Making the World that Makes Us

Understanding Sankara's Offering & What's on Offer

This is a long one. If you take your time, I think it may be worth your time. This week is my teacher’s birthday and marks too the day of his passing. Appa loved a good conversation, the kind you can revisit and rethink. Appa wanted conversation to be like art: worth it the first time and worth it every time you return. I make no such claim here but I do wish good conversation on you all.

1. More than Mere Differences of Opinion

It’s been a hard week, events so tragic, absurd, beyond credulity that we shudder and shake even if we are sitting “safely” at home. What do we really know of these tumultuous events? Who can we believe? How would we know if our understandings were mistaken?

Even a cursory glance at the news has us feeling a moral burden we cannot deny. We may tell ourselves we are not the crazy ones but that too exacts its price. Even when you know you didn’t do this or that, that you resisted and are not the agent of the madness, you feel the calumny, the sadness, and the rage of injustice and madness. I rarely attempt to speak for others but in this case, the exception feels warranted.

And then, as it will be for each of us, there are the personal experiences of grief and love in life that bring us closer to the edge of our understandings and sanity. So much with which we must contend, as we try our best to understand, accept what we can’t change and relinquish our desire to control events beyond our capacities to alter.

I cannot speak for you, but I hear myself at once raging and pleading: “Enough! Enough for now! Please!”

The world feels all too real and makes us wonder what difference we can possibly make for the better. How are we to live in this world changes and differences bring us irreconcilable feelings? The way the world appears is nothing like what we wish it were. We could use some help.

I’m not looking for answers that provide a by-pass, a way around or out of our vale of tears. I do wish the storm would abate. And of course one might attempt to withdraw, simply not participate. But even if we attempt to reduce our interest leaving others to engage, there may prove fewer places and fewer ways to take shelter. Waiting out the storm may be a necessity that doesn’t prevent us from suffering from its consequences. I know how privileged I am personally; how much more so much of the world will suffer.

Some are of the view that the events of the world are the result of a deeper intentionality, that there is present some cosmic agency, a god, a sublime energy, a will (in Sanskrit, some call it icchā). These beliefs bring us invariably to a version of the problem of evil: why do bad things happen to good people? Is there a god who could stop it or that could have made a different kind of world? The complexity of explanations fills volumes in the history of religions.

For most of India’s philosophers the burden of explanation as to why things happen and how they unfold is in the concept of karma. Karma itself may or may not have had a creator and it may or may not be possible to intervene in ways that undermine its determinism---that all depends on who we are asking to explain their version of karma.

But even those with a god or gods held to be responsible agents there is near consensus that karma matters. What is karma? Simply put it is action itself, the appearance of cause and effect, of conditional relationships, and it is the assessable consequences that simply operate the world. The world acts and we are subjects of actions as much as we are actors. But as for the action itself, karma functions, as it were, with a certain kind of autonomy.

As Krsna describes the world in the Gita, he reminds us that it whirls “as if it were on a machine.” (cf., 18.61) Stuff happens. We are made and unmade, we act, react, and respond. We experience karma as for the better or for worse because we can and we will. Even if an action or event is understood to have no moral content as such, karma will prompt a moral evaluation.

Indian philosophers don’t often debate the fact of karma, instead preferring to consider how we experience karma as a matter of determinism. Are we bound to karma such that even if we change its course it’s karma really decides? How can we experience freedom within a world of actions when actions are create a situation beyond the actions we can ourselves perform? What would be freedom to in a world in which karma chooses for us what is possible? And so what then about freedom from karma?

One important reason we should consider India’s philosophers as “religious” is because the solutions they propose to our karmic situation invariably locate the problematic in a bondage to liberation model. Liberation doesn’t usually mean something like “dealing with life’s twists and turns with measures of graceful aplomb.” Rather, liberation proposes Siddhas, Buddhas, and other terms for yoga practitioners who represent a blissful release.

We’ll have more to say about that “bliss” soon enough. Suffice to say for now that it’s difficult to discuss karma without liberation even if we take it to mean that we are subject to it and in some very practical sense bound to its terms. India’s philosophers are not usually willing to concede that being bound to karma (as the actions we experience in a mortal life) is itself our endgame. Some might argue that a karma-as-all worldview would place us outside the boundaries of India’s philosophies. But we’ll not be addressing that matter further here.

Given where we started today’s reflection crying uncle and looking for some kind of reprieve from the world’s outrageous fortunes, liberation perhaps shouldn’t be off the table. What I wish to do, however, is dive deeply into one Indian philosopher, Śańkaracaraya who offers us an explanation why and how we experience karma at all. I mean to address his understanding of the causes of our karmic experience without buying into his ideas about liberation theory.

Śańkara’s liberation theory, however, might rightly be deemed the true focus and purpose of his writing at all, and so we can’t possibly avoid that feature of his discussion. But what we can consider are Śańkara’s ideas about how we formulate experience at all.

“Experience” means here the experience of karma that is made by karma and is nothing but karmic. Śańkara has plenty to say about how we experience ourselves and why we do in the ways we do. It’s fair to say that he spent a good bit of his efforts thinking about how the differences we experience make all the difference to our self-understanding.

Whatever we think about the world, it’s never less important to consider how we imagine ourselves and the imaginings we experience as the world. We need not subscribe to Śańkara’s views, but he offers us an opportunity to think and feel more deeply about all this living.

Much of what follows here means to explain Śańkara’s theories about self-identity, who we think we are and what he thinks we really are. It’s a deep rabbit hole, I assure you. But at the conclusion I won’t hesitate to offer an opinion as to why this historically important Hindu philosopher has something to say even if we regard his version of liberation as mere religious tuck.

2. Śańkara and the Worlds We Conjure

In the works that historical scholars regard to be from the “original (ādi-)” Śańkara, , circa 750CE)---the principal philosopher representing early Non-Dualist or Advaita Vedānta--- there is an astonishing consistency of argument and critical vocabulary. Śańkara presumes that our best chance at understanding ourselves demands finding ways to cross the Rubicon of purely personal experiences.

He begins his voluminous commentary on the Vedāntasūtras declaring that you will have your own experiences, but that all such ideas, feelings, and experiences must engaged through hard work of understanding. We need to discern how we form our worlds from within the realms of human experience as actors and actions. Only then, Śańkara insists, can we appreciate the true potential of a human birth (which necessitates his claims of ultimate liberation). For our part, we’ll need to grasp Śańkara’s larger agenda to suss out further his ideas about how we can know but don’t know ourselves.

For the Ādi-Śańkara, the rigor and seriousness of conversation is prerequisite. He’s not much interested in our intuitive responses until we have run the gauntlet of argument. Of the three hundred or so Sanskrit works attributed to “Śańkara,” perhaps eight to ten come from that one hand deftly committed to this tenacious engagement. For this Śańkara, yoga is a conscientious, meticulous, and demanding conversation made of hard-won agreements and critical, life-changing ideas. That itself maybe a worthwhile take-away. In a world in which we understand so little, so few it seems are willing to say that learning to think about our self-construction should occupy our time.

Śańkara honed his razor’s edge by maintaining that the knowledge (jñāna) that provides the sole content of liberation is as rare as it is difficult to fathom. He will not say one “obtains” or reaches liberation because that would suggest a before/not liberated followed by an after/liberated condition, a change, a real transformation (parināma), which he says would make knowledge effected and conditional.

In Śańkara’s view, knowledge is the true state of affairs, it is not the product of thinking much less can it be brought about by any action; the world is knowledge, nothing less (or more) than the oneness that sublates the experience of a world that merely appears to be many. Karma then belongs in the provisional world: it is only as real as we experience it to be. There is no liberation through any form of action, hence Śańkara’s well-known “knowledge alone” (kevala-jñāna) claim.

His vision does, however, leave us with an interesting take on how and why karma turns up in experience at all. Suffice to say, Śańkara will focus on the kinds of mistakes we make that cause us to experience karma as problematic. (N.B., there is no unproblematic karma as far as Śańkara is concerned; only the methods through we can create more and less effective understandings that will bring us to the precipice of liberating knowledge. Knowledge is not a form of action: that is a distinction that Śańkara never forsakes.)

How we live in appearances depends not only on how we formulate ourselves but how “the many” appearances seemingly shapes us. Śańkara intends not to take us beyond appearances---there is no beyond. Rather, he means to show us why the world appears as it does and what we need to know that will free us from the tyranny of actions, whether or not they be chosen or determined.

Śańkara’s agenda is to us past the issue of karma as choosing for us or as our choices; to him there is no ultimate freedom in any form of action. Again, he’ll give us room to think about why we find ourselves in this conditional human predicament. The ultimate solution that the zneness that is the universe has never been truly compromised, only misappreciated.

If the world is truly “one” and only one and never really has been many, then why do we ordinary folks have experiences that tell us the world appears as it does. We don’t (yet) wake up each day to a world that delivers a Oneness that relieves or dismisses the problematics of change and impermanence that plague our ordinary lives. Śańkara not only believes this liberation from the malady that is the human condition is possible; it is his mission to describe the causes of the malady itself.

When we know why we suffer as we do it is in Śańkara’s view possible to alter how we experience our “experiences.” One-ness is a direct experience (anubhava), he says, not an argument that changes us or just another piece of information that alters our understandings. Oneness is the nature of reality that dissolves the problematic itself.

It’s impossible not to see Śańkara’s claims as religious: he posits not only relief from human problematics but a final liberation that totalizes human possibilities, a freedom beyond the reach of the suffering, death, and rebirth (or, to put it the other way, re-death). I mention this again only to emphasize that we’re not here to endorse those views. We can instead work backward, as it were, from Śańkara’s liberation to his creative understanding of the causes of our experience.

So let’s leave aside for the moment what would happen to a person who comes to Śańkara’s conclusion. What’s it like to live in the knowledge that all is One? Śańkara’s conclusion must also be his assumption, namely that the differences and forms we experience as the world are false (or at best useful as provisionary tools) The only truth that cannot be made conditional is that the universe is One because the two things we experience are inventions of conditional mind that does not know Oneness.

As Śańkara sees it, there is no disproof possible of an argument in which the correct understanding is not only irrefragably your own but is only being made by virtue of its apparent necessity. When we arrive at the One it seems we won’t need the difference that the argument means to make. As the Buddhists put it, we will cast off the raft that allowed us to cross the river from misunderstanding to awakening. Sigh. (In the sense of good luck and how’s that working out for you.)

What would that be like? How would we get along? Śańkara evinces little interest in this situation. How does the being recognizing the ultimate truth of the One somehow continue to get up in the morning and have a day. What happens to all the changes and differences that appear to make up life? We no longer suffer, that is clearly an agenda. But it is then also the case that we no longer love nor grieve except as formulations of a limited karmic experience.

If the being-of-Oneness doesn’t need any such world any longer, doesn’t this come perilously close to a kind of nihilism? How do we live in this body of feelings and thoughts that we deem meaningful, made of actions and defined by changes, when it is no longer identified as the true Self (ātman)? Śańkara traditions have all sorts of ideas that translate oneness knowledge into life choices but from inside Śańkara’s argument there appears little interes.

The Ādi-Śańkara texts are consistent on this point: there is no assertion that the material world is real, as Patanjali or Abhinavagupta the Kashmiri Saivite, maintain. A changing world cannot be the realist world and for that idea later Hindus, like Ramanuja, thought Śańkara more Buddhist than Hindu.

For Śańkara the world appears as it does because it is formulated through the machinations of karma, which means through the lens of causality, conditionality, and consequence; that kind of world is not to be confused with the unconditional, immaculate perfection of the One. If the universe really is a universe, as he tells us, then there must also be some explanation of why we see many (changing) things. It’s his conviction that we can overcome the apparent current situation from that of a limited suffering human being to that of a liberation beyond-all-conditions.

Once again, he gives us no clues what liberation is like for the liberated---it is itself incomparable but, like all yoga traditionalists, his uses the word bliss” (ānanda), albeit reluctantly, to describe the sempiternal state. Every Indian tradition teaches a version of liberation (Hindu, Buddhist, Jaina, et.al.) has its own ideas about ānanda. (Śańkara is particularly careful and suspicious of the term since it implies some kind of feeling or experience that involves volatility and alteration.) That we usually translate the term ānanda as “bliss” should strikes us as another feature of its awkward role in describing Śańkara’s liberation-outcome.

“Bliss” isn’t a feeling or an awareness; any such characterization lands us back in a world of comparisons and analogies. Neither can ānanda be an alternative form of pleasure; it’s not a joy forever or enduring ecstasy---it’s got to be other or at the very least nothing like all temporal experiences. A usual tactic is to say that ānanda is beyond-any-description, ineffable, or as Śańkara puts it anirvacanīya, literally “without the can-be-spoken” possibility.

Fair enough, he wants there to be a something beyond our speech, thought, feeling, any and every conditional or causal experience that could possibly be described. Just how that leaves us human at all is a matter we can discuss at another time.

If we are looking for a way to be wholly separated from this vale of tears and malaise of misery that inevitably arrives at our human doorstep, Śańkara has a reality for you while you are yet living. This is what he calls jivanmukti, liberation-while-embodied, though he must rigorously defend the idea that this is not an experience involving change, differences, time, or any of the other features we think of as experience.

Śańkara thinks we can “correct” the ordinary experiences that define us as beings of change, along with our experiences of time, and all the rest that puts us in our bodies and in a limited identity. We can arrive, he says, at a “bliss” that no longer requires enduring or weathering the world. Sounds attractive considering the current state of things, doesn’t it?

The implication of Śańkara’s view is not unlike Patanjali’s recognition of self (ātman) as purușa (person/spirit)---such realization is meant to confer complete immunity and inoculation from all human travails. Is that what you want? For Śańkara our wants could not change what the truth is.

Like Bodhidharma, the Buddhist monk said to have meditated until his legs fell off (the original weebles-wobble but they don’t fall down, n.b., and I’m not even kidding) or Valmiki whose meditative equipoise (the same-same-consciousness, literally sama-dhi) led to his envelopment while meditating into an anthill (also creates the meaning of his name), in Śańkara we get to check in with Oneness-bliss even as we check out of outrageous fortune and the slinging arrows of mortality.

For Śańkara, the knowledge of the One is the cynosure of the drama in which we, the players and the audience, exit the theatre of misery for an enraptured finale. I can’t say I don’t wish it were so.

I’m inclined to decline his offer.

I think I’d prefer another cup of chai and figure out what to do with this temporal, limited, and conditioned life of mine while I still can though I’m just as willing to say YSMMV (Your Spiritual Mileage May Vary). When the human condition catches up with us, we all wish for some kind of relief. Religion usually offers ways. I can see in Śańkara the appeal of manumission from the dread, consternation, sheer horror of the daily news. He wants to remove us as much from the ordinary decline all the more apparent should we have the (mis?)fortune of living long. Śańkara’s got a system that promises that none of these indignities and calamities need be yours. For my part, I think I’ll take the world for the love that promises grief and see what more to make of Śańkara---because there is more to help us through.

3. The Razor’s Edge

Arise! Awake! Attend

when you’ve obtained your desires!

A razor’s sharp edge is hard to cross—the poets tell you:

that is the difficulty of the path.

---Katha Upanisad, 1.iii.14

Let’s leave for another day how Śańkara thinks you arrive at this liberative knowledge and instead focus on why he thinks we are in this messy, anamorphic life of misunderstandings.

He posits three basic reasons. In Sanskrit he calls them: avidyā, adhyāsa, and māyā.

Avidyā is the absence of vidyā, that is, literally without knowledge (of the Knowledge) that is itself liberation. Once you know, you Know. Our ignorance as such is principally a personal, even individual matter that obtains in the experiencer by virtue of the complications of karma that have brought us through innumerable appearances of apparent death and rebirth. Each person must cure this individualized ignorance. Ignorance for Śańkara is less about the things we don’t know or the mistakes we make because we have limited individual capacities. For him, ignorance is not knowing the ultimate truth which cannot be had from any ordinary resources or human experiments.

For Śańkara we’ll need specific tools, like the knowledge-portion (jñāna-khanda) of the Vedas, a capable teacher, and some previous good-enough karma to bring us to nearer to the liberation-in-range possibility. We can relieve ignorance, Śańkara says, only with certain very particular insights that contain the crucial knowledge. We can at another time explore his view of ignorance-destroying great statements, the so-called mahāvākya of the Upanisads and the rest.

What we might cull from Śańkara here is that our not-knowing avidyā experience is not the exception but the rule. In other words, no matter what we do think we know about the world, the world will still present situations, appearances, experiences that we cannot solve with any ordinary knowledge. Avidyā could then be taken to mean not (only) that we are ignorant of the ultimate truth but that ignorance is the malady that describes how no hard-learned knowledge spares us the facts of karma.

The more we know, the better off we might well be but the “absence of knowledge” (avidyā) means that unless there is an ultimate truth we’re going to have to learn how to endure our states of provisional knowing and all our not-knowing. Perhaps then avidyā is not the disadvantage or problem Śańkara thinks it is. Perhaps our ignorance can provoke the curiosity and initiative we need to learn how to live with our limitations and the changes life brings.

Adhyāsa is usually translated “superimposition” but means a kind of misappreciation, a mistake that involves projection. You may well be familiar with Śańkara’s famous example of the snake and the rope. Walking down the road at twilight that appears to be a snake on the path. The snake we see brings with it the dread, fear, and concern of snake-ness we impose on this mistaken identity of the coiled object. As we approach, we realize in a single instant that the snake is nothing more (or less) than a harmless rope. Of course, the rope has never been a snake: the projection reveals that is the problem no longer obtains.

Śańkara claims that such a recognition will render all previous feelings, including the unwanted feelings of snake-fear irrelevant. For him, the important take-away is that we should realize this kind of projection is what dualism, a world of perception based on difference causes us to do to ourselves. When we figure out how adhyāsa does its mischief we not only fix the previous misconception but also understand that correcting and replacing it with another would only demand more fixin’. But what is to stop us from making the same mistake again? Is knowledge really ever final and complete?

Śańkara would have us believe that only knowledge of the ultimate can provide an ultimate result. This is why he maintains that only the knowledge-portion (jnana-khanda) of the Vedas tells us what otherwise no other kind of knowing can.

Śańkara wants us to believe that his idea of knowledge puts a stop to our problem of recurrent projected error. He has in mind something like a gestalt where once we see the truth we can’t un-see it, and won’t mis-see it the next time. Ordinary knowing is inferior to Knowledge because only seeing the rope/snake as the One and not as two can prevent falling into adhyāsa the next time.

For Śańkara, the One means there is no next time because there is no longer a before or after, there aren’t two things--snake and rope--there is only the apparent phenomenon itself. Our perceiver is no longer busy with (small-k) knowledges of difference but sees one without a second (advaita), the non-dual cure for manyness.

It’s this one-and-done solution that Śańkara wants to link back to our individual karma, our personal forms of ignorance (avidyā) to seal the deal: Oneness as a realization is a “state” in which there is no further change (no take backs, do-overs, revisions, etc.) because there was no REAL change in the first place. The rope was never a snake, but neither was the rope/snake not always the same truth (before, during, and after our karmic encounter on the road). Our actions didn’t change the truth; our knowledge revealed it as knowledge. For Śańkara such understanding means that with our ignorance of oneness cured, the problematic superimpositions of difference will simply vanish because projection was never the real truth.

In his view there wasn’t any real problem of change nor any of the implications of changeable-experience; the problem itself is made up of a falsity that wouldn’t occur if we had the Knowledge that every instance of this-and-that is merely our perception of difference. Once we shift our perception we see how perception itself forms the shifting world.

Śańkara’s not-two (advaita) is meant to cure not only the misappreciation that things are ultimately different but to tell us that it is our perception of difference that is the culprit. Thus, his adhyāsa unlike the more individualized avidyā is a shared human malady inasmuch as it appears to manifest in all of us.

Projection works its way through each of us but apparently invokes comparable responses in all of us. Śańkara’s solution to our false projections of difference is this Knowledge that should not to be confused with knowing. What he means is that knowing would suggest a process of change, the not-knowing-to-knowing event, while Knowledge does not come into being nor does it change, it is simply the state of affairs.

Certainly, from our rather more mundane vantage points, the world that is our projections involves not only seeing true from false (it was a rope, not a snake) but offers relief when we get it right. We project as a matter of course, or so it seems. Getting it “right” is no small matter because getting it wrong is clearly worse. But unlike Śańkara for whom there is an ultimate salve, we mere mortals may “correct” our projections and find out that the truth isn’t all we wish it were. The perils of truth notwithstanding, Śańkara’s theory of projection reminds us ‘tis better to get it right than wrong whether or not truth provides what we wish were true.

If we remove from Śańkara the oneness agenda of realization we might suggest that ignorance and projection place the problems we see in ourselves and in the world squarely within our perceptual experience. We see of the world what we can perhaps properly understand, ignorance and projection notwithstanding, but that our assessments are always of our own making. Or are they?

4. Living in the Matrix of Māyā

If somehow you have gotten this far and still have any Śańkaras left to give, let’s call that a miracle even if we dare not think it ānanda. Śańkara is about to take us to the more interesting point that explains how making our way through a world will always appear to be more than of our own inner making. Śańkara will offer another very particular understanding, but his version of māyā invites us to think about how the world makes us and what we can do about that.

We too often translate māyā as illusion, not a poor choice of words so long as we understand an illusion to be an appearance in which measure is involved: māyā linguistically leads us back towards the more ancient Proto-Indo-European verbal root that also gives us the English “measure” or meter. To measure we’ll need a measurer, something to measure, and the measure itself.

This is also a fine starting point for māyā since māyā does not explain the Oneness that Śańkara wants us to know but instead the process that causes us an even deeper confusion about ourselves. In ignorance and superimposition Śańkara placed the burden of misappreciation on our individual experience. With māyā we find ourselves in whole’nother kettle of fish.

That students of yoga and Indian philosophy view māyā as a problematic idea, a trickery or confusion, used as a pejorative term, may in no small measure be a feature of Śańkara’s influential understandings. Let us for a moment then consider māyā as a distinctive term Śańkara uses to describe the situation of our unrealized collective and surrounding malaise that brings us to human suffering.

Māyā is a complexity that In Śańkara’s view operates as a kind of inheritance of human birth. If we make it to this world, the world that bears us causes us confusion and pain. Śańkara thinks that the māyā defining the problems we are apparently experiencing are caused māyā. Māyā then is a kind of recurrent loop: the station from which we would like to escape invariably leads only to another form of māyā, thus causing all efforts to prove futile. Māyā can only encompass and surround us; we don’t live but for the māyā that creates the measurements of our existence.

So what is māyā according to our ever-precise Ādi-Śańkara?

Sanakra is on to something here no matter what we think of his Oneness universe and all the rest.

For Śańkara māyā is our consciousness environment, the context of the cosmos itself sustaining the appearances that cause us to see the world the way we do. If we are living individually through our ignorance (avidyā) and as a matter of our commonly projecting (adhyāsa) appearances onto formulated appearances in consciousness, Śańkara considers why we do those things to ourselves. His answer is that we live in a world that already made of māyā. Or to put it another way, the world in which we live (as limited beings) is the māyā that forms our experiences.

Let’s make this both easier to understand and perhaps applicable to our lives.

Śańkara is reminding us that we don’t live only in the world we invent as individuals through our conscious experiences. We live in a world that makes conscious experiences happen, the kind that makes such events of perception possible, a world that is the context, the environment, the situation that envelops and surrounds experience. The world is all that is the case, said Wittgenstein. The case invents the case-maker and whatever case-making we endeavor to make.

Śańkara thinks the world we experience is indeed a mental construct but unlike our Buddhist friends he thinks the world “out there” appears as more and as other than mere personal experiences: that’s the māyā that makes us. Of course, Śańkara doesn’t want to stop there; he wants there to be a solution to māyā’s problematics from within māyā. The solution he proposes need not do any more than show us that māyā doesn’t make the self because, in his view, the self is unmade.

Śańkara doesn’t say the world of māyā somehow knows itself to be making māyā or that it possesses intentionality; he doesn’t say māyā has a purpose or a plan. Śańkara’s with-qualities (saguna) god hasn’t thrown us into māyā’s clutches any more than it needs to relieve us of our apparent malaise. Rather, he treats māyā as the way in which we are conditioned, informed and formed by something that isn’t principally a personal invention or choice. To state his case plainly, the world we think we create is creating us. The māyā that binds us however cannot bind the truest unmade self, the atman.

To take our step past Śańkara’s view, we can think of this māyā as the totality of conditions, terms, and “facts” that shape our individual experience. We came into a world of māyā, we can only live in the māyā that is our given world, and there is for all intents and purposes no other world than our māyā. How we (think we) employ agency and implement choice in our lives, with whatever autonomy and self-determination and “freedom” we believe we have, it is at least as true that our environment, society, history, even genetics and the zeitgeist of our age is simultaneously inventing us.

If there is no escape from māyā then perhaps there is some relief in what māyā may provide in consolations like love and the privilege to live with ourselves knowing we are our makers but as much made. Māyā invites then an acceptance of the world as a priority for living in it as well as we can.

Before we choose our lives, our self-inventions, māyā has chosen for us. Māyā is the sum of all the “things” that must be for us to be at all. Some of those “things” function in a kind of a priori way, meaning that they must exist for there to be existence. (Kant thought time and space were just such a priori terms for our being in the world.) But the point of māyā isn’t to assert that these conditions and terms are any more real than our experiences of them, only that our experiences couldn’t happen without these appearances.

The other day in the dentist’s waiting room I sat watching virtual fish swimming in their virtual tank on what appeared to be (and most certainly was to my māyā-functioning mind) a computer-generated image. The virtual water in which the generated images of fish were swimming is a requirement, a feature of how they “live,” of how they have any reality at all. The virtual fish tank provides a cosmos (inside a cosmos in which it appears); and without their water, the necessary environment in which they must operate, they would not be fish at all.

As fish (of any kind) they neither control nor manage their environment; they would have no possibility of being at all. The fish are wholly dependent on the world that surrounds them, that informs their experience and determines their existence. This world is the māyā that makes a world, their world made with worlds that are generating worlds. Their world is, of course, as virtual as they are, and is nothing more than an invention of an invention, made of all the apparent constituent elements. The fish don’t know and don’t need to know they are virtual or if they are real. Their experience is not their reality, their reality is an experience of them.

Thus, māyā means not only to explain if we are having an experience of ourselves (as humans, not as virtual fish) but how our being is the world is a feature of the māyā that creates us. The distinction between being virtual---a merely generated appearance---and being “real” is but a feature of our perception and a feature of being in a perception, reality of measurements of māyā.

We believe that the virtual fish only exist in a virtual fish tank, which of course is an invention made by a host of other inventions. What makes the fish appear as they do is our invention, but what makes them appear to be fish is the sum of the total matrix in which they exist. They can’t be fish without this matrix, this whole “world” that creates the possibility of they being fish at all. They exist not knowing they are invented while every bit appears to be exactly what it is, determining the fish’s existence without its agency or consent. The fish, the water, the tank---everything about it---is made by the entire situation on which each it depends while nothing exists apart from the entire situation: that is the māyā.

If we as human beings knew we are as much made by the world as we invent ourselves, what difference would that make?

Śańkara thinks that when we know we’re being invented and at the same time inventing ourselves, we know something that others likely do not: we know the differences that make the world appear as it does are all that stands between us as knowers and the māyā that otherwise sustains us. Knowledge about the māyā matrix tells us our experiences of identity are formed in a deeper complexity than merely our individual minds. Our vaunted self-determination is itself a determination of the māyā that is creating us.

We are apparently at once inventing and being invented by our worlds. If we think this is really happening then the difference between that “real world” and its virtuality, its perception, is what we are choosing to measure. Is our autonomy a feature of the conforming factors we could not exist without? This is the core question to ask about a world of māyā.

When we know we are being made by factors, contingencies, situations, by an entire matrix of information that we as agents, as selves and persons do not fully control and did not invent then we understand ourselves as creatures of the māyā. As we measure out our lives, we find ourselves made of measurements: wherever we look, whenever we think we are functioning solely as selves inventing our worlds and making our choices, we consider how we must be for our individuality to exist.

As Śańkara would have it, the difference we experience as individuals is not ultimately real but rather what makes for our misappreciation of the one reality that includes (and only apparently invents) us in māyā. Were it not for the universe being itself, our experience would be mere falsity, a dream, a fantasy of māyā. Instead, we are inventions of the inventing power that appears within our bodies, our minds, our actions (karma) that appear as cause and effect. That is the māyā that we need to recognize as a feature of our inventing and invented experience.

We experience ourselves as the doers, the makers of the world and that, as Śańkara tells us, is true, that is what we are doing. But what we need also to understand from our by definition limited point of view is that the world we are making has long been busy making us. What exactly makes the world make us?

Śańkara says our process of being is a beginningless (anādi-) fiction of invention that will continue to baffle us, consume us, cause us to live and die so long as we fail to understand that it is difference itself that is the reason the world appears as it does. Difference makes all the difference until we realize, as Śańkara says, that difference is the creation of measuring māyā-mind that ultimately exists only as the singularity of being.

What that would feel like or how we would know we are that one reality? Well, when we know it we won’t need to ask but we will somehow taste the immortal as ānanda even while living (jīvanmukti). I can’t presume to tell you what that feels like because Śańkara knows all explanations hit only the marks they will.

What we can learn, I think, from Śańkara’s conception of māyā is that our thoughts and feelings, our experiences as individuals are shaped and formed, stamped, hammered, milled, developed, encultured, instructed, and made by forces we experience as greater and even as other and more than ourselves. Like the fish in the tank, we’re not the sole creators of life’s experiences but initiates into the experience of ourselves in the waters of reality.

I found myself this past week feeling the burdens of unknowing, projecting and assessing the appearances on the screens of my consciousness. But I also felt deeply the sense of being made no matter what sort of making I was doing. Reading Śańkara reminded me that it’s human to think about how we self-invent and feel like inventions for better and worse, creators of our own refuge even if we never feel truly free.

It has been a particularly torturous and confusing time in America’s history and for the world. There has been so much unnecessary death and violence, inexcusable criminality, corruption, and stupidity. I know I often feel a kind of helplessness, shame, and implication as an American, regardless of whether I have personally rejected and resisted the lawless, rogue regime that rules.

When I look into India’s philosophies, I don’t find solace. But I do find ways of thinking about how I construct and am a construction of the world as I make it and as it makes me.. And this world that is māyā proves not be an unreal world but rather a world that we mustn’t leave unmeasured even if we are not in control nor capable of changing merely by wishing it so. We are players in a matrix of experience for which we must be responsible and is shaped from within our perceptions. But much to our chagrin it seems the world will not be made solely from our will or even our actions. We are also made of māyā and from within the māyā we must learn to live with our measurements and the consequences of our differences.

***p.s. I have spared the reader the textual citations both from Sanskrit and scholarship but would be happy to provide. Everything I say about Śańkara here is meant to fall squarely within the realm of received scholarship while everything I propose or demur are my own ideas. Thanks again for the good conversation.