Non Duality in Vedanta and Spinoza--the Buddha's Negation

Subject: Upanishad (Vedanta)

Dear Gary,
following your instruction, yesterday I have started to read Indian
philosophy. I myself am from the Indian subcontinent. Last night I
was reading the Upanishad ( I am not sure about the English spelling
of the name, western people call it usually Vedanta). And I found
that Upanishad is telling the same thing Spinoza teaches us.
There are 12 parts of Upanishad. I have so far read two of them.
In Koth-Upanishad, the teacher (it is a kind of a dialogue between a
teacher/sage/guru and his disciple) tells the disciple that the
Brahma expresses himself in the world, which is a continuous process.
Brahma loves us, while we love Brahma (this is not what Spinoza
tells, Spinoza tells that we should love God, but should not expect
that God will love us). there is no personal consciousness which is
independent, but all the consciousness are derived from the great
consciousness, that is, consciousness of consciousness, mind of the
minds........
Now, the writing style in Upanishad is rather easy to
understand/follow, while Bertrand Russell accuses Spinoza for an
abstruse style of writing.
Upanishad is interpretted in many ways. This is actually an age-old
eastern philosophical tradtion that the great and popular
philosophical books will be used to propagate new philosophies, that
is interpretting the old and popular philosophies in favour of the
new philosophy. Thus Shankar, a great sage in the 8th century
AD,interpretted Vedanta as monistic, which sounds similar to
Spinoza's monism.

Cheerz !
-Tahmidal
Message: 3 
   Date: Wed May 31, 2006 4:09 am (PDT) 
   From: "Gary Geiser" aahouse10@yahoo.com  
Subject: Re: Upanishad (Vedanta) 
 Hi Tahmidal,
Naturally, the God in the Upanishad "loves us" because the Upanishad 
is exercising a dialectical logic, where we become more real than we 
are to ourselves by our entering the opposite to ourselves which is the 
One of which we are a finite expression.
Spinoza, however, exercises a logistical logic of 0 and 1. (We see 
this in Descartes, Leibniz, Locke, and Hume). But Spinoza peculiar to 
himself, reasons that man is a complex of modes, and he subsists insofar 
as God is affected by a further modification of his substance in the 
order of extension or thought taken to infinity.
The principle loss when we pass on to Buddhism, is that the Buddha 
disgarded the dialectical logic in the Upanishad. Buddhism exercises an 
agonistic logic of 1 and -1. 
For example, the Upanishad says there is a soul, and the world is an 
illusion. So the soul rises up to the One which is itself, as both the 
One and the soul are dead, i.e. dreaming is left of what is real. So 
there is the dialectical process of a unity of opposites: the soul and 
God's dream of which we are a part, and how our perception of its 
ultimate unreality, wins us our return to the One. 
OK. But the Buddha exercises an agonstic logic: he argues that there 
cannot be a soul if there is no world, so he "proves" that there is no 
soul, because there is no world. These two opposed terms are 
IRRECONCIABLE (1 and -1), and so they are proven both to not subsist!