Ignorance

I I face some difficulties in giving a ‘yes’ or ’no’ answer to your question because I am not sure how to understand ‘Samsara’, ‘Jnana’ and its Sanskrit negation ‘Ajnana’, and ‘moksha’. It is equally unclear whether there are differences of import between being ’the root’ and being ’the cause’, as far as the relation between ‘Ajnana’ and ‘Samsara’ are concerned. ‘Maaya’ is another notion used in …

Two caveats. One: the commentary is very, very short. To write down all the things I want to say about this citation requires a long paper and not a brief mail. Two: I have not checked either the citation or the reference (Brihadaranyaka upanishad - I.iv.10). I assume that both are accurate. This (Self) was indeed Brahman in the beginning. It knew itself only as “I am Brahman.” Therefore it became …

About the relationship between scientific knowledge and enlightenment: If every human being can become enlightened (at any time, place or culture), it logically follows that some or another hypothesis about the world cannot be a requirement to become enlightened. People were enlightened (in the past) without possessing knowledge that humankind has today; one can become enlightened without being a …

According to your account, Vedanta claims that the world is an illusion and that only the Brahman is real. If the world is an illusion, Vedanta has to deny the reality of the world. To it, in the way you construe Vedanta, the world is the empty set. That is to say, all experiences are on par because they are all illusions. One cannot distinguish between experiences unless one introduces the notion …

A few points about ‘self’ and about what I have said and have not. Comment: “Say, Mr. X made 1 run, 2 runs, 3, 4, n, and a total of 50 runs. Now to say “I made 50 runs” is to assume that, Mr. X who made 1 run, 2 run, etc. is linked to each other, and this organism , in this sense, has a unity. This unity is what Balu calls rubbish”. First, I do not call this ‘unity’ rubbish. Second, this is a …

Is bhakti what the bhaktas do, or are people bhaktas because they ‘follow’ (bad choice of words, but there is no other way to put it) the ‘bhakti marga’, or is bhakti neither of the two? I mean: is the bhakta moved because, for example, the child who stole the butter happens to be the Kannan, or because the child, who also happens to be the Lord, stole the butter? If it is the first, it is …

If we take our English language use as a reference point, it appears as though we can speak sensibly about experiencing our feelings (‘I experience sadness’), experiencing thoughts (‘I can even now experience my jumbled thoughts when …’), experiencing colour (‘I experience a redness’), experiencing actions (‘I still experience my shaking limbs when I…’) and so on. That is, we can experience the …

Is enlightenment learnable? (In a less loaded formulation: Can all people be happy?) My answer is an unequivocal ‘yes’. Before we go further, we need to be clear what exactly this sentence says: enlightenment is not, say, the result of some genes (that explains why we get molars and not tusks, for instance), nor is it a law of nature (that explains why, say, water boils when heated and does not …

When we speak about ignorance, we can do so in two ways. One is by talking about ‘how the world is’; the other is by talking about ‘how we think the world is’. Even though we could use both ways to characterize ‘ignorance’, they are not coextensive (or synonyms) because (a) they are about different things – in the first case it is about the world; in the second case it is about what we take to …