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Turiya, the “Fourth”, as a
Remainder Variable A procedural genealogy from
the Māṇḍūkya to “green sheep
in Orion” by the druid Finn 0. Method and register This
essay stays inside the modern druid’s established non-judgemental register: 1. No
devotional assumptions. 2. No “it
must be true because it’s revered.” 3. Treat
doctrines as procedural artefacts: conceptual tools that arise to
solve local problems of orientation, coherence, and continuance. 4. “Meaning”
is operational: a term means what it reliably does in a cognitive ecology
(what it lets you classify, stabilise, teach, repeat). The druid
does not ask: “Is ‘Turiya’, the ‘Fourth’
spiritually inspiring?” but the harder question: What kind
of thing is turiya—a
discovered feature, a logical remainder, or a culturally stabilised fiction? 1. The origin: turīya is not
mystical—it's ordinal The word turīya is plain
Sanskrit: “the fourth.” This
matters because it explains the type of move being made in the
originating text. Ordinals appear when you are doing classification. So the first observation is
procedural: Turiya enters the tradition not as a “found object,” but as a
bookkeeping label within a state taxonomy. 2. The base problem: three modes are observed—and that
creates a remainder The Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣad (c. 1st–3rd century CE, hence emerged about 500 to 600 years
after the earliest Upanishads) starts from a familiar phenomenological triad: ·
Waking (jāgrat):
perception + action + public world ·
Dreaming (svapna):
experience-like content without public constraint ·
Deep sleep (suṣupti):
minimal or absent reportable content Whether
or not one endorses any metaphysics, these are recognisable modes.
They are “data” in the loose, human sense. Then
comes the crucial conceptual tension: 1. I can
later say, “I was awake,” “I was dreaming,” “I slept.” 2. Therefore,
something is treated as continuous across the discontinuity of modes. 3. But if
you only have the three modes, you have nowhere to “put” that continuity. So the system does what systems
do when a classification breaks: It
introduces a remainder term. Call it
X. Procedurally: ·
If A, B, C are mutually exclusive modes, ·
and yet there is a sense of “I” spanning A, B, C, ·
the model introduces a term that is not-A,
not-B, not-C (hence apophatic). That is
not a discovery. 3. The original “definition”: negative predicates are a
warning label The druid
uncovered a key diagnostic: the Māṇḍūkya
characterises turiya largely
by negations (i.e. apophatically): ·
not inward-knowing ·
not outward-knowing ·
not both ·
not a mass of knowing ·
not describable ·
not graspable by ordinary commerce Whatever
else one thinks, this style is telling: it’s the
style used when you do not have an operational handle, so you fence
the term off by saying what it is not (as in Negative Theology). This is
exactly how a remainder variable behaves in serious systems: ·
You cannot specify it positively without
collapsing back into one of the three modes. ·
So you
define it by exclusion. In the
modern druid’s procedural idiom: Turiya is a
compression artefact: a label for whatever must be posited to keep the
tri-state model coherent. 4. What “turiya” originally
is and is not To keep
the analysis clean, distinguish three possibilities: (A) A fourth state (like a fourth mode of
experience) This is
how modern spiritual culture often treats it: “enter turiya,” “abide in turiya,” “the fourth state.” But this reading
is structurally unstable: if it’s a state among states, it should have positive
(i.e. cataphatic) markers (entry
conditions, exit conditions, reportable invariants). Māṇḍūkya
largely refuses those. (B) A metaphysical substance (an ontological ground) This is
the later Advaitic usage: turiya as Ātman/Brahman. But this
leaps from a classificatory remainder to a cosmic claim. (C) A remainder term (a logical placeholder for
continuity across mode-switching) This is
the reading the druid developed: turiya is the name given to the “whatever-it-is”
implied by the fact that the three states are tracked as three. Under
(C), turiya is not
“more real.” It is what your model needs once you start partitioning
experience into three mutually exclusive modes while retaining a single
indexical “I” across them. That is
why the druid repeatedly returned to the same spine: Turiya begins as a solution to a bookkeeping problem. 5. “Was it confirmed elsewhere?”—the independence test The druid
explored the decisive epistemic question: Was turiya confirmed
in any other independent text? The core
point established is not merely lexical (“do other texts use the same
word?”), but structural: ·
Is there an independent tradition, not
deriving from Māṇḍūkya’s
framework, that requires and introduces the same “fourth” remainder? ·
Is there a cross-tradition convergence that is
not simply later commentary echoing the same seed? The druid
held the strong line: ·
You can find waking/dream/sleep everywhere
because they are universal phenomena. ·
The “fourth” is not universal; it is a particular
conceptual move in 1 Upanishad prompted by a particular modelling
choice (preserving a continuing “self” across the three). So the independence test cuts
like a blade: ·
Waking/dream/sleep =
observationally grounded ·
Turiya = model-dependent remainder If the
remainder were a robust discovered phenomenon (like “REM sleep”), one would
expect independent identification, positive constraints, and reproducible
markers. Such independent
identification, and so verification, does not happen. What you find instead is inheritance
and commentarial amplification. In short: Turiya does not behave like an independently discovered datum.
It behaves like a term propagated by a lineage. 6. The crucial category error: mistaking
model-necessity for world-fact At this
point the druid hit the philosophical nerve: A
remainder term can be necessary for a model without being a thing
in the world. Examples
(non-mystical): ·
In classical mechanics, “centre of mass” is a
powerful construct; it is not an extra object floating in the system. ·
In accounting, “goodwill” balances a sheet; it
isn’t a measurable substance in the warehouse. ·
In grammar, the “subject” is a structural role;
it isn’t a physical entity you can point at. Turiya, in the
druid’s analysis, functions like these: a stabilising construct. The
category error happens when the culture says: “Because
the model requires X, X is therefore an ontological entity.” That step
is exactly what turns a useful placeholder into a metaphysical “fact.” 7. The green sheep analogy: why it is not merely a joke The druid
then speculated, very precisely: Is turiya as
provable and meaningful as green sheep living in the constellation of Orion? The
analogy is sharp because it isolates epistemic status, not emotional
resonance. “Green
sheep in Orion” has these properties: 1. It is
grammatically valid. 2. It can be
imagined without contradiction. 3. It is not
independently verifiable. 4. It is
meaningful only within a story-space that grants it. Under the
druid’s analysis, turiya—once it is inflated into a
“fact”—shares the same epistemic profile: ·
It is linguistically stable (“the
Fourth”). ·
It is conceptually coherent inside the
model that motivates it. ·
It lacks independent operational verification as
an entity. ·
Its “obviousness” is produced by repetition
and cultural embedding, not by detection. So the point of the analogy is
not to be rude; it is to separate: ·
semantic coherence (a
phrase can make sense) ·
ontological warrant (a claim
is constrained by independent evidence). Hence the
crisp conclusion the druid reached: Turiya is not
“false” in the way an arithmetic error is false. And the
druid’s sting was perfect: ·
The sheep never acquired monasteries (at least not yet). ·
Turiya did. Which is
to say: what differs is not truth-status but institutionalisation. 8. Why this mattered to the druid’s Procedure Monism Even
before we later scholastic machinery was into it the
thought experiment, the druid had already delivered a core Procedure Monism
diagnostic: ·
The world (and the mind, as structuring procedure) runs in quantised,
discontinuous iterations. ·
A system that notices its own mode-shifts will
generate indexical continuity artefacts (“I,” “witness,” “the Fourth”) as
stabilisers. ·
Those artefacts are useful (they reduce
disorientation), but they are not thereby ontological primitives. So,
framed in the druid’s terms: Turiya is what
a finite procedure calls “the remainder” when it insists on a single
continuous self across discontinuous operating modes. 9. Final compression The Māṇḍūkya
Upnaishad introduces turiya as a
remainder label needed to keep a three-state classification coherent; later
culture treats that remainder as a discoverable metaphysical fact—at which
point its evidential status is no better than any other well-formed but
unverified story-object (green sheep in Orion). How to manufacture
the Absolute from an empty box The Maharshi’s
unverifiable self From non-dual
transcendence to procedural clarity |