Damiani

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This series of classes attempts to forge a creative synthesis of diverse epistemologies, East and West, while demonstrating the inseparability of cosmology and epistemology. The epistemologies discussed are those of the Sautrantika, Yogacara, and Prasangika-Madhyamika schools of Tibetan Buddhism; Vedanta; Plato; Plotinus; Kant; and Paul Brunton. The series comprises five Friday-night classes, together with the paper "Prasangika Madhyamika Analysis of Objects," by Andrew Holmes (AH), which is read and discussed in the last two classes. The classes belong to a longer epistemological inquiry that also includes classes at Wisdom’s Goldenrod on 10/21/83, 12/1/83, and 12/19/83. The transcripts additionally cross-reference the earlier series in 1983 on Paul Brunton's Notebooks, Category 21, Mentalism.

One of the aims of this series is to develop a framework that will enable one to place any epistemology in its proper context. Such a framework must necessarily be cosmological because “cosmology and epistemology are not separate things; you can't have one without the other.” It will allow one to articulate the presuppositions of a given epistemology and see the validity of their limited or partial point of view.

The series opens (10/28/83) with the epistemology of the Sautrantika school, as explained in Stcherbatsky's book Buddhist Logic: there are two radically distinct sources of cognition, sense and intellect, delivering respectively the bare "that" of the point-instant and the constructed "what" of perceptual judgment. After a presentation of the various functions of intellect detailed by Stcherbatsky, Damiani points out that these functions operate more like instincts; they are “unconscious mental processes that are involved in the fabrication of the perceived world.” Using PB’s terminology, when the individual mind receives the World-Idea (comparable to the point-instants of the Sautrantika), these unconscious mental processes fabricate the primal image from which our experience flows. The intellectual functions described by Sautrantika are not the conceptual activities that occur once there is already an empirical subject in relation to an empirical object.

Indeed, the instinctual nature of these processes is brought out by identifying them with the thinking of the Earth’s mind in conjunction with the individual mind. Damiani then begins correlating the Sautrantika scheme with a cosmological scheme in which point-instants are correlated with the geometrical aspects planets make, pure sensation with their reception by the Earth’s Intellect conjoined with the individual mind, and the initial functioning of the intellect with the selection of certain degrees of the zodiac (that is, reason-principles) that ground the construction of the primal image (“the aspects show that there's a certain organization of these point-instants which only the reason-principles can understand.”) Finally, if one were able to stop all conceptualization, expectancy, and memory, one would experience the “shadowless” and vivid primal image.

The 11/11/83 class begins with a presentation of the epistemological problem posed by Paul Brunton’s Hidden Teaching: if we are localized in the body and locked into the contents of our psychosomatic organism, how can we know anything of a world outside us? Yet, the whiteness of a cloud at a distance from our body is a sensation, and sensations are mental—they must belong to a mind. This leads to the conclusion that one part of our mind is where the cloud is and another part is localized in the body.

The Witness-I receives the Idea of the world and translates it into a world with sensible qualities, and our body is included in that world, the primal image. This image is at a subtle level and includes all the possibilities, not just those that will be actualized. The Kantian categories are involved in fabricating this image; they fabricate the actual objects of experience, whereas the concepts derived from experience are secondary, mere ideality.

But what of the thought, the World-Idea, in PB’s terminology, that is given to the individual mind? Here is where the mystery is. The thought given to the individual mind is not sensible, is not an image: “it is this thought which at one and the same time includes the entirety of manifestation in its universality as far as any one of us as individuals can perceive it.” It contains together all times and places, places which become separated by vast distances when it’s translated into the primal image. In the primal image, light might take eight minutes to travel from the Sun to the Earth, but there is no separation between them in the World-Idea. True knowledge is found at the level of this thought: “that would make all the galaxies but little terrestrial incidences in your Consciousness. That's what they call gnosis. When you can get to these so-called seed-like thought-forms in the heart, spiritual knowledge is yours.”

The classes on 11/18/83, 11/25/83, and 12/9/83 begin with a diagram "Synthesis of Epistemologies," which is presented by Avery Solomon and then examined and refined by Damiani and the class. Damiani suggests that this diagram provides the framework in which to place any epistemology in its proper context. It comprises roughly five stages:

(1) The Overself, the I AM, receives the World-Idea. At this level, the Overself is coextensive with the Soul of the Sun and the Infinite Mind of the Earth, and it knows through insight.

(2) The Sun's reasoning powers, conjoined with the Overself, produce the conditions for a more limited subjectivity (the Witness-I) and a more limited objectivity (the primal image)—these conditions are correlated with the Yogacara's five functions of manas (as described in the text The Awakening of Faith in the Mahayana) on the subjective side and Kant's categories on the objective side. The soul knows through the faculty of understanding at this level.

(3) The Witness-I is identified with the whole primal image, the 360 degrees of the tropical zodiac, the highest level of the Earth’s Intellect. There is knowing without a split between knower and known.

(4) The Witness-I contracts a part of itself to function through a particular psychosomatic organism, which is included in the primal image, and transmits a limited consciousness and the primal image to the heart center of that organism. As included in the primal image, the body with its heart center and brain is at a subtle (taijasa) level.

(5) When the seed-thought and this limited consciousness (the antahkarana of Vedantic epistemology) rises to the brain and goes out to the object, there arises a wakeful (vaishvanara) level of consciousness, and the apparent empirical subject and the more determinate object now seem to be apart from each other. The ego, produced by the identification of the Witness-I with the body, now claims that “it” knows something.

These three classes also review the way the five activities of manas (according to Yogacara) delimit the infinite consciousness of the Overself so it functions as a Witness-I: the activity consciousness awakens the contemplative Overself into activity; the evolving consciousness brings the Overself consciousness into a state of evolving a Witness-I; the representation consciousness allows the Witness-I to represent the entire primordial image; the particularizing consciousness discriminates the real from the image; and the succession consciousness allows this witnessing phase to retain the essences of its experience, a memory of what it distills from experience.

The final two classes also turn to the view of Prasangika Madhyamika, through a study of Andrew Holmes’s paper. Holmes presents some of the arguments that lead them to conclude that nothing exists under its own power, that all things are dependent arisings that lack inherent existence. A thing’s lack of inherent existence is its emptiness.

Damiani observes that this view is appropriate for an analysis of the primal image from the standpoint of the Witness-I. But it is not an epistemology: “What you're left with is a sheer phenomenology. There is no analysis of the knowledge situation.” He goes on to endorse a comment by Avery Solomon, who noted that the Yogacara school, which historically followed the Madhyamika, might be telling the Madhyamikas that “now you have to move from the Witness-I to the Overself consciousness, if you want to get to the ultimate truth.”