S; It sounds so exciting the way you weave together all the different views…
AD: That was one of the things I was so hopeful of doing, because when I devised that scheme—in other words when I started working with the astrological symbolism and I began to recognize that what these people have been talking about, and by these people I mean almost any philosophic school, that I could illustrate in terms of the astrological symbolism, the point of view that they were expounding. That I could use the entirety of the symbolism to show, for instance, where a Buddhist might be coming from, or where a Vedantist or a Naya logician might be coming from. The project I had in mind was that I would like to get all these schools, which I feel each one is enunciating a certain truth. I mean you don't have a school of philosophy existing for a thousand years without it having some grain of truth in it. Let me put it this way, let me start differently. When I started studying philosophy, I was a young man, I got very interested in it. And I started studying all the various schools of philosophy whether East or West because at an early age I started reading Eastern literature. I was just as comfortable there as in Western literature and I felt that it's not conceivable that a sage like Sankara, and another one like Buddha, could possible disagree, it wasn't conceivable to me. And yet the fact remains that on the one hand you have the great Buddhist tradition and on the other hand you have the Advaitic tradition and that for a couple of hundred years or a thousand years they've been quarreling with each other. So I found that very difficult to accept and understand. Within the Hindu tradition the Naya logicians are arguing against the Vedantist or within the Buddhist tradition the Yogacara school is arguing with the Madhyamikas or in the western schools you have the rationalists against the empiricists and the empiricists against the idealists and the idealists against the rationalists and on and on it goes. And I couldn't accept it and there was something in me saying there is somewhere a totally comprehensive symbol that will include the divergences and everything that is fundamentally true in any one of these schools can be shown and symbolized.
So, when I got the idea that I might find this in the astrological symbolism because it is, in my opinion, the only schemata that has the initial premises that are comprehensive enough to include the variety of philosophic traditions. So I went to work on that, and over the period of years I began to realize that I could show, in terms of the astrological symbolism the validity of the Buddhist position, I could show the validity of the Vedantic position. And as we started doing that it became really exciting. Because there, within that I was able to do it. So if I took the Platonic tradition I could lay out their whole scheme in terms of the symbolism, if I took the Vedantic tradition I could do the same thing. And in the case of let's say a school like the Naya logicians in India, or let's take a representative philosophy of the twentieth century, Santayana, I could show their premises, I could show what part of their premises are valid and why it would have a kind of eternal validity, but what parts of it had to be shed and thrown out and disregarded. And then after a while, most of these schools do have certain presuppositions that are meaningful and valid. And so you began to get this totally comprehensive view of how they interface each other, how they interlock, how they interrelate, and that the notion that there is any one tradition that could do that became unnecessary, that they're all different facets of this one incomprehensible truth. So that was a project I'd like to see through but I don't know now that I will have the time now to do it.
S: Is it necessary for people to protect their own beliefs, to believe that they are the only valid ones? Otherwise it would not mean so much?
AD: A lot of that comes from--individuals are genetically, ontogenetically and philogenetically so constituted that it predetermines what kind of philosophy they're going to believe in. So that in astrology where you can see the indefinite plurality of different views, you can see that they can all be subsumed under the astrological symbolism where you're working with 360 ideas, which can be combined in such a variety of ways, that certain personalities are organized or constituted by these. And then these ideas are paramount for him, whereas another person is psychically organized and constituted in such a way that a different set of ideas are of paramount importance to him. And when you begin to see that, then you begin to see the validity in each person's view about reality as he understands it but you also see the limitations. Because no one is comprehensive enough to include this indefinite plurality of ideas which constitutes our mind's functioning. So once you begin to see that, there's a kind of feeling of joy and liberation, liberation from the fact that you don't have to believe that this is the only right idea or that's the only right idea, but that all of them in their totality constitutes different facets of the truth and then that ultimate truth has to be realized for oneself personally.
So I saw this in terms of the article I just read. This one where he (The Notebooks of Paul Brunton) says that:
All the conflicting doctrines that have appeared in the past were not meaningless and not useless. They played their part most usefully even where they seem most contradictory. They were really in collaboration not in opposition. We need not disdain to illustrate the highest abstract principles by the homeliest concrete anecdotes… A full view of the universe now replaces all the partial views which were alone available before and which embody merely single phases of the discovery of truth. Thus the analytical movement which uncovered the various pieces of this world puzzle, must now yield to a synthetic process of putting them together in a final united pattern. 12:2.186
And that's what I had in mind trying to do. To try to put all these pieces in a pattern and show how to a certain extent they are all valid and also at the same time how they're limited, in one way how they're complementary and in another way how they're in opposition. And the only thing that I felt was big enough to do that was the symbolism that we find in the astrological mandala. So that was really the pet project I had in mind.
The nice thing is it's got such a liberating effect, because when you see the value in the premises that the Vedantist has and then you see the value and the premises that the Buddhists have, you're free from the conflict. So before when we were talking and someone asked about the conflict that was taking place between the Vedantists and the Buddhists. The Vedantists would speak about the self-identity, the identity of the knower, it must be, otherwise we couldn't account for the continuity of knowledge and be able to validate it. And then the Buddhists said no, no, the world is changing instant by instant, there is no identity of an "I." There could be a continuity but no identity.
Now if we understand another perspective, we take the point of view from Plotinus, or better still from one of the discussions Ramana Maharishi gave. If we think of the movie projector and on the one hand we have the reel with the film in it which is being projected on the screen, and every instant there's a new still being projected. Now within each picture that's being projected you could take that as the position of the Buddhists. The Buddhists are saying, (Q: end side 1, begin side 2) look here is one picture, then the next picture, then the next picture. Now within those pictures where are you going to find a self-identical "I"? Because still `A' is different from still `B,' still `B' is different from still `C.' So where's this "I" that you are talking about, that is self-identical? Now, the Vedantist could come along and say, "That picture there, is being illuminated by the light which is in the projector, and it is this light which is always self-identical with itself and which is the same light regardless of how often the picture is being projected. So one film can follow after another, and there is constant change, the world idea is changing every moment in time. All right? But the light that illuminates that remains self-identical. Well, if that's true then both points of view are true and you have to see that if you take the premises of the Buddhist that the World-Idea is in a state of high vibratory oscillation, changing from instant to instant, then from that point of view there is no identity. If you take the point of view that you're the light in the projection which is always shining regardless of what film is being played out, then there is an "I" which is continuous with itself. So then, both points of view are true. You have a knower which is self-identical with itself. This light which is in the projector illuminating the film. But the other point of view is true too. If you think of the World-Idea, as a film, the oscillation from instant to instant of the world-Image, then within that you can't speak about there being any self-identity, and the world is in a state of constant flux. Well then why can't you hold on to the two of them? The two views perfectly explain everything.
And the fact of the matter is that someone like PB or Plotinus explains it that way. On the one hand there is the soul or the mind which is self-identical with itself, always remains what it is, on the other hand there is the content, the World-Idea which is flashing into it from instant to instant. Now the soul tends to identify with the psycho-somatic organism or a body which the World Idea contains within itself, and now since that soul or mind is identified with that psycho-somatic entity it takes itself to be an "I." But the Buddhist would say, how could you be an "I" because from instant to instant you are not the same, so they will be right in pointing out that "this" has no "I." But on the other hand the Buddhists will be wrong if they insist that there is change without a consciousness which doesn't change, but is aware of change. So the two points of view are not in opposition, they're complementary.
Looking into Mind Copyright 2019