A Meditation on the Absolute

The Meditation 🔗

The Absolute (Para Brahman) is not altered nor created by realization—but it cannot be revealed without a particular. At least this is how it seems from the perspective of a particular consciousness. It is the expression of the idea that God made man to be observed.

Para Brahman is the metaphysical ground of all existence according to Vedanta.¹ It permeates all states and dimensions of being, and is not confined to any single one. It is a thing-in-itself.²

The particular consciousness or soul is the jīva. It is finite, conditioned, embedded in a specific state of existence. Its experience of reality is limited and filled with illusory appearances (māyā).³

There is nothing significant about the dispelling of māyā. It is tremendously difficult for most human beings to undergo deconditioning, but the existence and prevalence of ignorance is a fact of reality—nothing that alters the nature of reality. Under māyā, the Absolute is in its mode of self-forgetting, which allows particulars to exist. Should all consciousness return to it, all particulars would disappear with them. Realization is not reparation; it is the natural flow of order. It is simply the moment in which the particular becomes transparent to its preexisting nature. The relationship is therefore asymmetrical but not one-sided:

Parabrahman does not need the jīva to be. But the jīva is the necessary aperture through which Being becomes present to itself. This presence is of course limited to whatever degree the jīva realistically can be deconditioned.²

Consider the tree that falls with none to hear it. The sound is a physical property which animals gain a particular experience from. Linguistically the question is exclusively human. Yet in either case it makes no sense to speak of sound if not for a particular being to experience it. Berkeley posed this same problem to argue the inverse—that matter without a perceiver dissolves into the continuity of God’s own perception, and that God is therefore the guarantor of an unobserved world.⁴ The Absolute is the ground on which all experience stands, but ground that no foot has touched is, from the perspective of experience, indistinguishable from no ground at all. A semantic distinction with little presence in the individual’s reality.

Meister Eckhart writes that even a stone is God, except it does not know it.⁵ The stone is God unconsciously. The realized jīva is God consciously. The nature of God is constant, but the experience of God has been altered from the point of view of the individual.

As a note to end on, nihil sub sole novum.⁶ Are these dialectic disagreements getting us closer to the truth? Perhaps not by much, but the thoughts must flow, and thus the subtle path might be revealed.