Questions

[Frank Maiello]

Parisi & Watson wrote:

> [...]
>
> ............................................................... So the
> basic impulse
> behind Advaita has been aired in the West (obviously much later than in
> India), but without drawing the same conclusions. Why? Because the same
> premises can support multiple conclusions.

The goal of any spiritual philosophy is experiential, notintellectual.
Although intellect is an inescapable avenue for
getting there, what transpires within it is quite arbitrary,
and only as valuable as it is capable of affecting "experience."
In the case of nondual philosophy (reaching its distillation
in advaita, IMO), the experience enters the core of the primal
Life-essence we refer to as satchidananda (the pure bliss
realized to be existing in unalloyed consciousness).

Within the textual tradition of vedanta is found an ordering of
approaches re the apprehension of reality, from three levels:
srishthi-drishthi vada, drishthi-srishthi vada, and ajativada.
The first approach holds that mind is a product of world, the
second that world is a product of mind, while the last proclaims
that both and neither of these views are an issue.  This last
approach is an obvious assault on logic, and is considered to be
one of the weapons of brahman, designed to quash the mind of its
relentless desire to contract and differentiate, thus breaking
the boundaries of its resulting egoic pretense.  The successful
application of this weapon diffuses the tyranical manipulation
of the mind, allowing the individual to simply be.

The real thrust of what advaita is saying has nothing to do with
creation theories, origins of karma, free will vs. fate, or any other
philosophy spun by the phenomenal mind, but rather the hypothesis
that we are holograms of the totality of what is, which is contended
as a unified field of noumenal/phenomenal existence--wholistically
incomprehensible...thus the mind cannot be used to get there.

TAT TVAM ASI (thou art That) is the whole of advaita.
(Its Western counterpart: "I and my Father are ONE.")

Namaste.