The optimism of Vedānta

The claims of Advaita can sometimes feel stark, fatalistic, and unrelenting. Of course, we should expect to be thus discomfited: the mind serves itself, so will rebel against the prospect of manonāśam. Upon reflection, however, I find the inverse to be true. Vedānta provides me with an enormous reservoir of hope. Here are some of the implications of Vedānta that give me great succour – intellectual, emotional, and aesthetic.

• The very condition of our being is not only apprehensible, but the most familiar thing of all.
• Philosophy possesses the capacity to free us, genuinely, with no gnostic conceit. We need not temper our aspirations.
• I am not my mind or its contents. Even in my station of ignorance I reap the benefit of driving this wedge between me and my mind.
• There exists a reality so effulgent, vivid, and total that it is to highest blisses of our transactional lives what a singular moment of waking is to endless dreaming.
• An utterly exotic numinous encounter is not necessary to see the truth; quite the contrary. The ordinary range of experiential states are the greatest doorway to self-realisation.
• The a priori nature of the witness greatly weakens the hard problem of consciousness (though not entirely solves it: the nature of mind, what constitutes it in empirical terms, and how it associates with brain states remains to be ascertained).
• Distinguishing the mind from the witness allows for empirical causal closure: the entire realm of objects may, in principle, be governed by a single physical set of laws.
  • The combination of the above two points paint an optimistic picture for the neuroscientific endeavour.
• Even within the constraints of the conventional world, my causal body participates in the being of Īśvara; even in this realm of difference, I cannot be ontologically cleaved from the highest good.
• “Realisation” is nothing more than noticing what already is the case. Whether I recognise it or not, I am already complete.