Johan: I have written my take on this issue below in the form of question and answer and would appreciate your comments.
It seems as though intelligence is a primary feature of a world appearing in many ways (from the level of subatomic physics to that of animal biology) as a creation of a superhuman intellect. There are qualms and counter-evidence—even leaving aside the issue of whether such a deity shows any special concern for human welfare or any attributes that could be meaningfully described as “good”— but the balance seems to be in favour of a designer of some sort of whom we can only conceive as a personality analogous to a human being, but possessing infinite, or very great power and intelligence. Thus a nondual philosophy such as Advaita Vedanta, which posits nirguna brahman (i.e. God without attributes, sometimes taken to mean an “impersonal” God) as the supreme reality makes an inferior principle the cause of a superior, which is absurd—an atheistic miracle of loaves and fishes.
Sundari: Words are very tricky things, and in Vedanta, we are very careful about their usage. You use the term ‘superior reality’ which we do not use referring the Self because superior implies inferior. Reality is non-dual, so the Self, Consciousness, is neither. It is simply all there is, the ground of being, that which makes ‘reality’ possible. But we must use words to teach, and all words have implied meanings. How to describe the ineffable? The answer to this question depends on what you think God is and who you think you are. The word God refers to the nondual Self as there is no other option. But to understand how the function of a creator relates to nondual Consciousness and the individual must be unfolded in stages. This is outlined in the satsang I sent on what God is yesterday.
Johan: If we ask, “what is a person’’ we can agree that the world displays features that could not have arisen by chance or mechanism. Consciousness, teleology, complex order all require a designing and supporting intelligence. But it is a leap from here to the position that the supreme reality must be personal, on the analogy of the human personality, for if we analyse our own personalities, we find it impossible to account for our own intelligent, creative or supposedly free acts. Upon analysis, it always seems as if there is another acting through us without our knowledge. The answer to a mathematical problem simply appears in the mind—if not all at once, then one step at a time; a memory is retrieved when needed, inspiration strikes, and an artwork is produced, perhaps according to a picture in the mind that appears in dream or daydream. And when it is time to act, to navigate a complex situation or make a morally hazardous choice, we can find no free agent whose action can be intelligibly conceived as uncaused yet non-random.
God may be posited to supply the ostensible lack of agency in the human person—but now the problem is that we have no idea what we are talking about: the deficiencies, the black boxes that conceal the workings of the human mind from itself are constitutive: they are precisely what it means to be a conscious being, possessed of intelligence. If we did not simply act from given motives, we would find ourselves paralyzed by the practical equivalent of the is-ought problem in philosophical ethics: like Hamlet, endlessly ratiocinating without ever arriving at a sufficient motive for action which thought alone can never provide. To attribute to God a personality that (so to speak) lacked this deficiency is to use words without meaning.
Sundari: Yes, hence the importance of karma yoga. The individual does have a limited kind of free will, or agency, in that it can seemingly make choices. If that were not the case, no success in life would be possible. But if we investigate how we make choices, we come to the inevitable conclusion that all choices are predicated on pre-existing programmes or vasanas. Even science agrees with this view. (I have attached a satsang on free will for you to read as it relates to the bigger issue of who or what God is). The individual or jiva is not ‘possessed of intelligence’. The jiva is inert, it is an object known to you, the Self. The jiva is intelligent because the light of Consciousness shines on the mind.
Johan: But this prepares the ground for a counter-objection: Having admitted that there must be some sort of divine intelligence, personal or not, to act as the fountainhead of creation, all the traditional arguments for God’s existence are admitted. There must be a first cause, an unmoved mover, a grand designer, and even a self-caused cause—a free, creative being by definition. And if we affirm that the limited, human self is not the real doer of its deeds, then presumably we imply that something or someone else is.
Sundari: Creation has two orders or ontological categories: the cause and the effect. Isvara One is Pure Consciousness, free of Maya, also called Paramatma. When and where Maya is operating, Isvara One appears as Isvara in the role of Creator, the subject or cause creating the world of objects, i.e., the effects. The effects change and modify each other, but the effects do not modify the cause. The gross cannot change the subtle but the subtle changes the gross (these are apparent modifications of course). If jiva is an effect of Isvara then it cannot have an effect on Isvara. Jiva depends upon Isvara, but Isvara does not depend upon jiva. Therefore, they are never co-creators.
As the Self is free and uncaused, it cannot cause anything. There is no first or second cause, though the cause and effect teaching in Vedanta seems to suggest there is. If Consciousness was the cause of the creation or the cause of the creator by whatever name, it would have to be a doer to cause. And if it were a doer, then the Self would not be free and would be stuck in duality. Consciousness is limitless and formless, and thus, so is Isvara=Consciousness wielding Maya in the role of creator. If Consciousness/Isvara ‘became’ matter, i.e., if duality and nonduality ever ‘merged’, Isvara would have to cease being Consciousness to become something else. It would have become limited, bound by time and space. There would be no sentient objects and no movement possible in the creation.
But, luckily for us, Consciousness appearing as Isvara/God is the uncaused cause of creation; it is both the intelligence behind the substance and the substance itself. Although the creation arises from Pure Consciousness because that is the only option in a nondual reality, Isvara cannot become the creation. Therefore, the effects (matter) are just an apparent transformation of the cause, Consciousness. It is not an actual transformation because if it were, Consciousness would have lost its limitless nature when it transformed into matter, as mentioned.
Thus, Isvara and jiva are in different orders of the same reality, satya (that which is always present and unchanging) and mithya (that which is not always present and always changing). In other words, whatever happens in Maya does not affect the cause of Maya, i.e., Isvara. For instance, if you have a thought or a feeling about an object, say you look at a person and project a like or dislike onto them. Does this change them? No, it does not, no matter how much you may want it to. The object you are projecting onto may try to modify to your likes and dislikes, but this never works in the long run because everyone is true to their own nature–Isvara. Another example is, say you look at a tree and think how ugly that tree is, it should be gone. Does the tree disappear? Not unless you are hallucinating, or take a chain saw and hack it down.
Thus, although it seems as if Consciousness has ‘become the world’, it has not. Owing to the agency of Maya, it appears AS the world. The world is not real and it’s not unreal; it is apparently real. This means we can experience it, but upon investigation into its true nature, the world (form) disappears. It is negatable, whereas Consciousness, being that which is always present and unchangeable, can never be negated. It is the only constant.
The jiva/ego thinks it is a doer with agency, owns things and experiences, not realizing that everything comes from and belongs to Isvara or God. But Isvara is not ‘in the forms’ either because Isvara never takes a form, though it creates all forms. Isvara’s only function is to provide the jiva with a field of objects within which to work out its karma. That’s it. Isvara’s creation runs on natural laws and so everything in the Field is in balance and in check for this sole purpose. The apparent person under the spell of ignorance takes duality to be real because it has no way of discriminating between what is real and apparently real. Even someone with considerable knowledge can be deluded by Maya and be seduced by the seeming reality of objects. Ignorance is tenacious and insidious.
Isvara is the Self and thus unchanging, but it is Maya that makes the changeless appear to change. As stated above but bears repeating, if Isvara did change, there would be no way out of duality. Isvara is both the creator free of form and the effect in apparent form (the milk and cheese, clay and the pot, or gold and the ring) because Isvara/God actually refers to pure Consciousness, which has no form but from which all apparent forms apparently emerge.
This discussion on cause and effect hinges on whether or not the apparent reality (and Isvara as creator) actually exists. It seems to exist because you as jiva can experience it, and it is clear that the Field is intelligently designed and run, as you point out. So, there must be an intelligent ‘creator’ behind the creation. But if the jiva (mithya/duality) is just a superimposition onto nonduality, the apparent reality is as good as non-existent because you can negate it with Self-knowledge. However, as the essence of the jiva is Consciousness, it is the Self, which is Existence itself. Therefore, the reason why satya and mithya never meet is that they are never apart. There is no other option in a nondual reality.
The creation teaching is confusing and extremely subtle, but it is a means to an end. Its main purpose (as all other prakriyas adopted by the Upanishads) is not to make you believe in causation or the creation. It is to reveal the truth of the Self being attribute-free, limitless, part-less, beginningless, and endless Consciousness. And, that the creation is neither real nor unreal. The creation has a dependent reality on you, Consciousness. The aim of the creation teaching is to eliminate all the variable non-essential factors (vyatireka) which leave the one invariable essential factor (anvaya) – the Self, Consciousness.
Therefore, since the Self never changes, the cause and effect proof is meant to unfold the fact that not only is the Self limitless, you are non-separate from it. The proof works because it is a result of knowledge, only. Nobody can deny that they are conscious. The only question is what does that mean? Experience is a secondary factor because Consciousness is the only factor that can never be negated, no matter how materialistic the investigation is.
Once you have understood the cause and effect teaching, the next stage of self-inquiry goes further, to the non-origination theory. Vedanta says that the cause and effect prakriya is a set-up and not the whole truth because the non-origination teaching (Mandukya Karika) states that there is no creation, to begin with. How can they be?
It answers the logical question: How can Sat, Consciousness, be the basis of the material creation if it is non-dual Consciousness? The material creation is not material. It is a projection caused by Maya, which is not the same OR not different from Sat, Existence/Consciousness. You can’t get something out of something that is incapable of modification. Sat is not the cause of anything. How could it be? If it was, it would not be non-dual.
The Mandukya also points out that the Self implies not-Self. When you know you are the Self, there is no satya and mithya or Isvara – Jiva, for you, anymore. Sathya and mithya, Isvara/jiva are just concepts/principles used to teach you that you are the Self and can be discarded. They are teachings designed to destroy the notion of doership. Mithya, the jiva, ‘becomes’ satya because it was satya all along, as stated above. You see everything as just ISNESS, a direct experience of Existence as your identity, the Self. While the jiva still apparently experiences differences, they are known to be only apparent, not real, differences. Duality remains or seems to, but you never identify with it again.
Johan: In Advaita Vedanta the jiva is said to be unfree in relation to Ishvara, who is Himself an illusory reflection of an impersonal Brahman manifesting the world and its creator out of its own essence. Brahman once manifested is only seen through the uphadi of Maya, which is itself the uncaused attribute of Brahman.
Sundari: See above. Isvara is not a ‘He’ nor a ‘Brahman’. The Isvara and Jiva ‘roles’ are impermanent with reference to the Self, but the essence of both Isvara and Jiva is permanent because they are the Self, Pure Consciousness. As pointed out above, there is essentially no difference between the roles of Jiva and Isvara except in their capacity to create. Isvara creates the objective world and Jiva creates its subjective world, its world of thoughts and feelings—which also come from Isvara, the gunas. Isvara creates all objects, subtle and gross and the jiva only knows the objects it has contact with. It cannot create a flower, the sun, the moon, and the stars. Isvara is conscious because it is the Self plus Maya, the creator of jiva. Repeat: the jiva appears to be conscious because Consciousness shines on the Subtle body, which is why Vedanta says Isvara and Jiva are ‘essentially’ the same.
Isvara is not a person with likes and dislikes like the Jiva. And neither Isvara’s creation nor jiva’s creation hides Consciousness. It is always present prior to the creation and prior to the birth of individuals. You can’t have a macrocosmic creation without Consciousness. There must have been something from which the creation ‘banged’ from. Also stated above, Isvara is not an effect, but it is a cause with reference to the creation. There is only one Consciousness out of which everything arises and depends upon, but Consciousness is always free of the objects. Vedanta is the path of the unborn because it reveals that although there appears to be a creation, nothing ever really happened, from Awareness’ point of view, as pointed out in the Mandukya Karika.
I have not included the four paradoxes you added in your discourse at this point as they are technical and pretty academic. There are six main schools of Hindu philosophy from which these arguments arise, and I have no interest in untangling them. There is no benefit to doing so for you or anyone else reading this satsang. I think you do not understand that Vedanta is not a school of philosophy. It is the logic of Existence, the science of Consciousness. This science called Vedanta sets us free of whatever doubts we may have about the nature of the material world, the nature of the human mind, and the God factor.
Most inquirers who come to Vedanta have a ton of indoctrination from other teachings to work through. It’s not that there is anything wrong with other teachings, but most other teachings are unclear about what the Self is, nor are they able to explain the apparent reality, other than through their own experiences or beliefs. There is no other teaching available that has a completely independent and valid means of knowledge capable of revealing the Self and what the world is by removing duality, ignorance. Some of them, like Buddhism, Neo-Advaita, other schools of philosophy, even some religions, have aspects of non-duality, but they do not have a means of knowledge. A philosophy is not a means of knowledge. It is a subjective system of thought, subject to error and usually, ignorance is woven fine with knowledge. At best, these other systems of thought are what we call ‘leading errors’ in that they lead you to Vedanta.
I must say I have to wonder what your main motivation is in studying Vedanta. Is your interest purely academic and intellectual? You write very well, and forgive me if I am mistaken, but it sounds to me that the article you sent me is designed to impress with your knowledge. Or are you genuinely interested in moksa? If so, you have come to the right place. But to help you, you need to sign on to the program. Without meaning to offend, we do not really have any interest in debating what other teachings ‘posit’ or ‘ratiocinate’. Vedanta requires faith in the teachings as a non-negotiable qualification. If what you are after is a degree in Vedanta by proving what a great scholar you are, you have missed the point. Vedanta is purely about you, the Self. It is a means to an end, a throw-away.
I cover basically all the topics you raise in the satsang on what God is. As I mentioned to you before, there are only apparent paradoxes in Vedanta which all dissolve upon investigation. All the same, the main thrust of your question, regarding who or what God is in relation to the person and to Consciousness is a good one.
Love
Sundari
