Self-Ignorance: Why Are We Afraid to Know Ourselves? | Prof. Arindam Chakrabarti

[SPEAKER_00]: Well good evening everyone and welcome.
[SPEAKER_00]: Tonight we welcome as our speaker Professor Arindam Chakrabadi, a comparative philosopher who will speak on self ignorance, why are we afraid to know ourselves?
[SPEAKER_00]: I will step aside to allow someone we all know well, swami-suffer-pin-under, to introduce you all to the Professor.
[SPEAKER_00]: But before I do so, I would also like to welcome a very distinguished member of our audience tonight, Professor Gayatri Chakravori-spivak of Columbia University,
[SPEAKER_00]: and fellow of the British Academy.
[SPEAKER_00]: We are privileged to have you here tonight, Professor.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_05]: Namaste and good evening.
[SPEAKER_05]: We are delighted and pleased to welcome in our midst a most distinguished guest speaker, Professor Arindam Chakravarti.
[SPEAKER_05]: I'll introduce him and unfortunately I am unable to be present here with all of you, although I am virtually present, but this recording of course was done a couple of days before this event because I have to be in the Vedanta society of Portland for their centenary celebrations.
[SPEAKER_05]: Professor Arinam Chakrabarti is the distinguished professor of philosophy at Ashoka University right now.
[SPEAKER_05]: Before this, he was more than 26 years at the University of Hawaii teaching philosophy.
[SPEAKER_05]: He has taught in numerous, most prestigious institutes across the world, the Institute of Advanced Studies in Edinburgh, in Trinity College in Cambridge, in Sanskrit University in Tirupati, the University of Calcutta, the Delhi University, and in fact he was right here in New York for a couple of years at the Philosophy Department at Stony Brook University.
[SPEAKER_05]: Professor Jagraverty was a dictator in Calcutta, he had a traditional Sanskrit education in Nyaia and other subjects in Indian philosophy.
[SPEAKER_05]: He proceeded to get a PhD from Oxford University in 1982, studying under such giants of analytic philosophy as a so-peeta-strosan and a micro-domet.
[SPEAKER_05]: His main areas of interest, study and research are the philosophy of language, logic, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and Indian philosophy, various trends of Indian philosophy.
[SPEAKER_05]: He has worked in this area of trying to combine Indian philosophic issues in Indian philosophy with the rigor of analytic philosophy, western analytic philosophy, and of course, the traditional Nyaia form of analysis.
[SPEAKER_05]: He has numerous publications over 100 papers and several books, including his latest
[SPEAKER_05]: published by Bloomsbury London, which was published in 2019, is next book is called the Book of Questions, analytical introduction to Indian philosophies, which is something that I am looking forward to and I am sure I am not alone in this, we are all eagerly looking forward to that book.
[SPEAKER_05]: He is also a lifelong sadaka, a spiritual seeker and practitioner, all his life, and that makes him specially dear to us.
[SPEAKER_05]: This evening, he'll speak on a subject of self-ignorance that we do not know our real nature.
[SPEAKER_05]: At the way the Vedanta we all know, central teaching is that we are Brahman, that we are infinite existence, consciousness, bliss, not just this, these mortal bodies, or even these little minds.
[SPEAKER_05]: And we do not know this.
[SPEAKER_05]: And that is why Advaita Vedanta exists to teach us something that we do not know and give us the saving knowledge of that you are Brahman.
[SPEAKER_05]: But what is this not knowing ourselves?
[SPEAKER_05]: Why do we not know ourselves?
[SPEAKER_05]: Why is it so difficult to know ourselves?
[SPEAKER_05]: What is the nature of the knowledge of Brahma and what is the nature of ignorance of ourself?
[SPEAKER_05]: This will be the subject, it is a subject of profound implication for Advaita Vedanta.
[SPEAKER_05]: Why just Advaita Vedanta?
[SPEAKER_05]: All the other strengths of Indian philosophy, which Professor Jagrava Tim Self has worked on in Nya, Vaisheshika, various forms of Buddhist philosophy, in Kashmini Shibisim in all of them,
[SPEAKER_05]: They all claim to be knowledge systems and they all claim to attack or overcome ignorance.
[SPEAKER_05]: So the issue of what is ignorance is of great importance, very central to Advaita Vedanta, but of course of great interest to other systems of Indian philosophy.
[SPEAKER_05]: Why is this Indian philosophy?
[SPEAKER_05]: Any philosophy, any very, in fact, in the broader sense, any knowledge system, anywhere, including modern science in its various departments, they are all increasingly interested in the issue of what exactly is the nature of ignorance.
[SPEAKER_05]: Today, of course, Professor Chakravati has chosen to specifically focus on a dyta Vedanta and the issue of ignorance of the self.
[SPEAKER_05]: As he always does, he brings to bear his profound scholarship, his analytic skills, but also his philosophy creativity.
[SPEAKER_05]: So, I have no doubt what he will speak about this evening will be a landmark contribution to the age-old tradition of Adwaita Vedanta.
[SPEAKER_05]: I know as young monastics, as monastic novices, brim macharis, we have to memorize by wrote what is ignorance, adhyanam to sada sada sada sada bhyam anir vachanyam that ignorance cannot be classified as ultimately real, nor as utterly unreal.
[SPEAKER_05]: Trigunathmakam, ignorance is composed of three gurus, Satvara just and Thomas, Gyanavirodhi, ignorance can be destroyed by knowledge, power, Rupam, Yatkintjit.
[SPEAKER_05]: It is an intangible something which is positive in nature.
[SPEAKER_05]: and it is this intriguing term that ignorance is not just the absence of knowledge, it is something positive in nature, this is what Professor Chakravati is going to narrow down on and focus on this evening.
[SPEAKER_05]: So, I am sure we are in for a profound metaphysical epistemological journey this evening into our own nature and our intriguing mysterious ignorance of our own nature.
[SPEAKER_05]: Thank you, Namaste.
[SPEAKER_03]: Oṁ s-sārda ar-dashra-irāyā s-irāma-kışnāyā bedaseṁ karna-tudevāyā s-tā-rāma-yā-vaināma jhuvāgre rājataṁ kalī jhuvā-adjā jhāta-vīdāsā lūla jhuvā-jāganma-ta jhuvāyā nābidīyate.
[SPEAKER_03]: I would try to avoid showing off my Sanskrit and to make up for these Sanskrit verses, I will begin the talk with a quotation from Donald Rumsfeld.
[SPEAKER_03]: But first, all this sucksly.
[SPEAKER_03]: It is because self-knowledge is painful and we prefer the pleasures of illusion, a little bit of cut-out punishment, they who dwell in the middle of ignorance, posing to be wise
[SPEAKER_03]: by their own judgment.
[SPEAKER_03]: This verse is, it feels like autobiography to me, deeming themselves very learn it, befuddled are those fools who wondered about round and round circling, like blind men, led by the blind.
[SPEAKER_03]: The last part, I cannot resist the temptation of coating with the Sanskrit original from this beautiful Upanishad katopanishad, and then I even need Yamanah, Yatha and Haha.
[SPEAKER_03]: First, let us talk about ignorance in general, and here I shall go from the ridiculous gradually to the sublime.
[SPEAKER_03]: First, the ridiculous, Rumswell's epistemology, Donald Rumswell defended the Iraq War by a sophisticated taxonomy of knowledge and ignorance.
[SPEAKER_03]: With the insidious we, that other co-opting, first-person plural, that includes and excludes arbitrarily.
[SPEAKER_03]: And he said, as we all know, there are no nouns.
[SPEAKER_03]: There are things we know, we know.
[SPEAKER_03]: We also know there are no unknowns.
[SPEAKER_03]: That is to say, we know there are some things we do not know.
[SPEAKER_03]: The ones we don't know, that we don't know.
[SPEAKER_03]: Such a comprehensive inventory of government's, knowledge's, ignorance's, even iterated meta-ignorances does not come with any spirit of confession or humility.
[SPEAKER_03]: It comes from a position of power, the power of sanctioned ignorance.
[SPEAKER_03]: In the current corporate milieu, from which we in the shrine are not exempt, such
[SPEAKER_03]: out, I think 2012 for it, called agnautology, agnoss, not knowledge from which agnostic comes.
[SPEAKER_03]: The subtitle of the making and unmaking of ignorance, it starts in the preface by that book.
[SPEAKER_03]: we live in an age of ignorance and it is important to understand how this came to be and why.
[SPEAKER_03]: Contributions.
[SPEAKER_03]: The swimming, sorry, swimming as we do, in oceans of ignorance, examples could be multiplied at infinitum.
[SPEAKER_03]: Contributions to this volume, probe the secrecy maintained by military classification, the doubt paralleled by manufacturers of carcinogens, in fact one company proudly said, doubt is our product.
[SPEAKER_03]: And you can see that when you go to a mainstream, best hospitals or surgeons.
[SPEAKER_03]: I went for months and years for my vocal cord disease, from Aden Brooks in Cambridge, to UCLA Hospital to my source, speech and hearing center.
[SPEAKER_03]: And the final judgment apart from the very technical scientific word that we are very happy, spending so much money, I got a diagnosis.
[SPEAKER_03]: This person is suffering from spasmodic dysphonia, I looked up, it means loss of voice.
[SPEAKER_03]: But in Latin,
[SPEAKER_03]: which is the Sanskrit of science.
[SPEAKER_03]: Now, I said, is this what?
[SPEAKER_03]: So, how do I get better?
[SPEAKER_03]: They said, unlike old quacks, we don't say, this is how you get better, we say, we don't know.
[SPEAKER_03]: Now, the less a doctor knows, the more we pay them.
[SPEAKER_03]: Some of this stuff is talked about in that book about the environment and all.
[SPEAKER_03]: There are some very heartbreaking examples in my own life and they are not about not knowing
[SPEAKER_03]: but very proudly preserving one's own ignorance about one's own self.
[SPEAKER_03]: A very, very famous philosopher who changed from philosophy to literature with a book called Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.
[SPEAKER_03]: He told me personally.
[SPEAKER_03]: that I think laughing at one's own culture is the hallmark and unique characteristic of European culture, no other culture laughs at themselves.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I said,
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, Richard, I have got examples of, for example, of the Vedas, from Rigveda onwards.
[SPEAKER_03]: Rigveda marks, in the most hilarious way, Rigveda chanters, comparing them to frogs in monsoon.
[SPEAKER_03]: It is in the Rigveda.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's where Tulsidas takes it from.
[SPEAKER_03]: where the paratha Janoon, but to Samudaya, he says, about describing frogs, he reverses it.
[SPEAKER_03]: And then I gave many, many more examples, and of course Sri Rama Krishna is full of mocking at himself, everything I was telling, some young men yesterday night, that when
[SPEAKER_03]: In the last time when he went and danced against Dr. Mahendraal Sarkar Sarkar Sarkar Sarkar's advice, at night he was eating and the condition is the beginning of his voice problem, the cancer.
[SPEAKER_03]: He said, I had asked Saradama, this woman.
[SPEAKER_03]: that what you like to come also, thank God he didn't go, we've danced so much.
[SPEAKER_03]: Talkata people who have said, how much harm she has to say, making fun of his word paramam so that people called him.
[SPEAKER_03]: So when I gave these counter examples, very simple answer from Mr. Richard, he said, I don't know about these.
[SPEAKER_03]: So, I said, but don't you understand, you've written a book on logic before, that a unique characteristic means you are making comments on other cultures, not what yourself, that means no other culture has that.
[SPEAKER_03]: He said, I don't know.
[SPEAKER_03]: Now, to the supply.
[SPEAKER_03]: Obsession with darkness.
[SPEAKER_03]: and shadows, as metaphors for our ignorance, from which comes to be a Tharnico-Panishad prayer, Thomas O. Mamm, Jotilk, come on.
[SPEAKER_03]: this obsession starts from the earliest, where the 10, 129, Nasi, the Yasukdom.
[SPEAKER_03]: So, I mean, if you look on the translated completely, this Vedic, him,
[SPEAKER_03]: After that, there are at least 100 classic translations that meet people did.
[SPEAKER_03]: Max Müller is being one of the more sort of lame ones.
[SPEAKER_03]: Death was not then normality.
[SPEAKER_03]: Neither existence nor non-existence.
[SPEAKER_03]: The night was not separate from day.
[SPEAKER_03]: So one darkness was covering under darkness.
[SPEAKER_03]: What does that mean?
[SPEAKER_03]: Simple.
[SPEAKER_03]: The nature of the hidden darkness is hidden by the darkness of our ignorance about it.
[SPEAKER_03]: So the one is the physical Thomas, the other is the darkness of our, now what we will talk about that.
[SPEAKER_03]: Some people will say our lack of knowledge, some will say no, it is the primordial element out of which everything is made, because this of India, this non-knowledge.
[SPEAKER_03]: will ultimately become identified with the power of the ultimate reality, of the Self.
[SPEAKER_03]: But more of that later on.
[SPEAKER_03]: This darkness is the darkness of ignorance, when Shankara interprets the word of India.
[SPEAKER_03]: He calls three ways, and all three are important.
[SPEAKER_03]: First he says, and in fact, these are not a certain things.
[SPEAKER_03]: If we reflect carefully on what is the water the anternings of knowledge, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: Because of Descartes, we think of doubt as the anternings of knowledge.
[SPEAKER_03]: There are 16 things that one has to master in order to have that Moksha Shastro, which is called Naya Sūtru, and the first Sūtru, lists the 16.
[SPEAKER_03]: The third of them is Sangshaya, Pramana, Pramaya, Sangshaya, Pralodhana, the Stanta, and so on.
[SPEAKER_03]: Even Tarko, Vada, Jalpavitanda, all of these are conducive to motion.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's a sad state of affairs.
[SPEAKER_03]: That way.
[SPEAKER_03]: either in the name of installing the great literary qualities of Indian knowledge system, which has become a political term, now it is, either because of that, or because I don't know what, of poo-pooing, of philosophy and logic and rational argumentation as opposed to the
[SPEAKER_03]: People even yesterday, we heard a lot, as if you cannot install bhakti unless you denigrate analysis, but the greatest text on bhakti and the greatest truth of the Vaisnavas.
[SPEAKER_03]: of the Koliwationalers who was being respected yesterday in the talk on Indian Gods and Goddesses, Hindu Gods, they were logicians, right, our book, which we start, you know, first year undergraduate, which is called Bhashapurichita, Sintant Muktavali.
[SPEAKER_03]: which is a nyeb text.
[SPEAKER_03]: It starts with Newton and Jala Dara Ruchai.
[SPEAKER_03]: Go Baba Duti, Dukul, Chauraya, Namak Krishna, Samasaram, Mahirvas, Chabijaaya.
[SPEAKER_03]: Not just yourself, that's the same location.
[SPEAKER_03]: After that, he gets down to business.
[SPEAKER_03]: No, all true.
[SPEAKER_03]: And this attitude, I don't know where this is coming from, is at the heart of our metapoeitri with which the second verse, the first verse, which is called the first poetry in Indian tradition of the Sanskrit, which is Valmikesh, cursed to the hunter.
[SPEAKER_03]: Mahani Sharda, Pratis-Tham-Tumagam, after that verse, apparently, before that nobody's poking on a stupid verse.
[SPEAKER_03]: Now, while Meheer, who was not a poet, he just got angry, and he got seen in Pratikki, got compassionate at the death of one of the lovebirds.
[SPEAKER_03]: But after that, he is no longer thinking about the hunter, he is not about to curse only, he says,
[SPEAKER_03]: He is not doing a metanalysis, he is not doing a literary theory of what he did, he is not measuring the meter, he is just wondering what did I do and this wonder this is expressed by interrogatives.
[SPEAKER_03]: And in this verse, this hymn, which we were going on in the cause, the greatest and the earliest poetry of humankind.
[SPEAKER_03]: Nāsara-rāsit-no-sara-sit-tada-ranim-tama-āsit-tama-sara-guram-agre-am-makkimāsit-gahanam-gabhiram.
[SPEAKER_03]: And it ends by saying, maybe who he, who the absolute Brahman knows, but it ends by saying, maybe even he does not.
[SPEAKER_03]: And this, in one small verse, ten occurrences of the WHO art of Kim, Kim Avarivu, Kuhah, Kasia Sharman, Kasia Arthek, so there are all these questions, but what does question show not knowledge, but doubt and lack, at confession of ignorance, we don't know.
[SPEAKER_03]: hand, a famous passage of the post-Shrunker, or Dwight Wark, we were on a premiere song, tries to establish the existence of a positive veil of ignorance on the basis of the following inference.
[SPEAKER_03]: And the inference is about the
[SPEAKER_03]: First lighting in a thick deep pitch darkness, if you light a match or a candle, that first flame, it has two
[SPEAKER_03]: It has to arise, it has to emerge by as it were removing the thick darkness all around, that's the idea.
[SPEAKER_03]: This is how it goes, first premise.
[SPEAKER_03]: If I am going to do this, I am going to do this, I am going to do it, I am going to do this.
[SPEAKER_03]: I am going to do this, I am going to do this, I am going to do this, I am going to do this.
[SPEAKER_03]: I am going to do this, I am going to do this, I am going to do this, I am going to do this, I am going to do this, I am going to do this, I am going to do this, I am going to do this, I am going to do this, I am going to do this, I am going to do this, I am going to do this, I am going to do this, I am going to do this, I am going to do this, I am going to do this, I am going to do this, I am going
[SPEAKER_03]: a freshly obtained knowledge piece of knowledge that is the portion like the hill has fire because it has smoke.
[SPEAKER_03]: So, in the case of hill here it is Pramana, Gyanum, any Gyanum, not just Pramun Gyanum, any knowledge, okay.
[SPEAKER_03]: You are talking about quantum mechanics, the two slit experiment and you will say, okay, I have just come to know experimentally that the photon could not have gone, but from either this slot, slit or that slit, but yet it went on the other side, this knowledge.
[SPEAKER_03]: It wasn't there before, okay.
[SPEAKER_03]: about that second premise must have been preceded by an ignorance.
[SPEAKER_03]: Just like the illumination of a first-lit lamp in darkness is preceded by a positive, concealing veil of gloom or darkness, substance distinct from the mere prior absence of the light.
[SPEAKER_03]: Aaloka, Praga Bhava, Vyatirikthu, not just the light, this light was not there, its absence was there.
[SPEAKER_03]: No, plus there was darkness, similarly about ignorance, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: both the light and the knowledge manifest that which was hither to unmanifested.
[SPEAKER_03]: It is from these passages and my study of the Nasi, the Yusuptham that I changed for my teaching and my writing.
[SPEAKER_03]: The old, cliched, adjective mind-independent for realism, that if somebody is a realist, they think that the objects that you come to know are not made by our knowledge, they are independent of our knowledge, mind-independent.
[SPEAKER_03]: I have rejected that word.
[SPEAKER_03]: I call them ignorance tolerant.
[SPEAKER_03]: They tolerate our ignorance.
[SPEAKER_03]: we come to know them, and how do we know them by removing, not from everywhere, just from that place I removed the ignorance, or do it metaphysics, thus compare darkness and ignorance, and suggests that this ignorance, like the play of shadows in a three-dimensional field of vision, gives delineation and body to the empirical in-own objects.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's like a shiny armor in Rembrandt's painting of the Night Watch, which shines because all around it.
[SPEAKER_03]: In fact, Rembrandt did a bigger painting of Judas returning the coins after he had, you know, repentance, because he tackled about Jesus.
[SPEAKER_03]: and he is returning the coins.
[SPEAKER_03]: Each coin, he hondes off on the floor, in Rembrandt's painting, is shining like anything.
[SPEAKER_03]: And the rest of the entire canvas is totally dark, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: To know, is to therefore, this cover.
[SPEAKER_03]: To remove the covering of ignorance,
[SPEAKER_03]: Louis Carroll, who was Vivekananda in a lecture here, I have quoted Vivekananda saying that I loved this book.
[SPEAKER_03]: This should be absolutely obligatory reading for all monastic people.
[SPEAKER_03]: Everybody should read, look through the looking glass and you know, Alice in Wonderland.
[SPEAKER_03]: Lewis Carrot wrote a series of points, which came out in a book called Silvian Bruno.
[SPEAKER_03]: And there he talks about this discovery, but that is Lewis Carrot, which is that the real good dish, the delicacies are covered by a dish.
[SPEAKER_03]: And if you have to discover them, then you have to un-discover them, because they are discovered.
[SPEAKER_03]: Now, so this is all about darkness.
[SPEAKER_03]: Now, if darkness is comparable to ignorance, then what is the light of knowledge?
[SPEAKER_03]: And we know here for those of us who has gone through a cosmopolitan education in philosophy, I hope in our over enthusiasm for indigenous Indian knowledge systems and abolishing all other philosophy, we don't stop like for at least 150 years, all philosophy students in all universities and villages also.
[SPEAKER_03]: have been reading Plato's Republic without that, you can't get an undergraduate degree in philosophy also.
[SPEAKER_03]: So, all of this, of course, we have to reduce, say sorry, resist the temptation, but this darkness and the shadows you cannot but think of the cave.
[SPEAKER_03]: it's all in the cave and coming out and getting dazzled outside.
[SPEAKER_03]: If darkness is comparable to no x, may mean at least three things, to have a perception of x, to possess the concept of x and to have a word for x.
[SPEAKER_03]: The relationship between these three levels is a separate and difficult problem.
[SPEAKER_03]: From the degree of the, which reflects on what was there, in the very beginning of the cosmos.
[SPEAKER_03]: When I taught Nassadhiya suksa, to a simple Honolulu Hawaii undergraduates second year, this Nassadhiya suksa.
[SPEAKER_03]: At the end of the semester, I don't even know her name, a girl in the class, she wrote that this is a description of at least three things.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's a description of the origin of the universe.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's a description of how a poetry is written.
[SPEAKER_03]: Initially, you don't know, it's a watery womb of some kind of, you know, imaginative amniotic fluid and then it gradually comes up.
[SPEAKER_03]: And then she said, it is more clearly, because there is a talk about a string in this that divides, that it is about the birth of a child.
[SPEAKER_03]: And then she ended by, say, by saying, at least the fourth thing that it describes is how I wrote this paper.
[SPEAKER_03]: Now, this is not that you suggest greatness, that it can access all these crevices of ordinary, half-knowing, half-ignorant people.
[SPEAKER_03]: Push to the limit, the perennial question concerning the origin of the universe or the beginning of life thus soon recedes back into the question, why am I asking these questions?
[SPEAKER_03]: What is making it possible that I can use words to mean this interrogative thought?
[SPEAKER_03]: What gives the first push to speech, to these words of mind, to these questioning thoughts?
[SPEAKER_03]: So you have an entire policeman, which is called whereby, open-ishot, whereby, k-na, k-na,
[SPEAKER_03]: is four questions, kene shitam patate pre shitam manak kena prara trathama praiti jukta, kene shitam vacham imam vadanti, imam vacham.
[SPEAKER_03]: These were the times saying, chakshu srotram kaude wo junakti.
[SPEAKER_03]: Putting together the visual and the auditory.
[SPEAKER_03]: Indo-European same group as Ved from which Vedakans, hearing, sounds, and seeing colors.
[SPEAKER_03]: Chakshushrothram, Kaudh-evo, Junakti.
[SPEAKER_03]: What is very interesting, very few people even get indulogists pay attention to this so it is that
[SPEAKER_03]: While it says in the beginning was Thomas darkness, covered by our ignorance and other darkness.
[SPEAKER_03]: an excellent example of this meditative movement from cosmological to self-referential inquiry into the act of inquiry, is to be found in one of the earliest hymns of the
[SPEAKER_03]: And it is the mantra Dhrastha, the seer, the sage, who does not write it because it is authorless, but he perceives it, this poem, and that man's name is long-darkness, Dilgothamoss.
[SPEAKER_03]: What a beautiful name, Dilgothamoss.
[SPEAKER_03]: So, he is like the, I mean even we not be, I was not born blind, but Deskai was born blind.
[SPEAKER_03]: And he is perceived the greatest Natsatiya suktu is also seen by him.
[SPEAKER_03]: And the two birds famous from the Vedas in the Upanishad, Mundakopanishad, Dvasupara Natsai, Yusansaka also the Irgothamas.
[SPEAKER_03]: And he starts by saying, I don't know the Natsatatiya suktu.
[SPEAKER_03]: I am immature, I am original, I am ignorant.
[SPEAKER_03]: He uses the word bhaka, yet to be cooked my mind is.
[SPEAKER_03]: My mind is still raw, who will tell me, go dada-shapratamam jaya-manam, the first to be born, who witnessed it, who witnessed it.
[SPEAKER_03]: I ask my over-smart or so-called University students who say, we don't believe in testimony.
[SPEAKER_03]: Everything I believe in, I have seen it myself in a lab.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I said, when were you born?
[SPEAKER_03]: What's your data part?
[SPEAKER_03]: He gives the part.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I said, as you were coming out of mother's womb, did you check the calendar?
[SPEAKER_03]: How do you know?
[SPEAKER_03]: Is there no I have a document, I can read the document, I said that's called testimony man.
[SPEAKER_03]: Look at his language, call the who saw the first being to be born, when the bone less won, bore in her womb, this world with bones, the unstructured, okay?
[SPEAKER_03]: Astehina, without asteh, unstructured, it was like a keos, right, from that structure, a skeleton comes.
[SPEAKER_03]: Life and blood might have come from earth, but where would self or consciousness come from?
[SPEAKER_03]: Who would approach the wise ones, with these queries of mine, with an immature raw mind, yet to be cooked, I asked this because I simply do not know these deep matters to deep even for the gods.
[SPEAKER_03]: heaven above, I know is my father and sustainer.
[SPEAKER_03]: This vast, expensive earth is my mother.
[SPEAKER_03]: I ask you, what is the limit of this earth?
[SPEAKER_03]: Where is the center naval Navi of this world?
[SPEAKER_03]: We show you Navi where the umbilical cord is connected.
[SPEAKER_03]: What is the sperm that gave birth to this mighty horse, the sun, that makes the year and where is the supreme space for all speech?
[SPEAKER_03]: Notice how the words are the metaphysical search for original limits of the world, look back to the topic of the primal sight of speech, because this is a speech.
[SPEAKER_03]: recall material's book title, the word and the word.
[SPEAKER_03]: If the word began to exist at that time at the first big bang, what was happening just before that moment?
[SPEAKER_03]: The answer of the physicist is that that's an illegitimate question.
[SPEAKER_03]: but in the procurant, West Chancellor of Ashoka University, who is a cosmologist and an astrophysicist, Sumakra Jyodhuri, he is coming to my class that I am teaching on darkness and shadows, to talk about dark matter and dark energy.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I asked him what's the difference?
[SPEAKER_03]: He said, dark matter is something that is matter.
[SPEAKER_03]: And we know that.
[SPEAKER_03]: But dark energy, there is much faster amount of that in the world.
[SPEAKER_03]: I said, why is it called dark?
[SPEAKER_03]: He said, because we don't know anything about it.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's made of our ignorance.
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, even if this initial period of time was strictly uneventful, it must have been without a beginning.
[SPEAKER_03]: It is the fact that it is being born, coming into existence, a part of the brief history of the world, or just outside it.
[SPEAKER_03]: We can shine, wrote in the Traktor's logic of philosophical, that death is not an event in life.
[SPEAKER_03]: What honor and, if you met with Constain, would have made him ask himself, is, is birth an event in your life?
[SPEAKER_03]: Your birth definitely happens to your mom.
[SPEAKER_03]: Does it happen to you?
[SPEAKER_03]: Because already you are there for anything to happen to you, but when birth happens, you are not there.
[SPEAKER_03]: At first, Bratarnagopolisus starts, all was covered by death.
[SPEAKER_03]: In my last, last paragraph, with which I'll end, I'll make a difference to this.
[SPEAKER_03]: What does death mean?
[SPEAKER_03]: Bratarnagopolisus says, death is hunger.
[SPEAKER_03]: Mertul nam ashanaya ashanaya is kshudha, hunger, hunger, a cosmic hunger to become, a bursting appetite for a variegated set of words, the universe emerged with a bang out of the womb of these voracious want.
[SPEAKER_03]: The question is, was this want just an absence or was it a take?
[SPEAKER_03]: fluid, darkness, some other thing, some much slower, time arises from a total ocean.
[SPEAKER_03]: If anybody is interested, it is not an easy read, but you can read a dialogue by Plato called Timaeus, Timaeus, D.I.M.E.U.S.
[SPEAKER_03]: Timaeus.
[SPEAKER_03]: and Indian humans are no exceptions.
[SPEAKER_03]: Contrary to high degree, proudly prejudice, sanctioned ignorance, that ontology and theory are exclusive characteristics of the European mind, and established text interpretive strategy adopted by ancient commentators of Vedic passages turns cosmogonic into a grammar of reflective experience.
[SPEAKER_03]: The origin of the universe talk is just best done in terms of the phenomenology of the darkness of our ignorance.
[SPEAKER_03]: I am now narrowing down this analogy from cosmology to not just epistemology.
[SPEAKER_03]: What it feels like to not know, not unlike a skeptic
[SPEAKER_03]: but like somebody who is hungry for knowledge.
[SPEAKER_03]: In the beginning was darkness, when the answer is returned, what was there?
[SPEAKER_03]: One meaning of that could be, at the root of this query lies the dark cloud of my unknowing.
[SPEAKER_03]: A sort of properly un-a historical even Christianity has a historical text.
[SPEAKER_03]: One of the greatest texts that the Catholics sent, a centaquinas, Thomas Aquinas themselves who keeps quoting, is by a man called Siododian use, the area of pejite, and his book is called The Cloud of Unknowing, The Cloud of Unknowing.
[SPEAKER_03]: unless they were ongoing, fairly rule governed rational debates about where the universe first came from, what there is and how best one should live in the world, the plethora of ontological hypotheses such as everything came from time, everything came from chance, everything came from property of nature, everything came from laws, neama, everything came from
[SPEAKER_03]: or a pregnant void, a source of all that there is, could not have surface, shwetash for the rupture, list, ten of those alternatives, doesn't decide that this is the right one.
[SPEAKER_03]: They keep debating.
[SPEAKER_03]: Of course, now it is, you know, the problem is that these guys that nothing to do, so we are really busy people, so we want to know the right answer, basically we don't want to think, we want to be told what to think.
[SPEAKER_03]: Right?
[SPEAKER_03]: That is against, even the ancient, the Vedic, the Tantric, all schools, you would say, well at least within one school, some colour school, let us say it, everybody follows one.
[SPEAKER_03]: No.
[SPEAKER_03]: The Veverano school from which I will be using my main argument today, is opposite.
[SPEAKER_03]: For example, there is a YouTube video.
[SPEAKER_03]: where Swami Sarva Priyana is answering the question, where does the original of India or ignorance stay?
[SPEAKER_03]: What is its locus?
[SPEAKER_03]: In Jiva or in Pramam and he first laughs, he says this
[SPEAKER_03]: Because without ignorance, first there, out of Brahman, the Jeeva cannot be sliced out.
[SPEAKER_03]: The Jeeva is a product of a Vidya, so it cannot house the other day.
[SPEAKER_03]: So then where you really have to be, this darkness of ignorance, it will have to be in that pure consciousness, Brahman himself, but Brahman cannot have sun, cannot have darkness in it.
[SPEAKER_03]: So, both options are gone, so he says, no, the Viverna school thinks that it is in from one that of it there exists, but of it there is not as real as Viverna, and Varchas Patimus was Bama Thi school says, now you would say, oh well, Sarva Pyananaji, please tell us which one is right.
[SPEAKER_03]: Right?
[SPEAKER_03]: And that is supposed to be the bhakti at its show too, but that is not correct.
[SPEAKER_03]: That is not correct.
[SPEAKER_03]: Even about what is your ishtadevata, which is a bhakti question, alternative circular.
[SPEAKER_03]: Jainas got that well, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: Huh?
[SPEAKER_03]: There is a beautiful verse by a cremarian who was obviously
[SPEAKER_03]: either Vishnu or Shiva devotee.
[SPEAKER_03]: So either horizontal or vertical, doesn't matter.
[SPEAKER_03]: He says, Shashi Khandamoli, either by a crescent moon on the head, saw Shikandu, Shikandu is Pikop feather.
[SPEAKER_03]: One wears a Pikop feather, is Shikandu.
[SPEAKER_03]: Sashikandamoli.
[SPEAKER_03]: Sashikandamoli wa.
[SPEAKER_03]: Sita mega jaru white cloud.
[SPEAKER_03]: Shiva.
[SPEAKER_03]: Shiva.
[SPEAKER_03]: Shiva.
[SPEAKER_03]: Shiva.
[SPEAKER_03]: Shiva.
[SPEAKER_03]: Shiva.
[SPEAKER_03]: Shiva.
[SPEAKER_03]: Shiva.
[SPEAKER_03]: Shiva.
[SPEAKER_03]: Shiva.
[SPEAKER_03]: Shiva.
[SPEAKER_03]: Shiva.
[SPEAKER_03]: Shiva.
[SPEAKER_03]: Shiva.
[SPEAKER_03]: Shiva.
[SPEAKER_03]: Shiva.
[SPEAKER_03]: Shiva.
[SPEAKER_03]: Shiva.
[SPEAKER_03]: Shiva.
[SPEAKER_03]: Shiva.
[SPEAKER_03]: Shiva.
[SPEAKER_03]: It doesn't mean doubt, there are two places where either or is used, even in English.
[SPEAKER_03]: And the war, Jadivāna vayda last line of Nāsadhiya suktu, one is in doubt, when you can't decide, the other is not about indecision, the other is on freedom.
[SPEAKER_03]: I can do this way or that way, that is an empowering or.
[SPEAKER_03]: Which American kids, my child, is an American kid, so I mean he is Indian, but she grew up here.
[SPEAKER_03]: She should always ask, what are my options?
[SPEAKER_03]: About food, ultimately choosing, like all the other kids, completely, you know, following the trend.
[SPEAKER_03]: But she needs to know what option she has to feel, because all is the same.
[SPEAKER_03]: Some of the most celebrated cosmological outpouring of the Vedic mind exhibit two unmiscape misdecapably philosophical features.
[SPEAKER_03]: Let me skip a little bit here and come to enough about the Nasa, the Asuktu.
[SPEAKER_03]: I already said Shankara defines Agyana or Avidya in three ways.
[SPEAKER_03]: of India.
[SPEAKER_03]: The second is projects.
[SPEAKER_03]: So, this ignorance does not stop by blocking knowledge.
[SPEAKER_03]: It projects error.
[SPEAKER_03]: It is a mark of an ignorant person and you see that in students all the time.
[SPEAKER_03]: They wouldn't say, I don't know because that they would make up something and go into
[SPEAKER_03]: So you have to gradually correct those errors and get them beautiful discussion in the same text about God being omnipotent, Omniscient, does he know our errors?
[SPEAKER_03]: Because in order to empathically know what it is to be an error, he has to be an error, but he cannot be an error.
[SPEAKER_03]: So then it says, He is sure of how?
[SPEAKER_03]: He is not born to but he born teach him, he knows what, it's like a good teacher.
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, we are so gratifying, he is sure as, stop, or we will show him a Guru, Kaleen on a Vacheda, the first teacher of all teachers.
[SPEAKER_03]: This is not Brahman, by the way, this is, he is sure.
[SPEAKER_03]: called Potter, first proposes the concept of God, a issuer, by saying, issuer is one unliberated soul and very accurate, correct, issuer never got liberated because he never was in bondage.
[SPEAKER_03]: The world's avidya is mentioned in the very ancient issuer of police in a puzzling passage.
[SPEAKER_03]: I won't deal with those passages, 9, 10 and 11 of Hisopanishads.
[SPEAKER_03]: There is one one hour YouTube video by Sarva Priyana on these three, 9, 10 and 11.
[SPEAKER_03]: Because 9 says those who worship ignorance go into deep darkness.
[SPEAKER_03]: and those worship knowledge going to even deeper darkness.
[SPEAKER_03]: And then the provision, which is a Vidyamo Pāsate, Tato Bhuja Ivate Tama, Jegu Vidyayama Rata.
[SPEAKER_03]: Second verse says, with the answer, avid the answer, just the way the uva yamsa, those who know both knowledge and ignorance together, avidyaya may tum tirtwa by crossing a cross, going across death through avidya, because all karma from karsas is avidya.
[SPEAKER_03]: without ignorance, there is no action.
[SPEAKER_03]: All action is a vithya.
[SPEAKER_03]: I won't go into that, but this is his interpretation.
[SPEAKER_03]: A vithya, amrism or shnute, so the both have to be there.
[SPEAKER_03]: So vithya and a vithya, so a vithya is not the devil.
[SPEAKER_03]: These are not to be shunned, they give, I think of it as heart history, they give the depth, the three-dimensionality of a cup, of a chin, in Valerina, Chachelyani, which is in Poland, in
[SPEAKER_03]: You are not a talks about that painting, in his notebook, there is a chin and the darkness and the semi-darkness on the chin, that makes the chin come out, the three-dimensionality, the Chaya, okay?
[SPEAKER_03]: And just as it is true, in painting,
[SPEAKER_03]: It is true in the drug-asaptershati.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yah Devi, Sarva Bhuteshw, Chaya Rupayana Sangstita, Vay Chaya, Avitya.
[SPEAKER_03]: Let us now move on.
[SPEAKER_03]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_03]: Now,
[SPEAKER_03]: We all know that when anyone claims to know something, there are two nodes or poles or necessary conditions of that knowledge.
[SPEAKER_03]: The Noah subject, Pramata, the Noah, who knows, the person who knows and the object of knowledge, the Pramaya, the object of
[SPEAKER_03]: What Jane Mohanti does in a pass-breaking paper called the dialectic of knowledge and ignorance?
[SPEAKER_03]: I actually wanted to dedicate this paper of mine, which I have just written for here.
[SPEAKER_03]: two professors of J. N. Manti and his teacher, Mahamaopadra, Jogendra Nath, Sankyovidantatithu, whose book Adwaita Vadeavidya and who wrote a commentary on Madhushudana Saraswati's magnum opas, Adwaita Siddhi called Balovodhini for easy understanding.
[SPEAKER_03]: painstakingly, this text, parts of and the Vivarana Pramya Sangra, to Jain Manti.
[SPEAKER_03]: So, we all know, and Jain Manti, what he does in a path-breaking paper, called the dialectic of knowledge and ignorance in Afitra, is to follow his teacher Mahama Paddha Jagendra Nath and extend this subject object by polarity to know what are the
[SPEAKER_03]: from knowledge to ignorance.
[SPEAKER_03]: Nobody has done this in English.
[SPEAKER_03]: We all talk about the object of knowledge.
[SPEAKER_03]: Monty talks, opens the discourse, what is the object of ignorance?
[SPEAKER_03]: Ignorance has equal intentionality.
[SPEAKER_03]: What's the problem?
[SPEAKER_03]: We know that.
[SPEAKER_03]: But look at how it leads to one of the juiciest paradoxes in philosophy.
[SPEAKER_03]: If I'm ignorant of the future, let us say, I'm ignorant of the data on which Russia, Ukraine war will really stop.
[SPEAKER_03]: Then I am the locus of the ignorance, again, Austria,
[SPEAKER_03]: or the subject of the ignorance and the future date of Russia you can war ending is the object of ignorance.
[SPEAKER_03]: I have innumerable ignorances.
[SPEAKER_03]: For example, I have ignorances about all the isotopes of a certain chemical element and I can distinguish between these ignorances
[SPEAKER_03]: Now that requires that when I am ignorant of something and I am aware that I do not know this.
[SPEAKER_03]: I must know both the astray of whose ignorance it is.
[SPEAKER_03]: I should not say it's the ignorance of my teacher or ignorance of my student.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's my ignorance.
[SPEAKER_03]: Just as I have to know the astray of the ignorance, I have to know the object of ignorance.
[SPEAKER_03]: What is it that I don't know?
[SPEAKER_03]: Now the sight of the ignorance and I must be aware of what it is that I am ignorant of.
[SPEAKER_03]: Now that is the beginning of what I would call the paradox of ignorance.
[SPEAKER_03]: all of you should understand now, this is not very difficult, which has a closed connection with Plato's paradox of inquiry in the dialogue called Mino.
[SPEAKER_03]: Even the most elementary phenomenology of ignorance seems to require that to know my own ignorance of x is to both be unaware of x because I am ignorant of it and be aware of x because that is the objective matter.
[SPEAKER_03]: How is that going to happen?
[SPEAKER_03]: Let us now move on to ignorance about the self.
[SPEAKER_03]: In his 16th century, this part, I would like, well, there should have been a tea break here, because I want everybody's brains to get a little parked up.
[SPEAKER_03]: And this I cannot litter with my bad jokes.
[SPEAKER_03]: The serious one.
[SPEAKER_03]: In a 16 century magnum of us are due to the city, proving non-duality, that is the title of the book.
[SPEAKER_03]: Moses was going to search for the offers three sorts of perceptual experiential proofs in support of the view that our ignorance in general and specifically our self ignorance is a positive entity, this view, which is supposed to this view.
[SPEAKER_03]: So, that is the argumentation.
[SPEAKER_03]: These are expressed, these three proofs, these called three protections are expressed by three paradigmatic feelings and they are corresponding verbal expressions.
[SPEAKER_03]: First, that I am ignorant, generally.
[SPEAKER_03]: I am not knowledgeable, I am ignorant.
[SPEAKER_03]: in Western philosophy, the problem of other minds is huge.
[SPEAKER_03]: And self-knowledge is discussed only very recently, a junior contemporary of mine, also a student of Professor Strosson called Kassim Kassam, has written a book in which there is one chapter on ignorance about the self.
[SPEAKER_03]: And third, I do not know the meaning of your words.
[SPEAKER_03]: This is very shows that culturally, the context of expressing ignorance, the most common context was in discourse.
[SPEAKER_03]: You wouldn't jump to a future opponent.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'll activate you to first say, I don't understand what you were saying.
[SPEAKER_03]: Bhavaduktam, to aduktam or thumna janami.
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't know.
[SPEAKER_03]: I can hear your words, but I don't know.
[SPEAKER_03]: I have no clue what you mean.
[SPEAKER_03]: So that's the third kind of ignorance.
[SPEAKER_03]: In this lecture, I shall discuss only the first and a little bit second sort of phenomenological evidence.
[SPEAKER_03]: When a reflective human being feels and says, I am ignorant, I don't know myself.
[SPEAKER_03]: What is the nature of this ignorance?
[SPEAKER_03]: Let us resist the temptation here of paraphrasing this evolve as I don't know who I am in some kind of a therapist, since.
[SPEAKER_03]: Also, we are not here speaking of an advanced Alzheimer's sufferer.
[SPEAKER_03]: Or any such pathological amnesia or aphasia.
[SPEAKER_03]: The common sense position of Nya and dualist Vedant in Siyar, Madhya Vedant in Siyar has a strong initial plausibility.
[SPEAKER_03]: It is simple.
[SPEAKER_03]: The linguistic form of negation of knowledge clearly shows what one is experiencing, lack or absence of knowledge.
[SPEAKER_03]: Against this absence of knowledge view, the non-dualist Madhushu Tana Saraswati puts forward a powerful destructive dilemma.
[SPEAKER_03]: if your view were correct, then either P or Q, P cannot be the case, Q cannot be the case, therefore if you view, you is not correct, that is called a destructive dilemma.
[SPEAKER_03]: Is this confessed absence of knowledge, the first view, a generic absence of any knowledge whatsoever, Giana Samanya Bab, or is it a Giana Vicheshabha, or is it a Giana Vicheshabha?
[SPEAKER_03]: an absence of a specific piece of knowledge, indexed to a particular object of knowledge to take chain one, this example, absence of knowledge of quantum mechanics that someone might admit to that I do not know quantum mechanics.
[SPEAKER_03]: It cannot be the former that is absence of all knowledge, plan of some unnava, because by speaking about this absence of all knowledge,
[SPEAKER_03]: The person who is confessing the ignorance is claiming knowledge of both whose ignorance it is calling it my ignorance.
[SPEAKER_03]: So, he has the knowledge of the astral of the ignorance and the subject to lacks knowledge and a generic knowledge of knowledgehood as the universal which delimits this universal he quantified any knowledge that one lacks.
[SPEAKER_03]: The claim that he has absence of all knowledge is self-refuting, so the first option cannot be held.
[SPEAKER_03]: It could be lacked, it could not also be the second or later option, because a specific absence of some specific knowledge cannot be avowed without some, however vague knowledge of that particular object,
[SPEAKER_03]: object of that knowledge which one fails to find in oneself, the confession in me, I find lack of knowledge of quantum mechanics, presupposes I know what quantum mechanics is.
[SPEAKER_03]: However vaguely, is sketchyly incompletely, which means that my topic specific ignorance has to coexist with my knowledge of that topic.
[SPEAKER_03]: So, the absence theory runs into total ruin.
[SPEAKER_03]: So what is left?
[SPEAKER_03]: And yet this is truthfully said by many of us, does the absence of knowledge theory of ignorance fails and one is compelled to accept the positive account of ignorance as something more than absence of knowledge.
[SPEAKER_03]: And now ancient sanghya, which was a refuted, where property or matter is made of three strands,
[SPEAKER_03]: By the way, please, even if in some Ramakrishna mission translation they are called qualities, do not ever make the mistake of calling the Sangya Guna's qualities, then why the word Guna, because the word Guna means rope, like in Thanur Guna.
[SPEAKER_03]: Even now, fishermen pull a boat and that is called Guantana.
[SPEAKER_03]: So, these are the three goodas.
[SPEAKER_03]: I Ramakrishna says, the three goodas, Sattura just Thomas, are not qualities.
[SPEAKER_03]: They are purusha-seban-nana-raju, they are binding ropes.
[SPEAKER_03]: And they are called them TTT or DDT.
[SPEAKER_03]: Delight dynamic city darkness.
[SPEAKER_03]: Delight Satu, Satu, Satu, Sukaya, Sanjayati, dynamic city rajas, and darkness tramos, or transparency, trouble and torpor, transparency of Satu, trouble of rajas, without trouble you don't move, and torpor, you know.
[SPEAKER_03]: any ignorance as Monty argues for specuously must have a locusts and an object.
[SPEAKER_03]: It has to be someone's ignorance about some subject matter or topic.
[SPEAKER_03]: For example, Saravor's jizhek may confess that he is clueless about Modusunasaswati sattwaita siddhi.
[SPEAKER_03]: This ignorance is located in jizhek and it is the object, its object is the text of twaita siddhi which I have been talking about.
[SPEAKER_03]: I can admit to my ignorance, I or in them, can admit to my ignorance of the genetic structure of octopuses.
[SPEAKER_03]: But with self-ignorance, there is a problem, the locus and the object are the same, whose ignorance mind about whom me,
[SPEAKER_03]: Right?
[SPEAKER_03]: This whole talk is a teaser because we are just getting warmed up and we will stop at warming up.
[SPEAKER_03]: The official are doing the theory.
[SPEAKER_03]: creates faces a huge complications, not only for the absence of knowledge theory, but even for the positive ignorance theory, according to which all ignorance is witnessed directly by witness consciousness.
[SPEAKER_03]: There are two kinds of awarenesses.
[SPEAKER_03]: One is Epistemic, Pramana Jaitan, and the other is Sakshi Jaitan.
[SPEAKER_03]: Witness consciousness.
[SPEAKER_03]: Witness consciousness
[SPEAKER_03]: Pramana consciousness is like a bully of a teacher who can't tolerate her in others and it eliminates witness consciousness, just watches, it's like the bird which doesn't pack at the fruit, just watches.
[SPEAKER_03]: Witness consciousness is also the registering of pleasure and pain.
[SPEAKER_03]: like what can shine, or do it with on the says, it makes no sense to say, I have knowledge of my pain because my pain, anything that we have knowledge of must be an object which is ignorant tolerant, but pain cannot exist without my registering.
[SPEAKER_03]: And definitely, as soon as the pain happens, the moment I register it, no one has the right to say you are feeling pain, but you don't have pain.
[SPEAKER_03]: but about an object of Pramana you can say that.
[SPEAKER_03]: So, these are Sakshibasya.
[SPEAKER_03]: They are eliminated by this non-interfaring.
[SPEAKER_03]: Some Sakshid does not want to translate knowledge into dollars.
[SPEAKER_03]: Pramana does, Pramana goes into successful activity.
[SPEAKER_03]: Sakshi is actually identical with pure consciousness.
[SPEAKER_03]: Sakshi chaital, no?
[SPEAKER_03]: Is ultimately that should do chaital.
[SPEAKER_03]: So absences are known by a separate Pramana called unipoloptic.
[SPEAKER_03]: That is why Agyana cannot be an absence.
[SPEAKER_03]: Agyana is known by Sakshi.
[SPEAKER_03]: Okay, and that is true of even our ignorance of ourselves.
[SPEAKER_03]: Now I come to the last part, where we are afraid of to know ourselves.
[SPEAKER_03]: There is a sense in which the self can never be an objective knowledge.
[SPEAKER_03]: The subject cannot be object.
[SPEAKER_03]: Shankara, almost cracks a joke here.
[SPEAKER_03]: But the most profound point.
[SPEAKER_03]: the questioning of the Buddhist theory of self-consciousness, Shankaras' says, gives the famous analogy of anyone who claims to know himself, is like a very proud acrobat, and he says, however skillful, this young acrobat, maybe he cannot write on his own shoulder.
[SPEAKER_03]: Nijas kande arolum a nashapkati, nashapkati, nashapkati, nashapkati, nashapkati, nashapkati, nashapkati, nashapkati, nashapkati, nashapkati, nashapkati, nashapkati, nashapkati, nashapkati, nashapkati, nashapkati, nashapkati, nashapkati, nashapkati, nashapkati, nashapkati, nashapkati, nashapkati, nashapkati, nashapkati, nashapkati, nashapkati, nashapkati, nashapkati, nashapkati, nashapkati, nashapkati, nashapkati, nashapkati, nashapkati, nashapk
[SPEAKER_03]: And those who confess to not knowing it, like Socrates did, and the Delphi Kaurakul said, he is the only one who knows.
[SPEAKER_03]: The real knowers say, and the Kenopolisha, the real knowers are those who say, we don't know.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yet Shankara himself says, at the end of his prefectory commentary, I have told Sarva Piyan energy to do a year-long explanation of that prefecturality as a version, the beginning, before Athatobrammajjajnaza, right.
[SPEAKER_03]: He ends that by saying, no, he can't take a vision, the self is not entirely a non-object.
[SPEAKER_03]: through vianigativa by saying what it is not, and by metaphorical extension of the secondary significance of the term u and that in u or that.
[SPEAKER_03]: Great sentence Mahavaka, the self can be, as it were, indirectly known, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: Emily Dickinson says, tell all the truth, but tell it with a slant, the slant.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yet Shankar himself says that, the court says, in a poem, this my task of knowing myself will never end up in a cage, an armor, purabena, and perhaps therefore the self has to be known
[SPEAKER_03]: K.C.
[SPEAKER_03]: Bhatacharya says, it is meant by the word high, as an unment, unminable.
[SPEAKER_03]: Ignorance and errors about the nature of self, Swami Swarap Sarvapyananda says, in many of His lectures, is the root cause of suffering.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yet we shrink away from the truth about ourselves.
[SPEAKER_03]: from the Tajghyana, as if that is going to take away our pleasure than happiness.
[SPEAKER_03]: Do we misidentify our sufferings as bliss?
[SPEAKER_03]: What does ignorance cause then?
[SPEAKER_03]: Pain or bliss?
[SPEAKER_03]: Now I come to my last paragraph.
[SPEAKER_03]: The main metaphysical reason.
[SPEAKER_03]: Why I am terrified, I am terrified, of knowing myself, has to do with the fear of using my individuality, my difference from others.
[SPEAKER_03]: This is a kind of primordial form of fear of missing out on plurality and otherness.
[SPEAKER_03]: This is the transcendental terror of facing the falsity, the mithyata of the world of objects, which thanks to this found ignorance, this dear darkness.
[SPEAKER_03]: I take to be given data presented to me, who wants to part with gifts.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's the given for my thirsty outward senses, my Paranjikani, whether or not so young, who.
[SPEAKER_03]: Though all my life, I whine about and cry about, unfulfilled desires.
[SPEAKER_03]: The possibility of being poor, being atma-kama, akama, aptakama, nishkama, scares me.
[SPEAKER_03]: Because deep down, I have an unacknowledged hunger, my source, the Mlittu, the hunger, the death.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I unacknowledged hunger for that primordial gloom, which Bryothard and the Copponitions calls Ashanaya, Ava Mlittu, hunger is that death.
[SPEAKER_03]: I have an appetite for appetite, more than food.
[SPEAKER_03]: the fear of having to bear the burden of my real freedom, which is the freedom from
[SPEAKER_03]: those temporal, special and particularizing limitations, the Ashakala was to paricheda, which has provided me.
[SPEAKER_03]: We are grateful to those limitations, because they have provided me from birth after birth after birth, they excuse for not bearing the unbearably infinite responsibility for and fully felt empathy with the suffering of all living beings.
[SPEAKER_03]: What can I do?
[SPEAKER_03]: I am limited.
[SPEAKER_03]: That is Bodhisattva, or every way I can on the fields.
[SPEAKER_03]: Thank you.
[UNKNOWN]: Thank you.
[UNKNOWN]: Thank you.
[UNKNOWN]: Thank you.
[UNKNOWN]: Thank you.
[UNKNOWN]: Thank you.
[UNKNOWN]: Thank you.
[UNKNOWN]: Thank you.
[UNKNOWN]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_03]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_03]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_03]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_03]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_03]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_03]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_03]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_03]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_03]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_03]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_03]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_03]: All right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all
[SPEAKER_04]: That is like trying to combine, give it kind of on them, live enough.
[SPEAKER_07]: infinite responsibility, infinite responsibility, infinite responsibility, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all
[SPEAKER_07]: two questions.
[SPEAKER_07]: One is around Thakur says God cannot be known but in certain places he also says God can be known by the pure mind because pure mind is God.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes, yes, shoot them on it.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_03]: In fact, that even in prayer that is done in Belurma at this Bhavasagar at Taruna Karuna here, that has that line, Mahimata Vagolcaru, shoot them on it.
[SPEAKER_03]: But you answered your question, in some sense, that
[SPEAKER_03]: I was not talking about knowledge of God, I was talking about knowledge of itself.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I was not even talking about Paramatma Self, but my real nature, I mean just, when I say I am ignorant,
[SPEAKER_03]: Obviously, for most of us, the more ignorant you are, the more proud you are, you would say, I know this and that and so on.
[SPEAKER_03]: Everybody on adults, these days, more or less identify all arrogance as insecurity.
[SPEAKER_03]: Everybody knows that, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: That much wisdom is there.
[SPEAKER_03]: Although, that's why I don't understand why even in personal management, all the managers,
[SPEAKER_03]: because they should not, because these are insecure people, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: Anyone who can advertise themselves with, you know, you like,
[SPEAKER_03]: showing that I have got right in our academic world that I have got you know already four publications and then inventing 16 others which are forthcoming which will remain forthcoming till goes to the grave but he gets hired I mean this seems like I don't know it's maybe a
[SPEAKER_03]: And they neither even eat a banana at all, like the employers themselves are full of themselves.
[SPEAKER_03]: So they don't have knowledge of their ignorance, so they like if they come back to it.
[SPEAKER_03]: So this is the kind of knowledge of God has
[SPEAKER_03]: What Thakus says, he is actually unbeknownst to him, an echo of a great philosopher called Spinoza.
[SPEAKER_03]: He said that the ultimate intuitive knowledge above rational knowledge is called Syensia Intutiva, which is, immediately, that knowledge is intellectual love of God.
[SPEAKER_03]: And he says, that is actually God's knowledge of himself.
[SPEAKER_03]: So when a human being becomes free of his bondage, bondage of reason and experience, both he gets that sign to me.
[SPEAKER_03]: But as you said, the mind which he gets it, it becomes God's mind.
[SPEAKER_03]: So you're right there.
[SPEAKER_03]: So that's more on the side of self-knowledge.
[SPEAKER_03]: My topic today was self-ignorance.
[SPEAKER_07]: Right.
[SPEAKER_03]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_01]: Namaskar and Pranam's professor, seeking clarifications on two points that I heard in your wonderful performance.
[SPEAKER_01]: If we were to have appetite for food versus appetite as you just posed, how would things change?
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, we cannot acknowledge it.
[SPEAKER_03]: When I said we have an appetite for appetite, we don't think so ourselves.
[SPEAKER_03]: We think it is appetite for food, but if we get a detached look, if we take a look at ourselves, we will see that pretty much everything I wanted I got, but I wasn't satisfied.
[SPEAKER_03]: So why is that, then one answer is that, and this is true, not only for ghastetary food, but also for sexual appetite, because people take medications not to drugs, not to actually have satisfaction, but to have more craving.
[SPEAKER_03]: Now, how would things change?
[SPEAKER_03]: This is very complex and that's why in the Mahabharata, which has the Bhagavad-gita, there is a small five verses called the Kama-gita at the end, and they are also Krishna is the speaker.
[SPEAKER_03]: Those of you who have
[SPEAKER_03]: sort of delved a little bit into the spiritual matter of seed syllables called bija mantras.
[SPEAKER_03]: If you look up, you will find out that karma- bija is the Krishna- bija, same.
[SPEAKER_03]: So Krishna is almost himself desire, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: So instead of saying, like Buddhist, Jainas would say, and Christians definitely would say that or this desire, this appetite is really what is really evil, it's coming from somewhere else.
[SPEAKER_03]: No, it is coming from God Himself, and of course, you could say, sadly made or something.
[SPEAKER_03]: But,
[SPEAKER_03]: The good counterpart, spiritually good counterpart in Bhakti, of appetite for appetite, is what is called Virahabhakti, you understand that I don't want to unite it, I want to constantly want you and that happens for rather better when she is away, she can never get sit, there's a very, very nice
[SPEAKER_03]: He was a English literary expression of that in a novel called Passage to India by E.M. Forster.
[SPEAKER_03]: So there is a character who is most probably a Maharashtra in called God Bolae.
[SPEAKER_03]: So God bullays introducing, every sophisticated British officer, an expert here, told the culture in that city, Indian city, and he takes him to a kirtan, where they are singing love songs Krishna and Radha, and that's the British person's dinner time.
[SPEAKER_03]: So he wants to leave.
[SPEAKER_03]: But the Kṛṣṇa has not yet come.
[SPEAKER_03]: So, as a polite gesture, he gets up and tells the singers that you are taking a break.
[SPEAKER_03]: Why have to go?
[SPEAKER_03]: But I hope he comes soon, and God-bola comes out and says to him, you just ruined it.
[SPEAKER_03]: You don't understand, he never comes.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's part of Bhakti also.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm not saying therefore that, you know, every time you've got great food, you just go into fasting, but there is something to be said for that.
[SPEAKER_03]: But this...
[SPEAKER_03]: This unending, this is something again I have learned from my guru and similar to that, there is a katham with a gospel's reference also.
[SPEAKER_03]: Somebody complained that if God really wants it, wanted us to have self-realization, he would not have made our mind so restless.
[SPEAKER_03]: And both my teacher and Sri Ramakrishna says, it is a great blessing.
[SPEAKER_03]: that the mind is restless, great blessing, that our desires are unsatisfiable, and he puts it so much and puts it beautifully.
[SPEAKER_03]: He says otherwise if it was fixed, he would have sat like a bee on a physical material object and never got up.
[SPEAKER_03]: but it is dissatisfied.
[SPEAKER_03]: It goes from one flower to another.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's good.
[SPEAKER_03]: It will sit down when it gets like the previous question I said, when the mind is clarified.
[SPEAKER_03]: Then it's no longer mind.
[SPEAKER_03]: You lose to mind.
[SPEAKER_03]: You become mindless.
[SPEAKER_03]: But its restlessness saves us from getting stuck to the external
[SPEAKER_03]: which is a great blessing.
[SPEAKER_03]: If we were not so distracted.
[SPEAKER_03]: you put all our obsessive attention on one object and if that object is a human being, that object would resent that the most.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's thanks to our restless mind that we think of other things.
[SPEAKER_03]: Only one entity can bear the load of all our attention forever in one place on
[SPEAKER_03]: God, only He can bear it.
[SPEAKER_03]: Otherwise, people don't, even the most loved people don't like it, if you obsess on them.
[SPEAKER_03]: So, the restlessness of the mind, the unappisability of our appetite, is a great benefit.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's a great blessing.
[SPEAKER_03]: Sorry for the long-runs.
[SPEAKER_01]: and a follow-up.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, in the framework of Advaita, we speak about active ignorance, which is typically mitigated by Nyan, not knowledge, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: So, essentially, what is the difference between this active ignorance and the positive ignorance that we just spoke about, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: No, this is the same note difference, because positive ignorance has two powers.
[SPEAKER_03]: One is called Avarana Shakti, covering the other is Vikshaya Vikshaya Vikshaya Vikshaya Vikshaya Vikshaya Vikshaya Vikshaya Vikshaya Vikshaya Vikshaya Vikshaya Vikshaya Vikshaya Vikshaya Vikshaya Vikshaya Vikshaya Vikshaya Vikshaya Vikshaya Vikshaya Vikshaya Vikshaya Vikshaya Vikshaya Vikshaya Vikshaya Vikshaya Vikshaya Vikshaya Vikshaya Vikshaya Vikshaya Vikshaya Vikshaya Vikshaya Vikshaya Vikshaya Vikshaya Vikshaya Vikshaya Vikshaya Vikshaya Vikshaya Vikshaya Vikshaya Vikshaya
[SPEAKER_03]: Rogers, our second dynamicity.
[SPEAKER_03]: This is like my troubling myself too, whipping myself up for another action.
[SPEAKER_03]: Without that you don't have activities.
[SPEAKER_03]: So that kind of action is coming from
[SPEAKER_03]: But it can be good of India, somebody who says, you know, like honestly somebody who is decorating their shrine with new flowers, with new something, with new instances.
[SPEAKER_03]: That is also a video, but good of India.
[SPEAKER_03]: in some sense.
[SPEAKER_03]: Until its quietens down and it becomes less and less and less in ritualistic, nothing wrong with rituals.
[SPEAKER_03]: And all the music, all the different Stotthras and Sanskrit, all boils down to just one name, one syllable, and thus repeating that more or less.
[SPEAKER_03]: Okay, but I am teaching right into a pop guru, so I should not answer this.
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you everyone.
[SPEAKER_01]: Thanks, bye, bye.
[SPEAKER_06]: Thank you so much Professor for a great talk.
[SPEAKER_06]: I wanted to ask again about the appetite for appetite So in Shaktain Kashviri Shem, this is then takes they Considered the desire to be of two kinds one that is born out of poverty or something and the other is born out of fullness of something full Man, you're selling over.
[SPEAKER_06]: So is the appetite for appetite also the same thing is it like born out of lack of something and then also out of fullness
[SPEAKER_03]: two kinds.
[SPEAKER_03]: This as I would my general principle, I have been in fact some Gita is part of that for the last six years.
[SPEAKER_03]: We are eating one verse in one month to our sessions or the issue or the provision of emotiony of Abina
[SPEAKER_03]: the poverty or because of lack I want, I want more that is distinguished very clearly from the spilling over.
[SPEAKER_03]: Now you might wonder if you spill over, where is the desire in that?
[SPEAKER_03]: Because desire sounds like a want.
[SPEAKER_03]: The distinction is very clear.
[SPEAKER_03]: In the first kind, one, you feel constrained, not free.
[SPEAKER_03]: In the second kind, you feel playful and free.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's up to you, whereas desire is you are waiting for the world to give you that.
[SPEAKER_03]: You feel
[SPEAKER_03]: are constrained by the world, by the external.
[SPEAKER_03]: And you blame, I was supposed to get it, I didn't get it.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's something else.
[SPEAKER_03]: But in the second one, you make it yourself.
[SPEAKER_03]: And this is where which comes, I would put it together with the Vedic idea, which I started,
[SPEAKER_03]: But in Tantra, death is identified, not just with Shiva but with his Shakti Kali, just read some of these, let Shama dance their, that poem, we were going to do.
[SPEAKER_03]: Kali, the mother, one of them, and you will see the beauty of death.
[SPEAKER_03]: and it is all poetic inspiration is coming from that, from that, and there are subtle hints of that in, we cannot just do it in a long lecture like that, but one has to read for oneself and see how, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know,
[SPEAKER_03]: This is not cynical, this is not, you know, you know, somebody saying that, or everything will end anyway, so I am asking you to go to the funeral ground and you know, cremation ground and practice, not like that.
[SPEAKER_03]: Even if you are a creative artist, you start with a plan,
[SPEAKER_03]: success comes when you give it up, give it up, and you know where just as, first, first of his open, it's a teaktainabunjita.
[SPEAKER_03]: Teaga is a renunciation, but with renunciation you do bogg of a different kind.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'll end this, let this be the last question.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I'll end with a story, not from the Indian tradition, but from the Greek tradition.
[SPEAKER_03]: And that too, from a skepticism book by a man called Sex Does Empricas.
[SPEAKER_03]: He talks about this state of quietitude, which comes when both options are rejected and you don't get stuck with either he has or no, like the beginning of the Natsudhya Suktu, neither existence nor non-existent.
[SPEAKER_03]: Then he gives an example, what comes out of it, he says that there was a painter in Alexander
[SPEAKER_03]: called Appalachian.
[SPEAKER_03]: He was a master painter, he had done a painting of the young Alexander
[SPEAKER_03]: Taming horse called Pussyfathers, so the horse's front feet are up.
[SPEAKER_03]: And every muscle of the shiny horse's body, he has done perfectly.
[SPEAKER_03]: But for months, he is stuck because he can't do the foam to the front in the mouth of the horse.
[SPEAKER_03]: He can't do it.
[SPEAKER_03]: Without that, the painting is not complete.
[SPEAKER_03]: So he gives up.
[SPEAKER_03]: I can't do it.
[SPEAKER_03]: He takes the white paintbrush, washes it in turpentine, throws it at the canvas, the brush goes and paints the frost.
[SPEAKER_03]: This is what Jaktana Vongita means.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's all.
[SPEAKER_03]: Thank you.