The Many Hats Worn by Brahman

A girl of eight sat under a starry night, staring at a star fathoming what it is. She asked her father what the stars are. The father said, “The stars and you are of the same making.” The girl astonished, stared at the star, still not knowing what it is, but now each time she looked afar, she was filled with a sense of wonder, at even what humans are. She asks her father, “I am a star?” The father says, “No sweetheart you aren’t a star. Neither is the star you. You both are same yet different.” The girl falls silent.

Since the dawn of philosophical thought, the human has found itself awestruck and perturbed by the true nature of reality and existence; it wrestles with, bargains with, negotiates with its own mental faculties over what even is the universe in which it is embedded. On one hand the empirical sciences developed fields like quantum physics, theoretical physics, and relativity theory in order to attempt explaining what the nature of the universe is, on the other hand, we have religion which claims to explain the universe through willed creation by a personal God. Interestingly… both sides find themselves deficient in arriving at a decisive answer, even though they’d claim the other side to be charlatans. Philosophers find themselves at an awkward middle point between the two: they neither have empirical evidence to fall back on, nor are their claims mere assertions without evidence. Philosophers claim to arrive at the answer using rhetoric, logic and non-empirical methods, since for the questions philosophy concerns itself with, it’s a material impossibility to conjure up empirical evidence.

In this essay we shall focus our attention on three such philosophers: Plotinus, Adi Shankaracharya, and Spinoza. We shall attempt at understanding what each one of them has to say about the true nature of being, where each of them resonate, and where each of them are dissonant against each other. The reader here may be preliminarily acquainted with the work of Shankara through his philosophy of Advaita Vedanta, or at least through one of the mahavakyas of which “Aham brahmasmi” and “Tat tvam asi” are namely two. Alongside a general exploration, another motive of this essay as it stands, is to enumerate and explicate the similarities between the thoughts of Shankara to that of Spinoza and Plotinus to illustrate that monism isn’t a thought which finds itself at a dead end at Advaita Vedanta, but rather Advaita Vedanta is one path in the grand scheme of monistic thought. Spinoza’s Substance and Plotinus’ The One are two more such paths.

The One: Neoplatonist Borrowings from The Vedas

Plotinus, a philosopher few have heard the name of outside philosophy circles, but who is one of the pioneers of monist thought in the western tradition, shows striking parallels to the Advaitin concept of the Brahman through his concept of “The One”. Now the natural question arises—what is “The One”? I’ll let Plotinus himself put forward the preliminary explanation as I feel he has put it in one of the most poignant ways possible. In his Ennead VI.9.3 Plotinus puts forth: “It is none of all the things of which it is the source, and yet it is all of them, for all must come from it.” To the keen amongst you this line might appear logically inconsistent or even paradoxical; “How can a thing be none, but all? The intersection set of $P$ and $\neg P$ is empty” one might say. To resolve this tension let me give an analogy. Sunlight is not the plant, neither is it the deer that feeds on the plant, neither the tiger which feeds on the deer, but it is everything because without sunlight there is no tiger, no deer, no plant. There is simply no life. All is Dead.

The keener yet amongst you may have also noticed that the one lined explanation Plotinus gives for The One is uncannily similar to the method of Neti Neti given by Yajnavalkya. You are in good company as you are certainly not the first nor the last who have made or will make this observation. Was Plotinus influenced by the Vedas? The academic consensus largely says no and that the convergence is a coincidence; but as you will see later this “coincidence” is actually instrumental in a question I shall raise in the conclusion.

One nontrivial area where Advaita and Plotinus’ concept of The One diverge, is their respective treatments of the mundane, terrestrial physical world. You may have encountered a fragment of this shlok once in your life:

ślokārdhena pravakṣyāmi yaduktaṃ granthakoṭibhiḥ |
brahma satyaṃ jaganmithyā jīvo brahmaiva nāparaḥ ||

In this shlok Adi Shankara declares the brahman alone to be real, and the physical lived world a mere illusion to be at last, surmounted. On the contrary the physical world for Plotinus is as real as The One, which he explains very lucidly in Ennead V.2.1 (On the Origin and Order of the Post-Primal): “Because the One is perfect and completely self-sufficient, it does not seek anything; rather, its sheer superabundance causes it to ‘overflow’ (hypererreē), and this outward outpouring brings about the successive levels of reality.” Plotinus does not claim one level of reality to be an illusion, how the Plant is not an illusion compared to the Sun, but because of the Sun, the plant is—precisely this is the relationship between The One and the world. Now that we have undertaken a thorough preliminary study of the comparison between The One and Brahman, we are now ready to look at a completely Independent (not quite) monist thought: that of Spinoza and his Substance.

The All-Pervading Substance

“I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings.”

Above we find a quote by none other than Albert Einstein which proclaims his faith in something he called A “Spinoza’s God”. You might now be wondering what is Spinoza’s God? Name anything. Literally. Name anything physical or real; that what you name is in Spinoza’s God. “Wait what?” everyone reading this thought. Spinoza said his God or Substance is omnipresent: “Quicquid est, in Deo est, et nihil sine Deo esse neque concipi potest” which translates to “Whatever is, is in God, and nothing can be or be conceived without God”. The substance of Spinoza is causa sui and per se concipitur which mean self-caused, and self-conceived respectively. He describes the substance in his Ethics in Part-2 Proposition 43 as “Sane sicut lux seipsam et tenebras manifestat, sic veritas norma sui et falsi est.” (“Indeed, just as light reveals both itself and darkness, so truth is the standard of itself and of what is false.”). The ones paying attention may quickly make an electrifying connection; what Spinoza describes the Substance to be, what he analogises the Substance to be is word for word what Shankaracharya describes Brahman to be: svayaṁ-prakāśa.

The Substance is infinite and sine forma. It is sarva-vyāpi like Brahman because whatever must exist, exist in it. The parallels don’t stop there. For Spinoza the Substance has infinite attributes and humans perceive those attributes in two modes: the thought and the body. This mirrors what Shankara says about the Vyavaharika Saguna Brahman. Where the two ultimately diverge sharply is their treatment of the physical world. While Spinoza maintains the physical world to be real and pumps the brakes right at the cliff, Guru Adi Shankaracharya ain’t no chicken and drives off the cliff at top speed and ultimately declares even the physical world and the duality of the self to be a mere illusion brought about by ignorance. It is clear where Plotinus and Spinoza stop, and where Shankara takes over the steering wheel.

Why should You Care?

This brings us to the concluding section of the essay where I urge the reader to ask more questions rather than expecting an answer. Recall the section in Plotinus where I said that the connection between him and Advaita Vedanta is a coincidence. Expanding on that, Spinoza too was not aware of the philosophy of Advaita Vedanta despite having developed a system startlingly similar to it. Could the convergence of three distinct and independent streams of monist thought separated by hundreds and thousands of years be a mere coincidence? It can be. It can be nothing but a coincidence, or it can be evidence of something. What can it be evidence of you may ask—for that I offer no answer. A Greek of the 3rd century C.E, a Portuguese Jew of the 17th century, and a Vedic teacher of the 8th century, some of the greatest minds ever arrive at ideas so similar independently you’d think they were part of a greater movement. It is though only fitting, as The One, the Substance and Brahman at their core are not separate entities, in The One, the Substance and Brahman, The One, the Substance and Brahman lie.