[Advaita-l] On the nature of muula avidya

[Venkatesh Murthy]

Namaste

On Tue, Oct 25, 2011 at 4:41 PM, kuntimaddi sadananda
<kuntimaddisada at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Nature of Muula Avidya

> In addition ignorance cannot be proved by any known means of knowledge, pramANa.  In fact, it gets negated if you bring a pramANa, or an operation of an instrument of knowledge. Yet, it appears to exist until it is removed by knowledge. This is true for all types of ignorance, fundamental (related to oneself) or related to ignorance of any objective science, say physics. Ignorance is generally equated to darkness and knowledge as light that removes that darkness. Referring to darkness as an example, how can we prove the existence of darkness. When we say it is dark, how do we know it is dark? General answer is – I can see with my eyes that it is pitch dark that I cannot see anything. However, epistemologically, eyes are the means of knowledge only when we light up the objects by external light. Hence I can see any object only when the physical light illumines the object that I see. Without that light I cannot see any object in a pitch-dark room.
>  However I still say it is too dark when there is no light (normal means of knowledge or pramANa). If I turn on the means of knowledge for the eyes to see (that is turn on the physical light so that eye can see the objects), the darkness that I am seeing itself disappears. Hence is the statement above that ignorance or darkness gets negated when we operate the pramANa to know it. Here eyes do not perceive darkness since there is no light and if there is light there is no darkness for the light to illumine that darkness. Hence darkness is neither real, since it gets negated by turning the light on, and it is also not unreal, since one can experience the presence of pitch-darkness.

Before light is switched on in the room you can see darkness only.
There is no object there but only you. Can you say you experience
Advaita condition in the darkness because only you are there. Nothing.
When Light is switched on you can see objects. There is Dvaita there
because you can see many objects.

Can you conclude in darkness there is Advaita but in Light there is
Dvaita? If so Dvaita is better because it is better to be in Light not
darkness.   To prove it is wrong you should argue there is Dvaita in
Darkness and Advaita in Light. How?

-- 
Regards

-Venkatesh