/lit/ - Literature

>>16992621
>Is your hand doing the observing? Is your nose? No? Then what is the "you" doing the observing?
Sentience is that you that does the observing

>The simple truth is that there is no observer, and no observee.
This is quite foolish, if this was the case, there would be no way to distinguish between your own experience and the experience of others. Experience has to be directly revealed or manifested to us in order for it to be experienced as such. Take for example the identical hearing of a siren by two conscious individuals, if there is just the hearing then there is no way to distinguish between the subjective or lived experience of that hearing between one of the persons from the other if there is no experiencer to whom the experience of hearing was manifested.
>There's just observing. To say otherwise would have observers that observe nothing,
What is samadhi but someone establishing themselves and remaining for a while in the state of the observer/awareness which is isolated from all contents of awareness?
>and observees that are not observed by anything.
Why would the observer be observed by another? There is no logical necessity for it.

>>16992684
>But those observings can be broken apart.
But the sentience which observes the minds activities cannot break itself down apart, because breaking down and identifying are processes of the mind involving discursive thought and the minds rational faculty; these take place by the light of sentience, and only ever are directed towards insentient things. The mind can use its intellect to project or create an imagined mental image of what sentience is, and sentience can observe the mind do this. But sentience cannot directly observe itself, as something can never simultaneously be both the subject and object of knowledge, This is like fire burning itself, it's a reflexive relation which Nagarjuna says as a rule are inadmissible.
> The fact that it can go away, or be broken down further, is evidence of a lack of atman. An atman would result in never being able to change what you see, or stop seeing what you presently see
This is not true, because only the contents or objects of the Atman changes, not the Atman itself. The Atman is transparent and allows changing things to appear in or be reflected in its unchanging transparency. So what you say is not true, because you are confusing the objects (i.e. thoughts and sensory perceptions) of sentience for the sentience/Atman itself, and then wrongly concluding "well therefore since the objects of sentience change, therefor sentience itself cannot be unchanging", you are attempting to identify attributes (such as being transitory) about the non-sentience, non-Atman things like thoughts and sense-perception, and then extending that attribute to the Atman which is qualitatively different from that thing, but there is no basis for making this extension, it involves a categorical error by you.

>>16395656
The awareness of the Supreme Self or Brahman is itself not trapped in maya. The thing that is trapped in maya is the Jiva or Jivatma, which refer to illusory association of the sentient Atman with the insentient intellect, body, etc. This Jiva is beginningless and has existed forever just like Brahman has. The sense of being individualized beings and all other ignorance inheres in the Jiva and its subtle body or intellect, and not in the Self which is the unaffected witness of that intellect and its actions. Only the Self has sentience, the subtle body and its intellect are as insentient as a rock. It is by the luminous presence of the Self that the insentient intellect takes action and appears to be an autonomous thinking entity, just as the wind rustles the leaves or as a candle imparts its luminosity to the exterior parts of the cloth lamp covering it. By the light of the Self's awareness, the intellect and its thoughts appear to the Self as Its objects.

Jivahood is a beginningless complex of ignorance which identifies the insentient intellect as the source of conscious experience, and in believing oneself to be that individual contracted locus of experience, without realizing that the source of experience is That which also observes the intellect. The sentience of the Self is like a ray of sunlight, which when entering through and illuminating a stained glass window (the intellect/mind) appears to become another ray of light when it emerges from the other side of the window with a red or green color (sentience that has attributes and is a doer and thinker) but really the light on both ends is the same ray of sunlight. Being liberated from Jivahood involves realizing that all of one's prior eternal and beginningless experience as a Jiva had taken place within the background of and been witnessed by eternal and unchanging non-dual Consciousness, and that there had been this invisible and attributeless light of non-dual Consciousness illuminating your every experience but which you had never been able to detect until then.

>>16395665
>false reflections exist? That means brahman is at fault.
These reflections as well as their source are without any real ethical or moral connotations, hence there is no 'fault' produced by their creation. Good and bad are subjective categories and the absolute reality of Brahman underlying everything is beyond them, not grasped or delimited at all by them. These reflections are false by design, not by error.