I went and had a cigarette and while I was staring at the side of our neighbors' building it got me thinking about articulating my viewpoint.

To grant the title of Real only to that which is static and nontransitory is to deny that part of Reality which is dynamic; and any true Reality which is all-encompassing must include both it's static and dynamic properties.

Someone may comment on the appearance of my body and say, "he is young". My body will not always be young, but this doesn't mean that it does not possess the attribute of youth at the moment that the speaker has said it. Just as every discrete object in manifested existence is seemingly distinct yet part of a whole, so too the moments in time which seem distinct but are all aspects of a whole. They are only parts, but this doesn't make them any less real; just incomplete. A static totality is, by it's very definition, incomplete as well, because it excludes dynamic processes, which do in fact exist. The two sides of the coin are complementary, not mutually exclusive. A true totality must hold within itself the entire coin. things and attributes separated by time are not inherently any more divided than those which are divided by space.

Similarly, since my thoughts exist (as can be proven by the simple fact that I have written them down), and I exist (as a part of a whole), the totality must include my thoughts, fleeting as they may be. Any system which describes itself as nondual and places any of these outside that which is truly real is not actually nondual. Even if life is "but a dream", the dream itself is a state that the dreamer finds itself in; and if the common currency of existence is, as I believe, consciousness, there is no contradiction or need to divide the real from the unreal. That which is "unreal", by it's existence which is shown by perception, does in fact exist and is thus real - otherwise it could not be perceived, because it is one state of a real thing. The temporal state of a real thing is an aspect of that thing, and thus, just like any transitory property such as the color blue, etc., is still a fragment of the real. it may be severely limited(!) but that doesn't make it unreal in any way. my daydreams are "not real" in the sense that they don't have embodied existence, but this turns the qualification for what is real in the view of vedanta on it's head, because the embodied world isn't really real either, so that's a pointless argument. if anything which is perceived has the currency of reality (perception of a dream, perception of a world "out there"), it's all real, and there's no need to qualify either one, because consciousness is the common denominator. we have never known the true absence of consciousness, because it would take consciousness to perceive it's own absence. even when our individual limited consciousnesses have blinked out, the principle of consciousness still exists - and I believe that it pervades the universe, creates, sustains and destroys the universe (in relation to it's self limitations as a given observer, be that as an individual mind or as spacetime and it's basis as a substratum for which things are relative to in terms of position and velocity, for example), and is the universe(s).

"just as through a single clod of clay all that is made of clay would become known, all modifications are but name based upon words and the clay alone is real" - Chandogya Upanishad

the "modifications" of clay would just be states of the clay itself; but even clay is a state of various elements - water, dirt, etc. there is ultimately no inherent "clayness" if this is taken to it's logical conclusion, but that does not make "clay" any more or less real than the elements of which it is composed. the two are merely differing states, or aspects of some thing's description. this metaphor in the hands of the advaita vedanta depends upon a static idealist undifferentiated clay state which has primacy over that of molded clay. clay as a lump and clay as a pot are just two different ways of describing clay. the clayness is equally inherent in both, and is unchanged by the state of clay. a pot is just as real an expression of clay as a clod, or even the idea of clayness itself. all of these things exist equally. if clayness is replaced with realness, then all things real, like the clay, consist of that same realness - the metaphor breaks down because reality is a principle, not a "stuff" that can be molded in the same manner as clay - for something to be molded it must be subject to an outside force. even if it was self transforming it must be limited by time, space, etc. and as reality is the nature of all things real, even those forces must consist of realness. so we have clay which is subject to the laws of clay in order to be molded into clay - all these things are still clay, just different manifestations of clay. clayness in this sense must include all of the possible ways that clay could be juxtaposed against itself in all of it's molded forms and as the principles of molding (as these consist of clay as well) in order for clay to truly be clay - because it's all clay, the whole way. the principle of clayness must include the permutations of clay or it's not the totality at all. clay is merely a subclass of class-dirt or class-atoms-molecules-elements-dirt-clay, etc... the true totality is the class that contains all classes within itself, and the very principle of class. when we start dividing things into the real and the nonreal it quickly gets ridiculous. if everything is real, just *limited*, there aren't these silly problems.

the division of truth into three levels strikes me as a copout, and maya as neither truly real nor truly unreal I find similarly evasive.

I think that neti neti is exclusive - if Brahman includes everything, then it is "not JUST this, not JUST this". It is often said that the map is not the territory, which is true as far as it goes - but when the territory is EVERYTHING, then necessarily the territory is a set which includes the map; so the map is not the whole territory, but it is part of the territory. an inclusive nondualism sees God in all things. this denial of immanence by privileging transcendence is unbalanced and is what I see as fundamentally setting vedanta at odds with Shaktism as it has historically been known at the tantric (and IMO, less adulterated) level.

The argument of cause and effect is itself a limited viewpoint - that of a mind conditioned by time. In something that is all-existent and beyond temporal change, nothing comes from anything else - it simply is. So that which is perceived as an "effect" is only so within time - seen from the outside of a linear process, the beginning and end of the same process would merely be differing states of the same thing. Saying that God could have just decided not to create anything is pointless, as here we are - obviously something did happen. So it's purely academic to debate on whether or not a true vacuum could have existed, because it doesn't (or doesn't exist to the exclusion of multiplicity!). If Brahman is the *cause* of manifested reality in the usual sense (and that is how the logic in the metaphors plays out), then it is a temporally limited thing. think of a monitor screen. you may say that only the monitor truly exists, and not the pixels on the screen. well, what makes up a monitor? what seem like discrete units when viewed at a certain distance - so it goes with the pixels as well. they make up part of the wholeness of the monitor. now, even if we have a dense, unchangeable monitor which exists as an undivided solid and a single unit, it still has pixels dancing across it, which change over time - which means that the interaction between the monitor-brahman and the pixels exists WITHIN time - the monitor cannot, by this definition, include time. thus, time, the monitor, and the pixels are all part of something else - which would be the true totality. see where I'm going? something static and unchanging cannot be everything, because it denies that which changes; similarly, something which changes over time cannot be everything, because it is subject to time - the two are subsumed within something greater which is both internally changing and unchanged at once. this is why positing only the eternal as true is fallacious - and in fact, something that is simultaneously true and untrue (such as maya is posited), has more Reality Currency than something which is only true and never untrue, because if more than one attribute are available, only something which holds both attributes can be the whole - and then maya is more impressive than brahman, really.

anyway, all of these paradoxes go away when you consider the principle of consciousness to be that which is the basis of reality instead of a merely transcendent stasis. consciousness can be singular and divided at once - it is an eternally existent principle, not a thing with regards to time. the principle of consciousness can silently watch itself, unchanging, and it can observe limited viewpoints through time, without sacrificing it's level of reality in any way. the descent into matter and the ascent into spirit are really just two ways of looking at a holistic totality. the top-down hierarchical structuring is just easier to wrap one's head around than viewing the whole. stasis and dynamis are like the drawing that looks like an old woman one way and a young woman another way - both are parts of a whole, and it is possible to see both simultaneously. it's the old Shiva-Shakti thang. the whole is both one and many without giving primacy to either state. my beef is not with the concept of a unity in existence, but that which views one aspect of that unity (in this case, undifferentiated unity) as superior or somehow more real than another aspect of that same unity (unity in multiplicity). the only way there could be a hierarchy of cause and effect would be if the cause and effect were separated by and thus subject to time, which would make cause, effect and time all part of a greater set, which would be the actual totality. if cause (brahman) and effect (the world) are seen as differing and ultimately equal states of one and the same thing (in my view, self reflective consciousness) there is no paradox. however, looking at things which to our limited viewpoints generally appear as paradoxes to logic in a deterministic universe is the only way to start understanding reality outside of linearity.

IMHO