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markael
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Where Does Ignorance Come From? - Sherrard's Dilemma
#21765347 - 06/05/15 10:30 AM (8 years, 7 months ago) |
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Hey everyone. Recently read a paper by Phillip Sherrard titled The Tradition and the Traditions: The Confrontation of Religious Doctrines and in it he posed what he calls the "horns of an irreducible dilemma" regarding Vedantic metaphysics. Without getting into the whole scope of the paper, I want to know what if he asserts is correct.
So to get into it: Sherrard questions how the jivatman, who hasn't yet recognized that the flux of the world and the Absolute are the same thing, comes about. How does he not realize that he is the Absolute in a sense? Where does this ignorance come from if the Absolute cannot err? He states that Vedantic metaphysic, which starts from the logically deduced point of the non-being and non-duality (of God) decomposes into two different notions to answer this question. First, 1) The notion of illusory transformation (vivarta-vada) and second 2) the notion of real transformation (parinamavada).
1) According to Sherrard, option one allows the Absolute to preserve its simplicity, purity, etc. but leaves the fact of error - real or fictitious - unaccounted for. He then states that the Absolute cannot err. So from what cause then does this ignorance come from?
2) Regarding option two, he states that this then does account for the fact of ignorance, but in this case the purity, non-particularity and immutability of the Absolute are sacrificed.
To sum up, "It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that according to Vedanta, there can be no understanding of the relationship between the absolute and the manifestation that does not result in either an 'acosmism' reducing the world and particular beings to the unaccountable appearance of maya and the ignorance that goes with it, or the disruption of the absolute simplicity, immutability and transcendence of the divine essence."
For those of you who are a bit more versed in Eastern philosophy, do you have any adequate answers for this? Whence proceeds this ignorance that stops us from realizing our unity with the Absolute? Hope I made clear what I'm asking. Sherrard is much more lucid in his writings than I am.
PS: For a little context, I'm pretty sure Sherrard is writing from within the Eastern Orthodox Christian Tradition, and his main contention in this essay is that one needs to stay within the bounds of the Tradition in which he was raised in order to make the most sense of the world. Although he does encourage reading other religion's spiritual works to supplement one's understanding.
It's an interesting paper though and you can read it for free here: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20005204?&seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents You just have to sign up for the beta version of the website if you haven't already. Might help you understand more what he's saying since it won't let me copy and paste him here lol.
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PocketLady



Registered: 01/18/10
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Re: Where Does Ignorance Come From? - Sherrard's Dilemma [Re: markael]
#21765525 - 06/05/15 11:31 AM (8 years, 7 months ago) |
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Interesting question. Have you ever studied any Gnostic teachings?
In particular the Gnostic creation story is quite interesting and might shed some light on your enquiry. The main story can be found in the Apocryphon of John. There are a few translations, but this is a pretty good one.
http://www.gnosis.org/naghamm/apocjn-davies.html
If you don't want to read the whole thing, a friend of mind wrote a pretty good article a couple of weeks ago which sums it up quite nicely.
https://khepferharu.wordpress.com/2015/05/26/a-paraphrasing-of-the-gnostic-tractates-of-creation/
-------------------- Love is from the infinite, and will remain until eternity. The seeker of love escapes the chains of birth and death. Tomorrow, when resurrection comes, The heart that is not in love will fail the test. ~ Rumi The day we start giving Love instead of seeking Love, we will have re-written our whole destiny. ~ Swami Chinmayanada Saraswatir
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Deviate
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Re: Where Does Ignorance Come From? - Sherrard's Dilemma [Re: markael]
#21766075 - 06/05/15 02:08 PM (8 years, 7 months ago) |
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Quote:
markael said: Hey everyone. Recently read a paper by Phillip Sherrard titled The Tradition and the Traditions: The Confrontation of Religious Doctrines and in it he posed what he calls the "horns of an irreducible dilemma" regarding Vedantic metaphysics. Without getting into the whole scope of the paper, I want to know what if he asserts is correct.
So to get into it: Sherrard questions how the jivatman, who hasn't yet recognized that the flux of the world and the Absolute are the same thing, comes about. How does he not realize that he is the Absolute in a sense? Where does this ignorance come from if the Absolute cannot err? He states that Vedantic metaphysic, which starts from the logically deduced point of the non-being and non-duality (of God) decomposes into two different notions to answer this question. First, 1) The notion of illusory transformation (vivarta-vada) and second 2) the notion of real transformation (parinamavada).
1) According to Sherrard, option one allows the Absolute to preserve its simplicity, purity, etc. but leaves the fact of error - real or fictitious - unaccounted for. He then states that the Absolute cannot err. So from what cause then does this ignorance come from?
2) Regarding option two, he states that this then does account for the fact of ignorance, but in this case the purity, non-particularity and immutability of the Absolute are sacrificed.
To sum up, "It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that according to Vedanta, there can be no understanding of the relationship between the absolute and the manifestation that does not result in either an 'acosmism' reducing the world and particular beings to the unaccountable appearance of maya and the ignorance that goes with it, or the disruption of the absolute simplicity, immutability and transcendence of the divine essence."
For those of you who are a bit more versed in Eastern philosophy, do you have any adequate answers for this? Whence proceeds this ignorance that stops us from realizing our unity with the Absolute? Hope I made clear what I'm asking. Sherrard is much more lucid in his writings than I am.
PS: For a little context, I'm pretty sure Sherrard is writing from within the Eastern Orthodox Christian Tradition, and his main contention in this essay is that one needs to stay within the bounds of the Tradition in which he was raised in order to make the most sense of the world. Although he does encourage reading other religion's spiritual works to supplement one's understanding.
It's an interesting paper though and you can read it for free here: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20005204?&seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents You just have to sign up for the beta version of the website if you haven't already. Might help you understand more what he's saying since it won't let me copy and paste him here lol.
I don't have an adequate answer, because as far as I know he has identified a genuine problem/shortcoming of vendantic philosophy.
The only reason I feel qualified to have an opinion on this is because I have studied the teachings of Jan Esmann who also identified the same problem.
You may want to read his critique of advaita, I'm sure it will help shed some more light on this topic. Jan also does not come from a Christian background, so his qualms with vendantic philosophy are having nothing to do with desiring to promote a Christian framework. Here is a link to his critique: http://lovebliss.eu/advaita-vedanta.html. He also talks more about this topic in his books and in his commentary on other scriptures. He ends deciding that kashmir shaivism is a superior system of understanding.
I also was confused by vendanta, although at the time I assumed it was my fault rather than any problem with vendantic philosophy. WHen I studied the Bible and Christianity for me, many lights went on in my head, because I felt as though it did a much better job at explaining the relationship between the individual soul and God and how the individual soul came to be spiritually ignorant. I consider this to be true of both Orthodox and gnostic Christianity (though I don't know nearly as much about the latter and cannot comment on the different schools).
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MarkostheGnostic
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Re: Where Does Ignorance Come From? - Sherrard's Dilemma [Re: markael]
#21766392 - 06/05/15 03:38 PM (8 years, 7 months ago) |
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There s a cosmic dualism in Vedantic teachings - Purusha and Prakriti. This metaphysical dualism is also found in the juxtaposition of Shiva and Shakti, respectively. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purusha http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prakrti
One of the major metaphysical conundrums is to phenomenologically [bracket] the assumption that God is impassive. Among Christian theologians one finds Process Theology (Hartshorne, Griffin & Cobb, in response to Alfred North Whitehead's process thought) where, just as in Samkhya, and the Bhagavad Gita, God is both spiritual and material. Materiality is created from the non-substantiality of God, and is absorbed again in what physics calls an Oscillating Universe model. The materiality of God has extension from Zero-dimension (Singularity) in at least 3 spatial and one temporal dimension, and it is in this aspect of God is there ignorance, imperfection, error, and evil.
The Christian metaphor about God being Light also suggests that when there is creation, God's proverbial light casts a Shadow. By way of parallel, this is how the human psyche works also. Good decent people still have an unconscious into which we repress and suppress all that we do not consider to be good. Jung called it the Shadow. These metaphysical imperfections of which you inquire are the necessary corollary to creation which, dualistically, separates Creator from creation. It is as though God projects his/her Shadow into creation like we humans project our rejected material into the unconscious. Of the 60 some odd books I've read on Kabbalah, only in one does the author suggest that the Bereshith: "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light," be interpreted as God voiding Him-Herself! That is to say, the creation was God taking a Divine Dump! The author, William G. Gray in his book Qabalistic Concepts, Chapter 20 'Esoteric Excretion,' was completely serious about this concept, not joking at all, and it is saying the same thing I am when I suggest that God has projected good and evil into the creation. At any rate, in the West, the question about how a benevolent deity can allow (or create!) evil is called theodicy.
If you think about it, feces embodies death and decay, which is what characterizes the demise of biological life. We pass dead matter from ourselves when we 'void' and the only life that goes with it are the millions of E. coli and other bacteria. The E. coli is necessary for us in the intestines, but elsewhere in the body can kill us. It is both good and evil, depending. Sometimes I think that humanity is like a teeming colony of organisms consuming all the life on this planet like bacteria or viruses attacking a healthy cell. Bacteria adapt to conditions of temperature, moisture, antibiotics, etc. and so does humanity, to a point. If we continue to poison and strip our host planet of its air, water, minerals, and even oil (which some Gaia-believers say is a 'lubricant' or a 'lymph' that the Earth's crust needs), this human colony will perish. We do not have the capability to migrate en masse to another viable world. In Kabbalism, God dwells even in the material world, The Kingdom (Malkuth), perhaps like my own DNA gets voided in my shit. I suppose the metaphor could be developed further.
"I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things." - Isaiah 45:7
-------------------- γνῶθι σαὐτόν - Gnothi Seauton - Know Thyself
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