Be-ing or Non-Be-ing, is that the Question?

Recently I finished a translation of the Aparokshãnubhuti, attributed to Sri Shankaracharya, under the title of Immanent Awareness. Here is the introduction for those of you interested in reading more about it. I will be putting out a more comprehensive examination of the text within the year, but the current edition is available now on Blurb as you can see on the left side of this page.

Namaste,

Robert

Introduction: Indra’s Net as a state of Be-ing and non-Be-ing

The relatively short text of the Aparokshãnubhuti, here translated as Immanent Awareness, attributed to Sri Shankaracharya, is remarkable for that which it is not as much as for that which it is. Perhaps taking the advice of the text itself from verse 138, it is beneficial for us to assert what it is from the negation method as well as from the positive method.

The question concerning authenticity of authorship is then an appropriate point of departure for our investigation. Whether Sri Shankaracharya composed this text is a question that will most likely never be answered, and for all intents and purposes, it is not a very interesting question, rendering either a positive or negative response neutral, like the noun Brahman itself. As such, I have no intention of either spilling any more ink or splitting any more hairs about the question than has already been done in previous studies on Shankara and/or Advaita Vedanta, or Indian Philosophy in general. However, I will maintain that it is important to realize that it could be a text by Sri Shankaracharya, and that remains a valuable point worth pausing upon for a moment.

Shankara is believed to have composed several hundred texts in his brief, yet brilliant lifetime, dying at the early age of 32, sometime in the 8th Century BCE. Yet, as with many of the eminent Sanskrit authors and texts, the likelihood of ever correctly attributing a specific text to a specific author approaches zero rather swiftly. Again, that Shankara could have written the Aparokshãnubhuti, however, does not raise many eyebrows, and it is usually ascribed to at least his Advaita Vedanta school of thought, if not to the poet-sage himself. Shankara’s more well-known works include the Advaita Vedanta pièce de resistance of the Vivekashudamani as well as his commentaries on the Bhagavad Gita, the Manduka Upanishad and the Brahmasutras, which are all considered to be the bulwark of his achievements.

The important thing being for our purposes here, however, is that the Aparokshãnubhuti does fall under the rubric of an Advaita Vedanta text and not necessarily commentary on any one particular textual tradition as in the case of his aforementioned texts, excluding the Vivekashudamani that is. Advaita Vedanta itself, which literally means “Non-Dualism of the End of the Vedas” is considered to be a reaction to the various competitions of Vedic Scriptures, most notably Buddhism, Yoga, sectarian Hinduism, and Jainism, which each and all threatened to overturn the supremacy of the Brahmin caste as the truly learned and traditionally revered. As such Advaita could easily be seen as being much like the New Testament to the Old Testament in which Jesus does not come to replace the old laws, but rather to complete them. By saying “the End of the Vedas,” one is to take it as such, a completion of the Vedic tradition, rather than its negation or replacement.

However, given the very nature of Advaita itself, meaning that it is Non-Dualism, it runs the risk of not only negating the division between what came before Vedanta, but also, per definition, must take into account what comes after the Vedas, and consequently, must account for all of the competition as being part of the Advaita. For, in order to fully become Advaita, there can be no competition, the dualism must be extinguished on every level. And, this is where the Aparokshãnubhuti shines.

The sheer economy of the text itself, merely a gross number of verses, is staggering in the scope of what it accomplishes. Within the text, entire philosophical systems and major religious tenets are encapsulated, and in some cases refuted, in a mere handful of verses, such as in verses 90-99 where the entire concept of Prãrabdha, the concept of regenerative Karma and culmination of the actions of past lives and the consequences thereof, is negated wholesale, written off as a veritable myth for the Ignorant, and even the scriptures themselves are put into question. So much for being slavishly Vedic, a critique that Shankara has had levied against him more than once by those who oppose his presumed associations with the ultra-Orthodox. In essence, Shankara’s message of Advaita both thwarts and proves the concept of Orthodoxy, becoming a most troublesome enigma and paradox for many. In order to refute Advaita, moreover, you must accept it fully.

Yet, this self-negation is a necessary product of Advaita and in turn is the solution to its own riddle as a perceived dilemma. It must negate itself in order to reach its goal, that being the union of Brahman with the Universal Ãtman, which in turn is the all-pervading Soul of Everything. No mean feat to be carried out in a mere 144 verses, yet, it happens within this text. The name ascribed to the text, namely Aparokshãnubhuti, literally means an “immediate or unmediated realization/awareness,” meaning that there is no mediation between Brahma and the Individual Ego, for how could there be if the goal of Advaita is to show that they are one and the same? The rub, however, is whether the One is the Same, and what relationship it has with the Many.

In philosophy, specifically what is loosely termed Western Philosophy, the concept of the One versus the Many has occupied the minds of many thinkers and has caused irreparable rifts amongst various fields of thought and inquiry, most notably with the infamous sparring of Plato and Aristotle, the classic case of the student taking a 180 degree turn from the Master resulting in the Platonic championing of the One as a grand Synthesis of the particulars into the Ideal, and the Aristotelian favoring of the Many by means of taxonomy and classification by Analysis. This perceived duality between the concepts of Synthesis and Analysis is highlighted in the Platonic dialogue known as the Parmenides by the discussion of the phrase hen to Pan, or what is usually translated as “All is One.” However, as I will show below, what the predicate actually is for Advaita will prove to be quite important in its distinction from this translation and its consequences in philosophy.

As a result of taking sides for the One or the Many, for millennia, western philosophers have quarreled over the teleological conundrum of, when it is all said and done, is the Universe One, or is it a composite of Many? Herein lies that rub, yet one that Advaita does not balk at. The answer for Advaita, however, is “simply”: both, and neither, because it’s the same answer. Let us consider a few other attempts to answer this question, however, before going further.

An illustration of the paradox of the One and the Many can also be seen in what is known as Zeno’s Paradox, regarding Time and Space. The situation is whether all is in flux, or if nothing changes. When an arrow is shot from a bow, at any given time, it should be half the way from some other point, and this division, theoretically, can go on ad infinitum, resulting in the arrow never reaching its target as it is always, half the way there, from some point. And, at each point, even at Infinity, as a result of Gödel’s Theorem, there can always be one more division, or Infinity plus one. Or, on the other hand, if Time is a continuum, then the arrow is both in the bow, and at the target, and every point in between, at ALL TIMES! In the former, we are dealing with Aristotelian Analysis and infinite regression between Cause and Effect, never reaching the source, nor the Prime Mover. In the latter, we are looking at the Platonic Ideal that the arrow is a mere shadow of the perfect, Ideal Arrow, that exists at all times, and is in a perpetual state of perfection, unmediated by Time or Space. Advaita, by default, has to say that both are correct, yet also that both are incorrect. In other words, we are at the stage of MU, a well-known concept within Zen, and which Advaita comes closest to encapsulating, specifically in the Aparokshãnubhuti.

MU, as Douglas Hofstadter celebrated in his monumental book, Gödel, Escher and Bach, is the concept of a state that is beyond either 1 or 0 in the binary system, or in other words, is neither Yes nor No, but both, and neither. Many Zen Koans, or thought experiments, (most famously with the question of “What is the sound of one handing clapping?”) are based upon this state of Mind, or Be-ing, in which there is No State of Mind, nor Be-ing. It is non-Duality par excellence because it is a non-entity state. It exists outside of both Time and Space. It transcends the transcendent.

Yet, we must not just turn to Zen or other Oriental thought for this concept, for within the Occidental tradition, there is Immanuel Kant. In Kant’s three critiques, when read together as a whole, we see this same concept being played out. Within his first Critique, that of Pure Reason, he establishes the two a priori concepts of Space and Time as the Transcendental Dialectic. Space and Time are Transcendental to the human experience, which is the subject of his second Critique of Practical Reason. In the first Critique, Time and Space, being a priori, are beyond our comprehension when taken together. They are the two aspects of the Law of Nature, or the realm of God, and human understanding cannot, because of its limitations bound by Time and Space, ever reach full awareness of the Time-Space Continuum that would later be the lynchpin for the emergence of Quantum Mechanics and the New Physics of the new millennium.

Kant’s philosophical concept of incomprehensibility was synthesized by the Physicist Werner Heisenberg and his “Principle of Uncertainty,” in that we cannot measure both the vectors of location and movement of an object at the same Time within Space. It is impossible with our limited, human a posteriori faculties of Reason, being Practical, not Transcendent. There are two realms of Law, the Natural Law of a priori Time and Space that transcends our capacities of understanding, and there is Human Law, which is fabricated upon experience and can only ever be an approximation to Nature.  Morality, as a consequence of being part of Human Law is merely a good approximation based upon a common consensus of what we ought to do. But, even Kant, in the end, will not say it is what we have to do. We can only guess, and make an approximation. There are limits of Reason. Only God, according to Kant has the capacity to know all Space and all Time. In Physics, this God would become GUT, or the Grand Unifying Theory, a search for the “Mind of God” as Stephen Hawking would phrase it.

What happens in between for Kant, however, is the subject of the third installment, that being the Critique of Judgment. In this Critique, the mediation between the realm of Nature and the world of Human Understanding is simply “play,” or Spiel. Herein lies our capacity to make judgments based upon experience and to witness the Beautiful and the Sublime of the Universe as a sense of perception. However, neither is based upon reason, but rather they are the result of an “Immanent Awareness,” which is likewise the focus of the Aparokshãnubhuti. The unmitigated experience and witness of Brahman as Be-ing is this immanent awareness, or unmediated consciousness. It is transcendent, and once someone has this awareness, the Universe can never be viewed in the same way as before having this awareness. The Laws have changed, forever, or rather, our perception of them has as a result of this awareness.

Hegel was the logical step following Kant in the development of this train of thought, and brings us one step closer to what we find within Shankara’s text, though predating Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit by at least a millennium. For Hegel, Bewußtsein, or consciousness/awareness was the goal of philosophy. Yet, this Bewußtsein, or consciousness did not stop at Selbstbewußtsein, or unmediated self-awareness, but something much more bizarre, yet very akin to Advaita. In the individual dialectic of Self-Consciousness, with each step of realization, a “new” Individual living for-Itself was manifest. Furhtermore, with each consequent sublimation of an awareness of the Self, the Individual became more and more Self-Conscious, like the accretions of nautilus shell building upon its own complexity in simple stages, only revealing the trajectory of the spiral in its completion, or Perfection. But, the ultimate goal was not merely for each Individual to reach Self-Consciousness, but rather for the entire Universe to do so.

Furthermore, the way that the Universe performed this amazing feat, for Hegel, was to suddenly become Self-Conscious of Itself being Self-Conscious of Itself, much like an infinity of mirror images reflecting upon themselves. In Indian thought this is similar to the concept of Indra’s Net, which is described as a net, infinite in all directions, containing a brilliant jewel at each intersection, of which each jewel reflects all other jewels in all Space for all Time. For Hegel, this reflexive self-awareness of the Universe was done when all individuals realized that they were Universal. In other words, in the words of Advaita, it was when the Individual Atman realized that they were No-Thing but rather were the Universal Atman, meaning they were all Brahman, and consequently not Individuals. At that moment, all distinctions are extinguished and the Universe becomes Self-Conscious, and consequently, Time and Space cease to exist. The state of the Universe becomes MU, a non-State of Be-ing.

As a result, the question that has plagued western philosophers about whether it is the One or the Many dissolves before our very eyes with this awareness. As the text of the Aparokshãnubhuti says at verses 138-39, that when the Effect dissipates, so too does the very Cause, saying that if the Universe becomes immanently self-conscious, then the effect of being a manifold of existence ceases to exist, and then likewise, so does the Cause of there being an existence at all. In other words, both Creation and Creator cease to exist with this awareness. Moreover, it is not a holistic awareness as Parmenides said that All is One, but rather, something much more in line with Advaita’s own paradox, namely, when the predicate is commutative with the subject, resulting in a much more descriptive solution, that is simply: The One IS the Many, in that Brahman as Atman is both the One and the Many. And, when the Many cease to be relevant, so too does the One.

MU.