Viveka talks – exercise 9.
Remember: this article/chapter is tokenized, and you may buy it as “writer’s NFT!”
Points to consider
If you take a closer look at old India’s academic environment, you’ll find that it is mostly devoted to finding the answers to epistemological questions. The knowledge itself –vidya – is always true. What is not true is ignorance – avidya. The problem is in finding the difference. How do you recognize knowledge and differentiate it from ignorance?
One simple piece of advice can be: don’t make any assumptions.
Western scientists do compromise with that. They make a huge assumption, which is impossible to verify, and then continue further as if nothing has happened. It is an assumption about the independent existence of the outer, material world.
It may seem strange, but if you think about it, you’ll see that such an existence can never be proven.
Descartes, with his idea of an “evil demon, was consistent with Shankara’s idea about Maya. Descartes says:
I shall consider myself as not having hands or eyes, or flesh, or blood or senses, but as falsely believing that I have all these things.
Note one important point: when Decarteses or Shankara proclaim that something is an illusion, that does not mean that “something” does not exist!
We are inclined to make mistakes in how we understand what we read or hear. It is easy to mix the idea of delusion and non-existence. If something is a delusion, that means it doesn’t exist, right?
No. Not right. It exists. Fully exists. But, it exists in a delusional reality. It does not exist in reality as it is but in a specific, subjective, and most probably false reality of a delusion.
When you truly understand that, you’ll never repeat the modern mantra of spirituality that “everyone has their own truth” and that “each truth is equally valid for somebody.”
Remember the basic dictum of viveka: there is only one truth about anything. So, there is only one truth about the nature of reality.
If you understand that, you should ask the fundamental question of philosophy: what does the „reality as it is“ looks like? You would like to know, wouldn’t you? Nice. But how?
How do you know what you know? Or, better, how do you know what you think you know? And here we are – the fundamental question of epistemology!
For an ordinary person in the human condition, the answer is in the „physical“ experience. „Physical“ is in quotes because it is an interpretation. There is nothing in the experience that suggests its physicality.
For the western scientist, the answer is in perceptual consensus. The knowledge is confirmed if we perceive the same thing repeatedly and if that perception does not change from one observer to the other.
For a viveka student, both ideas are unacceptable. The first one, the idea of something being physical just because it seems so, is unacceptable because any interpretation without direct knowledge (and there is no direct knowledge about the material world, just experiences of that world) can not be the basis for further investigation.
As for a perceptual consensus… well, until recently, that was a hard one to crack. The old advaita masters (and others alike, for example, Zhuangzi and his question about butterfly and who’s dreaming who) struggled with an analogy of a dream.
Plato tried to explain what was going on with the cave wall and the shadows cast by the Sun outside the cave; Shankara summoned Maya, a Lady of the Illusion, and Descartes complained about an evil demon. But none of them make the idea of „true“ reality so questionable as computers and VR!
If we extend that analogy further, how do we know that the mind, which is, according to prevalent science, the product of brain activity, is actually in the brain? If it were somewhere else, for example, in an electronic environment or a pure spiritual environment (like in someone else’s super-mind), and the impulses it receives would be the same, there would be no way for the mind to tell where it actually is.
Either way, the mind has to decide about reality. It does that by interpreting experiences and making assumptions about their nature. So, if a mistake is made, it is made by the mind.
To solve the problem of lack of direct knowledge, western philosophers and philosophers of science introduced the idea of „justified true belief“. We don’t know, but it is justified that we believe so. Of course, if something is a belief, it is a construction. On the other hand, Shankara contends that vidya (knowledge, real knowledge) is construction-free and not construction-filled.
How to gain such knowledge?
We are now approaching the basic methodology of viveka, which we’ll discuss in the next chapter, “Archimedean point”.
Questions for thinking
- What is your understanding of the idea that the independent existence of the outer, material world is just an assumption?
- What do you think: is it possible that what we call our reality is just a construction of the mind?
- Do you understand that the mistake about reality is not in EXPERIENCE but in the mind who interprets that experience?
- Given that you understand the answer to question no. 3, do you understand that any new or different experience WILL NOT change the interpretations of the mind and that the mistake can only be resolved IN THE MIND?
It is your turn now. Write your thoughts, comments, or questions.
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