[Advaita-l] satyam jnanam anantam brahman

[Vidyasankar Sundaresan]

Brahman-Atman is never an object. So unlike the lotus-cactus example you
make, your mind can never really take the form of Brahman. All the mind
has to do, which is at once the most simple answer and the most difficult
to achieve, is to get out of the way and stop superimposing itself upon
Reality.

jnAna that is brahman is never jnAna "of" an object. It just IS. That is
the most that can be said of the matter - yato vAco nivartante aprApya
manasA saha. All your attempts at defining relationships between satya
and jnAna, jnAna and ananta, ananta and Ananda, Ananda and satya, etc.
as well as relationships among these relationships are of no avail. Such
a futile exercise is like trying to put a tilaka on the forehead of your
reflection in a mirror, instead of turning your fingers towards your own
forehead. You will only put the tilaka on the mirror. If you stand still
in front of the mirror, the tilaka may appear to be on your image, but
it will never be on your own forehead. The only way to get it on your
mirror image is to put it on yourself. Therefore, advaita teachers say,
give up the outward definitions and look within.
 
In a way, advaita already does negate nothing while negating everything.
If you don't see this, you have pinned a false label on advaita. Do not 
expect that those who see the truth about it can tell you anything more
than that what you are seeing is only a false label. For us, ultimate
reality is not one of the probabilities, nor even only the substratum of
infinite probabilities; rather, it is the given certainty.
 
Vidyasankar
 

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> Date: Tue, 30 Nov 2010 19:07:31 +0000
> From: rajaramvenk at gmail.com
> To: advaita-l at lists.advaita-vedanta.org
> Subject: [Advaita-l] satyam jnanam anantam brahman
>
> To my question, on what jnanam, the answer is it is Consciousness. So, what
> is this Consciousness? Is it knowledge or the power of knowing? The answer
> is it is the essence of knowledge. Let us push the envelop further and ask
> what is the essence of knowledge? The wise philosophers on this forum will
> quickly see the problem with the attempts to define that which is
> transcendental even with the help of sastras. The problem does not end with
> an attempt to define it as per sastras and bhashyas. The relationship
> between Existence and Knowledge, Knowledge and Infinitude and Existence and
> Infinitude have to be defined in addition to defining the relationship
> between Existence, Knowledge and Infinitude in addition to the relationship
> between the aforsaid relationships and this and so on. Infinite
> relationships in a trans-relational Brahman is interesting. As finite and
> infinite are opposite notions of a spacio-temporal world, why Brahman is
> Infinite and not Finite. In the same breadth, why it is existence and not
> non-existence? In the same (slightly longer) breadth, why is Brahman
> Consciousness and not Unconsciousness (sic)?
>
> If we take that Brahman IS Infinite Knowledge, it resolves the problem but
> then you have to come a non-mayavada conclusion of Advaitam that negates
> nothing while negating everything. Let me give an example. If we think of a
> lotus, the mind takes the form of a lotus. We say Mind is Lotus or in other
> words Lotus is nothing but the Mind. When not thinking, the knowledge of all
> objects from lotus to cactus is in the mind but undifferentiated,
> non-different from the mind. The mind is not the lotus, not the cactus etc.
> is true as much as mind is lotus, cactus etc. is. There is a theory
> that reality is one of the probabilities. The substratum of all these
> probabilities is the ultimate reality. It is not only a negation of all
> realities but summation as well.
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