Real

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 …

Let me begin with the following dialogue between a Swiss-German and a young Balinese (from Bichsel, Peter, Der Leser, Das Erzählen: Frankfurter Poetik-Vorlesungen, 1982, Darmstadt und Neuwied: Hermann Luchterhand Verlag. Pp. 13-14, my translation and italics): When I discovered, or when it was explained to me, that Hinduism is a pedagogical religion, namely, that in so far as the best “good deed” …

I Question: “Certainly that Brahman == self-awareness == Atman is also a matter of direct experience, not of intellectual reasoning?” Let me first begin with reason and then drift towards experience. Suppose, as an expansion of the sentence that ‘Atman is Brahman’, it is said: “Atman and Brahman are identical to each other”. What kind of sense does it make and how do we explain that sense? Let us …

Some Swamiji claims: “One cannot experience the Atman[, the Atman] is the witness, it is what experiences.” Obviously, this is a very rough and approximate formulation. This statement is both wrong and right in different ways. (a) In the very early days, when I began to develop my meditation exercise, I ‘sensed’ the vague presence of an observer (somewhere present in the background of my …

You say that you experienced Shakti as an emanation of a force that is overpowering and palpable; you also say that you felt the ‘presence’ of Shakti strongly. These two sentences make one think that you felt the presence of the force. In that case, there are only two routes open to us: (a) either reject that we have knowledge of the world which forbids linguistic utterances from infusing material …

Consider the fact that the Indian ‘gods’ are portrayed in at least two ways. First, there is their portrayal with four arms (say) and there is their portrayal in completely human forms. Krishna has four arms (with Shankha, Chakra, Gada and Padma or one hand with a blessing palm or downward indicating a mudra of some kind) and he also has a fully human form. The balakrishna’s I have seen give him …

Two points should be kept in mind before using these examples: (a) the examples illustrate that the distinctions are not unknown to an English language-user (b) the distinction does not require denying the knowledge that we have about the world. These merely indicate that the distinction between ‘real’ and ‘existence’ might be worth a serious investigation. A possible set of examples: Not Real but …

Question: I have some problems understanding apara, para, existence, and presence. Apara exists, but is not present; para is present but does not exist. Are you saying that what is present does not exist, what exists is not present? If so, how can you reconcile with our common sense notion that what exists is present? Even though presence doesn’t imply existence, we can’t say that existence imply …

It would be a good thing to narrow-in on the ‘spookiness’ of the accessing ‘Real’. However, because there is a very great danger that ‘access’ can be conceptualised as an access to a ‘supra-mundane’ or a ‘spiritual’ world, or to a world that is not accessible to ‘sciences’ but can be ‘spiritually’ accessed, etc. a few extra words are required. Therefore, an attempt that might reduce one possible …

Let us agree on the proposed division into two categories: “1) That which exists or could exist (2) That which could not and does not exist but is present (therefore ‘Real’)”. Let us also accept that (1) collects: “(a) everything that we know like Earth, stars, mud, (b) everything that we can think of or imagine - models, formulas, triangles, present and future scientific theories, tooth fairies, …

No, I cannot explain the real; nor has anybody else in the world. Even more radically: the Real can never be ‘explained’, nor will there be an explanatory theory, ever (that is what is meant by ‘providing an explanation’ or speak of explaining) about the real. Well, if the ‘Real’ comprises of “all these doctrines” then the Real is the world of ideas as distinct from the material and the mental …

The problem is more complicated and the implications far more massive than either of us can even dream of. In fact, I think we are not even aware of the nature, size and the dimensions of the problem(s) today. We do not even know whether we are dealing with something called the ‘translation’ problem or whole sets of other issues and problems that also redefine what it is to ‘translate’ texts …

With some justifiable distortion, one can claim that the Indian Adhyatmic traditions revolve partially around some ‘philosophical’ questions: what is real and what is existence? Is there a distinction between the two and, if yes, how to draw that line? This is a distortion because the debate never took this form; it is justifiable nonetheless to present it this way because it gives us a handle to …

One of the questions that has come up in this discussion is the following: are we logically forced to assume the ’existence’ of, say, Rama or Krishna, when we ‘believe’ in them? This question has partly been responsible for the discussion about the ‘historicity’ of Ramayana. Here is my answer as I see the situation today. In some sense, we all work with some notions (however vague they might be) …

One of the debates in the Indian traditions is about the kind of creatures that exist in the world and about the reality of what exists. The Jains, for instance, disagreed that the “deva’s” of other traditions (with the properties they were supposed to possess) existed in this world or were real. (Their so-called ‘atheism’ is a result of this debate.) Consequently, when they call Valmiki Ramayana …