In the last post I introduced my philosophy about conditional reality and absolute reality. In this post I will explain why there is a conditional reality at all and how it arises out of pure intentionality.
Arthur Schopenhauer is famous for his philosophy that the world is a representation of our will. Schopenhauer was inspired by Kant's platonic categorization of the world into the broad categories of phenomenon and noumenon. The phenomenon is the reality that appears to us after it is processed by the mind's logical categories, or the things themselves, and the noumenon is the things before they are processed, or the things in themselves. Unfortunately, because we apprehend the things after they are represented to us by our mind, we can never see things in themselves and thus Kant says we can't ever know the noumenon. I explained in my first post how I depart from Kant's philosophy of the unknowability of the noumenon and turn towards Indian philosophy to explain the noumenon as the a priori universal mind. Schopenhauer too turns towards Indian philosophy to explain Kant's noumenon.
According to Schopenhauer Kant's noumenon is desire itself. The representations of the phenomenal that the mind processes are only at the levels of thoughts, but what precedes the level of thought is the level of feeling or desire. This would later be developed by the psychologist Brentano and later the founder of Western phenomenology Husserl as the philosophy of intentionality. When we think of something, it is always about something, this aboutness is always a priori. Every thought that we have is formed of intentional or mental acts which are a priori, and is they which give rise to thoughts. If you think about an "apple" this thought is not completely random, but there are underlying intentional acts which have caused that thought. Thus intentions or desires is what gives to the world at all and thus are the things themselves. However, as the world is fashioned out of desires, it means that if we fulfill our desires, it leads to a state of nihilism, an emptiness which we must then fill by desiring more. So as long as there is desire, there is world, and as long as there is a world there is desire and thus we can never fulfill our desires and be in the world at the same time. Schopenhauer then draws a very gnostic like conclusion that the world is the cause of all evil and suffering, and offers a Buddhist solution to the problem: transcendence of desire. The only way to end suffering is to transcend your desire by not fulfilling them, negating them and even suppressing them.
Schopenhauer skirts very close to the Indian Philosophy of reincarnation. According to which the only reason that we reincarnate in the world is because of the presence of desire and it is desire that is the cause of our suffering and keeps us locked in the cycle of birth and rebirth(Samsara) The only way to end this cycle is to transcend desire. I would like the reader to note that reincarnation is a more complex philosophy than is commonly understood. The act of reincarnation is not the coming of a soul from one world into another world, but rather in Indian philosophy the world is one and is multidimensional and ultimately is occurring within a cosmic or universal mind which has various levels of holographic extension. The lowest level of extension is the physical plane of 3D, known as Bhurloka(Earth plane). The universal mind, in turn is being interacted with by infinite individual minds, which are none other than according to Vedic cosmology the diffraction and localization of the universal mind. In the same way as in physics waves are diffracted into particles through a diffraction grating. These individual minds are interacting and participating within the greater universal mind's holographic universe(It maybe worth taking a look at Talbot's "Holographic universe" theory)
As per the laws of karma, when there is an intention or desire latent within the individual mind of the soul, it causes a projection of that individual mind into the 3D physical plane for the desires of that individual mind to manifest. These are not the same desires as we are consciously aware of, but rather they are unconscious desires emanating from the subconscious of the individual mind. In this sense this is very similar to Psychoanalytic theory which states all desires as manifest are actually the opposite of the real subconscious desires. So as long as these desires are present within the individual mind, so long will it continue to reincarnate into the physical.
Does this mean the actual physical world is just a manifestation of the desires of the individual mind? No, because that would that be crude idealism. The Indian Vedic cosmology instead purports that the physical world is a manifestation of the intentions latent within the universal mind. This can be first found in the oldest Vedic writing the Rig Veda in the Nasadiya Sukta or the hymn of creation. The relevant verses here are:
In the beginning desire(also sometimes translated as love) arose, which was the primal cell of the mind. The seers searching their heart with wisdom found the link between being and non being.
This could mean that the universal mind too can desire and its desires lead to the creation of the worlds. However, in Samkhya philosophy, which has been traditionally regarded as atheistic despite belonging to Hinduism, the notion of a perfect being that desires is contradictory. How could this being be perfect, if it desires? Is it not itself then caught up in a perpetual cycle of birth and rebirth. So Samkhya rejects a creator god. There are various answers for the Samkhya objection, some of which are:
The Yogic answer: There is a universal mind known as Ishvara which controls everything and manifest all desires, but it is different from pure being itself. In other words there is an ontic god and there is an ontological god. There is only an apparent duality here, because even in this cosmology the ontic god comes into creation and thus is secondary to pure being itself.
The Vedanta answer: There is none other than pure being(ontological god) and any apparent creation is actually a no-creation. It is an illusion that is projected from pure being, but does not actually exist. The pure being is called sat(existent) and the world is called asat(non-existent)
In my philosophy I reconcile both Vedanta and Yoga. Pure being simply "IS" and thus it is existent, and because it is, there is an isn't, but which is insofar as a holographic projection of the "IS" The world is therefore like a dream of the pure being. Thus everything in this world from god to souls or individual minds do not really exist from the perspective of the absolute reality and never came into being, but insofar as they exist as conditional reality or a dream of absolute reality, they exist for themselves. I caution the reader not to take this as solipsism or as idealism, instead the holographic extensions of the universe can be seen as multiple dimensions of being and thus each are real from their own perspective. This is critical realism. Just as the dream indicates the dreamer, likewise the world in its multi facets indicates pure being. This pure being will remain a mystery for the individual mind. The Nasadiya Sukta itself boldly declares this:
That out of which this creation has arisen
He who has fashioned it, or whether he did not
He who surveys it in the highest heaven
surely must know, or maybe, he knows not.
In the last part of this post I will look at the causation of the world from intention with reference to the Vedic text, the Chandogya Upanishad, and a transcendental inquiry presented with it. For the reader who does not know what a transcendental inquiry it is a query where one regresses from the given to the primordial. An example of a transcendental inquiry is Kant's analysis of how knowledge is possible by regressing from the world of phenomena to the logical categories which construct it. But his query only goes as far as the level of logical categories, and thus not very far at all. In the query presented in the Chandogya Upanishad thousands of years earlier not only does it anticipate Kant, but goes several steps ahead of Kant to unify the phenomenon with the noumenon, which Kant failed to do even thousands of years later. This is a very long query and I have a lot of commentary, so I do not want to bog down my readers with pages of text, so I will discuss the query in the next posting. I have already composed this post in the past, so it will only be a matter of copy and pasting with a few edits here and there.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment