Is the World You See the World That Is?

The Mandukya's four states of consciousness vs Plato's cave.

Mandukya Upanishad vs Plato. Both say ordinary perception is incomplete. The Mandukya maps exactly how, with four states of consciousness that anyone can verify from the inside.

The Dreamer at the Slate

Sometime in the seventh century, in a small hermitage on the banks of the Ganga, a monk named Gauḍapāda sat down with a slate and a stub of chalk to write the strangest sentence in Indian philosophy. The slate was cool against his palm. The morning air smelled of river silt and cow-dung smoke from the cooking fire in the next hut. Before him lay a palm-leaf copy of the Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣad, twelve verses in all, the shortest of the principal Upaniṣads and the one the tradition regarded as sufficient by itself for liberation.

The sentence he was about to set down, which would become verse 2.5 of his Kārikā, was this: the wise declare the states of dream and waking to be one. Not similar. Not analogous. One.

He had his reasons. He had spent years noticing that when you are inside a dream, the dream feels complete. The objects are solid. The people seem independent. The events follow a kind of causal law. Only on waking does the dream show its seams. And then Gauḍapāda had pressed the symmetry further. While you are awake, the waking world also feels complete, the objects also feel solid, the people also seem independent. What evidence do you have that waking will not dissolve in turn, from some further vantage, the way the dream dissolved from this one?

The Māṇḍūkya had already given him his answer in twelve short verses. What Gauḍapāda was now doing, chalk on slate in a hut by the river, was working out what the answer meant. The book he finished that season would travel a thousand years, anchor the whole of Advaita Vedānta, and end up being reinvented, badly, by the Wachowski siblings in a Los Angeles editing suite in 1999. But that is the end of the story. The beginning is the slate.