Metaphysics by Promotion: When a Variable Demands Worship

Why and how Adi Śaṅkara transmuted turiya, the ‘Fourth’, into a “fact” that now anchors modern Hindu culture

By the druid Finn

1. The druid said: “Adi Śaṅkara was fantasising”

“Fantasy” is here understood not as childish invention or deliberate fraud. It is a technical diagnosis:

Fantasy = treating a symbol required by a model as a feature of the world.
(i.e. variable promoted to a value.)

The Māṇḍūkya Upnaishad’s turiya (i.e. the “Fourth”) begins as a remainder label: a bookkeeping solution to the “three states + continuity” classification crack. Śaṅkara’s operation is the decisive promotion:

· from remainder label → to ontological ground

· from model-term → to world-fact

· from logical remainder → to salvific absolute

So yes, “fantasising”—but as a high-level systems move = ontological laundering.

2. The enabling conditions: why the culture was “ready” for the transmutation

A remainder term only becomes a “fact” when an ecosystem needs it. Imagine an environment with three converging pressures:

(i) Doctrinal competition and identity threat

Multiple soteriological systems were in play during Śaṅkara’s era —ritual Brahmanism, early devotional (i.e. bhakti) currents, Buddhist and Jain critiques, regional schools. A culture under competition tends to prefer theories that close (make a single coherent story) and stabilise authority.

(ii) Scriptural pluralism and internal inconsistency

The Upanishads, like the Vedas, are not a single authorial project. They contain competing metaphors and partial models. That creates a problem: how does a tradition claim one ultimate truth while preserving a library of diverse, sometimes conflicting texts?

(iii) The existential need for a continuity node

Humans experience discontinuity (waking/dream/sleep, change, death). Most enduring religious systems offer a continuity-anchor: something that “is” through all change. When a culture wants a stable continuity node, it will seize on any candidate that can be made to do the job.

The Māṇḍūkya’s “Fourth” is a perfect candidate—because it is already positioned as “not any of the three,” i.e., “beyond change.”

3. Śaṅkara’s core aim: system-closure, not mere interpretation

Let’s treat Śaṅkara as a continuance engineer—a master of closure operations (to wit, integrating the Veda with the Upanishads).

He needs four things:

1. One ultimate reality (otherwise pluralism fractures authority).

2. One salvation mechanism (otherwise rival practices compete).

3. One interpretive method (otherwise texts remain messy).

4. One continuity node (otherwise the system can’t promise release, permanence, finality).

A remainder-variable (turiya) can be transmuted into all four—if you fuse it to two already powerful tokens (as place-holders):

· Ātman (the continuity node already culturally primed)

· Brahman (the cosmic absolute already scripturally privileged)

This produces the master identity equation:

Turiya = Ātman = Brahman

That equation is not a “discovery”; it is a closure move that solves four problems at once.

4. The mechanism: how the transmutation works step-by-step

Step 1 — Reframe turiya from “label” to “referent”

The Māṇḍūkya’s negative (i.e. apophatic) definition (“not inward-knowing… not describable…”) is interpreted not as warning (“this is just remainder talk”), but as elevation:

· “Indescribable” becomes “transcendent.”

· “Not an object” becomes “subject itself.”

· “Not any state” becomes “the ground of states.”

This is a classic semantic inversion:

lack of operational definition → proof of ultimacy
(because the ultimate must exceed language)

Example (abstracted):

· A scientist says: “We can’t measure X.”

· A mystagogue says: “Exactly—that’s why X is ultimate.”

The same sentence is re-used with opposite intent.

Step 2 — Collapse taxonomy into ontology

Originally: three states + remainder label.
Śaṅkara converts the scheme into an ontological hierarchy:

· waking, dream, sleep = appearances / superimpositions / vyāvahārika

· turiya = reality proper / pāramārthika

So a classification chart becomes a ladder of being.
Once you do that, turiya is no longer “the fourth in a list”—it becomes the only real.

Step 3 — Introduce a universal solvent: the two-truths style distinction

To manage textual contradictions and lived experience, you need a solvent. The tradition provides it:

· conventional level (transactional reality)

· ultimate level (absolute reality)

This allows any counterexample to be defused:

· “But I don’t experience turiya.” → “You do, but ignorance veils it.”

· “But waking is real.” → “Real enough for commerce; not ultimately real.”

· “But texts disagree.” → “They speak from different pedagogical levels.”

Once that solvent is installed, turiya becomes unfalsifiable by design.

Step 4 — Turn non-detectability into a soteriological promise

A remainder term becomes culturally valuable when it is turned into a promise:

· “There is a permanent ground.”

· “You are That.”

· “Liberation is not acquisition but recognition.”

Now turiya isn’t merely a theory—it is an exit strategy for suffering, mortality, instability. Exit strategies spread.

Concrete example (everyday, not mystical):
A person crushed by change hears: “There is something in you untouched by all of this.”
That sentence does real psychological work. It stabilises. It recruits.

Step 5 — Manufacture experiential confirmability through training

Even if turiya begins non-operational, you can create “confirmation” socially:

· Teach meditative attentional techniques.

· Teach “witnessing.”

· Teach “neti neti” (not this, not this).

· Teach that certain quieted or depersonalised experiences count as “turiya-glimpses (viz. Ramana Maharshi’s experience at 15).”

Then, when a practitioner reports a shift—calm, distance, spaciousness—the culture supplies the label:

“That was turiya.”

This is not a conspiracy; it is normal cognitive ecology:

· an experience occurs

· the available vocabulary classifies it

· classification reinforces the doctrine

· doctrine shapes future reports

The label becomes self-validating through guided interpretation.

5. The distribution system: how a scholastic move becomes a civilisational “fact”

To become a reference node, a concept must be embedded into infrastructure. Śaṅkara (and the tradition that follows him) does exactly that.

(i) Hermeneutic infrastructure

He supplies a repeatable method for reading everything as non-dual:

· prioritising certain “great sentences”

· interpreting contradictions via levels

· treating ritual and devotion as preparatory

Result: turiya can be “found” everywhere because the interpretive lens makes it visible everywhere.

This is how a node becomes central: it becomes the key that unlocks the entire library.

(ii) Institutional infrastructure

Lineages, monasteries, teachers, curricula. Once the concept is installed in training pipelines, it becomes:

· examinable

· teachable

· repeatable

· transmissible

And transmissible items outcompete subtle, local, unstandardised insights.

(iii) Social-status infrastructure

A high-prestige class of specialists (Brahmins, scholars, renunciates, gurus) become the authorised interpreters of the node. This gives turiya what all durable “facts” need:

credentialed custody

Modern “facts” have journals and universities; ancient “facts” have lineages and commentaries.

6. Why turiya specifically is the perfect anchor node

Many concepts could have been promoted. Why did this one win?

Because turiya is structurally ideal:

1. It is defined by negation → immune to ordinary refutation.

2. It sits “behind” all experience → can be claimed as always present.

3. It offers existential relief → emotionally and socially valuable.

4. It supports a monist closure → exactly what Advaita needs.

5. It can be retrofitted into other texts → maximal scriptural reach.

In a continuance competition among ideas, turiya has high “fitness.”

7. The crucial twist: when “fact” means “reference node,” not “measured entity”

Modern people often hear “fact” as “empirically demonstrated.”
Religions often use “fact” to mean:

the non-negotiable reference node around which the system stabilises meaning.

In that sense, turiya is a fact in modern Hindu culture because:

· it is treated as axiomatic

· it is used to classify experience

· it grounds authority claims

· it organises pedagogy and practice

· it resolves contradictions

· it provides the promised exit

That is cultural facticity, not laboratory facticity.

8. Examples of the transmutation in action

Example A — The “witness” upgrade

A person learns to observe thoughts without identification.
They report: “I felt separate from my mind.”

The system says:

· “That separateness is the witness.”

· “The witness is turiya.”

· “Therefore, you have tasted your real nature.”

A remainder label has now become a certified referent through interpretation.

Example B — The deep-sleep inference

Someone notices: “I slept, and yet I say I slept well.”

The system interprets:

· “There must have been awareness even in sleep.”

· “That awareness is turiya.”

· “Therefore turiya is continuous.”

But this is not evidence; it is model-choice. Other models explain the report without positing an ever-present witness. Yet within Śaṅkara’s Advaita Vedanta closure, the inference is declared decisive.

Example C — Textual omnipresence by lens

A verse says “the Self is unborn” or “that thou art.”
The lens maps it automatically:

· unborn = not-state

· not-state = turiya

· thus: proof everywhere

This is not discovery; it is a universal decoder ring at work.

9. The modern druid’s procedural translation: what actually happened

Inside Procedure Monism Śaṅkara’s achievement could summarised like this:

1. A culture had discontinuity stress.

2. A text supplied a remainder label for continuity.

3. A master closure-engineer fused that label to the tradition’s most powerful continuity-token (Ātman) and absolute-token (Brahman).

4. He installed interpretive and institutional machinery that made the node ubiquitous, self-validating, and socially protected.

5. The node’s “truth” became identical with the system’s stability.

So the druid’s earlier formulation was exactly right:

a fine, high-caste Brahmin scholastic closure—hence continuance—job.

Not “truth” in the sense of measurement, but truth in the sense of survival-grade coherence.

10. Final compression

Adi Śaṅkara’s transmutation of turiya into “fact” is best understood as a five-part operation:

1. Elevate negation into transcendence

2. Convert taxonomy into ontology

3. Install a two-level solvent against refutation

4. Create experiential confirmations via training + interpretation

5. Embed the node in institutions and lineage authority

Result:

A remainder variable becomes the civilisation’s reference node—
not because it was found, but because it stabilised.

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