EVILITY

 

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Wisdom knows two things. Wisdom discerns skillful from unskillful, helpful from unhelpful. It can tell the difference between the various intentions that arise in our own heart and mind, to know how to navigate and steer in life.

Fundamentally, wisdom knows the difference between suffering and its end; stress, what leads to stress, and how stress ends. It’s the beginning, but also the end of the path.

 

— Oren Jay Sofer, SEP

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Instead, the higher order consciousness persists as the underlying, unifying and intelligent ground of all phenomenal states of consciousness. "Reality is consciousness"l and consciousness is "like a thread, that courses through and holds together a collection of pearls"2 but which is never identical with them. 

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Love life more thanthe meaning of it.~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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However, a debate did· develop among later Advaitic thinkers over the question of whether the mind is a sense-organ (indriya) or not, and a brief discussion of this debate is of assistance in coming to understand the Advaitic theory of mind. Sailkara failed to give a decisive answer to this question and instead merely acknowledged that Sruti treats mind as distinct from the senseorgans while the Smrtis (indirect teachings derived or "remembered" from the Vedas) counted the mind as one among the organs of sense.2 But Vacaspati Misra, founder of the Bhamati school, argued that mind must be a sense-organ for two reasons. First, Vacaspati claimed that we have immediate knowledge of internal states and feelings, such as pleasure (sukha), and that perception is the only means of obtaining such knowledge according to Advaitic epistemology. Second, he argued that there would be no means available for the mind to apprehend its own inner states unless mind itself, as an organ of sense, assumed this function

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STAR OF BETHLEHEM X ITALY 

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As sentient beings’ conceptual thoughts increase, [those] thoughts spin [them in Saṃsāra]. Once concepts have left their karmic imprint, [they] become [caught] in the conceptual state.

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Thus, the reflection and limitation metaphors indicate on the one hand that modified consciousness is never different from absolute consciousness, and on the other hand that the ontological distinction or discontinuity between the two collapses in the light of higher knowledge. In support of this point, Sankara says : [j]ust as the knowledge of the rope destroys the serpent which appears on · it through ignorance, even so, the illusory nature of the individual soul, so far as it is erroneously understood to be separate and distinct from the highest God ... vanishes the moment there arises the true knowledge.! 

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 Advaitins have long recognized that there is an ambiguity involved in using the same concepts to refer to two radically distinct levels. Sankara himself says that what we call modified consciousness, conventional experience, or pragmatic truth is ultimately rooted in ignorance, opposed to the full consciousness of Atman and, in this sense, "unconscious."l Nevertheless, the Advaitin maintains that we are justified in calling ignorance relative consciousness, even though it is not absolute consciousness, because modified consciousness is the only kind of intelligence with which we are conventionally familiar and , -' to which our universe of discourse refers. Ultimately, however, absolute consciousness stands beyond the grasp of language. Thus, the act of calling individuality modified consciousness is nothing more than a "courtesy" to ignorance itself. 

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