Thoughts into Words

It's very hard to put thoughts satisfactorily into words unless there is an external force to push up against. This is why it is so important to have good intellectual friends. Typically, one has very little ability to self-judge one's ideas. Not to say that the experience of that idea beyond the veil of language (a very real veil to be sure) is unable to to assessed, but it is true that those subjective experiences typically are quite formless, and must go through a miniaturized process of pseudo-manifestation (not to be confused with the manifestation or formlessness of the absolute).

So, one must have an opposition of some sort or another, against which one's thoughts and modes of subjectivity may take form. The form taken depends on a wide variety of objective factors (and even, indeed, one's subjective semi-formless experience is, as a piece of the whole, determined by these as well). And then again the particular form taken reacts back upon the subjective inner sanctum, in good dialectical fashion, and so on goes the evolution of thought. In fact, the places to which we are led by phenomenal thought are often of quite a different nature than was our initial intuitive understanding. One thing that is often forgotten, especially in spiritual circles, is that the intuition itself develops in dialectical interaction with other, non-intuitive forms of knowledge. The influences of society, of the phenomenal universe, are paramount in shaping how we view both the phenomenal and the non-phenomenal.

The question arises: What is the relation between the socially-determined world of phenomenality/society and the so-called eternal Absolute, non-phenomenality, the Unmanifest? The complete indeterminate quality (or better yet, non-quality), the non-duality of Brahman, leads one to conclude (although prematurely) that Brahman is un-social, eternal in the old-timey metaphysical sense of the word. This, however, is not the case, because of the social construction of the phenomenal reality against which that non-duality is opposed. Of course, this is only part of the solution, namely that from the point of view of Maya, phenomenality. What about from the viewpoint of the Absolute? Is that, then, social or unsocial in its self-understanding? The answer, of course, is that it is neither, because it is beyond distinctions like this, from its own perspective only, however. One would do well to keep in mind that to progress to the non-dual in any sense of the term, and to speak of it of course, we must bow to the inescapable logic of the plane in which we live and work and philosophize.