not exist within its parts then it wouldn't exist anywhere else and would be non-existent. But the whole also cannot exist within its parts, because the whole, by definition, cannot be contained within individual parts which are incomplete components of the whole; because then the same whole would be both the complete whole and the incomplete non-whole, violating the law of non-contradiction.

So, both because of the notion of parts+whole being inherently contradictory and because of the Upanishads saying so, Brahman can never have parts and your arguments which rely on phrasing things this way fail automatically for this reason. When you insist on attacking a version of Advaita where Brahman has parts then you are not even attacking or trying to refute what Advaita actually teaches, but instead you are just attacking your own imagined strawman version of Advaita. How can you ever expect people to take your arguments seriously if you can’t even accurately describe and critique the position of the school you want to refute?

>, it doesn't make any sense. for maya to only be within a portion of that brahman is not possible unless it is able to cut it.
Maya is not a portion of Brahman but it is different from Brahman. Brahman is portionless, He does not have portions.

>so if it were as you describe it then it would not be able to contain leaves because it would not be able to contain anything, even illusion/ignorance.
Maya appears within Brahman and is in that sense contained within Brahman, this is able to happen because Brahman is the omnisicent Lord who is the anterior cause of time, space etc, so He is unrestricted in His utilization of His own power.
>brahman wouldn't be able to interact with such things either
Brahman doesn’t, he simply wields his maya without interacting with things within maya.

>> No.17673713

>>17673547
A counter argument worthy of Saguna Brahman himself

>> No.17673721
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17673721

>>17673547
>SOMEONE'S INSULTING MY GURU!!! SOMEONE'S INSULTING MY GURU ON THE INTERNET!!!! SHANKARA WAS 7 FEET TALL AND DUNKED SO HARD SHAQ HIMSELF SAID HE WAS THE BEST DUNKER IN INDIA, HERE IS A SCREENSHOT OF ANOTHER CRAZED INDIAN WHO WORSHIPS A STATUE OF SHANKARA'S FEET SAYING THAT BUDDHISTS ALL ADMITTED SHANKARA CAN DUNK

>> No.17673769

>>17673633
>how do they cope with brahma creating illusion?
By achieving moksha

>> No.17673822

>>17670308
>hypocrite, why are you able to type out this message telling all about consciousness and where it exists?
Nothing I’m saying is contradictory, just because something does not exist in the absolute sense does not mean that its appearance cannot exist conventionally and empirically. I’m able to type out because the world and intellect exist in conventional/empirical reality, despite them not existing in absolute reality.
>your mind that came up with it and your fingers that typed it are material.
Yes
>how did they learn about consciousness? the mind and intellect know about consciousness because the consciousness interacts with them (the body is illuminated by consciousness the same way the universe is illuminated by the sun)
That’s not what interaction means, the literal meaning of interaction is “reciprocal action or influence”. When one thing (A) affects another (B) without A being affected by B in return then it’s no longer an interaction because it’s non-reciprocal. Brahman is not affected by anything including the jivas so there is no interaction between them. If Brahman were affected by the jivas it would make Brahman mutable and non-eternal.
>but only one single portion of consciousness illuminates the single living entity.
The notion that Brahman contains portions was refuted by the Upanishads and by Shankaracharya
> for a pearl to be illuminated by light in the same way the sun illuminates the universe, the pearl (material body) must be pierced by light (consciousness). if the pearl is just sitting in a pool of light it means there is no portion of light that is designated to the pearl
If the pear is sitting in a pool of light its still being illumined, the same undivided light of Brahman illumines everything simultaneously
> and that one piece of light might be in this pearl at one moment and then that same portion of light can come to a second pearl at another moment.
No, it can’t because Brahman is all-pervasive so Brahman doesn’t move from position to position because He already fills everything
>no light is bound to any pearl, meaning that at any moment the pearl could change drastically
No, because Brahman’s omniscience means that the maya He wields functions with a natural order to it that keeps everything in its proper place. Brahman doens’t need to divide himself into pieces to ensure that His won power functions properly. Does the woodcutter split himself into multiple pieces to chop wood? No, he remains undivided.

>> No.17673859

>>17668459
Sanskrit places way too much emphasis on itself as a language, as the words within it were fundamental realities-in-themselves, rather than merely constructions which can be used to represent things existing outside of language. It's definitely not something I admire, especially after I started reading into disciplines like semiotics.

>> No.17673920

>>17673859
as if*

>> No.17673953

>>17670319
>this does not imply advaita because he is clearly taking a lump from the earth. this is one portion of earth being distinguished from the total earth substance.
Yes it does, the individual lumps are negated when he says “changes are mere words, but earth is the reality”. The change that is responsible for shaping the basis into the lumps is negated by the unchanging basis alone being described as the reality, when the lumps are negated there is just the unchanging reality remaining. This implies Advaita as Brahman in Advaita is the unchanging basis of all unreal appearances.
> if one piece of brahman could not be separated from another piece of brahman then this metaphor would have zero relevance.
That’s incorrect, because Brahman possess power like maya while remaining partless, the maya that He possesses is not a part of Him. It’s not a real transformation of Brahman (if Brahman transforms He is not eternal anymore) and so like the lumps its negated, leaving the sole reality of earth (Brahman) alone remaining.
>the brahman can be broken down into it's individual parts.
If this were true, which it’s not, then Brahman would be mutable and liable to decay
>your interpretation is that the total brahman substance is just a single molecule of soil.
Brahman is not a substance, but rather Brahman is completely immaterial and formless, a formless substance is an oxymoron.
>if this planet was just a single undifferentiated piece of earth then it would not be possible to take a single lump of earth.
That would only be true if that lump were not a sentient and omniscient entity possessing unlimited power, but Brahman is such an entity so that argument fails
>there would be no "lump" of earth, because a lump is differentiation. there is no lump to know.
the ‘lump’ is just the power of that entity
>There is only the single earth molecule and it cannot contain anything or be affected by anything.
Brahman contains everything because it’s infinite and the ultimate ground of everything, Brahman is not affected by anything because Brahman is unconditioned and immutable
>it has no internal or external - if it is to be compared to your conception of brahman.
Yes, Brahman has no interior or exterior because He is infinite and all-pervasive, this is why the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad in verse 3.8.8. says that Brahman is without interior or exterior
>the same applies if it is a homogenous liquid instead of earth
Neither are like Brahman as Brahman is formless and earth and water have form

>> No.17674126

>>17673681
>Brahman is distinguished from the jivas, the jiva is not made of Brahman
>Samsara/maya is not a differentiation but its just Brahman’s power appearing as not Brahman
>brahma is distinguished from maya
>maya is not a differentiation
distinguish: to recognize or treat something as different
differentiate: recognize or ascertain what makes something different
so i guess brahman is simultaneously distinguished but not differentiated. nice contradiction
>The jivas are not portions or parts of Brahamn in Advaita Vedanta, they completely reject this. Saying it again doesn’t make it true.
i put forth two possibilities:
1. all of brahman is contained within a single point, or single jiva, meaning that all of brahman is within your own consciousness. i.e. the whole entire thing is stuck there, and actually there is not a single part of brahman that is undeluded by maya, because for one part to be under illusion and another part to be not under illusion implies differentiation and portions.
2. all of brahman is NOT contained within a single jiva. they are portions
you said that #2 is incorrect yet you didn't address the problem with #1. in fact you ignored it entirely while also failing to point out why #1 is wrong. you continually fail to address the central points that i'm making. if there is some #3 that i'm missing then you failed to point that out too. either lazy or just sticking your head in the sand.
>brahma is without portions
saying it again doesn't make it true.

>> No.17674380

>>17673691
>if things were parts of a greater whole ; then, were this whole to exist anywhere, then it must necessarily exist in the parts of which it is made
No. I’ll use the example of a civilization to illustrate why. A civilization is made up of people. Without the people you just have empty buildings and useless materials and so on. The people are parts of the whole. Now, does the entire civilization exist within the local food market, or within a young student or his clothes? No, and yet the civilization still stands as a whole that is made up of parts.
The supreme lord is the governing principle, like a president, and is omnipresent as the paramatman though is never divided. The concept of infinity is used here which makes sense in a spiritual context even though it doesn’t jive with this temporary material world.
I don’t see what the problem is. Maybe you were, hmm I don’t know, attacking a strawman?
>maya is not a portion of brahman but is different from Brahman
>maya appears within Brahman
How did maya, something that is not Brahman, manage to pierce into Brahman and get inside of it? That is not possible.

>>17673822
You’re denying that the body is illuminated by consciousness (if that doesn’t count as an “interaction” then let me go over to thesaurus dot come and shop for a synonym real quick brb), as if the body could continue living without it. Ridiculous.
>the undivided light of Brahman illuminates everything simultaneously
Except if there is a pearl within this light in one location, and another pearl in another location, that necessarily means that there are two different sections: one containing the first pearl and the other containing the second pearl. Also how are these two pearls able to sit within this light if the light cannot be pierced (spirit cannot be pierced in the same way that the wind is pierced by leaves)? Being pierced by illusion still counts as being pierced.
>the woodcutter does not split himself in order to split wood?
Why is Brahman splitting maya? What does that have to do with anything? Maya is within Brahman (or Brahman is within maya if you prefer that). The woodcutter is not inside the wood or vice versa. However, if he put his penis in the wood and then chopped the wood he would be splitting himself.

>> No.17674382

>>17669432
more like, "you aren't what you observe"

>> No.17674582

>>17674382
Is consciousness not capable of observing itself?

>> No.17675029

>>17674582
No, because observing involves a duality of observer and thing observed. Consciousness always knows itself, not as observer and thing observed but instead just pure immediate self-revealing sentient presence without any distinction of observer and thing observed. Observation occurs in the intellect which is separate from consciousness. When people don't know their own consciousness they think it observes things, but it's really the intellect which does so. This is why the doctrine that one's Atman or Self is Brahman is not contradicted by experience, because the Atman doesn't experience what the intellect experiences or observe it, in order to conceive of the Atman as bound, ignorant or embodied and in order to adduce evidence to support this as a claim you have to falsely attribute the functions of the intellect to the Atman which It doesn't really possess.

>> No.17675111

>>17675029
Then what is the relationship between consciousness and the human experience? Does a human have consciousness? Does consciousness suffer or enjoy?

>> No.17675558
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17675558

>>17675111
>Then what is the relationship between consciousness and the human experience?
The Lord out of his unlimited power makes the jivas superimpose the latter onto the former, the whole time the underlying consciousness isn't affected in any manner and It doesn't observe or or have It's non-dual and constant revealing of Itself to Itself interrupted or affected in any manner by the jiva and its superimpositions. From the jiva's perspective, and only from the jiva's perspective, the jivas experience is like the Atman is illumining everything within the range of the jivas experience, but for eternally liberated Atman it abides alone in absolute reality, the Atman as It really is in Itself in absolute reality doesn't have the delusions of the jiva hovering nearby and being illumed by It. This is why when you isolate your sentience from all of its contents one finds that it consists of intelligent presence that is formless, homogenous, without partitions, transparent, constant, immediate and self-revealing, It's not affected by anything including whatever the intellect does, or the death of the body or other harming of the brain or the transition from waking to dream and deep sleep, It's not affected by anything at all, It's light is unwavering. It only seems to be affected by things instead of being constant, unborn and undecaying because one has never known It, despite It (the Lord) knowing Himself eternally.
>Does a human have consciousness?
Nothing except Brahman is conscious, He is the only consciousness that exists, the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad explains this in verse when it says verse 3.8.11. when it says "There is no other witness but This, no other hearer but This, no other thinker but This, no other knower but This. By this Immutable, O Gārgī, is the (unmanifested) ether pervaded." Because the human body and its corresponding subtle and gross body are not really conscious, there is no other consciousness but Brahman's in which hearing and thinking seem to take place (this seems to be so only to the jivas within that consciousness and not from Brahman's perspective though, it doesn't intrude upon His non-duality as something He observes).

>> No.17675565

>>17675558
Lest the above verse be misunderstand by people to imply that Brahman actually possesses the functions of the intellect like thinking and perceiving through the sense organs, the same Upanishad clarifies that it is not actually so, that Brahman does not actually think etc but that this just seems to to the ignorant.

‘Which is the self?’ ‘This infinite entity (Puruṣa) that is identified with the intellect and is in the midst of the organs, the (self-effulgent) light within the heart (intellect). Assuming the likeness (of the intellect), it moves between the two worlds; it thinks, as it were, and shakes, as it were

- Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 4.3.7.

The same verse says that the infinite entity is not the intellect and so it does not do what the intellect does, but it is instead 'identified' (wrongly) with the intellect. This is why to the ignorant it seems that the Self "assumes the likeness" of the intellect and "thinks, as it were, and shakes, as it were". The expression "as it were" means It doesn't actually do so in truth.

>Does consciousness suffer or enjoy?
No, both are entirely the concepts of the intellect and never affect consciousness in any way or exists as states or transformations of it. "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 Atman, dwelling in all beings, is never contaminated by the misery of the world, being outside it." - Katha Upanishad 2.2.11. Consciousness itself is bliss, the bliss of consciousness is not dependent on exterior/changing things and circumstances like enjoyment is but it's the nature of consciousness.

>> No.17675568

>>17675565
>>17674126
>so i guess brahman is simultaneously distinguished but not differentiated. nice contradiction
Differentiation has several meanings, I'm only denying that Brahman is differentiated in the sense of undergoing the change known as differentiation (i.e. a type of transformation). To undergo differentiation is: "development from the one to the many, the simple to the complex, or the homogeneous to the heterogeneous"

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

Brahman doesn't do this. That I differentiate Brahman from not-Brahman in the sense of identifying them as being different things does not mean that Brahman Itself undergoes the transformation which corresponds to the other meaning of differentiation mentioned above.
>i put forth two possibilities:
>1. all of brahman is contained within a single point, or single jiva, meaning that all of brahman is within your own consciousness.
This is what Advaita teaches, that there is only an infinite Atman-Brahman, and that the Atman inside every jiva is the same infinite Atman-Brahman which exists everywhere while remaining partless. This Brahman is not condensed into a single point, because then it wouldn't be infinite anymore.
>i.e. the whole entire thing is stuck there, and actually there is not a single part of brahman that is undeluded by maya, because for one part to be under illusion and another part to be not under illusion implies differentiation and portions.
Did you notice how you your example presumes an analogy involving Brahman having parts to begin with, and then says that example implies that Brahman undergoes differentiation and has portions? That's circular reasoning. The answer to your question though is that there is no need to consider the jiva and its experience of things as a part of Brahman, because as explained above the conscious Atman doesn't observe the delusions of the jivas but the Atman inside and outside the jivas everywhere just knows Itself non-dualistically without interruption, without the intellectual activity of certain jivas disturbing it anywhere.

>> No.17675571

>>17675568
When you don't consider the Atman in the jiva as observing it's intellect anymore, there is no longer an inherent contradiction anymore in saying that the consciousness inside one jiva is at the same time the complete and infinite consciousness that is everywhere and inside every jiva, because the consciousness inside one jiva doesn't possess any differences from the consciousness anywhere else or in other jivas due to it not actually observing thoughts and sense experiences etc inside those different jivas, so consciousness anywhere and everywhere is the same continuous non-dual self-revealing presence, undivided and all-pervasive at the same time.
>saying it again doesn't make it true.
What else could the Svetasvatara Upanishad be saying is true when it says in verse 6.5: "The Great Lord is the beginning, the cause which unites the soul with the body; He is above the three kinds of time and is seen to be without parts", or when it says in 6.20: "When men shall roll up space as if it were a piece of hide, then there will be an end of misery without one’s cultivating the Knowledge of the Lord, who is without parts"

>> No.17675627

>>17674380
>No, and yet the civilization still stands as a whole that is made up of parts.
Yes, the argument does not deny that we can find empirical examples of it in the world, like when we find that six slices of pie make up the whole of the pie, the point is that when you subject the concept to rational analysis, there is a fundamental contradiction where you have to assign contradictory meanings to words and have the parts be both the part and whole at the same time and have it violate the law of non-contradiction that way just for it to work as a concept that explains things. While it may have validity for the empirical world and be true to a certain degree with regard to the nature of everyday objects, it's irrational nature is a strong indication that it's not the nature of Brahman, the absolute reality.
>manage to pierce into Brahman and get inside of it?
Brahman is without interior and exterior. Because His power is limitless, He can express it and have it appear to the jivas to be within the infinity of Brahman.
>You’re denying that the body is illuminated by consciousness
No, I'm saying that this only seems to be so from the perspective of the jivas, but Brahman is not aware of it occurring and this view of the jivas doesn't interrupt or intrude upon Brahman's non-dual self-revealing presence
>as if the body could continue living without it.
It could because the body and the universe are all maya which is continuously sustained for the jivas until they individually attain liberation by Brahman

>> No.17675699

>so who am I?

>why you are just Atman within jiva who witnesses but is also an observer superimposed intellect Self because it says in the Brianna upanishad that "I am that, that I am, you are we, we are He..." but you are God because the Lord is within you and He is within Himself so How can you say He isn't Himself if He isn't Himself but consciousness Brahman Atman Immutable and Unmanifested Jiva Maya Illusions Upanishad Verse Saguna Nirguna argument analogy of the Sun Advaita Vedanta Shankaracharya said this and He wields His power because Brahman Atman upanishad Maya Illusions Saguna Vedanta Eternal.......

This is suppose to be the peak of Hindu philosophy....

>> No.17675713

>>17662198
not until the reputation is completely ruined

>> No.17676011

>>17673769
>>By achieving moksha
that's jsut being with brahma, and brahma creates suffering

>> No.17676039

The more the posts about Advaita are made, the more I am repulsed by it. Can't believe Hindus and Crypto-buddhists still uphold this garbage, you idiots should read the Bible.

>> No.17676180

>>17676011
>doesn’t even know Brahma and Brahman are different
Opinion discarded

>> No.17676212

>>17676180
Westerners like you don't understand a single thing about Vedanta.

>> No.17676892

>>17675568
>”all of Brahman is contained within a single point”
>this is what advaita teaches
>this Brahman is not considered of a single point because then it wouldn’t be infinite
Then it’s not what advaita teaches, is it? Either way, you are saying that Brahman is NOT isolated to a single point, meaning that it has to be multidimensional. If that is the case then it has parts insofar as you can have a left side and a right side. Even if it’s homogenized etc, there is still a “this area over here” and “that other area of Brahman there”. This is a fundamental quality of something that is multidimensional. If you have a cube you can cover half of it with a cloth while leaving the other half exposed. The only way to get around this is for Brahman to be a single point, otherwise it has parts.
But really what difference would that even make? If Brahman is the same through-and-through then how is it of any importance whether it’s singular or multidimensional? So why not just say it is a singularity? For all practical intents and purposes it is the same, isn’t it? If it has infinite power then one drop is potent enough - you don’t need a whole ocean, right?
>>17675627
>the body could continue living without consciousness
Wait, does advaita actually teach this? So a cow could continue living even if it is devoid of consciousness? Please answer the question.
The main thing though:
>until the jivas individually attain liberation
How can a jiva attain liberation? Im not asking for le path of liberation or anything like that; I mean what are the technicalities of what is happening when this occurs? Does the jivas evaporate into Brahman or something? What stops another reincarnation from happening *if there are still other jivas around*?
What is the relationship between the jiva and Brahman when liberation happens? Shouldn’t there be no relation between the wood chopper and the wood as long as he never got his penis stuck in the wood?
>jiva attain liberation
Jiva is illusion isn’t it? How can it “attain” anything with regards to Brahman?

>> No.17677416

Does anyone have a pdf on dvaitadvaita/nimbarka?

>> No.17678861

>>17677416

http://srikathiababa.org/pdf/the-essence-of-nimbarka-philosophy.pdf

>> No.17679383

>>17676892
>>17676892
>Then it’s not what advaita teaches, is it?
Brahman is not condensed into a single point, it’s more like He is more like an infinite undivided partless united entity whose center is everywhere, because the directions of space don’t really exist in absolute reality, they are projected for the experience of the jivas through maya but Brahman is anterior to and transcendental to them while remaining non-finite. The spatially-infinite extension of an unlimited universe that we can imagine on one hand and the other notion of all of reality being condensed into a single pinprick point are both false concepts of the intellect which don’t delimit the nature of Brahman, the absolute reality, so it’s a false dichotomy to say “if Brahman has extension then He must have a left side and right side”. The metaphysical infinite has no sides. It possesses no center to trace the sides from
>Either way, you are saying that Brahman is NOT isolated to a single point, meaning that it has to be multidimensional. If that is the case then it has parts insofar as you can have a left side and a right side.
That’s wrong, see above for the reason why
>Even if it’s homogenized etc, there is still a “this area over here” and “that other area of Brahman there”.
No, because the infinite doesn’t inherently posses such distinctions, but they are arbitrary distinctions that the intellect projects onto it. If It really was composed of a series of portions then your position would violate the law of non-contradiction when you say that the whole of Brahman and has parts, and that Brahman exists in his parts but nowhere additionally outside of them (implying another part which is not a part, i.e. a contradiction) meaning that outside of the Brahman existing as the parts there is nothing else existing as the whole, which amounts to saying that the same thing exists as the incomplete part and as the complete whole at the same time; but this is a contradiction which cannot be true. In order to substantiate your claim that if Brahman has extension then He would necessarily be composed of or contain parts or areas you’d have to explain how this claim wouldn’t violate the law of non-contradiction but you haven’t done so yet, and so on that basis alone what you are saying should be rejected for the reason that it refutes itself.
>This is a fundamental quality of something that is multidimensional.
Brahman is transcendental to the conceptions of the intellect including distinctions like multidimensional and singularly dimensional.
>But really what difference would that even make?
The difference is that one position contains inherent contradictions and the other doesn’t, one of them is a more logically-consistent metaphysics or theology and the other isn’t.

>> No.17679392

>>17679383
>>17675627 #
>the body could continue living without consciousness
>Wait, does advaita actually teach this?
No, I actually misread your question there and thought you meant something else, everything within the world lives only to the extent that the Brahman’s power keeps their bodies alive and intact through such things as the vital force etc.
The main thing though:
>until the jivas individually attain liberation
How can a jiva attain liberation?
from gaining Self-knowledge, after the teachings of the Upanishads eliminate the jivas superimposition the Self reveals Itself at which point that jiva no longer exists anymore at a conditional level anymore as beginningless indiscrimination between Self and not-Self.
>I mean what are the technicalities of what is happening when this occurs?
The Self (consciousness) is already eternally liberated, the change from liberated to liberated only inheres in and is experienced by the intellect of the jiva and not by consciousness which is immutable. The jiva just stops obscuring the ever-present and ever-liberated reality of the Self
>Does the jivas evaporate into Brahman or something?
There is just no longer misidentification with the reflection of consciousness in the intellect, like realizing you that which is reflected instead of regarding oneself as the reflection of ones face in the mirror. The body of the jiva and its intellect etc continue to exist in the shared empirical world, although there is no delusion and misidentification accompanying them

https://www.wisdomlib.org/hinduism/book/mundaka-upanishad-shankara-bhashya/d/doc145123.html

>> No.17679397

>>17679392
>What stops another reincarnation from happening *if there are still other jivas around*?
Because when Self-knowledge dawns for the jiva, the cause of further transmigration ends. Other jivas continue to transmigrate, but not the jiva for whom Self-knowledge dawns

>What is the relationship between the jiva and Brahman when liberation happens?

“The yogin having achieved perfect discrimination contemplates all things as subsisting in himself, and thus, by the eye of knowledge, discovers that all is this one self. He knows that all this changing world is awareness, or that beyond Atman there is nothing; as all varieties of vase are clay, so all things he sees are awareness. He knows this who, free from the notion of being a person, rejects the limited superimpositions he previously believed himself to be, and becomes one with his essential nature, being, awareness, bliss, just as the chrysalis loses its former nature to become a bee ... From the moment in which the superimpositions are removed the truthknower enters immediately into that which permeates everywhere, as water in water, air in air, fire in fire.
- Vivekachudamani

>jiva attain liberation
Jiva is illusion isn’t it? How can it “attain” anything with regards to Brahman?
The attainment or non-attainment of Brahman is contingent on the realization of Brahman or the lack thereof. Liberation means that the delusion stops inhering in the intellect of the jiva that the sentient being is other than the formless and all-pervasive Self. The intellect of the jiva doesn’t go anywhere, but when it stops obscuring the Atman that is already there, the sentient light which had been dwelling within the heart of the jiva and illumining it reveals Itself. The jiva and its intellect and thoughts, volition etc were already different from the Atman-Brahman and they continue on as such after liberation is attained.

>> No.17679497

>>17679383
>The spatially-infinite extension of an unlimited universe that we can imagine on one hand ... are both false concepts
That is to say, a 3d space imagined as extending infinitely in every direction is not the true metaphysical infinite, because the infinite includes not only whatever possibilities are manifested but the total set of unmanifested possibilities as well and not just one specific determination of them existing as a boundless space.

>> No.17679514

>>17661408
Westerners that look up about poor third people paganism following retarded germans philo loosers is thr biggest cuck of time. Just know that you all going to hell

>> No.17680160

>>17679514
cringe

>> No.17680472
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17680472

>>17679383
>Brahman is not a single point
>it is not one or multi dimensional either
>but it does exist
huh. very interesting. I think I’m beginning to understand it now
>muh contradictions
The law of non-contradiction is a concept of the intellect, pleb.
>>17679392
>be consciousness
>tell everyone that I’m eternally liberated and can never be affected by anything
>”but what about that thing that’s obscuring you?”
>I’m not actually obscured bro that’s impossible
>i mean yeah, the jivas do still need to dawn self knowledge in order for Brahman to no longer be obscured, but that doesn’t mean I’m not liberated though.
>bro you can be liberated and obscured at the same time
>you only say it doesn’t make sense because of your intellect. Intellect is just illusion so it doesn’t mean anything.
Is advaita a form of gaslighting?
>>17679397
>”what is the relationship between the jiva and Brahman upon liberation”
>can’t even answer the question so just posts a copy pasta
I’m now fully convinced that you’re merely pretending to know what you’re talking about.
Anyways, the guy said “water into water”. So the jiva *does* merge with Brahman upon liberation, yes?
That was a rhetorical question don’t worry about it.
>>17679497
So Brahman also includes a scenario where Brahman has parts? Based

>> No.17681272

>>17680472
>The law of non-contradiction is a concept of the intellect
If you don’t care about applying and using logic consistently anymore then you might as well give up entirely on debating theology and metaphysics because you’ll have no ground to stand on anymore.
>>be consciousness
>>tell everyone that I’m eternally liberated and can never be affected by anything
>>”but what about that thing that’s obscuring you?”
>>I’m not actually obscured bro that’s impossible
You are confusing here the Atman being obscured from the jiva which is what happens, with the Atman being obscured from Itself, which never happens.
>>i mean yeah, the jivas do still need to dawn self knowledge in order for Brahman to no longer be obscured, but that doesn’t mean I’m not liberated though.
what is saying this is the mind/intellect and not the already liberated consciousness, so there is no contradiction
>>bro you can be liberated and obscured at the same time
No you can’t. Liberation is the eternal nature of Brahman, Brahman never has obscuration as its nature but its a delusion of the jiva which doesn’t affect or change the Atman, it would only be a contradiction if both were the nature of Brahman
>Is advaita a form of gaslighting?
No, you just don’t know what you are talking about and are seizing upon and interpreting every little statement of mine in bad faith.
>>”what is the relationship between the jiva and Brahman upon liberation”
>>can’t even answer the question so just posts a copy pasta
The short answer is that there is no relation, before during and after, the real never has any actual relation with the unreal.
>Anyways, the guy said “water into water”. So the jiva *does* merge with Brahman upon liberation, yes?
No, Shankara’s writings are meant to be understood hermeneutically, if you’ve actually read his works it’s clear that he is not talking about consciousness actually merging because consciousness is immutable, nor is he speaking about the jiva merging into Brahman because Brahman does not have any relation with the jivas that would allow them to merge into Him, the merger spoken of is that when the jiva’s Self-knowledge dawns, the transition from regarding oneself as an individual being existing amidst multiplicity to regarding oneself as omnipresent is experienced from the jivas perspective as a merger, but neither consciousness nor the jiva truly merge with anything. When a pot is broken the space inside the pot was already the same as space everywhere, it doesn’t really merge with the rest of space although it may appear to be doing so.
>So Brahman also includes a scenario where Brahman has parts? Based
No, because the Supreme Brahman is never Himself manifested and He is not included within any determined set of possibilities, He is instead That in which they are all contained, because of them flowing from and being sustained by His power.

>> No.17681580
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17681580

>>17681272
>If you don’t care about applying and using logic consistently anymore then you might as well give up entirely on debating theology and metaphysics because you’ll have no ground to stand on anymore
pot calling the kettle black, huh?
>the atman being obscured blah blah blah
the atman still gets obscured either way. your quote: "the Atman being obscured [...] which is what happens"
>brahman never has any relation to maya
then where does liberation (something having to do with both brahman and maya) fit into all this, if brahman and maya are never related?
>When a pot is broken the space inside the pot was already the same as space everywhere, it doesn’t really merge with the rest of space although it may appear to be doing so.
yeah except the pot is separating (cutting) a section of air from the rest of the atmosphere. maya cannot cut brahman the same way a pot can do to air.

>> No.17681596

>>17661408
>Now Advaita is clearly unscriptural crypto-Buddhism
Go back and try again. Not reading the rest.

>> No.17682509
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17682509

>>17681580
>pot calling the kettle black, huh?
No, because when you accuse me of saying something or holding a position that is contradictory, I provide an explanation for why it's actually not. You hold the view that Brahman has real parts, but you're unable to explain why Brahman existing both as incomplete parts and as the complete whole at the same time doesn't violate the law of non-contradiction. In Advaita there aren't any such two mutually-exclusive things which are simultaneously affirmed about the Supreme Brahman.
>the atman still gets obscured either way. your quote: "the Atman being obscured [...] which is what happens"
My point was that the Atman is obscured only for the jivas and that this doesn't constitute a real obscuration of the Atman, I thought that was clearly implied in what I wrote, the Atman is always shining and self-revealing, the ignorant jiva may be compared the blind man who cannot see the sun though he is bathed in its light. That obscuration is never really an obscuration that affects the sun itself, the sun doesn't have its capacity to shine and provide illumination affected by that blind man, but it exists only for the blind man and is the result of his own faulty perception, it's an obscuration of the blind mans correct vision instead of the sun itself. In a similar way, the obscuration of the Atman for the jivas doesn't exist outside of the jivas own indiscrimination, it's not that Atman is really obscured, but the jiva's own correct vision is obscured.
>then where does liberation (something having to do with both brahman and maya) fit into all this, if brahman and maya are never related?
1) Liberation is the eternal nature of the Atman, if liberation were a product of things instead of already existing eternally then it would have a beginning, and things which have a beginning aren't actually eternal.

>> No.17682521

>>17682509
2) Brahman, out of His omniscience and omnipotence manifests beginningless ignorance only on the level of the conditionally real or Vyāvahārika, but this ignorance never emerges into existence as a fully real entity which would require it existing in absolute reality too, it doesn't exist there though because on that level, Pāramārthika, there is just the infinite and non-dual Supreme Brahman alone. Because of this, nothing which exists only on the level of conditional reality can contradict absolute reality, because the conditional reality doesn't really exist as a thing in its own right, but its just misapprehension of the absolute reality itself. The snake we misapprehend the rope to be never exists as a real object. The rope's existence is not contradicted in its own right or negated by someone's misapprehension of it. The rope never has any real relation with the snake that a person misapprehends it as, because that would require the snake existing as a real thing or object possessing the same reality as the rope, that the rope could have some sort of direct causal interaction with.
3) The complete realization of the Paramatman is liberation, because an eternally existing and unproduced reality can only be attained through the removal of ignorance of it, this happens without Brahman ever having a real relationship with maya.
>yeah except the pot is separating (cutting) a section of air from the rest of the atmosphere. maya cannot cut brahman the same way a pot can do to air.
Yes, and that's because pots and air are both substances which can obstruct one another, Brahman is formless like space and so physical objects don't present an obstacle to Brahman like how objects are not a obstacle to the continuous existence of the space in which they are situated. Air is a gas which is contained within space/akasha. The pot only separates and cuts the air because the pot presents a physical obstruction to that air which is a gaseous substance, but physical objects existing with form are no impediment for space itself which is formless, rather, they are contained within space. Even within the pot where there is matter existing, that matter is not cutting space but is contained within space. The space inside and outside the empty pot continues uninterruptedly all throughout as well as at the exact same location where the physical material of the pot itself exists, there is no point where it doesn't exist. Similarly, maya never actually cuts or separates the formless Brahman in which it seems to be situated to the deluded, the analogy of the objects in space demonstrates this concept, and the fact that the maya doesn't even exist in absolute reality as something which can cut Brahman there shows it too.

>> No.17683019

>>17682509
You didn’t provide an explanation for how something can exist while being neither a point nor multidimensional
>something cannot exist as an incomplete parts and also as a whole
How can a tree exist if it’s made up of leaves and branches and whatnot? Inb4 trees are illusory and don’t actually exist
>I was just kidding when I plainly said that the atman gets obscured
>the blind man’s inability to see doesn’t affect the sun
So then why should there be any reason whatsoever to seek moksha? Why study the upanishads? You are already liberated, and the blind man seeing or not seeing doesn’t affect the sun whatsoever, and the blind man actually doesn’t even exist in the first place. So why bother?
>le snake is actually a rope
Why do you keep making these walls of text that barely even relate to the question? It’s like you just spit out passages from what you’ve read in the past that you think are relevant to the question but you don’t really know what you’re saying. You’re a glorified search engine. You have all this information in your head but you can only parrot it. I see you are using more Sanskrit words now too. This is like memorizing one of Aesop’s fables word for word but still being unable to grasp and manipulate the core message
>you have to remove maya in order to experience Brahman
>maya is not covering or subduing anything though. It isn’t even real
>maya cannot affect you in any way but you still have to remove it because reasons
>removing ignorance doesn’t count as an interaction with ignorance
Ah, that explains how something involving two things can occur despite those two things never being related. I understand how that’s not a contradiction. Liberation isn’t even real because you’re already liberated.
>the formless Brahman is like space, neither the pot or the air
So now Brahman is just a void? Now your views actually make sense. You should have said this earlier. Would have saved my time

>> No.17683260

How do you guys feel about Neoplatonism?

>> No.17683650
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17683650

>>17683019
>how something can exist while being neither a point nor multidimensional
Because dimensions only pertain to space and Brahman is not included within space but Brahman is transcendental to space, so Brahman is not subject to things which are predicated on space like dimensions
> How can a tree exist if it’s made up of leaves and branches and whatnot?
That you are asking this shows that your conception of Brahman contains inherent contradictions which you are unable to resolve. That something may seem empirically real doesn’t make illogic logic.
> So then why should there be any reason whatsoever to seek moksha? Why study the upanishads?
Because until the Jiva overcomes their indiscrimination they don’t realize the Self and its eternal liberation and though its always existing
>You are already liberated, and the blind man seeing or not seeing doesn’t affect the sun whatsoever, and the blind man actually doesn’t even exist in the first place. So why bother?
If someone like a jiva is desirous of being liberated or knowing the liberation of the Self, that contains the impetus for them to seek it. Liberation is not produced by anything but is the very nature of the Self, that’s why when ignorance is overcome the Self is right there waiting for you so to speak. Liberation is the end of all sorrow and eternal bliss, but until the jiva overcomes its indiscrimination it wont know the liberation of the Self.
> Why do you keep making these walls of text that barely even relate to the text in question?
“To be a master of metaphor, is the greatest thing by far. It is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others, and it is also a sign of genius.” - Aristotle, poetics

>> No.17683658

>>17683650
>you have to remove maya in order to experience Brahman
yes
>maya is not covering or subduing anything though.
It is in conditional reality for the jivas, but not for the Atman in absolute reality, your arguments come back to this point that misses the absolute vs conditional reality distinction because you either genuinely don’t understand the concept or because you are willfully playing stupid
>It isn’t even real
not in absolute reality, it is in conditional reality, just like how dreams seem real but then are sublated when you awake
>maya cannot affect you in any way but you still have to remove it because reasons
You are confusing the jiva and the Atman here, not for the first or second or third time either. The jiva has to remove maya, the Atman doesn’t. If in Advaita they are speaking about ‘you’ doing something they are speaking about the jiva, consciousness is non-volitional and doesn’t do anything.
>removing ignorance doesn’t count as an interaction with ignorance
Do you interact with the snake that you thought the rope was? No, because it’s not an actually existing thing, you just wrongly thought it was and then you remove that ignorance by the right perception of the rope without ever interacting with any actual snake.
>Ah, that explains how something involving two things can occur despite those two things never being related. I understand how that’s not a contradiction
There is no real interaction between Brahman and maya in absolute reality, nothing actually involves Brahman and anything else in a real relation, that’s a delusion of the jivas
>Liberation isn’t even real because you’re already liberated.
That’s exactly why Liberation is absolutely real, if liberation was produced into existence it would be non-eternal and liable to decay
>the formless Brahman is like space, neither the pot or the air
>So now Brahman is just a void?
No, because the void is not sentient and self-knowing like Brahman is

>> No.17683661

>>17683019
All advaita relies on metaphors because it cannot be clarified logically. It's a sub philosophical doctrine.

>> No.17685089

>>17683661
> because it cannot be clarified logically.
yes, it can

>> No.17685119

>>17679514
go back to facebook

>> No.17685234
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17685234

>>17683260
its based

>> No.17685279
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17685279

>>17683650
>Because dimensions only pertain to space and Brahman is not included within space but Brahman is transcendental to space
in your last post >>17682521 you say say that brahman is space (the pot and air are in space). you also say "there is no *point* where it doesn't exist.", implying multiple spatial dimensions. .
either way, it's not about space. it's about logic. but brahman is transcendental to logic though, right?
it's all just pilpul at this point but i will continue anyways.
>can't even cope with the fact that trees exist
>can't explain why moksha is necessary
>t-the jiva has to realize the s-self
there is no logical reason why brahman should care about what the jiva is thinking. the jiva is maya and doesn't even really exist. brahman is already liberated. you can't explain why the pursuit of moksha is important. ignorance isn't real and that means it has never existed and never will. only brahman is real, yes? and don't try to act like your brahman can be obstructed by anything either, because it is eternally unaffected
>If someone like a jiva is desirous of being liberated or knowing the liberation of the Self, that contains the impetus for them to seek it
who gives a shit what maya's impetus is? maya isn't real and it never will be. it can never "attain" anything. seeking is an illusion. the jiva will never experience brahman because maya and brahman are never related.
>until the jiva overcomes its indiscrimination it wont know the liberation of the Self
it is entirely worthless what jiva knows or doesn't know. jiva is maya and it doesn't matter. it means nothing to brahman. brahman is eternal bliss, not bliss with the jiva blocking it at some point in the middle.
>dude i'm friends with aristotle irl and he told me i'm a master of metaphors
in >>17667504 you ducked my inclusion of a metaphor that was foreign to you because you don't actually understand metaphors at all. you can only parrot them.

>> No.17685284
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17685284

>>17683658
>>17683658
>brahman is just having a dream
brahman can't dream. dreams affect people but brahman cannot be affected. brahman is never deluded. it is unchanging.
>the snake is not actually an existing thing
the rope doesn't exist either. unless rope is brahman and the snake is maya here, but then you would be implying that a rope on the ground is the equivalent to a snake believing itself as a snake which is ludicrous. the the snake isn't even there for one, so it can't realize the true nature that it is actually a rope or something like that either, and if it did do such a thing then that would have no affect on the situation because the all-powerful rope that can do such a thing as this would not be affected by what the imaginary snake thinks anyways. this concept of a snake believing itself to be a snake doesn't even exist. it's basically just a hypothetical. it makes no absolute difference whatsoever what happens with the snake, just like it makes no real difference whatsoever what maya does. your study of the upanishads is all worthless. it didn't even happen and has no real affect on anything absolute.
>b-but the snake is real to the jiva
the jiva isn't real. inb4 conditioned reality is real and has any affect whatsoever on brahman which is eternally liberated and immutable
>nothing actually involves Brahman and anything else in a real relation, that’s a delusion of the jivas
exactly. it doesn't matter what the jivas do. they don't even exist in the first place. brahman doesn't care whether or not the jivas study the upanishads. anything that the jivas think is necessary is just a big cope.
>the void is not sentient and self-knowing like Brahman is
so it's a sentient and self-knowing void. doesn't self-knowing imply a knower and something-to-be-known though? hmm. either way still pretty voidy. if you want a simile i'll give you one (they're easier than metaphors so don't worry): brahman is like empty space.

>> No.17685412
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17685412

>>17661408
any vedanta traditions that attempt to provide a rigorous argument as to why we assume there is ever an external world outside of the self like fichte does with the practical portion of his work?

>> No.17685699
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17685699

advaita is basically the transgenderism of vedanta
here's what it's like arguing with an advaitin
>if you have y chromosomes then you can never be a woman
>"well actually sex and gender are completely different things. imagine I've adopted a child. Sure, I will never share my genes with this child, nor will I ever be their bio parent, but I am still socially and legally their parent. If I went to a parent-teacher conference, and was asked which kid was mine, i wouldnt say "X, but actually I'm not his real parent." To say I am not a parent because I didn't perform the biological roles required for parenthood makes things inconvenient and complicated in a social setting and cruel on a personal level. SRS and HRT change the way a person's body presents. Trans people do this because it makes them feel comfortable about their bodies but also because it helps them get perceived as their desired sex. Once they become perceived as the sex they desire, they may get treated as that sex, and that creates the social experience of gender. In this way, a trans woman (mtf) can understand some of the experiences women go through and trans men (ftm) understand some of the experiences go through
>"and thus there is no absolute difference between a transwoman and a so-called biological woman. the perceived difference that results from chromosomes is a conditioned reality and has no bearing on the absolute reality of me identifying as a woman, which is an eternal and immutable facet. this biologically-male body of mine is temporary and illusory and cannot affect my true absolute identity as a woman, which is transcendental to material conceptions of gender"
you will never be vedic

>> No.17685722
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17685722

Qualified monism is the patrican's choice

>> No.17685999
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17685999

>>17685279
>in your last post you say say that brahman is space (the pot and air are in space).
No that’s wrong, I compared Brahman to space in that they are both formless, if you had read the Upanishads and Brahma Sutras you would know that Brahman is different from space as its cause as they say this about Him
>you also say "there is no *point* where it doesn't exist.",
You are confused, I said that about space with reference to it containing all objects, I didnt say that Brahman has points
> >can't even cope with the fact that trees exist
There is nothing to cope with because that doesn’t refute what I’m saying. That objects can be apprehended with the mind which seem to be composed of parts doesn’t prove or show that it’s no longer a violation of the law of non-contradiction for something to exist both as an incomplete part and as the complete whole at the same time, they can’t both be true at the same time because they are mutually exclusive like light and darkness or heat and cold, and so they cannot both be affirmed as true of Brahman without landing yourself in a major contradiction. When we look at trees seeming to exist with parts that doesn’t mean that the law of non-contradiction isn’t real anymore, it just means that the relation of parts and whole isn’t real but it’s something that our mind imposes on the world in an attempt to help make sense of it. If you actually followed your own reasoning consistently and made what appears in our empirical experience the ultimate criterion of truth that would be an argument against the existence of any Brahman or God or Vishnu because they don’t present themselves to us as objects of empirical experience.
> >can't explain why moksha is necessary
Necessary for what purpose? You never said what it is supposed to be necessary for. It’s not necessary for the Atman who already has it. And for the jivas its not necessary, they can keep transmigrating if they want to. It only remains to be realized by the jivas because of them being engendered by and under the influence of Brahman’s unlimited power
> here is no logical reason why brahman should care about what the jiva is thinking.
Brahman doesn’t have cares which involve a mind, but the Supreme Brahman in His non-duality is without mind (manas) and so without cares
>the jiva is maya and doesn't even really exist.
correct

>> No.17686012

>>17685999
>brahman is already liberated. you can't explain why the pursuit of moksha is important.
its important only if the jiva wants to awaken to the already-existing reality that is boundless bliss
>b-b-but how can the jiva awaken when its not actually real
The delusion of taking the body and mind to be oneself and the delusion of being an individual being existing amidst multiplicity, are, like thoughts, insentient, and they are like physical objects in that they are both insentient things which appear in sentience. The correct view of viewing everything as the Self is another thought or mental distinction that inheres in the intellect and is itself insentient. The jiva can ‘awaken’ despite not actually being real because the distinctions of pre- and post-liberation are unreal maya-objects, and so the ‘awakening’ of the jiva is just the end of the stream of one type of maya-object (incorrect understanding) and then the ending of the body constituting jiva when it dies and doesn’t transmigrate again, leaving the underlying consciousness as the sole reality. This is possible because maya-objects of the jivas and the distinctions in its intellect never really existed in absolute reality to begin with, like how its possible to wake up from dreams because they are a projection of our own mind and are not real. Brahman does not wake up, but the jiva ceases to regard consciousness as other than Brahman, and when that jiva vanishes there is just consciousness remaining that had always been liberated.

>> No.17686017

>>17686012
>ignorance isn't real and that means it has never existed and never will.
Yes, but until one knows this directly and not merely intellectually as a hypothetical concept it doesn’t change anything, just like how until you correctly perceive see the basis or substratum of an illusion you will still perceive it as an illusion in your vision even while being told it’s an illusion
>only brahman is real, yes?
yes, in absolute reality
>and don't try to act like your brahman can be obstructed by anything either, because it is eternally unaffected
the jivas intellect and its vision/distinctions can be obstructed so as to not be correct, but thats not an obstruction of Brahman Himself because the jivas are not Brahman

>who gives a shit what maya's impetus is? maya isn't real and it never will be. it can never "attain" anything.
Yes, maya isnt real and it never attains anything, that’s why I said above that attainment in Advaita really refers to the unreal illusion vanishing due to it no longer being mistakenly perceived as such, leaving the absolute reality of conciousness alone. When this happens neither the illusion nor consciousness really attain anything:

>seeking is an illusion. the jiva will never experience brahman because maya and brahman are never related.
The jiva doesn’t have to experience Brahman because Brahman’s own experience of Itself as non-dual sentient presence is self-revealing, once the ignorance of the jiva goes away there is just this self-revealing sentience alone

>until the jiva overcomes its indiscrimination it wont know the liberation of the Self
>it is entirely worthless what jiva knows or doesn't know.
Worthless for whom? Not for the jiva since ignorance involves suffering, and to remove ignorance is to end suffering which is not worthless
> it means nothing to brahman. brahman is eternal bliss, not bliss with the jiva blocking it at some point in the middle.
Yes, that’s why Brahman is untouched by and indifferent to the Jivas ignorance

>> No.17686022

>>17686017
>dude i'm friends with aristotle irl and he told me i'm a master of metaphors ... you ducked my inclusion of a metaphor that was foreign to you because you don't actually understand metaphors at all. you can only parrot them.
I later pointed out that it was invalid because it involved situating Brahman as immanent in the world with other objects and as being composed of parts, which is heretical to the scriptures of Hinduism which state that Brahman is partless and transcendent. It also doesn’t withstand logical analysis because it violates the law of non-contradiction and your complete inability to refute this second point is all the justification I need to not even bother addressing any metaphor which incorrectly makes Brahman into an object which parts, because I’ve already demonstrated that the premise you’ve started with is contradictory and false.

>brahman is just having a dream
brahman can't dream. dreams affect people but brahman cannot be affected. brahman is never deluded. it is unchanging.
I didn’t say that Brahman was having a dream, Brahman just out of his own omnipotent allows for the jivas to “dream” or be ignorant, but Brahman is not affected by that

>the snake is not actually an existing thing
the rope doesn't exist either.
It does because the rope corresponds to Brahman insofar both are the ultimate substratum of the illusion
>unless rope is brahman and the snake is maya here, but then you would be implying that a rope on the ground is the equivalent to a snake believing itself as a snake which is ludicrous.
The rope is Brahman and the snake is maya, again you confuse the jiva and its intellect with the Atman, Brahman (the rope) doesn’t misperceive Himself as the snake, rather the rope is omniscient and omnipotent and through that engenders beings (i.e. the jivas who are not the rope) that misapprehend Brahman

>> No.17686028

>>17686022
>the the snake isn't even there for one, so it can't realize the true nature that it is actually a rope or something like that either,
The answer to this is given above when I explain how the false and correct perception of Brahman by the intellect are both unreal and have no effect upon the underlying reality of conciousness, when the underlying non-existence of the jiva is revealed, the reality that was the substratum of illusion reveals itself.

>and if it did do such a thing then that would have no affect on the situation because the all-powerful rope that can do such a thing as this would not be affected by what the imaginary snake thinks
The rope isn’t affected, the jiva doesn’t have to affect the rope to affect the situation, the jiva just has to overcome its own ignorance, but the jiva doesn’t have to enter into any sort of causal relationship with Brahman/the rope to do this

>anyways. this concept of a snake believing itself to be a snake doesn't even exist.
What do you mean? Are you saying that snakes don’t believe themselves to be snakes? What else what they believe? That they are dragons or lizards?

>it makes no absolute difference whatsoever what happens with the snake, just like it makes no real difference whatsoever what maya does. your study of the upanishads is all worthless. it didn't even happen and has no real affect on anything absolute.
Studying the Upanishads doesn’t have to affect Brahman to produce liberation and make a difference for the jiva, because if the cause of the jivas continued existence (ignorance) is eliminated, that brings about the end of the jiva and leaves Brahman alone as the only reality. If Brahman was affected by anything He would then be conditioned and mutable, but then he could not be eternal at the same time.

>> No.17686033

>>17686028
>b-but the snake is real to the jiva
>the jiva isn't real.
So? There is no contradiction. Belief itself is not sentient but is an insentient thing appearing within sentience, so the jiva doesn’t have to be an existing separate sentience to have beliefs about the snake being real, the beliefs and ignorance (itself also insentient) of the jiva are insentient and they appear within the undivided expanse of Brahman’s sentience, but without affecting or inducing any change in that sentience, similar to how physical objects don’t induce any change in the formless expanse of space in which they are situated.

>nothing actually involves Brahman and anything else in a real relation
>exactly. it doesn't matter what the jivas do. they don't even exist in the first place.
But until their intellect understands this, or rather until it no longer has the ignorance view of the reality of multiplicity and things other than Brahman, then the jiva experiences suffering, so even though nothing matters to Brahman if you (the jiva) care about about happiness and avoiding suffering then liberation does matter

>brahman doesn't care whether or not the jivas study the upanishads.
Yes

>anything that the jivas think is necessary is just a big cope.
Coping in what way? It’s still needed to bring out the end of suffering for the jiva so I dont see how that is a cope
>the void is not sentient and self-knowing like Brahman is
>so it's a sentient and self-knowing void.
No, because something being sentient is mutually exclusive with something being a void, so because Brahman is sentient that means that He is not a void. Not everything that is formless is a void, consciousness is formless and has no distinguishing characteristics but nobody in their right mind would say that consciousness is a void.

>doesn't self-knowing imply a knower and something-to-be-known though? hmm.
No, because the self-knowing of Brahman is non-dual in that it consists of uninterrupted, immediate and constant revealing of its own sentient presence to itself in a way that transcends and doesn’t involve the distinctions of knower and known which are categories created by and inhering in the intellect.

>> No.17686058

>>17685722
Is there a gallery of these somewhere? I see them pop up occasionally but I often forget to save them

>> No.17686079
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17686079

>>17686058
What these special type of compasses? There is a place on reddit devoted to it called 'Compasses from the Future'. Not all the good ones are there though, and there are alot of bad ones. Pic related is probably my personal favourite

>> No.17686093
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17686093

>>17686079
Thanks brother
>tfw I will never live in an archeofuturist miyazaki patchwork world

>> No.17686107

>>17685699
What about the transgender individual wielding her power of dilation?

>> No.17686153
File: 905 KB, 3820x1836, advaita brahman cube.png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
17686153

is there anything more miserable than advaita?

>>17685412
>an argument as to why we assume there is ever an external world outside of the self
you mean like an argument against solipsism? i'm not familiar with fichte

>> No.17686737
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17686737

>>17686012
>>17686017
>>17686022
>>17686028
>>17686033
come on, man. if you're going to reply to me this many times at least give me the (you)'s. i am their rightful owner.
you're just (you)ing yourself here which is essentially the same as masturbation

>> No.17686859
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17686859

>> No.17686940

>>17685412
Most vedantic philosophies are emanationist as long as emanationism is understood loosely. Advaitins have perennially had this problem of explaining why brahman does anything except be brahman, mostly because their philosophy owes so much to mahayana epistemology which was not meant to prove the existence of some Absolute, but negate the illusory permanence of experienced phenomena. Truly autistic advaitins are basically stuck with the Parmenides problem of why apparent multiplicity apparently exists if all that really exists is the primal unity. This obivously gives 'apparentness' some kind of ontological status, even if it is a shadowy or second order status.

However it should not come as a surprise that most advaitins are not that autistic. Like neoplatonist and neoplatonist Christians, and Fichte too, they have to devise some way of explaining why the original unity overflows itself or automatically dependent phenomena. This is not just a problem with advaita it's a problem with all absolute idealisms and emanationisms.

Christians and neoplatonists often talk about God/the One being so overfull of being that it overflows. I've seen advaitins talk about brahman 'playing'. I think I even saw guenonfag talk about that once here. But you can see how the guenonfag problem of using a metaphor to explain something occurs here. In philosophy metaphors can only be used to illustrate, not prove. Overflowing, playing, metaphors of sunlight and sunrays and shadows, they're all strictly speaking not philosophical. Naturally many absolute monists will say that the metaphors are only to guide you to the direct insight and intuition of the One, but you have to make that intuition yourself, but this is a copout, it's basically 'its mysticism I ain't gotta explain shit'. But at least that would be better than what guenonfag is doing by offering fake solutions to the ancient Parmenides problem.

Fichte has similar problems himself, just like Hegel and Schelling. They either have to posit a lack or incompleteness on the part of the Absolute, a need of the Absolute to know itself in a way it doesn't yet know itself without contingent being (which creates a dualism). Or they have to posit a determinate unfolding of the One, which makes God into a substance with properties. Even Plato in his unwritten doctrines has this problem with the murky idea of the Dyad emanating from the One.

So the problem is both yes and no. Yes people do think about this, both within advaita and other vedanta traditions and also western traditions, and maybe some of those traditions are better or less autistic about the mystical wall of incomprehensibility that is 'why did the primal state of unitary Being become a multiplicity of Becoming?'. But no if you think the question has ever been rigorously answered. All answers will ultimately be metaphors. Guenonfag threads are a microcosm of thousands of years of philosophers positing paradoxical pseudo solutions to this.

>> No.17686955

>>17686940
And also ironically that's one of the tenets of mahayana, namely that no amount of philosophy will ever solve the problem so you should solve it directly by bypassing contingent thought about contingent phenomena altogether. But that's hardly satisfying either.

All of this frustration should of course direct your mind to the miracle of Being and its paradoxical manifestation in Becoming. No matter how smug and confident we get about our great traditions and systems fundamentally nobody fucking knows a thing unless they've seen it directly.

>> No.17687710

>>17686955
>nobody fucking knows a thing unless they've seen it directly.
Even then you don't actually know. This is the failure of buddhism, direct experience means jack shit, you can convince yourself of anything.

>> No.17688100

>>17686940
>Advaitins have perennially had this problem of explaining why brahman does anything except be brahman,
It’s not a problem, you just got filtered by what they say. Brahman has an eternal uncreated nature which is why He always projects maya, there is no problem or contradiction with this
>mostly because their philosophy owes so much to mahayana epistemology
It’s not, the Upanishads talk about all that stuff first, and then the Mahayana and Prajnaparamita sutras just repeat what the Mandukya and other Upanishads already said centuries earlier about things maya, absolute vs non-absolute knowledge, Brahman being unborn etc. The Buddhists came up with a completely retarded interpretation of it that doesn’t make any sense when they can’t explain what permits pratityasamutpada to exist despite denying that its self-caused, and they also contradict themselves by saying that the absolute reality can act as something which allows the conventional reality to be negated without it resting in nihilism, but then they still land themselves in nihilism by saying that the absolute reality doesn’t actually have its own absolute existence. Advaita completely rejects this, unlike Buddhism they have a non-nihilistic interpretation of the absolute vs conventional distinction which can account for what permits samsara to exist.
>Truly autistic advaitins are basically stuck with the Parmenides problem of why apparent multiplicity apparently exists if all that really exists is the primal unity.
They are not though because having maya be Brahman’s power that He projects out of His omnipotence solves this, this doctrine is not a part of the portion of Parmenides’ works that survives.
>This obivously gives 'apparentness' some kind of ontological status, even if it is a shadowy or second order status.
If Brahman has some ontological status, it naturally follows that His power would possess some degree of limited and contingent ontological status as well, this is natural. This status doesn’t conflict with Brahma being non-dual though because it doesn’t exist simultaneously with Brahman in absolute reality but is negated.

>> No.17688142

>>17687710
>This is the failure of buddhism,
it's not even relevant in buddhism you fucking twat

>> No.17688156

>>17688142
>direct experience is not relevant in buddhism
based absolutely braindead retard

>> No.17688165

>>17688100
>the Mahayana and Prajnaparamita sutras just repeat what the Mandukya and other Upanishads already said
see >>17664444 and >>17666664

>> No.17688200

>>17688100
>Mandukya Upanishad
Composed in the early centuries AD, the same period as the Prajnaparamita sutras.

>> No.17688203

>>17688100
What prevents the advaitin from becoming nihilistic?

>>17664444
Only quads can defeat the giga-advaita

>> No.17688206

>>17688100
>having maya be Brahman’s power that He projects out of His omnipotence solves this
If it solves it, why have you been arguing with 500 different people who all disagree that it solves it, for the last year at least? Why did you make this thread specifically because you know people would come and say it makes no sense, so you could argue about it?

>> No.17688563
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17688563

>>17688206
>500 different people

>> No.17688722
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17688722

>>17688165
Just like a certain group, Buddhists like to accuse others of what they themselves are guilty of, the whole “muh Advaita is Buddhism” is ridiculous because Advaita rejects just about every single tenet of Buddhism when you get down to the details, those images were created as a smokescreen to shift the focus away from how Buddha copied half the metaphysics of the pre-Buddhist Upanishads, and then the authors of the Mahayana Sutras did the same and copied the ideas of the Upanishads too.
>>17688200
That’s wrong, most scholars date it as being from around 500-400ish BC. In any case the pre-Buddhist Upanishads talk about the same stuff.
>>17688203
>What prevents the advaitin from becoming nihilistic?
Because they admit that there is an eternal, uncaused absolute reality with its own independent and unconditioned existence which remains when the conventional reality is negated. The Buddhists dont say this but they deny that the Absolute reality has its own independent existence. Advaitin criticizes this and says that the notion of an illusion like samsara happening without an existing/real substratum for it to abide in is complete nonsense.
>>17688206
>If it solves it, why have you been arguing with 500 different people who all disagree that it solves it,
Because it’s difficult to understand unless you’ve read a lot of Advaita writings, and so a lot of the discussion just ends up being me correcting the misconceptions that people have because they are speaking on a topic they have not studied well. The other reason is that there are people who are already emotionally invested in or believe in whatever doctrine they have committed to (like Buddhism) and so they feel compelled to argue against something that is opposed to it, even if they dont have any good arguments. There are no good arguments which refute this doctrine of Advaita, otherwise they would have been posted dozens of times already, but when people to try to come up with some criticism of it and then have it explained to them why their argument is wrong they usually have the self-awareness to realize that their argument is wrong even if they dont like Advaita, even in this thread that one guy arguing for Brahman having parts stopping replying after I explained how what he was saying was almost all wrong.

That’s why its a new argument every thread, because there are none that stick. There are no refutations of Advaita which are clear arguments that can be summed up in a few simple steps or sentences, unlike Shankara’s refutation of parts+whole or his refutation of pratityasamutpada for being unable to enter into existence because of there being nothing causing it despite it not being self-caused.
>Why did you make this thread specifically
I didn’t make this thread, the OP of this thread slandered Advaita which I dont do. 95+% of the threads where I get into long debates about metaphysics are threads that other people create

>> No.17688745

>>17688563
Okay, it is exactly 499. You know what I meant nigga. Suffice to say, he does it a lot.

>>17688722
>I didn’t make this thread,
Schizo or greatest gimmick poster of all time.

>> No.17688813

>>17688722
>they admit that there is an eternal, uncaused absolute reality with its own independent and unconditioned existence which remains when the conventional reality is negated
Yeah but the jiva is not related to this. I didn’t mean nihilism of the Brahman. I was talking about the jiva, which is not related to what you just mentioned. How does the jiva avoid becoming nihilistic?
>inb4 a direct equivalent of “because he knows heaven exists and that prevents him from becoming nihilistic”

>> No.17688858

>>17688813
>How does the jiva avoid becoming nihilistic?
What exactly do you mean by the jiva becoming nihilistic? People say theologies or metaphysics are nihilism when they say that nothing at all really exists, but Advaita denies this and says that Brahman alone truly exists. And since the jivas are not even conscious but persist because of indiscrimination between sentience (Brahman) and the insentient, its not as though conscious jivas or consciousness is obliterated from existence, but instead consciousness is just divested of the false attributions mistakenly superimposed upon it, but this does not carry any connotations of nihilism unless its misunderstood.

>> No.17688891

>>17688745
>Schizo or greatest gimmick poster of all time.
If you feel confidant enough to put your money where your mouth is then quote me and OP in the same post so the (you)s will show up and I’l screencap it on my phone right now and prove to you that im not the same person as him
>inb4 excuses

>> No.17689295

>>17688722
>That’s wrong, most scholars date it as being from around 500-400ish BC.
They don't

"The Praśna and the Māṇḍūkya, which cannot much older than the beginning of the common era"
Patrick Olivelle (1996) Upaniṣads, p xxxvii

"the Praśna and the Māṇḍūkya from the end of the last millenium BC"
Valerie Roebuck (2003) The Upaniṣads, p xxvi

"Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣad (early centuries CE)"
W.J. Johnson (2009) Oxford Dictionary of Hinduism, p 197

While they don't provide solid dates, both Paul Deussen and Signe Cohen put the Mandukya as one of the two latest principal Upanishads, well past the spread of Buddhism
Paul Deussen (1898) The Philosophy of the Upanishads. English trans. (1908) pp 22-26
Signe Cohen (2008) Text and Authority in the Older Upaniṣads

>> No.17689311

>>17688722
>there are no good arguments against advaita, otherwise they would have been posted dozens of times already
Apparently they were actually posted 500 times
>that one guy arguing gave up
I had already figured out the gist of your advaita so I didn’t even read that six post pilpulfest. You think that talking more than the other person is what determines the winner of an argument. You’re like jelly that slips through the fingers any time it is grasped and and then changes into a new shape

>> No.17689317

>>17661408
It came before Buddhism ya dim

>> No.17689364

>>17689295
The scholars Phillips, Ranade, Mahony
and Coomaraswamy all have dated the Mandukya as belonging to the middle of the first millennium BC, predating all the Mahayana Sutras. The pre-Buddhist Upanishads speak about the exact same topics as the Mandukya Upanishad anyway, so the Mandukya coming later wouldn’t rescue Buddhists from the charge of copying the Upanishadic ideas.

>>17689311
>Apparently they were actually posted 500 times
No, in each debate and each thread its a different argument, each time they are grasping at at different straws and then move onto the next when none of them work. Anyone could prove me wrong by posting it right now, except they can’t because it doesn’t exist.

>> No.17689389

>>17689311
>You think that talking more than the other person is what determines the winner of an argument.
No I don’t, in this thread I countered all the charges you made, explained how they were not actually contradictions, I pointed out your numerous misunderstandings, and then I pointed out a logical contradiction in your position which you still have not been able to solve.

>> No.17689428

>>17689364
>in each thread they are grasping at different straws and none of them seem to work
You mean grasping at the same jelly but it keeps slipping through their finger and changing shape? Bit of a Freudian slip there.
>>17689389
>in this thread I countered all the charges you made, explained how they were not actually contradictions
>”I talking about it and managed to verbally slip away every time while still maintaining favorable footing within the structure of the conversation”
Journalists can do that too.
Remind me again how something can fit these three criteria all at the same time:
1. Exist as a real thing
2. Not be confined to a single point
3. Not be one dimensional or multidimensional either

>> No.17689477

>>17689428
>Remind me again how something can fit these three criteria all at the same time:
>1. Exist as a real thing
>2. Not be confined to a single point
>3. Not be one dimensional or multidimensional either
That’s easy, if It exists outside of and is anterior and transcendental to space, and as such It is the cause of space while not being delimited by or conforming to the conditions of space such as having dimensions, which are predicated on cause and cannot exist without it.

>> No.17689487

>>17689477
*which are predicated on space

>> No.17689534
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17689534

>Ramesh Giri was a standing Baba for eight years. Then one day he sat down. “ I stood for many years, but I decided to stop when I knew that rocks can float.” At first we thought this was some kind of arcane spiritual metaphor, but Ramesh was to show us otherwise. Leading us down a small tented path, with twinkling eyes he takes us into a small compound in the centre of which is a small cauldron full of water. In the cauldron, bobbing about like an apple is what appears to be a large rock. I touch it. It is a rock. It is floating. “I carve the name of Lord Ram on the rock. Then the rock will float,” says Ramesh. I must be looking goggle eyed because Ramesh then breaks into peels of demented laughter. The laughter doesn’t stop. It follows me as I make my exit and tread wearily back to my motorbike. It feels like an escape from the brink of insanity.
nooo you cant just do that

>> No.17689592

>>17689477
Why can’t Brahman be transcendental to logic?

>> No.17689618

>>17689364
You could at least give first names, how am I meant to track down a citation using only a common a surname like 'Philips'? I gave you books and page numbers.

Coomaraswamy is at least well known but he wrote dozens of works. In any case, he was an art historian, his sanskrit studies were only in his free time and coloured by his perennialism which of course would bias him to earlier datings of texts that support his views on perennial tradition.

>> No.17689699
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17689699

>>17689295
Well done.

>>17689311
That is true. Now that there are several of us here, all aware of and agreed about guenonfag's jellylike invertebrate nature, I want to ask you guys something. Isn't it easier to talk to him now that the general consensus on /lit/ is that he's a deranged gelatin?

It used to be harder back in the days when he would be manipulating or lying to someone. It bugged me more when there was a risk that he was misleading people with his pilpul shit. But now he's enough of a known quantity that I just come to the threads because they're funny. Anyone else feel the same?

He seems to enjoy it too. I really think all he wanted all along was to have this same argument.

>>17689364
Typical guenonfag manipulation, selectively relying on outdated and nonscholarly sources, while also at other times claiming he doesn't care about sources at all.

Just like he used to rely on Muller until Muller betrayed him, just like he used to rely on Olivelle until Olivelle betrayed him, just like he used to rely on Robinson until Robinson betrayed him, and just like how the sources he cites even lately (>>17664444) still betray him, by proving that the 100% standard scholarly view is that Shankara is essentially a Mahayana buddhist with some Brahman on top.

>>17689618
He has been caught many, many times using google and google books for sources. He finds one source that seems to confirm his views, skims it for one quote or name, and then repeats it for ages, until someone actually goes and reads that source and finds on the next page the same author saying something guenonfag doesn't like. Then he switches to different googled sources, usually after saying he doesn't care about non-perennialist western scholars or something. Guenonfag will confirm momentarily that I am the foremost scholar on his activities so you can trust what I say on this.

I guarantee the sources he's citing are not things he's read. He didn't even read Hirst before saying it's the best modern book on the subject >>17664444. Hirst calls Shankara a cryptobuddhist all over the place.

>> No.17689703
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17689703

>>17689699

>> No.17689704

>>17686153
>against solipsisism
that is part of it, but also why we don't feel solipsistic but instead feel compelled to believe in an external world in the first place (after all, everything is really just in the self) which involved some fine dynamics that i honestly don't completely understand. it seems like the guy i have been reading's argument is that the striving of the finite self (which i am guessing you people would call a jiva? quick browse yields that jiva=life, and i guess that fits since there is a requirement that there would be a restriction of this striving [=drive]) towards the infinite which produces this compulsion in the first place
>>17686940
i see, ty anon. this sounds fascinating. after this guy has fucked my ass for weeks as i was trying to understand his work i was wondering if there are other attempts. nice to know that there are, though probably all not very satisfying
>>17688206
it's just my luck honestly that there is a recurring thread where people are arguing about this problem. after fichte i am moving to schelling, who also attempts to solve the problem so there is really an entire panorama of argument in my fingertips

>> No.17689712

>>17689592
Brahman is transcendental to the intellect and its functions including logic, which are all maya. It’s taken as a given in Advaita and some other Indian philosophy that logic doesn't necessarily 100% delimit the nature of the Absolute. Logic is still the best tool that the mind has for determining what is false and what isn’t though, so as long as you don’t reject the notion that the law of non-contradiction and the law of the excluded middle etc and other forms of logic are completely invalid in every circumstance, then they and similar points of logic still have their own proper place in debate and theology. It could hypothetically be true that logic is totally false and invalid and that things including Brahman can have mutually contradictory attributes and violate laws of logic that way, but all the indications that we have suggest otherwise. So, Vedanta accepts that logic is not infallible in its own right, but with that already being recognized they still engage in debate with the understanding that any debate or argument between two parties only possesses meaning or purpose insofar as the people involved both accept logic as provisionally true. Vedanta doesn’t claim that human reasoning is infallible but they still venture out to meet other doctrines on the playing field of logical debate to show that they can still hold their own and demonstrate their position to be logical and that of their opponents to be illogical, even if that may not be completely infallible.

>> No.17689726
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17689726

>> No.17689730

>>17686153
kek'ed

>> No.17689804

>>17689618
im on my phone right now but if i can track down the exact pages when i get home where they say that I will post them
>>17689699
>spazzing out this hard over an argument about the date of 1 Upanishad
The earliest Upanishads are still pre-Buddhist and Buddha repeats a bunch of their metaphysics from centuries before him anyway so what does it matter? Buddha himself and his later followers still ripped a huge amount of stuff from the Upanishads regardless of the date of Mandukya

>> No.17689837

>>17689804
>The earliest Upanishads are still pre-Buddhist
Even that is questionable, as Olivelle (your old love) says. The dating for any of the Upanishads has to be done within a band of a few centuries, and they are all edited so much that finding the original strata is nearly impossible. Same with any other ancient text, but especially bad in the case of the Indian texts since there was never really a final editorial moment of crystallization, like there was for the older Vedas for example. The antiquity and archaism of the older Vedas actually helped preserve them artificially because they were not living language anymore.

Buddhist texts are no better obviously. They are all late and constantly evolving. But the general traditions that produced both the Upanishads and the other sramana movements in India extend back a few centuries before any texts appear. So it's really hard to say.

Unlike you in the intervening several years since we first talked about this, I have actually read like a dozen books about it. I hope you're still getting a lot out of that 80 page master's thesis that is the first google result for "shankara."

>Buddha himself and his later followers still ripped a huge amount of stuff from the Upanishads
It doesn't matter at all. It's just funny that you're obsessed like a Hindu uncle who plays youtube mantra 10 hour loops all day to enlarge his penis about primacy, when all the writers you cite themselves say that Shankara ripped off most of his ideas from Buddhism. It's fun to remind you of it.

>> No.17689968

>>17689837
>Even that is questionable
No, it’s almost unanimously held among Indologists, linguists, etc that the Upanishads predate Buddhism. The one or two people who say otherwise are the exception that proves the rule.

>> No.17690120

>>17689968
Two of them, yes, are considered to predate the earliest historical mention of the Buddha. In fact recent rumblings in the scholarship aim at a complete redrawing of the old chronologies that may end up dating the life of the Buddha even later than we currently do. The existing chronologies are all based on a kind of compromise position nobody was happy with in the first place.

But none of that is relevant to what I said. I said the sramana culture that produced both the Upanishads and the Buddhist and Jain cultures, and likely a lot of other things, predates the appearance of the texts we have, and that in any case, we can't be sure of the editorial process of the texts we're reading. The original kernel of the Chandogya Upanishad might even be surprisingly old, for all we know, but what that kernel is and what parts are much later accretions (perhaps even surprisingly late in some cases) is another thing.

Replying to you is a formality. Pilpul like the other guy said. Read a book other than Sharma. Even I actually read Sharma because of how excessively you relied on him. I bet you never finished him.

>> No.17690239

>>17689699
>He seems to enjoy it too. I really think all he wanted all along was to have this same argument
i'm surprised at how he can keep it up. nothing phases him.
i thought i would ask him about what stops him from becoming nihilistic to make some more memes or something but he managed to snuff out that question like all the rest and i don't have the energy to further engage with him anymore. reading his answers is like eating soggy cardboard. you get full but it has no nutrients and isn't satisfying whatsoever.
it's like he's playing a completely different game. a guy who can wordplay himself into immunity to nihilism is something else

>>17689712
>Brahman is transcendental to the intellect and its functions including logic. It’s taken as a given in Advaita that logic doesn't necessarily 100% delimit the nature of the Absolute
i bet that's awfully convenient
>except for these specific forms of logic that advaita uses against non-advaitins, like the proof that trees are a logical impossibility. those forms of logic are real
even more convenient. you guys must really have it made. i might become an advaitin myself now. does it come with dental insurance too?
like here >>17681272 where you said:
>If you don’t care about applying and using logic consistently anymore then you might as well give up entirely on debating theology and metaphysics because you’ll have no ground to stand on anymore
i bet that's a fun schtick

>>17689704
i'm not exactly sure what that guy thinks jiva means. i've been assuming that for him it just means the physical body. according to my understanding the jiva is the individual spirit particle that resides in the heart and illuminates the whole body with consciousness (the semantics might be wrong though. maybe i mean 'atman' instead), but advaita says there's no such thing as particles of consciousness - that it is all just one single mass and it is not related to the jiva whatsoever.
as for solipsism why does it matter? i guess you could for example just go kill somebody (which wouldn't be very nice, of course) but you would still have to face the repercussions of your actions. from my very brief thought about it just now it seems that i would act the same even if i believed i was the only conscious entity in existence (or maybe i wouldn't. i haven't put any real thought into it) .
i suppose advaita or any other non-dualist would be solipsist since they say it is only one unified consciousness that exists rather than multiple differentiated conscious entities; so even though you appear to be separated you aren't. maybe advaita is a form of hyper-solipsism since even the physical body and all bodily conceptions including products of the mind and intellect don't exist according to that view. just one consciousness and nothing interacts with it in any way because it is eternally immutable, unchanging, and un-obstructed. so if you're looking for an argument against solipsism i wouldn't go with advaita.

>> No.17690323

>>17690120
>said the sramana culture that produced both the Upanishads and the Buddhist and Jain cultures,
This is nonsense, the Upanishads were composed in Sanskrit, were inserted into the Vedas and kept there, they extensively reference Vedic deities, Vedic ritual and Vedic metaphysical concepts, and they praise the Brahmins and they say that Brahman is the source of both the Vedas and Upanishads. All of those things point to the Upanishads being composed by Sanskrit-speaking priests within the Vedic hierarchy already, it’s absurd to suggest that anyone aside from Brahmins could have composed them, there was not even a wider culture of people speaking and writing in Sanskrit at this time outside of the Brahmins. You nihilists will go to absurd lengths to cope.

>> No.17690352

>>17690239
>it's like he's playing a completely different game
It’s just that Advaita Vedanta is impossible to refute. You can choose to get upset over this or you can choose to be indifferent to it and move on with your life, the latter is a better choice. If you choose to read through Shankara’s works yourself you may even find that you like it.
> except for these specific forms of logic that advaita uses against non-advaitins
What I said was true of logic in detail, I wasn’t saying it only about those specific forms of logic, I just cited them as examples

>> No.17690359
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>>17690323
>brahmin
>wrote in Sanskrit
>incredibly influenced by Buddhism

Are you sure you're not describing Shankara?

>> No.17690365

>>17690352
*true of logic in general

>> No.17690432

>>17690323
>It’s just that Advaita Vedanta is impossible to refute. If you choose to read through Shankara’s works yourself you may even find that you like it
people find themselves liking literal pilpul and being jewish too. why else would they incarnate in such bodies? if you've ever argued with one of these people you'd know that it is impossible to refute them. they just keep coming back for more no matter what you say.
do you identify as asura?

>> No.17690452

>>17690432
>do you identify as asura?
No

>> No.17690470

>>17690452
why not, and what is an asura to you then?

>> No.17690519

>>17690239
>according to my understanding the jiva is the individual spirit particle that resides in the heart and illuminates the whole body with consciousness
im guess it's not quite the same thing. from how im understanding fichte, life is a metaphysical principle that is talked about from the higher vantage point of the self against the not-self (both of which are subsumed under the absolute self)
>but advaita says there's no such thing as particles of consciousness - that it is all just one single mass and it is not related to the jiva whatsoever
i see
>why does it matter?
of course there is a practical side of why it matters, like you mentions with murder, but i think there is a fundamental intellectual import to understanding why this drive to the external world manifests
>maybe advaita is a form of hyper-solipsism since even the physical body and all bodily conceptions including products of the mind and intellect don't exist according to that view. just one consciousness and nothing interacts with it in any way because it is eternally immutable, unchanging, and un-obstructed. so if you're looking for an argument against solipsism i wouldn't go with advaita.
do they really deny the existence of these things or is it more so just their independent existence?

>> No.17690548

>>17690470
>why not
Because the experience of being a human appears to me within sentience instead of the experience of being an asuras bodies. I also don’t have demonic qualities but I’m generally a kind and thoughtful person. When I catch mice in glue traps in my home, I take them outside and slowly pour olive oil over them and gently pull on them to free them from the trap and then I let them go in the woods to save their life instead throwing the mice and the trap into the trash and killing it that way like most people do. I also don’t do battle with the gods like the asuras though.
> what is an asura to you then?
supernatural beings of a questionable/malevolent disposition

>> No.17690570

>>17690519
Advaita does not agree with solipsism as it is normally understood, because solipsism says that everything is just one persons mind who is the only existing being. Advaita says that there are innumerable minds suspended within an infinite consciousness and that the minds of any one of these beings dont take precedence over any other one. Advaita says that there is a shared world of experience existing in conditional reality which is independent of and not dependent upon one mind’s perception of it.

>> No.17690684

>>17690519
>do they really deny the existence of these things or is it more so just their independent existence?
according to advaita: brahman alone exists. brahman is consciousness. everything that is material (fire, water, earth air, space, mind, intellect, and your identification with your body) is just illusion (maya) and does not interact with brahman whatsoever even though maya is a product of brahman and brahman is what allows the material entities to live. brahman is eternally unobstructed by maya. maya cannot affect brahman in any way and they are not related at all.
now, you may be asking yourself: if brahman is unchanging, immovable, immutable, eternally the same, fully-homogenized, and never related to maya; then how does maya exist as a product of brahman?
answer: it just does
t. advaita
i know it sounds bad but if you ask the other guy about it he'll be glad to elaborate on it for as long as you like. not until it makes sense; just until you get tired of engaging with him.

>>17690548
that wasn't a very fun answer. it's just getting boring now

>>17690570
when solipsism says that the mind is the only existing being, isn't that the type of person who thinks the mind to be the true self? so a solipsist who believes conscious experience to be of a spiritual entity would think that said entity is the only existing being.
the whole point is that your current experience is the only thing that can be known. people have different conceptions of the self but regardless it is still the self only which can be known.
>there are innumerable minds suspended within an infinite consciousness
except consciousness is not a thing in which a mind can be suspended because that implies space, which brahman does not have nor occupy. brahman is not space, remember?

>> No.17690748

>>17690684
>then how does maya exist as a product of brahman?
>answer: it just does
It’s more like Brahman permits the misapprehension to take place on a contingent level of existence that maya is an existing product
> except consciousness is not a thing in which a mind can be suspended because that implies space, which brahman does not have nor occupy. brahman is not space, remember
Brahman is not space, it’s true, when I said suspended I didn’t mean literally but I meant more so that the one consciousness projects the illusion of the various minds and from their projected perspective it is as though they are situated in consciousness as though it were an expanse of space.

>> No.17690820

>>17690748
Another classic post. It makes absolutely zero sense whatsoever and you just keep striding along.
Stay gold, ponyboy

>> No.17691010
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[ERROR]

>He's still stuck in digital samsara

>> No.17691114
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[ERROR]

>>17691010
Finally, my queue to leave this godforsaken thread.

>> No.17691153

>>17691114
Don't forget to make another one tomorrow. Pretend to be a buddhist again this time, like when you dug through the archives to find old buddhist threads to repost.

>> No.17691580

>>17690748
>>It’s more like Brahman permits the misapprehension to take place on a contingent level of existence that maya is an existing product
in other words brahmins have no idea

>> No.17691646

“This (universe) previously was simply non-existent ” [Ṛg Veda
X.129]

>> No.17691673

Guenonfag, do you only believe in this horse shit because it makes guzzling cum not gay because it’s all maya whether it is penis sauce or pussy juice and you’re actually just Brahman sucking Brahman down? Please respond

>> No.17691796

Funny how lit Buddhists disappeared chased away by Guenon chads?