|
|
| AYURVEDA |
Subject and Object
Vedanta studies all experience by fist analyzing it, as is most commonly done, into two factors, the knowing agency (kshetragna) and the known or knowable world (kshetra, which are roughly speaking, similar to the `mind’ and `matter’ of European thought. The correspondence, however, is but a rough one. For, in the West, philosophers do not seem to have as yet analyzed `mind and matter’, or subject and `object’ so completely as the Vedantists have done. The knowing factor does not include, in Vedanta, the contents of `mind’ such as thoughts, feelings, and ideas, which are treated as `mind’ in Europe and America. They are treated as the `known’ or the object in India, and are put into the same category as percepts. Vedanta recognizes two classes of object, mental and physical, i.e. internal and external. The witness (knower) is thus separated from what is witnesses (known), i.e. the entire panorama of the physical and mental worlds. The reason for such an analysis is that the two factories, belong to distinct categories. The seen or known is inconstant, whereas the witness only sees the changes and is as such non-varying.
The Practical Significance of this Division
Such men as are struck by the impermanence of the objective world, and particularly of this physical body seek the comfort and support of religion, theology, mysticism or the like. Such others as cling to the objective world, believing it or at least the changes to the real, because of the pleasure they yield, are realists, most of whom are scientists also. They do not ignore the `objects’ known as mental. Only they rely most upon the `seen’ or known, internally or externally. Those few, on the other hand, that investigate both mind and matter. I.e. the `witness’ and the `witnessed’, the subject (knower) and the object (known), and seek the absolutely real, are philosophers. They do not fall back upon mere intuition or imagination, as do the first group of men; nor do they ignore any part of the mental factor, as do the second group or take the known world to be real because it is a source of pleasure to them. What the philosopher according to Vedanta, seeks is not comfort or joy, but truth. He who knows the tauth of all existence is said to attain supreme Knowledge, which is seen to comprehend the universal good.
The Whole of Life or Experience
This is in fact the central problem of the philosophy of Vedanta. European and American philosophy is based upon the date of the waking state, in other words, of a fraction of experience, while Vedanta takes all the three states of waking, dream and deep sleep, or the whole of experience, into consideration. Western philosophy, again, takes the waking data as the standard of Reality, and with this standard it evaluates the experience of dream and deep sleep; whereas Vedanta places all three states on the same level and enquires into their worth as `reality’. The philosophic conclusions of the West cannot, therefore, attain a view of the whole truth, Vedanta is the only road leading to it, for it considers the whole of experience.
Without going into detail, it will suffice here to say that the study of the three states leads one, first, to the fact that entire world of the waking states is as much a creation of the mind as the world of dreams, and as both the worlds disappear in deep sleep into the mind, the entire objective world of the waking and dream states is unreal or illusory. They appear to be real for the time being. Vedanta is neither realism nor idealism, but unrealism so far as the object would goes, and Atmanism so far as the substance in itself is concerned’ for the whole world of mental creation emanates from and returns to the mind substance. The knowledge that everything is Atman cannot be attained unless one rises above the thought or concept of Atman, i.e., lives or has his being identified with everything, the all.
WAKING EXPERIENCE
Sankara the greatest exponent of the Advaita Philosophy has systematized the teachings of the Upanishads in his comments on the Brahma-Sutras which have condensed them under various topical headings. In his comments on the Sutras, the Upanishads and the Bhagavad-Gita, we find a rational, consistent and exhaustive treatment of all the problems of Truth and Reality as they arise in the course of his exposition of Vedic Monism. In his introduction to the Sutras, Sankara, imbued with a truly scientific spirit, discusses the foundation of empirical life. We can discover in him no traces of a theological or scholastic leaning.
“Subject and object – the Self and the non-Self (Aatma and Anatma) are so radically opposed to each other in notion and in practical life that it is impossible to mistake the one for the other.” After this grand beginning Sankara adds, “Yet we find that the mistake is universal and we can never trace it to its source, for our common life cannot do without this initial error (avidya).” Without identifying the Self(subject) with the non-Self, viz. the body, the senses and the mind, we could not describe ourselves in terms strictly applicable to the latter. We could not say, “I am lean or stour”, “I am walking or sitting”, “I am blind or deaf” “I feel, I perceive or act”. Hence we unconsciously confound the pure subject or the witnessing consciousness with its own objects, and conversely, we confound the ego with the witness, whereby the real unattached character of the pure consciousness is lost sight of altogether. Admittedly this is due to a fundamental illusion on which all our waking activities are based; and to attain to Truth and Reality we must, realizing this illusion rise above it by means of a rational enquiry. Reason which points out the illusion must also be competent to release us from its hold. Sankara is not alone in drawing our attention to the illusory nature of empirical life, Plato, Kant and Hegel adopt the same strain, and in recent times, Bergson, equipped with all the knowledge of modern science, arrives at the same conclusion. The intellect, he says, disguises Reality, misrepresents it and presents to us a static world, while the Reality is pure movement, change, or the wider consciousness. According to both Sankara and Berson the illusion is necessary to practical life, though none the less it is an illusion, Sankara does not favour the reality of the idea as against that of the object. The testimony of consciousness itself establishes their distinctness. While the one, viz, the idea, is admitted to be real, this reality can be maintained only by contradistinguishing it from that of the object. Still the reality of the idea and the object cannot be held to transcend the state in which both are experienced. In other words, their claim to reality is valid within the state, not beyond. This is a philosophical view that disposes of the dream-experience also. If we are true to consciousness, if consciousness is true to us, the objects and notions of dram are presented as indisputably real at the time, and are discovered to be illusions only after dream gives place to waking. We cannot suppose that waking experience can survive waking, any more than dream-experience, dream. For that would be self contradictory. Waking life may thus seem to be reduced to a long dream; but, as Locke would say, “Even then the thinker and the critic being equally involved in the dream, their mutual relations remain the same as if the condition was one of waking.” Hence the external world with its multiplicity of other minds and objects, together with the internal world of judgments, feelings and volitions, like the ego cognizing them and engaged in action and enjoyment, is all on one level of reality which correlates them. It is wrong, therefore, to imagine that Vedanta is solipsistic, that while it concedes reality to the ego, if denies it to the non-ego.
Waking or dream is not a state in the strict sense of the term. A state implies change occurring in the soul or its object. When we compare waking with dream, the soul assumes the position of a witness of the two, and no change can be allowed in the witness. The two states seem to offer themselves successively for trial, but as they are not events n one time-series, their sequence is an illusion. Neither can we suppose a change in the objective order which would demand a continuity of the same time-series. Moreover, we labour under the disadvantage of having to judge from memory of dream which cannot be called up to confront us as a present experience, and this memory is itself of a strange character. Memory ordinarily refers to the past – a past time moving backwards infinitely from the present moment at which it terminates that is to say, to a continuous time-flow related to the present, ream experience. However does not belong to this time-series, and cannot be included in its past. Again, just as we cannot know when waking begins, so we cannot know when dream begins for both seem to be uncaused. A cause connects one event with another of the same time-order and the cause of a state would have to be inside the state, so that to transcend the state in order to discover its cause would be not merely illogical but impossible. Further, the soul as the witness of the two states intuits both, and that is how we know both. Hence the witnessing character of the soul claims special consideration. It behaves as an entity free from attachment to the bodies, the minds, the sense groups and the percepts of the contrasted states, and becomes a metaphysical element which can be realigned only as the `I’ but with the `I’ aivested of the egoity of waking or dream. While it is difficult and impracticable for us to eliminate, in waking, this Witness from the ego-complex, and the Witness might seem to be a mere abstraction, our ability to remember dream and appropriate it to ourselves proves that nature does for us the analysis which we are unable to do for ourselves. She does this is virtue of the undeniable fact that the Witness is the Reality, the essence of our being. In discussing sleep, we shall come upon another feature of the Witness, which then passes off into Pure Consciousness.
DREAM STATE
From the waking point of view, dream is a case of typical illusion, or rather hallucination. Without admittedly an external ground a whole world rises into view, and no suspicion is aroused that we are bamboozled. Scene after scene follows originating feelings and acts with the stamp of genuineness. We are actors in the drama, playing fantastical parts, enjoying and suffering we know not how or why. There is no limit to the grotesqueness of the pageantry, over-leaping the bunds of waking possibility. Yet at the time there is no surprise; every thing looks natural. We take things at their face value. All the elements of waking are reproduced: time, space, and change. In the very midst of the drama, we might jerk into waking, and, behold, it was all a dream! The usual explanation offered is that the impressions formed on the waking mind remain latent in the background of the unconscious and suddenly gain scope for activity, manifesting themselves in the shape of dream-experience. Sleep is the region of the Unconscious and we are then admitted behind the scenes to the sight of how the impressions, in their various degrees and strength, act and react upon one another in deeps of our nature. No impression apparently ever dies, and when it is denied adequate scope in waking, obtains in dream, which is a realm of life for the latent impressions. The space and time are creations of the mind, and the relation of cause and effect is improvised. The intellect, suspends its censorship and our critical faculties are laid to sleep. Such is the dictum of waking reason. But this theory of impression loses sight of the fact that if the theory be right, an impression has to be endowed with the power to create a world of realities at a moment’s notice, rather, without any notice at all. If the mind by a list can create actualities, where is the need or place for matter which is the object of absorbing study for a scientist? How can this indispensable factor of life be brushed aside so lightly? What is sauce for the goose must be cause for the gander. If the reality of matter in waking life depends on our belief in our close observation and experimentation, how is our involuntary belief in the reality of our dream occurrences to be accounted for? How can we take two contradictory attitudes towards life, the one solipsistic and the other realistic? This explanation is therefore suicidal and demolishes the very foundations of science. We can, besides, never notice the beginning or the origin of a dream. All our notions of propriety are outraged, without still engendering any surprise in us. Our consciousness, which guides our judgement suddenly, turns capricious, and one that lies down in Calcutta might find himself in a moment, as it were in London. A single moment might expand into days and years. The dreamer might be transformed into a bull, a goat or an insect. And the learned explanation is belated. It comes after the illusion is over, for there are no certain marks or characteristics by which we can identify a dream as such at the time. In truth, dream cannot be defined; otherwise we could not fail to detect the trickery when it repeated itself a second time; but a man’s even a philosopher’s life must include dreams to his dying day, and nature’s power to delude is irresistible, supreme. A dream can indeed mimic all the features of waking, but one element remains triumphant and beyond its utmost power to mimic, and that is Consciousness. All the rest is plastic in the omnipotent hands of dream, and can be moulded into any shape it pleases. Time, space and causation are its avowed slaves, and obey its autocratic bidding Consciousness alone defies its factices and remains an unruffled witness of its whims.
We have hitherto viewed dream as an object of the waking mind, as an external object. We shall now examine it from within, by placing ourselves sympathetically in its midst. This is properly to judge dream as dream, without the waking bias. Dream now appears to be a perfect replica of waking. A world is unrolled before us; we never notice its suddenness or its incongruity with waking; on the contrary it comes with all the impress of waking. Time, space and change are inevitably present. No element of life is missed – other minds, natural scenes, familiar faces and objects, the earth below and the star studded sky above. We think, feel and act, We refer happenings to the past, and forecast them for the future. We remember dreams and relate them to friends. There is no suspicion of the state being a break, discontinuity from waking; no fear that it may be sublated in the future. Miracles are common occurrences which do not strike us as anything extraordinary. We acquiesce in all, we appropriate all. Memories and emotions stream in, giving birth to strange conations. We converse with gods and ghosts. Sometimes the future is foreshadowed, We acquire new powers, occupy new positions; nothing is impossible. We fly without wings and fall from hill tops down, down through endless space. Nevertheless, we believe that all is real and nothing shocks us. After waking we condemn dream as an irrational, self-contradictory and unreal illusion, and resolve to be no more befooled. But in the next dream there is the same masque enacted and the same helplessness on our part to detect it, and thus is repeated without end to our eternal chagrin through all our living days. It will not do to bush aside this aspect of life as a mere phantasy.
“There are few subjects,” writes Dr. F.C.S. Schiller, ”which philosophers have more persistently forborne to work out, not to say neglected, than the philosophic import of dreams.” (*Indriya Statna of Charak Samhita deals very exhaustively). To regard that dream-experience is unreal is to subordinate it to waking, and to accept the biased decree of the latter against a sister-state. And on what is the claim of waking to reality based? Evidently on its own pronouncement. If so, is not dream entitled to equal reality according to its own pretensions? If it is objected that waking is never stultified whereas a dream is, the answer is, how can a state which is accompanies with a sense of waking stultify itself while it continues? A state which is believed to be waking can never be conceived as liable to stultification while it lasts, and every Present state claims to be waking, flinging to its rear a stultified dream. Compare the instance of a dream within a dream. No state can be disloyal to itself. A dream proper is never known to be such at the time. A stultified state appears as a past dream and the present is ever waking. No state is self-identical. Thus a sympathetic examination of dram leads to the conclusion that it is a rival state as real as waking, and owing to the indeterminable discrepancy between the two in the time-flow, added to the unconscious and timeless interval between, they must be adjudged equal independence, as different realms of Reality of which they are expressions. The word `interval’ used above is owing to a defect of language, meant to denote what is timeless. For if a time interval were imagined, it would connect waking and dream and make them a single continuous state, which would militate against all experience. Waking-time rules waking and stops with it, and dream-time is coeval with a dream. The interval is metaphysical. It is Pure Consciousness.
We are now free to consider the results obtained at this stage of our enquiry. The examination of dram was made possible only by our individually being set aside. The mind and the body constitute our personality and our individual life depends on our connection with them. These two factors can hardly be supposed to be identical in both waking and dream, as our experience in to the contrary. So are the two worlds distinct. In ** the states side by side in our study, we have mentally disentangled ourselves from both and have attained to an attitude in which, free from the trammels of individuality, we comprehend the two manifestations of Reality as unstinted wholes – an attitude quite different from that in which we think of the waking world. In the latter case the world is not seized as a whole, since, as our object of attention, it is separated from ourselves and placed right against us in thought. We conduct our examination of dream, not as one ego contemplating the other, but as the soul divested of its egoity altogether. The simple experience denoted by the words, “I dreamt,” raises us to the level of the witness and above that of the ego. The soul is thus proved to be an entity at the back of the mind, taking its stand as the metaphysical basis of life. The monobasic view, confined to waking, of theology throws it on the mercy for the scriptures or revelations to establish the soul or God. They are matters of faith. But Vedantic analysis makes them indisputable elements of life and identifies them. The world is a correlate of the mind, concomitant with it. The question of other minds is limited to the fugitive states and is devoid of meaning with reference to the soul as their Witness. The soul thus sheds its individuality and becomes Universal Spirit, beyond the region of meum and tuum. The mind perceives the world, while the soul or spirit intuits both waking and dream, projects both, and absorbs both. The difficulty that perplexes the enquirer, viz., “When I am sleeping, is there not a world outside in which simultaneously there are other minds awake and active, which I rejoin when I awake? How does my sleep affect the real affairs of the world which go on uninterrupted for all my changes of state?” – this difficulty now vanishes. For the individuation implied in my sleep and the waking of others ceases when the comparative view of the states is taken. This is possible only with the individuality dropped. Moreover, the waking world composed of other minds and matter, with which waking connects me and from which sleep releases me, is strictly bound up with waking, and to aver that my waking or my waking world persists when I am sleeping is not only illogical but inconceivable. The world has no status outside of my waking. The physical organism together with its rain, nerves and breath is limited to waking. To carry it over to another state, where another set obtains free play, is unwarranted. Similarly, birth and death, the evolution of the world, are integral parts of waking, and beyond it, meaningless, Solipsism or Subjectivism is easily transcended, for the Witness is no ego and Reality attaches to the former alone. Thus we have arrived at an entity, which is the universal basis of life, which is all Life, beyond time, change and individuality. Why then should we examine sleep? For the simple reason that it is the primary state without which waking and dream would be impossible. We dream in sleep and wake from sleep.
Meanwhile we shall advert to some philosophical problems which receive their solution from our enquiry so far. The question of perception dissolves itself. The Spirit manifests itself as matter and mind, which appear as the correlated elements of experience in each state. Their metaphysical basis is one, and this affinity in their source accounts for their mutual adaptiveness. The Spirit as mind perceives Spirit as matter. The puzzles of Realism and Idealism evaporate. For the principle on which we explain waking perception must apply equally to dream perception. If in the one case our knowledge is real, so must it be in the other. No purpose is served by affirming or denying the reality in either. Pragmatism is right in regarding judgments as only truth claims with a tentative value. Every manifestation of life or Spirit must necessarily promote life-purpose. For life is supreme and its apparent frustration by death is but a delusion. Death itself is a manifestation for life which transcending the states is immortal.
|
|
|
Previous
Next
|
|
|