Ultimately though, perhaps this ‘neutral’ kind of ‘presence’ might, as Advaita Vedanta suggests, actually be a deeper kind of consciousness –“pure experience” in James’ terms or ‘pure awareness’ in Advaita Vedanta terms. Since cosmic consciousness or Brahman (like ‘presence’ for Silberstein), as the primordial groundless ground of all existence, remains beyond the subject-object distinction and is the source of all possibility while remaining itself both immanent in, but irreducible to, any comprehension itself, it certainly would seem to exhibit the qualities that Silberstein’s neutral monism prescribes. Silberstein’s work suggests that the problematic nature of the hard problem perhaps involves the realization, foundational to so many Eastern philosophies and religions, that the living experience of consciousness transcends any theory—physical or philosophical—about it. As the ground of possibility for all theories, cosmic consciousness is not reducible to any theory itself.
I find my self in strange agreement, but I would hasten to add how important it is to see that what is missing in this and the expository things you say, is method. But it remains in the abstract and doesn't put a finger on the real issue because it remains removed from this most difficult problem. Consider that language itself is a yoga. Western philosophy, I would argue, came to its final purpose with Husserl and post Husserlian thinking and this is NOT to say the he had it all right, but that without knowing it, he came upon the real yogic function of language, and a discussion along these lines is exactly where philosophy should be. Consider this from your post:
Advaita Vedanta’s concept of “nirguna Brahman” (Brahman as primordial consciousness encountered beyond all conceptual representations) provides the world’s oldest original, perennial and universal mode of encountering existence that simultaneously transcends and includes all world civilizations’ religious, philosophical, scientific and other conceptual frameworks.
If these concepts are going to be understood, they have to be taken to a deeper level of analysis, which is not going to be entirely welcome because it takes a radical move in the direction of renunciation. To analyze something requires it to be "visible" and I claim (though I consider the matter to be less a position to be argued than a position to be discovered and understood) that Husserl's epoche, the infamous phenomenological reduction, is THE method, for the West, to conceive of the renunciatory demands of the East. Terms like 'Brahman' are meaningless and Wittgenstein is right to toss such things in the bin of metaphysical nonsense if there is no phenomenological counterpart, that is, nothing in the presence of one's experiences that can be placed on the logical grid in the first place. The reason why analytic philosophers are so rudderless is because they refuse to make this dramatic move toward the revelatory, and this refusal has its basis in an infatuation with their own need to indulge need-to-think, and so they will forever be stuck on the rock of the ordinary in a world that massively interesting in the presuppositional analysis.
If there is such a thing as an overarching and dominating illusion that keeps a proper response to your question about the self at a distance, it is the illusion that what we say in the familiar and even (or especially!) technical ways can at all be ABOUT where analysis takes inquiry; so where does it take this? To an endless analytical cycle of question begging affirmations. Husserl's epoche takes inquiry "out" of this, and the reason I put this in quotation marks is because the world itself is "under erasure," meaning it includes something that cannot be spoken (obviously a term borrowed from Derrida), and this is where understanding Hinduism and Buddhism begins! The idea is that once one takes a step into this world of impossible intuitive openness, explicitly, at first, away from philosophical contexts that are initially a hindrance because they carry with them the assumption that the terms in play make sense, only then can philosophy rise to, if you will, a new expository paradigm, I mean, new things can be said and old word can be recontextualized (because we are, after all, stuck with them) because something new has been experienced, to put it plainly. A Buddhist or a Hindu does NOT, if meditation has been taken as a serious discipline of real affective and cognitive consequence, live in the same world as that in which the same terms carry the same meanings, and this is why philosophers like Heidegger are so important: they redirect thinking by resurrecting deactivated ideas in order to establish a a novel play of meanings that is not filled with the usual delimitations (keeping in mind that our words and their meanings are "open" to interpretative possibilities that are either open or closed, depending on pressures within a system of thought. Religion has always been notoriously closed. Philosophy is supposed to be open, that is open to the meanings that are made possible by....well, I am going too far here. But I'll keep it, just to say here that there is a LOT to say when one straddles the fence between language and its meanings and the presence of transcendental impositions. Only here do the things the ancient mystics of the East start to make sense, for these things are not grounded in the standard ways of thinking. They are grounded in a disclosure of, if you will, an examination of the interiority of the "self").
Follow Husserl's thinking, put aside that it makes claims that are arguable (as is evidenced in the post Husserlian developments), and keep in mind that Husserl is no mystic! He is a very disciplined philosopher who gives the world a method, albeit convoluted and opaque to commons sense ( I mean, it takes WORK to get to the simplicity of it) what could be construed as a kind of jnana yoga that takes our existence (the self you ask about in your OP) down to the wire where existence meets the language that conceives it. This is not just philosophizing; it is existential, and deals with the transformation of the self in a radically different, and "impossible" way).
- By Surabhi Rani
- By Gertie
- By Fried Egg