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Indefinite monism is a philosophical conception of reality that asserts that only awareness is real and that the wholeness of reality can be conceptually thought of in terms of immanent and transcendent aspects. The immanent aspect is denominated simply as awareness, while the transcendent aspect is referred to as omnific awareness.
Awareness in this system is not equivalent to consciousness. Rather, awareness is the venue for consciousness, and the transcendent aspect of reality, omnific awareness, is what consciousness is of.
In this system, what is real is distinguished from that which exists by showing that everything that we are conscious of exists but is not real since it is contingent upon awareness for its existence. Awareness is the source of its own energetic display -- its omneity. Rather than leading to a solipsistic account of reality, it is claimed through an analysis of consciousness that it is an error on our part to conceive of individuated awareness. That error being found in a conflation of the objects of consciousness with the subject of consciousness within an assumed form of reality of separate physical things. Proceeding from the one necessarily true and unquestionable fact – that we are present to our experiences – an understanding of reality is developed that is neither a materialist nor an idealist conceptualization. This way of viewing the world is referred to as surjective, a metaphorical use of a concept found in mathematical set theory that means a function that works upon every member of a set, where awareness is the function and omnific awareness is the set, in order to distinguish this position from both subjectivity and objectivity.
Within this system anything whatsoever can arise from omnific awareness, thus the use of the term “indefinite” in labeling this monism. What does arise as the existents that we are conscious of is conditioned by the affections of awareness for its display. Thus this system does away with the idea of an active, creative force called free will and replaces it with an active volitional component known as affections, that does not itself create anything, whether movement or structure, but instead, constrains the possibilities of what arises naturally. Arguably, the concept of free will necessitates a world of separation as it implies an actor and that which is acted upon. In this conception there is no such separation. Yet our intuitive modeling of the existents of reality as arising from natural processes, as well as our intuitive understanding that we can ‘cause’ things to happen by our ‘will’, are both cleanly supported.
The distinction between physical phenomena and mental phenomena is also removed by this system. Omnific awareness gives rise to everything – thus the use of the term omnific – and this includes thoughts that phenomenally arise in brains as well as existents that arise phenomenally as things in the world. By removing this distinction this system cuts off the inevitable paradoxes that otherwise arise in philosophical systems. The implications of this move create a number of novel, but necessary, modifications in current categorizations of ideas about reality and our study of it. For instance, ontology – the study of being – is necessitated by the assumption of a physical world of separate things, but when viewed surjectively ontology collapses into epistemology – the study of the methods or grounds of knowledge. Similarly, by removing the distinction between mental and physical phenomena the tensions created in dualist understandings of reality of how the mental and physical interact with one another are dispelled. Surprisingly, the removal of this distinction also completely removes the need for claims of metaphysical realms of being or metaphysical processes, thus collapsing all of reality into this reality.
The implications of this view of reality are carried as far as ethics, where the lack of separation between awareness and that which it gives rise to necessitate a far-reaching adjustment in our ethical beliefs. One such difference that is highlighted for instance is that all conscious beings, which are called “knowings” in deference to this new conception of reality, are qualitatively the same; thus our current distinction between “human beings” and “animals” is based upon a false dichotomy, and this new understanding will necessitate an adjustment in our ideas of who or what can be “property” and who or what can be a “person.”
Idealism in philosophy, also known as philosophical idealism or metaphysical idealism, is the set of metaphysical perspectives asserting that, most fundamentally, reality is equivalent to mind, spirit, or consciousness; that reality is entirely a mental construct; or that ideas are the highest type of reality or have the greatest claim to being considered "real". Because there are different types of idealism, it is difficult to define the term uniformly.
Neutral monism is an umbrella term for a class of metaphysical theories in the philosophy of mind, concerning the relation of mind to matter. These theories take the fundamental nature of reality to be neither mental nor physical; in other words it is "neutral".
In philosophy, physicalism is the view that "everything is physical", that there is "nothing over and above" the physical, or that everything supervenes on the physical. It is opposed to idealism, according to which the world arises from mind. Physicalism is a form of ontological monism—a "one substance" view of the nature of reality, unlike "two-substance" or "many-substance" (pluralism) views. Both the definition of "physical" and the meaning of physicalism have been debated.
Panentheism is the belief that the divine intersects every part of the universe and also extends beyond space and time. The term was coined by the German philosopher Karl Krause in 1828 to distinguish the ideas of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775–1854) about the relation of God and the universe from the supposed pantheism of Baruch Spinoza. Unlike pantheism, which holds that the divine and the universe are identical, panentheism maintains an ontological distinction between the divine and the non-divine and the significance of both.
The doctrine or theory of immanence holds that the divine encompasses or is manifested in the material world. It is held by some philosophical and metaphysical theories of divine presence. Immanence is usually applied in monotheistic, pantheistic, pandeistic, or panentheistic faiths to suggest that the spiritual world permeates the mundane. It is often contrasted with theories of transcendence, in which the divine is seen to be outside the material world.
In Dzogchen, rigpa is knowledge of the ground. The opposite of rigpa is ma rigpa. A practitioner who has attained the state of rigpa and is able to rest in it continuously is called a Rigdzin or Rigma, which may be used as a title either pre- or post-nominally.
Implicate order and explicate order are ontological concepts for quantum theory coined by theoretical physicist David Bohm during the early 1980s. They are used to describe two different frameworks for understanding the same phenomenon or aspect of reality. In particular, the concepts were developed in order to explain the bizarre behaviors of subatomic particles which quantum physics describes and predicts with elegant precision but struggles to explain.
Actual idealism is a form of idealism, developed by Giovanni Gentile, that was influenced by the absolute idealism of G. W. F. Hegel.
Tsongkhapa was an influential Tibetan Buddhist monk, philosopher and tantric yogi, whose activities led to the formation of the Gelug school of Tibetan Buddhism.
In philosophy, transcendence is the basic ground concept from the word's literal meaning, of climbing or going beyond, albeit with varying connotations in its different historical and cultural stages. It includes philosophies, systems, and approaches that describe the fundamental structures of being, not as an ontology, but as the framework of emergence and validation of knowledge of being. These definitions are generally grounded in reason and empirical observation and seek to provide a framework for understanding the world that is not reliant on religious beliefs or supernatural forces. "Transcendental" is a word derived from the scholastic, designating the extra-categorical attributes of beings.
Integral yoga, sometimes also called supramental yoga, is the yoga-based philosophy and practice of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother. Central to Integral yoga is the idea that Spirit manifests itself in a process of involution, meanwhile forgetting its origins. The reverse process of evolution is driven toward a complete manifestation of spirit.
The philosophy of mind is a branch of philosophy that deals with the nature of the mind and its relation to the body and the external world.
The mind–body problem is a philosophical problem concerning the relationship between thought and consciousness in the human mind and body.
Prakāśa is a concept in Indian philosophy translated by various authors as "light", "luminosity", "shining forth", "manifestation", "splendour", "light of consciousness" and so forth.
The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory was published in 1996, and is the first book written by David Chalmers, an Australian philosopher specialising in philosophy of mind. Although the book has been greatly influential, Chalmers maintains that it is "far from perfect", as most of it was written as part of his PhD dissertation after "studying philosophy for only four years".
In Dzogchen, the ground or base is the primordial state of any sentient being. It is an essential component of the Dzogchen tradition for both the Bon tradition and the Nyingma school of Tibetan Buddhism. Knowledge of this ground is called rigpa.
Romantic epistemology emerged from the Romantic challenge to both the static, materialist views of the Enlightenment (Hobbes) and the contrary idealist stream (Hume) when it came to studying life. Romanticism needed to develop a new theory of knowledge that went beyond the method of inertial science, derived from the study of inert nature, to encompass vital nature. Samuel Taylor Coleridge was at the core of the development of the new approach, both in terms of art and the 'science of knowledge' itself (epistemology). Coleridge's ideas regarding the philosophy of science involved Romantic science in general, but Romantic medicine in particular, as it was essentially a philosophy of the science(s) of life.
The Svatantrika-Prasaṅgika distinction is a set of arguments about two different positions of emptiness philosophy which are debated within the Mahayana school of Buddhism. It is most prominently discussed in Tibetan Buddhism where Prāsaṅgika and Svātantrika, are viewed to be different forms of Madhyamaka philosophy.
The study of the mind in Eastern philosophy has parallels to the Western study of the Philosophy of mind as a branch of philosophy that studies the nature of the mind. Dualism and monism are the two central schools of thought on the mind–body problem in the Western tradition, although nuanced views have arisen that do not fit one or the other category neatly. Dualism is found in both Eastern and Western traditions but its entry into Western philosophy was thanks to René Descartes in the 17th century. This article on mind in eastern philosophy deals with this subject from the standpoint of eastern philosophy which is historically strongly separated from the Western tradition and its approach to the Western philosophy of mind.
The TheravadaAbhidhamma tradition refers to a scholastic systematization of the Theravāda school's understanding of the highest Buddhist teachings (Abhidhamma). These teachings are traditionally believed to have been taught by the Buddha, though modern scholars date the texts of the Abhidhamma Piṭaka to the 3rd century BCE. Theravāda traditionally sees itself as the vibhajjavāda, which reflects the analytical (vibhajjati) method used by the Buddha and early Buddhists to investigate the nature of the person and other phenomena.