Spirituality Studies 11-1 Spring 2025 7 Patrick Laude in the soil of ignorance. This is why, for Śankara, vicāra, or “discerning investigation”, is the “destructress” (Sa. vināśinī) of the complex of fear and suffering. The Advaitin point of view envisions fear as being rooted in an epistemological and ontological gap between the one who fears and that which is feared. Duality is therefore inherent to any experience of fear, whether it be induced internally or externally. One may fear the other as a representation in oneself – as in the anticipation of death or danger for instance, or in the objective field; either way, the dualistic vision that presides over ordinary experience is ever potentially a source of fear (Jha 2006, 151; Comans 2000, 144). However, in the non-dual perspective of Advaita, duality itself is not real, it is only an appearance. The dual vision is akin to a disease of the eye, a misperception. The “large snake” (Sa. mahāsarpa), see passage above, has never been, despite its appearance of being, a symbol of Māyā has been the source of one’s fright. That which appears to be is mistaken for what is, while it has indeed no true reality. Although the status of the “large snake” is not totally unreal, since it is not “nothing” as a subjective phenomenon, it is also inaccurate to deem it real. Reality cannot be assigned to an object whose reality can be dispelled through discrimination. As Natalia Isayeva (1992, 163) puts it: It would be incorrect to assume that avidyā, or māyā, in Advaita is something unreal, sine it certainly absorbs something of the reality of its ultimate origin, indeed, in Śankara’s words ‘something perceived cannot be a mere non-being’. Now the appearance of the snake is dispelled by a proper perception of the rope. The rope is here a symbol of the “ultimate” reality; or in other words Reality is That which “outlasts” discriminative investigation, or symbolically that which remains when the vision of the discriminative eye has been sharpened. At the root of this view lies a concept of Reality as withstanding any “subrating”, to use Eliot Deutsch’s expression: “An object or content of consciousness is ‘subrated’ or is ‘subratable’ when it is or can be so disvaluated, denied, or contradicted by another experience” (Deutsch 1973, 15–16). The Real, the Ātman, is that which cannot be subrated by anything else; it is the ultimate ground of Being and Consciousness. Since Reality is That which “resists contradiction”, or bādha, the most important investigation of Advaita Vedānta is to reach the core of ignorance, fear and suffering to dispel illusion. Indeed, while the question of the origin of Māyā remains unanswered, the elucidation and resolution of its cause is indeed the central point of Advaitin teachings (Deutsch 1973, 28–34; Sarasvati 1997, 661). In other words, Advaita does not account for the initial appearance of the snake, but it delves extensively – with a view to liberation – into its epistemological and ontological status as a principle of appearance. Māyā is the beginningless and indefinable, indeed not understandable, source of ignorance: “Beginningless and, yet, also called ignorance… It cannot be understood except by its action, and that, only by the illumined ones. It has created all this universe – produced it all.” (Śankarācārya 1991, 46). In fact, its dispelling is considered by Śankara to be the only way to know its true nature. Thus, when contemplating the symbol of the snake and the rope, the principle of delusion may be situated in a misperception, or in a misinterpretation of the perception. The first way of understanding the symbol implies an intrinsic inadequacy of the human self: “The Hindu regards himself as an entity to complete, a false vision to rectify, a composite of substances to transform, a multiplicity to unify” (Daumal 1982, 9). What is emphasized here is the innate, congenital aspect of Māyā as misperception, the predisposition to illusion that defines, in a way, the human predicament. The second understanding, however, suggests the way out of this predicament through the principle of misrepresentation, and a close examination of what it entails. Here, the problem does not dwell in the eye itself, but in the way its vision is misread. Hence, the perception of a “large snake” is connected to the notion of superimposition: the individual projects onto the real Selfhood the whole array of formal limitations with which it has erroneously identified. This is the key notion of adhyāsa or “false attribution”. This process of alienation of the true Self, the Ātman, through misidentification, involves “limiting adjuncts” or upādhis. This means that, from the symbolic point of view of eyesight, the deluding process of superimposition can be alluded to in terms of veiling, obstructing, limiting, blurring, or reflecting as a shadow. Thus, Śankara (Śankarācārya 1991, 44) writes: “in the ‘upādhi’ is that shadow of the Ātman which lives in the heart… it enjoys or suffers, as the case may be.” The correction of the misrepresentation can only occur, therefore, through “discrimination” (Sa. viveka) and focus on the true source of light. This is achieved through a thorough ascertainment of the nature of the true Self: as in the parable from the Gospel of Matthew, it is therefore not the eye itself, which is flawed, but extraneous associations or conditions that prevent it from reaching an adequate vision of Reality. With this in mind, we turn in section II to the image of the eye in Islam.
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