/lit/ - Literature

>>20653557
>Explain how it’s logically consistent. If the personal self is mere illusion then so is the personal self realizing that the personal self is mere illusion.
This is very easy to answer for anyone who has closely read through Shankara. You are basically saying if the mind of the human was an illusion that would preclude it having the realization of itself being illusion.

What is the nature of all thoughts and mental phenomena in general?
They are a temporary objective (is not the subject of subject-object relations) mental content that arises and is thereby observed by a witnessing awareness which senses them, and then the awareness observes that thought being replaced by another in a stream, this is true of both baser thoughts about animal urges and higher-order mental activities like introspection, imagination, creativity etc.

Understanding that the egoistic or psychological identity is illusory in the sense that Adaita is talking about means that it’s an ephemeral appearance that has a relative state of being through it being utterly contingent on that Brahman’s power or nature that casts it as the appearance it is; not that its a nothingness. What is real in any moment is the Brahman-Atman awareness which imparts a relative being to all appearances and forms, the timeless you that knowledge of anything requires.

All thoughts and other changing phenomena are cast by Brahman as appearances along with all objects, space, time etc in an occasionalist-like manner via maya, realization about Brahman or anything else is another thought that takes place in the mind as a maya-appearance that is witnessed by truly real awareness, and it is sustained and generated and has its relative being through the power of Brahman endowing it with such. Thus, each soul is not a self-contained locus of existence which is also illusory (which would be a contradiction); but rather all individual bodies and minds are illusory appearances that are illumined and revealed by supra-individual infinite Brahman-consciousness.

Thus, “realizing things about Brahman” is just another of many phenomena that Brahman’s power generates as appearances which flash before our awareness, like just regular thoughts and the body itself also are.

Someone here perhaps may think “but if all realizations about Brahman are appearances we can never truly know Brahman”; this is wrong because Brahman (awareness) is reflexive by nature, i.e. it’s by nature immediately self-disclosed to itself or self-aware of itself without relying on thought or the Kantian categories or even the mind or mental acts in general, because it’s not even the mind or body to begin with but a self-aware independent incorporeal entity, (you) are not the mind or body, you instead know them as objects. This self-awareness of Brahman is not another appearance like thoughts are but is the nature of the real Absolute.