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saidevo
28 February 2008, 05:49 AM
Negation as Shakti-energy: The Relation and the Cause of Interplay between the Self and the Not-Self

THE third factor in the sva-bhAva, own-being, of the Absolute is ni-shedha, or prati-shedha, Negation, denial, 'Not' or rather the connecting of 'Not' with 'Not-I' by 'I'.'



sva-bhAva; ni-shedha, prati-shedha. 'Own-being' may be regarded as a variant of 'thing-in-itself'; it is 'self-being', 'being-in-its-self', the peculiarity, personality, individuality of the thing; 'temperament' in the mediaeval medical phrase; 'constitutional idiosyncracy' in the modern scientific medical phrase; prakrti, nature, in both Samskrt Darshana, i.e., philosophy, and Vaidyaka, i.e., medicine.

Mula-prakrti or Matter and Daivi-prakrti or Force, together, make up the whole sva-bhAva of Purusha or Pratyag-Atma. shakti shaktimatoH abhedaH, 'Force and Possessor of Force are not-different, not-separate though distinguishable.'


From the standpoint of the Absolute, this third factor is not a third, any more than the second is a second; for the third is a negation of the second which is Nothing, No-limited-or-particular-thing, Not-Being; and, where this is so, it also follows that the first is not a first, for there is nothing left to recognise it by as a first; the resultant being a Purity of Peace as regards which nothing can be said and no exception taken.

Anagogic Permutations

The full significance of this Negation, which is the nexus between Self and Not-Self, will appear when we consider the different interpretations, which turn upon it, of the logion, each correct, and each exemplified and illustrated in the universe around us.

Thus, the logion Aham-Etat-Na may mean:

• (a) M U A. Not Not-Self (,but only) Self (is).
• (b) U A M. Not-self (is, and) Self (is) Not.
• (c) M A U. (Only vacuity, nothingness is, and) Not Self (or) Not-Self.
• (d) A M U. Self (is) Not Not-Self; or, Self (is) Not (,to the) Not-Self.
• (e) U M A. Not-Self (is) Not Self; or Not-Self (is) Not (,to) Self.
• (f) A U M. Self (is) Not-Self (and also) Not (it).
• (g) A--U--M. Self--Not-Self--Not, the Absolute wherein all possible permutations are.



These permutations are based on statements made in the Pranava-Vada, an unpublished Samskrt MS., referred to in Note I at the end of Ch.VII (p.121, supra).

As explained in detail in that work, Veda in the full sense of the word, is Cosmic Ideation, i.e., everything, (see footnote, p.40 supra), and the four collections of hymns, currently known as the Vedas, in the plural, may be regarded as comparatively small but highly important text-books of superphysical art and metaphysical science.

What is Absolute Truth?

The question may be legitimately asked: If all these permutations and combinations of the factors of the logion are, as indeed they obviously ought to be, included in Cosmic Ideation, and therefore true in their own times, places, and circumstances, is there any final absolute truth, independently of time, place, and circumstance; and is there any infallible test of truth? Who is to judge between the rival claimants of truth? What will decide? Is it spiritual experience? But spiritual experiences differ also; who is to judge between them?

These difficulties may be solved thus. Absolute Truth can be only that which totals up, reconciles, and synthesises in itself, all 'other' truths, showing that they are all relative or partial or half-truths.

If a person says: "No; errors and heresies are the irreconcilable opposites of the truth," then he has to explain how they, (like sin, evil, pain, etc.,) came to be.

If he says, "By the act of God," then 'God' is his absolute truth wherein the reconciliation is found. What 'God' means, and how he brings home the 'absolute truth' of 'God' creating error, etc., will remain for him to explain, or rather for the questioner and seeker to find out;

for, the person who says errors are irreconcilable and synthesis impossible, has no use for absolute truth, i.e., the Absolute; he is not seeking it and does not want it--yet. He is perfectly content with what he has got, and it would be a mistake to try to give to him something else which he does not want; as food to one not hungry.

If there be any special reasons making it right to do so, then the need should first be aroused in him. But the craving for Absolute Truth is not easily aroused from without, by 'another'. It comes from within, through the cyclic processes of life of the individual self.

Therefore, among the special and peculiar qualifications mentioned for the student of Vedanta, the seeker after Brahma, is the ethical attitude of vairAgya, revulsion from the worldly life and dispassionate compassion for all sufferers, and kshama, dama, uparati, titikshA, shraddhA, samAdhAna, inner subsidence of desire and consequent serenity, self-control over senses, wish for retirement and repose, resigned endurance of whatever befalls, firm faith in one-Self and in the guide and teacher one has chosen with due care, and collected single-mindedness; Brhad-Aranyaka Upanishad, 4.4.23; Nrsimha Uttara Tapini Upanishad 6; Shankara, shaarIraka bhAshya, I.i.1.

न अनुभुय, न जानाति, जंतुर्विषतीक्ष्णताम्;
निर्विद्येत स्वयं तस्मान्; न परैर्भिन्नधि: पुनः ।

na anubhuya, na jAnAti, jaMturviShatIkShNatAm;
nirvidyeta svayaM tasmAn; na parairbhinnadhi: punaH | --Bhagavata, VI.iv.41.

Daksha, reprimanding Narada, (who has led Daksha's young sons astray, preaching vairAgya to them), says: "Without experience of the sharpness, the intensity, of the objects of sense, there can be no surfeit and no real, lasting, revulsion therefrom; the Jiva should, therefore, turn from the world, suo motu; not mis-led prematurely by others."

But as soon as the craving is aroused, the possibility of fulfilling it is aroused also. So soon as, and no sooner than, a question forms in the mind, the answer begins to form also.

In fact the question is the first part of the answer. As soon as a person says, "I want the Absolute Truth." he means, "I want something which will reconcile, synthesise, explain, and not merely condemn and abuse, all truths other or less than this ideal Absolute Truth"; and, as soon as he means that, he is on the track of it, he has got hold of a vital feature of it.

"It takes two to tell the truth, one to tell it and one to hear it" ; "truth is truth to him who believes it": "the one test of truth is the belief of the believer"; if you convince a person that what he has believed so far is not true, then you have created a new belief in him; therefore he, the I, the Self, the One We, is the final, universal, absolute test of Truth.

'Self-evidence' is the absolute test and the Absolute Truth. He who asks, "Who is to judge?" understands the answer, "The judge must be common, impartial, equally benevolent to him, you, me, all the parties, and, here, such is the Self"; and he who asks "What is to prove", will understand the answer, "Self-evidence", the evidence of the Self, by, to, and in the Self.

The western school of thinkers who said 'conceivability' was the test, really meant this. 'Spiritual experience' is nothing distant and mysterious. Alla-pa-roksha, direct 'experience', which comes home, whether cognitive, emotional, or actional, is such; and whether of physical or of superphysical and subtle things. It attains its highest degree, its 're-alisation', its 're-ality', its 'act-uality', when all these aspects of the consciousness coalesce, when the individual's cognition is so clear and certain that he feels or desires and also acts accordingly. The faith that maketh martyrs witnesseth itself. See pp.22-23,96, supra.


The Self-Evident

Such permutations and combinations of Self and Not-Self and Negation give rise to the actual varieties of facts in the universe and to the corresponding beliefs of man; now to the prevalence of Spirit, now to the triumph of Matter, again to the reign of pra1aya; to dreaming, waking, and sleeping; to subjective monism or idealism, objective monism or materialism, shUnyavAda or nihilism, pantheism, solipsism, dualism, absolutism, etc. (corresponding broadly, not strictly, to a, b, c, etc., above, respectively) and all other possible forms of beliefs.



इति नाना प्रसंख्यानं तत्त्वानां ऋषिभिः कृतम् ।
सर्वं न्याय्यं युक्तिमत्त्वात्; विदुषां किमशोभनम् ।

iti nAnA prasaMkhyAnaM tattvAnAM RuShibhiH kRutam |
sarvaM nyAyyaM yuktimattvAt; viduShAM kimashobhanam | --Bhagavata, XI.xxii.2

"The seers have thus explained the fundamental constituents and features of the universe in various ways. Each way is just, because of its own special reasons. The wise see no conflict and no lack of beauty in any."

Each preceding view leaves behind an unreduced surd, and consequent discontent, which grows slowly. When the last view is reached, no surd remains; all views are reconciled; each is seen to have its own beauty and duty.

From one standpoint, pantheism may appear as a combination of I and Not-I only, rather than as a permutation of all three factors of the Logion. But (f) above may be interpreted as Spinoza's pantheism, viz., that A and U, Thought and Extension, (Mind and Matter), both, are two aspects of that which is Not-describable otherwise; or as (the poet Alexander) Pope's pantheism, viz., "The universe is one stupendous whole, whose Body Nature is and God the soul."


Turmoil within Peace

All these permutations mean only the accentuating, in different degrees, of the factors of the Logion severally. If we emphasise them all equally, then we find the Peace of the Absolute left untouched; because the net result, of the three being taken in combination, is always a neutralising, a balancing, of opposition, which may indifferently be called fullness or emptiness, peace or blankness, "the voice, the music, the resonance of the silence";

because the three, A, U, and M, are verily simultaneous, are in inseparable combination, are not amenable to arrangements and re-arrangements, to permutations and combinations; and these last merely appear, but appear inevitably, only when the whole is looked at from the standpoint of a part--an A, a U, or an M, which is necessarily bound to an order, a succession, an arrangement.

And yet also the whole multitude and Turmoil of the World-Process is in that Peace; for 'No-thing', Not-Self, is 'all things destroying each other', and Negation is 'abolition of all these particular things'; and 'I' is that for the sake of which, and in, and by the consciousness of which, all this abolition takes place.

This is the true significance of the Sankhya doctrine that Prakrti, Not-Self, displays herself and hides herself incessantly, only in order to provide an endless foil for the Self-realisation, the amusement, of Purusha, Self. In such interplay, both find everlasting and inevitable fullness of manifestation, fullness of realisation, and unfettered recreation.



Metaphysical Catalysis

Compare H.Ellis, Psychology of Sex, Vol.Ill, p.95 ("Love and Pain"):

"... The male is active and the female passive and imaginatively attentive to the states of the excited male ... The female develops a superadded activity, the male becoming relatively passive and imaginatively attentive to the psychical and bodily states of the female. ...";

and the well-known doctrines, of Sankhya, viz., that Purusha is the actionless Spectator of the movements, the dance, of Prakrti;

and of Vedanta, viz., that the juxtaposition or coexistence of Purusha and Prakrti, (the metaphysical archetypes of sex), superimposes, causes adhyAsa of, the characteristics of each upon the other, by vi-varta, inversion.

The mere presence and proximity of a person, of one sex is enough to produce some excitement (not necessarily lustful at all) in a person of the other sex. The Sankhya description of Prakrti exhibiting Herself to the watching Purusha, and shrinking away ashamed, as soon as the latter loses interest and turns away His eyes--this is, literally, an expansion, to the Universal and Infinite scale, of the facts of daily sex-life; and the latter are, conversely and obversely, the contraction to the finite scale, of the Infinite Fact, of the never-ceasing Drama of the Interplay of the Eternal Masculine and the pseudo-Eternal Feminine.

पुरुषस्य दर्शनार्थं, कैवल्यार्थं, तथा, प्रधानस्य,
पुंगु अन्धवद्, उभयोर् अपि संयोगः, तत्कृतः सर्गः ।
प्रकृतेः सुकुमारतरं न किंचिद् अस्ति, इति मे मतिर्भवति,
या द्यष्टा अस्मीति पुनर्न दर्शनं उपैति पुरुषस्य ।

puruShasya darshanArthaM, kaivalyArthaM, tathA, pradhAnasya,
puMgu andhavad, ubhayor api saMyogaH, tatkRutaH sargaH |
prakRuteH sukumArataraM na kiMchid asti, iti me matirbhavati,
yA dyaShTA asmIti punarna darshanaM upaiti puruShasya |
--Sankhya Kaarika, 21 and 16.

"In order that Purusha may see Prakrti and then retire into Soli-tude, and that Prakri may show Herself (and then shrink away), the two come together; as may the lame man who cannot walk but can see, and the blind man who can walk but cannot see, in order to help each other. Very modest, shy, sensitive, is Prakrti; for having shown herself, and been seen, if the spectator turns away, she vanishes."

The chemical phenomenon of catalysis seems to correspond to the psychological phenomenon of "imaginative attention" and its effects upon that which is attended to. The watering of the mouth in the presence of a tasteful edible; the expanding of the eyes or the nostrils, in that of a beautiful form or color or fragrant perfume all these are variants of the same fact. In all cases, of course, the perceiver must be 'interested' and 'pursuant'; not 'tired' and 'renunciant'.

saidevo
01 March 2008, 09:38 AM
The Ever Implicit 'am' in Both Parts of the Logion

The why of the movement of this Interplay, of to and fro, identification and separation, action and reaction, has been already dealt with, in one aspect, in the previous chapter. It will have appeared from what was said there, that the Negation necessarily appears, and can only appear, in the limited as, first, an affirmation, and then, a negation.

We may now consider a little more fully the nature of the affirmation and the negation. The statement, repeated from time to time, that negation hides affirmation within it, and as preceding it in time, should be clearly grasped.

In the logion, Ego Non-ego Non (est), the bracketed est, (or sum), is the hidden affirmation. A little reflection shows that it should be so, and must be so, quite unobjectionably; that thought can detect no fault in the fact. Take away the est, not only from the sentence but really from consciousness, and the remaining three words lose all coherent meaning.

To deny a thing, it is necessary first to describe it, to allege it as at least a supposition, a hypothesis; and to describe it, is to postulate for it at least a false, an assumed, existence. In order that Non-Ego may be denied, it must first be alleged as at least a supposition. For this reason, and for the reason that affirmation and negation cannot be contemporaneous in a single, particular, limited, thing, it comes about, as we have seen, that the logion, for the purposes of the limited, in order that the limited may ex-ist and appear and be a fact at all, necessarily falls into two parts, (a) Ego Non-Ego, and (b) Non-Ego Non.

The first contains implicitly, hidden in its stated words, the word est or sum, for otherwise it has no meaning; and the second part also similarly contains implicitly within it the same word est or sum, which alone gives it any significance.

For the reasons already partially explained in chapters VII and IX, the affirmation and the negation respectively take on the form of an identification of Self with Not-Self, and of a separation from it.

The mere unconcerned assertion, in the third person, of the being or the non-being of Non-Ego, has no interest for Self; it has no motive for making such an apathetic assertion. Such indifferent statement about another would have no reason to justify it, to make it necessary, to explain why it came to be made at all.

It cannot be said that Not-Self is a fact, and so has an existence independent of the motives and reasons and interests of Self; because it has been settled at the outset that Not-Self cannot be, must not be, is not, independent of Self, but very dependent thereon for all such existence as it has.

Therefore it follows necessarily that the assertion and denial of that Not-Self by Self should be connected with a purpose in Self, should immediately subserve some interest in that Self. The only purpose and interest that there can be, in that which is Ever-Perfect, Full, Desireless, and therefore Purposeless, is Self-recognition, Self-definition, Self-realisation, Self-maintenance, Self-preservation, Self-assertion.

The eternal Self requires nothing in reality from outside of it-Self; it is only ever engaged in the one pastime of asking: "What am I? what am I? am I this? am I this?" and assuring itself: "No, I am not this, I am not this, but only My-Self."

This pastime, it must be remembered, which, from the standpoint of the 'this' is repeated again and again, is from the standpoint of the 'I' but one single, eternal, and changeless act of consciousness in which there is no movement.

Thus, therefore, the affirmation necessarily takes on the form of an identification of 'I' with 'Not-I', and the negation, that of the dis-identification, the separation, of 'I' from 'Not-I'. The logion is not merely a neutral statement of the non-entity of 'Not-I'.



lokavat tu lIlAkaivalyam | --Brahma-Sutra, II. i, 32.

lIlA[/b] is pastime. A western writer has said well that "The history of man is one long search for God". Vedanta and Sankhya-Yoga instruct us how "The history of the whole universe is one eternal search-and-finding by Self of It-Self". See fn. 2 on p.84, supra.


'I (am)' Begins and Ends the Day

The affirmation, then, Ego est Non-Ego, not only imposes on 'Not-I' the Being which belongs inherently to Self, but also, for the time, makes it identical with the Self, i.e., [i]a self; and at this stage, that is to say, in the separation of the two parts of the logion, because 'Not-I' is always a particular, a limited something, it takes on its most significant character and name, viz., 'this', 'idam', or 'etat', as it is called in Samskrt books.

Side by side, also, with this change of name of Not-Self, (which does not mean any change of nature, but only indicates the special and most important aspect and manifestation of the nature of Not-Self), the bracketed est becomes sum, and the first part of the logion becomes: 'I (am) this'.

In continued consequence of that same reason, the second part of the logion becomes: 'This not (am I)', having the same meaning as, 'I am not this' with a special significance, viz., that in the actual World-Process, in every cycle--whether it be the daily waking and falling to sleep of the individual human being, or the sarga and pra1aya, creation and dissolution, of world-systems--the I-consciousness begins as well as ends the day, the period of activity and manifestation.

The new-born baby's first shut-eyed feeling in the morning is the vague feeling of a self, in which of course a not-self is also present, though a little more vaguely; and his last shut-eyed feeling in the evening is the same vague feeling of a self returning, from all the outward and gradually dimming not-self, into its own inwardness and sleep.

The order of the words in Samskrt, Aham-Etat-Na (asmi), expresses this fact; and it expresses something additional also, for asmi, '(I) am', indicates that the individual 'I', at the end of the day's work, is, as it were, fuller, has more deliberate and definite self-consciousness, than it had at the beginning thereof.

The Bhrama of the 'Swan'

The 'this', it now appears, is, in the first place, the upAdhi, the body, the sheath, or the organism, which the individualised spirit occupies, owns, identifies itself with, and, again, rejects and casts away; and, in the second place, it is all the world of 'objects' with which the Spirit may identify itself, which it may possess and own as part of itself, as belonging to itself, and again renounce, in possibility.

Thus, through the dual nature of Negation, dual by reflection of the being of Self and the non-being of Not-Self, is kept incessantly moving, that revolving wheel of samsAra of which it has been declared: "That wherein all find living, that wherein all find rest, that which is boundless and shoreless in that tire-less wheel of Brahma, turneth round and round the ham-sa, the swan, because, and so long as, it believeth itself to be separate from the mover of the wheel; but when it recogniseth its own oneness with that Self which ever turneth the wheel, it forthwith cometh to rest, and attaineth the Peace of Immortality."



सर्वाजीवे सर्वसंस्थे बृहन्ते तस्मिन् हंसो भ्राम्यते ब्रह्मचक्रे,
पृथग् आत्मानं प्रेरितारं च मत्वा; जुष्टस्ततस्तेन अमृतत्वम् एति ।

sarvAjIve sarvasaMsthe bRuhante tasmin haMso bhrAmyate brahmachakre,
pRuthag AtmAnaM preritAraM cha matvA; juShTastatastena amRutatvam eti |
--Shvetashvatara Upanishad, i.6.

Glta also speaks of the chakra of the World-Process (ii.16). The 'cyclical' movement of the World-Process, in space and in time, is a patent fact; its reason is to be found in the alternating, rhythmic, succession of the two parts of the logion. Chakra, (Greek) kuklos, cycle, circle, are etymologically allied.

The same idea, as expressed by bhrama or bhrAnti appearing in Brahma, 'wandering and straying round and round in space', has been referred to on p.159, supra.

To run round and round in circles, as the orbs of space are doing, like puppies chasing their own tails, is to be aimless, mistaken, illusion-ed. The word bhrama covers all these meanings, all these analogies. Say that "chasing one's own tail" is "chasing one's own Self", and the aimless becomes the aimful; the illusion-ed, becomes the illumin-ed.

Trying to Achieve Infinity by Endless Circling

To put it in another way: This verse of the Upanishat pictures the vi-varta view. Believing it-self to be an infinitesimal speck, the Jiva rushes round and round, trying to achieve Infinity by encompassing all Space.

It does so, because, though outwardly believing itself to be limited, finite, inwardly it knows it-self to be Infinite; and the endless circling and cycling is due to the necessity of making the Outer belief One with the Inner; and thus abolishing the restless and intolerable pain of inconsistency and conflict.

So soon as the Jiva dis-covers that it is It-Self this Infinite Space, that It has that Space within It-Self, instead of It-Self being within It, so soon is the vi-varta, 'reversal' of outlook, change of attitude, completed.

It is the same with Time and Motion. The 'solid' substantial speck or atom, which the Jiva formerly identified itself with, in 'empty' Space, now begins to be seem as a 'vacuum'-bubble ('koilon'), a 'vortex of nothing', (mere 'imagination'), in 'a Plenum of Consciousness. There is a reversal, vi-varta, in all aspects and respects.

The world is seen in a 'new' light. Every-thing becomes 'new'; prakarSheNa sarvaM navI karoti iti praNavaH; 'because it makes everything seem new, therefore is it called pra-Nava'. 'The solid-seeming world doth vanish like a cloud, nor leaves a wrack behind'; becomes a dream, when 'man, most ignorant of what he's most assured, his glassy essence', casts off that i-gnor-ance, a-vidyA, recovers vidyA, wisdom, assurance of his glassy essence, his Self, the Self of all.


'So-ham', is the Jiva that recognises the identity of the Universal Ego with the individual ego in the words 'sah aham', 'That am I'; whereas 'ham-sa' (which, as an ordinary word, means the migrating swan, recurrently, periodically, flying to and fro between the arctic and the temperate zones, between cold and heat), is the reversal and contradiction of this recognition, and indicates the Jiva (migrating recurrently between 'this world' and 'that world', and also from body to body) which does not recognise its identity with the 'I'.

Two arcs, and two only, and always, are there in the endless revolution of this wheel. On the first arc, that which is not, 'This', appears as if it is; it takes 'name and form', 'a local habitation and a name', and predominates over Self. This is the pravrtti-mArga, Path of Pursuit, whereon the individualised self feels its identity more and more with some not-self, separates itself more and more from the Universal Self, runs after the things of sense, and takes them on to itself more and more.

But when the end of this first arc of his particular cycle comes, then it inevitably undergoes viveka and vairAgya, discriminative, reflective, introspective, intense thinking and surfeit, and turns round on to the other arc, the nivrtti-mArga, Path of Renunciation; on which, realising more and more its identity with the Universal Self, it separates itself more and more from the things of sense, and gradually and continually gives away all that it has acquired of Not-Self to other Jivas, who are on the pravrtti-mArga and need them.



See pp.12,18. vi-veka is discrimination between nitya and anitya, the Permanent and the Fleeting; and vai-rAgya is the coefficient revolt against all selfish desire for fleeting things and sorrow-pervaded joys. The Permanent appears to the Jiva first as the lasting, then as the ever-lasting, and only finally as the true Eternal, the opposite or vi-varta of the other two, in correspondence respectively with the three answers (chs. ii and vii, supra).


Thus, while on the first arc, Not-Self, falsely masquerading as a self, prevails, and the true Self is hidden, on the second arc the true Self prevails, and that Not-Self, or the false self, is hidden and slowly passes out of sight.

saidevo
03 March 2008, 06:20 AM
'Eye of Matter' and 'Eye of Spirit'

To him who sees with the 'eye of matter' only, incognisant yet of the true Self, the Jiva seems to live and grow on the first arc, and to decay and die on the second, and be no more at the end of it. The reverse is the case to the 'eye of spirit'. What the truth is, of both and in both, is clear to him who knows the sva-bhAva of the Absolute, and the perfect balance between Spirit and Matter.

Inasmuch as 'this-es' are endless in number and extent of temporal and spatial limitation, cycles are also endless in number and extent, ranging from the smallest to the largest; and yet there are no smallest and largest, for there are always smaller and larger.

Again, cycles and periods of activity are always and necessarily being equally, balanced by corresponding periods of non-activity; and vice versa. Further reasons for this may appear later on, in connection with the Law of Action and Reaction, and the nature of Death.

Thus sarga, emanation, is succeeded by pralaya, dissolution, and the latter by the former, endlessly, on all possible scales; and their minute intermixture and complication is pseudo-infinite. Thus are the names justified, of nitya-sarga, continual incessant creation, and nitya-pralaya, perpetual unremitting destruction.

Buddhi and Manas: Hot Point of Consciousness

From this complication it results that

• there is no law belonging to any one cosmic system, small or large, which the limited Jiva can divine and work out, on limited data, with the lower reason, i.e., the understanding or manas, of which law there is no breach and to which there is no exception;

• and, again, there is no breach which will not come under a higher law belonging to another and larger system; that ultimately, 'order' and 'disorder' are both equally illusions, both essentially subjective, both 'such stuff as dreams are made of'.

• The pure or higher or transcendental reason or buddhi, sees the necessity of both, the particular law and the breach of that law, from the standpoint of the all-inclusive Absolute.



Distinction between Buddhi and Manas

The distinction between buddhi and manas has been indicated before and will become clearer as we proceed. Briefly, Universal Mind, unconscious or sub-conscious or supra-conscious omniscience, reason which relates together all things at once and is 'pure' from all admixture of motivation and therefore limitation, obscuration, perversion, or aberration by selfish egoistic desire and, so far as possible, the manifestation of such pure reason in the individual consciousness also is Buddhi.

Individual mind, dominated by egoism, its vision coloured and narrowed by a particular interest, not made transparent and world-wide by the 'pure' wish to know all, for the sake of the 'deliverance' of all such egoistic mind, manifesting in and by attention to a particular object, is Manas. Indeed, such manas is the Jiva itself. (Vide the quotation from Yoga-Vasishtha in the foot-note at p.32, supra, and Gita, XVI.17, and III.29).

In terms of the logion, we might put it thus. Universal I, ideating the whole of Not-I, is Universal Mind, Mahat, Mahan-Atma, Vishnu, etc.; from the standpoint of the individual I, this Universal Mind is the unconscious, subconscious or supra-conscious; it is buddhi or 'pure' reason or shuddha-jnAna, in the fullest sense, reason here being not the step-by-step arguing intelligence, but the all-relating awareness, all-grasping intuition.

The same Universal, when faintly individualised (the 'We' aspect predominant, the 'I' aspect very subordinate, the egoistic intensity and limitation unaroused and undefined by strong desire), and ideating the most general aspects of the things that make up Not-I, with the faintest trace of succession, is buddhi in manifestation, cognising metaphysical, mathematical, scientific generalisations.

The same I, when ideating not-I's, 'this-es', in the predominantly particular and singular aspects, itself being focussed or canalised by definite egoistic desire, is manas, the outstanding feature of which is 'attention', whereby the 'hot point' or focus in the field of consciousness changes from place to place. (See William James, Stout, Hoffding, etc.)

The ability to direct this power of 'attention' deliberately and effectively, by practice in inhibition, ni-rodha, of psychoses that are not wanted, and in contemplation, sam-yama, of, and focussing on, that which is wanted, is yoga siddhi, achievement, accomplishment (of attentional mind-power, mental force; achievement of which ability is the first practical object of applied psychology, i.e., Yoga). (Bergson's writings help to illustrate this.)

In the more definitely individualised I, which is the man as above-mentioned, compounded of 'I' and 'not-I', 'Jiva' and 'atom',

• the reflection, of the Universal Buddhi above-mentioned, appears as intellect, also called buddhi in Samskrt, with the function of jnAna or cognition;

• the reflection of the 'I' appears as aham-kAra with the function of desire-emotion; and

• the reflection of manas itself as the manas again, with the function of conation and action.

The summation of these three functions is called chitta; which, however, has a function of its own, memory, which, again, is, so to say, the Universal Mind in the individual, the infinite storehouse out of which the individual, by attention, draws, in succession, what it wants, and into which it merges, when the whirling harmonogram of vAsanA-desire, the will to live as a separate individual, trshnA, libido, which makes chitta what it is, disappears in moksha or pralaya (for the time being). The theosophical doctrine of Atma-Buddhi-Manas seems to be in accord with these ideas.


"Soul-Struggles by Night": Changing Dreaming into Waking

For illustration by analogy, we may say that the person in deep sleep represents Absolute Consciousness; just before full waking, while he is taking a prospective view of the whole of the coming day's work, he represents buddhi; when awake and actually engaged in a piece of the work, manas.

At the end of this chapter will be found a collection of relevant Samskrt quotations in a separate Note. It seems to be an important, perhaps even fundamental part of Yoga-discipline, to 'wake up' the soul and make it conscious in the region of what is now its un-conscious.

A Master has said that a disciple progresses through "soul-struggles by night". The meaning seems to be that the disciple should fix in his mind, during the day, the determinate resolve

• that he will not allow himself to become, in the night, the puppet of his dreams;

• • i.e., of his 'unconscious lower desires, carnal passions, etc., which come out, like thieves in the night, and secure indulgence and satisfaction for themselves, by creating the images, fancies, phantasies, dramatic scenes, situations, of the dreams;

• • and which, the disciple has prevented his mind from entertaining during his waking hours; (or, in other words, which desires of the lower mind have been kept at bay by the disciple's higher mind, during the waking hours);

• and that, by such fixed resolve, he becomes more and more able to struggle against those base fancies;
• • he can more and more consciously prevent them from arising, even during the dreams;
• • and his dream-life, therefore and thereby, becomes, so to say, a continuation of his day-life, part of his waking consciousness.

The same Master has said elsewhere (but my memory here is faint and doubtful) that he, the Master, sleeps without dreaming at all, the three or four hours, out of the twenty-four, that he ordinarily spends in bed. In this way, the 'individual', progressing on the Upward Path becomes more and more perfectly self-controlled on all planes of his being, more and more Master of him-Self.

• Persistent introspection, pratyak-chetanA; tracing semi-consciously, even during the dream, its occurrence to the influence of incidents which have actually taken place in the day;

• mantra-japa, continuous inner silent recitation of some 'sacred words of power';

• willing and praying to the All-pervading 'Power', for 'power' to resist evil thoughts, and bring in good ones only--all this helps the soul to struggle successfully.

Having thus very cursorily indicated some of the most important features of the Interplay of Self and Not-Self in the World-Process, as arising out of the affirmative-negative nature of the third factor of the Absolute, we may next deal with the Cause of the Interplay, from another standpoint than that taken up in Chapter X, in connection with the question why parts appear in the logion.

'Cause' and 'Condition'

It has been said that this multitudinous process of samsAra takes place through Negation, and the word 'necessary' and its derivatives have been used from time to time, all along, in accounting for step after step of the deduction.

• It is clear that Negation, with its included affirmation, is only a description of the Relation between Self and Not-Self.

• It stands between them as a nexus between two termini.

• It inheres in the two, and is nothing apart and separate from them; by itself it can do nothing; but, as being the combined Nature of the two, it explains, expounds, accounts for, and supports the infinitely complex process of samsAra.

• This combination of the Nature of the Two into the dual Negation constitutes the Necessity of the movement involved in the Logion.



A fact is a necessary fact, a necessity. Every event is its own justification. When a fact is, so to say, violently and arbitrarily disrupted, and insistently pieces itself together in a new synthesis, a new form, the disruption is said to have been followed by its necessary consequence, illustrating the law of causality, which is the Law of Identity, i.e., Identity persisting through apparent changes in succession.


This Necessity requires no support or justification; it is self-evident at every step of the deduction; it plainly inheres in, and is part of the nature of, the three factors of the triune Absolute, which have been sufficiently explained, justified, and established, before.

For, remember, this nature is not three separate natures or even two separate natures, belonging to three or two separate, or even separable, factors of the Absolute--but is only One Single and Changeless Nature, the Nature of 'I' denying that It is 'Not-I'.

Whatever may be distinguished or said of Not-Self and Negation, or of their respective natures, can be said only by the courtesy of that Supreme Nature which is the source, the essence, and the whole, indeed the very Nature, of what we call their natures.

Bearing this in mind, we may easily see that this Supreme and changeless Nature is ni-yati, the 'fixed', Avashyaka-tA, Necessity i.e., the nature of the Whole, that which must be always, that which cannot be changed and avoided.



If 'Necessity' is derived from ne, not, and cessum, to yield, to give up, and means 'that which will not yield', then it is literally the same as A-vashyaka-tA, that which is beyond vasha or control, that which cannot be checked. The word niyati (nitarAm, wholly, yam, to control) is used frequently in Yoga Vasishtha, in the sense of 'fixed' necessity. dishta is another Samskrt word with an allied sense, 'destiny', 'fated', 'ordained', 'doomed'; from dish, to direct, order, point out the direction (dishA, desha) in which to go.


Necessity, the Cause of Causes

This Necessity is the One Law of all Laws, because it is the nature of the changeless, timeless, Absolute; all other laws flow from it, inhere in it, are included within it. It is the Primal Power, the One Force, the all-compelling Supreme Energy, in and of the World-Process, from which all forces are derived, and into which they all return; because they are inseparate from it, are only its endless manifestations and forms.

Its unbreakable and unalterable Oneness and Completeness appears

• in the facts of the Conservation of Energy;

• and of Motion (which undergoes transformations only, and never suffers any real reduction, so that the distinction between static and kinetic is at bottom illusory, apparent only, and, in reality, one of only comparative degree);

• and the Indestructibility of Matter, which manifests in ever-new ways, ever-new qualities, but is never changed in the Total quantity; for the Absolute may not be added to nor subtracted from.

It is Absolute Free-Will, which is called in the sacred books by the name of Maya-Shakti, Impersonal Goddess of a thousand names and a thousand hymns; who alone is in reality worshipped by every worshipper, either as nirguNA vidyA or as saguNA a-vidyA; because she ensouls all the million forms that human beings worship, each according to his heart's desire. It includes in itself the characters, or rather the single character, of all the Three Ultimates, and it thereby becomes another expression for and of the Absolute, viz., Becoming.

Thus, a hymn, personifying Shakti in imagination, utterly inseparable though she is from the Absolute, and therefore impersonal, exclaims: "Thou art the consort of the most high Brahma." (tvaM asi parabrahmA mahiShi;--Shankara, Ananda-Lahari)

This Necessity is the cause of all causes, kAraNam kAraNAnAm, and all other so-called necessities are but reflections of it.



Some hymns that worship Shakti

चैतन्यस्य समायोगात् निमित्तत्वं च कथ्यते ।
प्रपंचपरिणामाच्च सहकारित्वमुच्यते ।
केचितां तपः इत्याहुः, तमः केचिज्, जडं परे,
ज्ञानं, मायां, प्रधानं च, प्रकृतिं, शक्तिम्, अपि अजाम् ।
विमर्शः इति तां प्राहुः शौवशास्त्रविशारदाः ।
अविद्याम् इतरे प्राहुर्वेदतत्त्वार्थचिंतकाः ।
एवं नानाविधानि स्युर्नामानि निगमादिषु ।

caitanyasya samAyogAt nimittatvaM cha kathyate |
prapaMchapariNAmAccha sahakAritvamuchyate |
kechitAM tapaH ityAhuH, tamaH kechij, jadaM pare,
j~jAnaM, mAyAM, pradhAnaM cha, prakRutiM, shaktim, api ajAm |
vimarshaH iti tAM prAhuH shauvashAstravishAradAH |
avidyAm itare prAhurvedatattvArthachiMtakA |
evaM nAnAvidhAni syurnAmAni nigamAdiShu |
--f)evl Bhagavata, VII.xxxii.

"Shakti becomes an Efficient Cause, nimitta, by conjunction with Consciousness, chaitanya; and a necessary Condition, concomitant. saha-kAri, (or sAdhAraNa, a-prthak-siddha, upa-kArana) in transformations of objects. Some call Her Tapas, some Tamas, Jada, A-jnAna, Maya, Prakrti, or AjA. Shaivas name Her Vimarsha; Vaidikas, A-vidya. Such are Her many names in the nigamas, traditions, of different thinkers and worshippers."

रुद्रहीनं विष्नुहीनं न वदंति जनाः किल;
शक्तिहीनं यथा सर्वं प्रवदंति नराधनम् ।
प्रणवार्थस्वरूपां तां भजामो भुवनेश्वरीं ।

rudrahInaM viShnuhInaM na vadaMti janAH kila;
shaktihInaM yathA sarvaM pravadaMti narAdhanam | --Ibid. III.vi.
praNavArthasvarUpAM tAM bhajAmo bhuvaneshvarIM | --ibid. VII.xxviii.

"When men wish to express contempt for a (feeble, lethargic, inert, spineless) person, they do not call him Rudra-less or Vishnu-less, but Shakti-less, Power-less, Energy-less. We meditate on Her, the Sovereign Goddess of the Universe, as the very Meaning, the whole significance, of Pra-nava, AUM."

saidevo
04 March 2008, 08:51 AM
'lIlA', the Final 'why'

We may appropriately consider the meaning of 'Cause' in this connection. From the standpoint of psychology, as has been shown over and over again by various acute and accurate thinkers in many lands,

• the world is an endless succession of sense-impressions; and

• the idea of absolute necessity, which we associate with the successions that are described as cause and effect, is a mere hallucination produced by the fact that a certain succession has been invariable so far as our experience has gone.

This view is correct so far as it goes; but only so far as it goes. It does not go far enough. It does not explain satisfactorily the 'Why' of the hallucination. Indeed, some holders of the view refuse to deal with a 'Why' at all. They content themselves with a mere description, a 'How'. But others will not rest within such restrictions. They must understand how and why there come to be a 'How', and a 'Why' at all in our consciousness; how and why we talk of 'because' and 'therefore' and 'for this reason'. It is true that every so-called law of nature is only "a resume, a brief description, of a wide range of perceptions," (Pearson's Grammar of Science, p. 132, 1st edn.) l but why is there any uniformity in the world at all, such as makes possible any such resume or brief description?

The explanation of all this is that each 'why', each generalisation, each law, is subsumed under a wider and wider law, till we come to that final and widest law, the Logion, which is the resume, the sva-bhAva, the nature, of the Absolute, which, sva-bhAva, because of its Changelessness, requires no further 'why'.



yad apariNAmi tad akAraNAm | 'The unchanging is the uncaused.'

The series of 'why's,' with reference to actions, 'Why did you do this?' 'Because of this,' 'Why that?' 'Because of that,' etc., ceases when the reply comes, 'It was my pleasure'. Few people ask further, 'Why was it your pleasure?' There is an instinctive recognition of the fact that the pleasure, the Will of the Me, the Self, is something final.

But if any should ask that question also, the reply is but an expansion, or another form or aspect, of the same fact, viz., that all 'things' are in the I; i.e., all 'this-es', all conjunctions and all disjunctions with all possible things, i.e., all possible pleasures (i.e., desires and fulfilments of desire or will for conjunction), and also all possible corresponding reactive and necessarily implied pains (which also are 'pleasures', lIlA, being willed by the Self, sub-consciously, as fulfilments of desire or will for disjunction) are Mine.

In other words, 'It was, and is, and will be my pleasure to undergo all possible experiences, including this one, which you ask about'. In the fn. on p.50, supra, is stated the question which Vidura, sorely exercised in mind, put to Rshi Maitreya. Maitreya answered him in words which may be interpreted in two ways:

सा इयं भगवतो माया यत् नयेन विरुध्यते,
ईश्वरस्य विमुक्तस्य कार्पण्यं उत बन्धनं;
यद् अर्थेन विनाऽमुष्य पुंसः आत्मविपर्ययः
प्रतीयते उपद्रष्टुः स्वशिरश्छेदनादिकः ।

sA iyaM bhagavato mAyA yat nayena virudhyate,
Ishvarasya vimuktasya kArpaNyaM uta bandhanaM;
yad arthena vinA&muShya puMsaH AtmaviparyayaH
pratIyate upadraShTuH svashirashChedanAdikaH |
--Bhagavata, III.vii.9-10.

"This is the Lord's mAyA which defies all naya, logic, reason, all why and wherefore this, viz., that Ishvara, the Sovereign Lord of the Universe, the Ever-Free, appears as a humble creature bound in bonds of all sorts; that, without any artha, meaning, purpose, without rhyme or reason, senselessly, the Supreme Man turns Him-Self insideout, upside-down, reverses Him-Self, becomes the Opposite of what He really is. The Witness of all, sees Him-Self, appears to Him-Self, as to a by-stander, as if He had cut off His own head, as jugglers do!"

Such is the plain meaning of the words; but, equally plainly, it is not a satisfying reply to Vidura's question. The real reply is in the riddle of the words, yat nayena virudhyate. They admit of another interpretation, by separating the single-seeming nayena into two, na and yena. In Skt., the gloss would run:

इयं सा माया, यत्, येन 'एतदा' भगवान् विरुध्यते, तत् न;

iyaM sA mAyA, yat, yena 'etadA' bhagavAn virudhyate, tat na;

"The Illusion is that This, Etat, which, is the Opposite of the Lord, Self, is Not.' In this way, the lIlA, Play, is seen to be static, eternally frozen, changeless; not kinetic, moving, changeful.

This may, no doubt, appear a forced explanation. But we know well that 'mystic' writings are full of such riddling rhymes, and that the 'the kingdom of Heaven has to be taken by storm'.


No Change, No Cause, No Why: Spirit's Unbroken Identity

A cause is asked for by the human mind only when there is an effect, a change. We do not ask 'Why?' otherwise.

• We ask it because the very constitution of our being, our inmost nature of unbroken unity as the one Self, 'I am I', 'A is A', revolts against the creation of something new; against A disappearing and not-A appearing; against A becoming 'not-A', i.e., becoming B, C, etc.

• We cannot assimilate such an innovation; there is nothing in that inmost nature of ours to respond to it. Our whole being, our whole nature, insistently demands Continuity, Identity, in which is to be found Changeless Immortality, and without which our Eternity would be jeopardised; for if any thing could be annihilated, why might not I also be liable to the same catastrophe?

• We therefore inevitably break out with a 'why?' whenever we see a change. And the answer we receive is a 'because', which endeavours to resolve the effect into the cause, in the various aspects of matter, motion, force, etc., and shows that the effect is really not different from the cause, but is identical with it.

And we are satisfied, our sense of, and our craving for, Unbroken Unity is soothed. Causality is the reconciliation between the necessity, the fixed unity, of Self on the one hand, and the accidentality, flow and flux, manyness, of Not-Self, on the other.



See foot-notes, ch.II, pp.7,9,11, supra. Hoffding's treatment of the problem of causation, in Outlines of Psychology, ch.V-D, will be found useful in this connection, as explaining in modern terms, vikAra or pariNAma-vAda, which may be called the scientific conception of causation. Hoffding himself holds it, as distinguished from what he calls the popular conception of causation, corresponding to Arambha-vAda.


Three Views of Cause-Effect



The last stage of thought in this respect, which may similarly be called the metaphysical conception of causation, is vivarta-vAda, next dealt with in the text, and briefly defined in Pancha-dashl, xiii.9, thus:

अवस्थांतर भानंः तु विवर्त्तो रज्जुस् पर्वत् ।

avasthAMtara bhAnaMH tu vivartto rajjus parvat |

"The false appearance of changes of states in the Changeless One, as of a snake in a piece of rope in the dark, is vivarta, vortex, turning round, facing round, opposition."; false appearance as distinguished from really passing from one state into another.

Or, in Vedanta-sara, thus:

अतत्वतोऽन्य था प्रथा विवर्त्त इत्युदीरितः ।

atatvato&nya thA prathA vivartta ityudIritaH |

The corresponding definition of vikAra is:

सतत्वतोऽन्यथा प्रथा विकार इत्युदीरितः ।

satatvato&nyathA prathA vikAra ityudIritaH |

'Appearance of change, when there is no real change, is vivarta; change, when real, and in a real substance, is vikAra'.

Another way of describing the three stages is this:

(1) कार्यं (आरम्भात्) पूर्वं असत्, पश्चात् सत्;

kAryaM (ArambhAt) pUrvaM asat, pashchAt sat;

'The effect is non-existent before its birth; it is existent, real, after birth': this is the Nyaya-Vaisheshika view.

(2) कार्यं (उत्पत्तेः) पूर्वमपि सत्, पश्चात् च सत्;
पस्मात् कारणाद् अभिन्नं, तस्य रूपान्तरं एव, तस्य परिनामः, विकारः

kAryaM (utpatteH) pUrvamapi sat, pashchAt cha sat;
pasmAt kAraNAd abhinnaM, tasya rUpAntaraM eva, tasya parinAmaH, vikAraH

'The effect is existent before as well as after birth, because it is not really different from the cause, but only another form of it': this is the Sankhya view.

(3) कार्यं पूर्वं अपि असत्, पश्चाद् अपि,

kAryaM pUrvaM api asat, pashchAd api,

'The effect is non-existent, unreal, untrue, before as well as after birth, i.e., appearance': this is the Vedanta view.

The reconciliation of all these is thus:

• Arambha-vAda (Nyaya-Vaisheshika) may be said to be true with reference to the new form, and to the kartA, the doer, actor, maker, the efficient cause, whose shakti, power, will, creates or brings into manifestation, the new form; in other words, produces the transformation, the change, the newness.

• pariNAma-vAda (Sankhya) is true with reference to the upAdAna, the material cause, the matter or substance which is transformed.

• vivarta-vAda (Vedanta) is true with reference to the One Nature of all the Factors taken together at once, from the transcendental standpoint (as distinguished from the empirical or experiential standpoint which sees things in succession, one after another).

This Transcendental View of Causation, or absence of cause-and-effect succession, does not in the least diminish, much less destroy, the experiential value of the Law of Karma, and does not give countenance to any immoral anti-nomi-anism, i.e., absence of (moral and other) law, as that 'You may do what you like'.

Of course, in a way, it does say to the 'emancipated soul', 'You are free now, since you know, and are therefore a law unto yourself, and you may do what you like', but it also adds, 'but be prepared for the the painful consequences of sin, for you know them also.' Every elder guardian, when handing over property to a ward who has attained majority, says: "This is yours, to utilise or to waste, as you please: you know the consequences of each way."

Sankhya says, kAraNaM asti avyakttaM, (kAryaM vyakttaM), 'cause is unmanifest, effect is its manifestation'. In other words, Undifferentiated Unconscious is Cause; differentiations are effects. All effects exist simultaneously ously in the Cause. The Unconscious Whole is the Cause of each part, each 'conscious'.

The Darshanas, 'views', philosophies, up to Sankhya. believe in the relation of cause and effect; also that the former invariably precedes and the latter succeeds.

Vedanta does away with this, as with all other views ordinarily held, by its vivarta, inversion, of them all. It cannot be said definitively that the cause 'precedes' and the effect 'succeeds'--as a generalisation.

The seed precedes and the tree succeeds, no doubt; but only in the sense of a particular seed and a particular tree. Otherwise, the tree (another particular tree) precedes and the seed (another particular seed) succeeds; and the relation is reversed.

Therefore, you may say, in the case of any given event, not that the cause precedes, but that what precedes is the cause; not that the effect succeeds, but that what succeeds is the effect.

From undifferentiated a-vyakta arises differentiated vyakta; from chaos, cosmos; from the homogeneous, the heterogeneous; and vice versa; and this, necessarily, as a rule, not as an accident. This being so, it cannot be said that such and such a thing is always necessarily cause, and such and such another, effect.


But, all the same, it is only a subterfuge, an evasion, a mayavic illusion; it is only 'the next best thing'; not the best.

For, in strictness, the merest change, the passing of something, a mere form, state, condition only though it be, into nothing, and of nothing into something, is impossible, impossible to understand. True satisfaction is found only when we have reduced change to changelessness.

• Then we see that there are no effects and no causes, but only steadfastness, rock-fixed-ness. Such steadfastness and shakelessness is its own necessity, and requires no external support.

• We find it in the Logion, wherein all possible sense-impressions, all possible conjunctions and disjunctions of Self and Not-Self, are present once for all, and therefore in all possible successions.

• These pseudo-infinite and mutually subversive successions make up the multitudinous order as well as disorder of samsAra, World-Process, which is the Contents of the Logion.

• And the shadow of the ever-present Necessity of the Logion, on each one of these successions, is the fact, and the source, of the belief about 'cause and effect', 'reason', 'why', 'therefore', etc.

• Each one of these successions, because included in the necessity of the Logion, appears as necessary also, as a necessary relation of cause and effect.

• Yet it never is in reality necessary, for every law has an exception, and every exception is under another law, as said before; it is only an imitation of the One real Necessity.

The counterpart of this truth is that every particular free-will, while not reality free at all, appears free by imitation of the Absolute Free-will; and Necessity and Free-will obviously mean exactly the same thing in the Absolute, Aham-Etat-Na, which is and includes the totality of endless Becoming.



Consider the etymological meaning of 'automatic', viz., 'self-moved', 'self-willed', 'free-willed'. But it has come to mean the reverse, viz., 'mechanical', 'non-free', 'mechanically necessitated to work in a certain way'. Autonomous is now used for 'self-determining', 'self-governing', 'self-willing.' Both extremes meet in the Absolute Self.


We may express the same idea in other words, thus:

• Each one of the endless flow of sense-impressions, of motions, of successions, is an effect, of which the Totality of them is the One constant Cause;

• or again, the Absolute, or the Uni-verse, is Its Own Cause;

• or, yet again, the necessity of the Nature of the Triune Absolute is the One Cause of all the possible variations, details, movements, which fall within and make up that Tri-unity, all that endlessness of Becoming, as One Effect.

saidevo
05 March 2008, 11:42 AM
Whole, Cause of Each Part

The Whole is the Cause of each Part within it.

This is what we have to studiously realise in this connection, in order to understand the nature of Cause, Necessity, or Shakti-Energy.

The simultaneous, the changeless, the ever-complete, the Absolute, is the cause of the successive, the changing, the partial, which, in its full totality as Not-Self, is always contained within that Absolute.

When we so put it, the idea of causation presents no difficulty. But it may be said that the difficulty disappears because the essential idea of causation--one thing preceding and giving rise, by some inherent, mysterious, unintelligible power, to another thing which succeeds--is surreptitiously subtracted from the problem.

To this the reply is that there is no such surreptitious subtraction, but an entirely above-board abolition and refutation of that so-called essential idea, and of every thing and fact that may be supposed to be the basis and foundation of that idea.

We show that the idea of necessary causation, by some limited thing, of some other limited thing, is only an illusion, and a necessary illusion; in the same way in which the idea of any one of many individuals being a free agent, having free-will, is an illusion, and a necessary illusion.

The one universal Self is free, obviously, because there is nothing else to limit and compel it. Here the word 'free' may, from one point of view, be well said to have no significance at all; but from another, it has a whole world of significance.

Now, because every self is the Self, therefore it also must be free by inalienable birthright. And yet, being limited, being hemmed in on all sides, by an infinite number of other selves; each of which is, like itself, not only the Self, but also a self, because identified with and limited by, a not-self; how can it be free?

The reconciliation is that every individual Jiva feels free, but is not free; it is free so far as it is the One Self, and it is not free so far as it has made the 'mistake', a-vidyA, of identifying itself with a piece of Not-Self.

It is now generally recognised, and so need not be proved in detail here newly, that the idea of necessity, present in our idea of causation, is a purely subjective factor; not created by anything or any experience 'outside' of us (except in the metaphysical sense in which the 'subjective' includes the 'objective', in which the 'outside' also is 'inside', or, as said before, the 'without' also is 'within').



Thought and Thing

'This is without, i.e., outside me', and 'this is within, i.e., inside me or my mind', 'this is objective and this is subjective', 'this is thing, this is thought', 'this is ideal, this is real'--all these are thoughts, ideas, experiences, plays or forms of consciousness which alone creates, and distinguishes between, both the factors of each of these pairs of opposites.

'This is a thing, and not a thought' is still a thought. But the distinction is made, and therefore there must be some truth in it also. The truth is twofold:

• (a) the percept of only the individual consciousness is a 'thought', is 'ideal'; that of the universal consciousness is a 'thing', is 'real' (pp. 59,189-190, supra); and

• (b) the relatively permanent, intense, strong 'thought' is a 'thing'; and the weak, passing 'thought', contradicted and abolished by other and more permanent thoughts or things, is only a 'thought'.

The distinction of individual consciousness and universal consciousness is made and grasped by the former identifying itself with the latter, and then recognising that the former is included in the latter, as part in whole. Cf. Hoffding, Psychology, pp. 130,206,208; and Yoga-Vasishtha, generally, on bhAvana-dArdhya or vAsanA-ghanatA, 'hardening of imagination', 'density of desire'.


The outside world shows only a repeated succession, which by itself is never sufficient to substantiate any notion of invariable, inherent, necessary, power of causation.

The validity of 'inductive' generalisations does not come from the number of instances observed. Limited data cannot yield unlimited conclusions. No addition or multiplication of finites can make the Infinite.

The element of necessary validity in inductions is really a 'deductive' fact; as once, so ever; as here, so everywhere; because I, that am now and here, am ever and everywhere.

This element of the idea comes from within us, from Self, from our self as willing, as exercising a power of causation, from our indefeasible feeling of an exercise of freewill, though that again, because limited and dealing with the limited, the material, is naturally always resolvable, on analysis and scrutiny, into material forces.



'Destiny' is 'Past Karma'

The question of Free-will and Necessity is discussed in Samskrt works, mostly in terms of daiva and purusha-kAra, 'div-ine will' or 'fate' and 'personal will' or 'individual effort', ('person' and 'purusha' are perhaps etymologically the same);

and the siddhAnta, the 'established conclusion', from the empirical standpoint, or vyava-hArika drshti, the stand-point of the limited, finite, separative, individualist ego, is, that what is called daiva is only accumulated previous Karma operating as tendencies, habits, character, leading tocorresponding opportunities or environments, etc.

पूर्वजन्मजनितं पुराविदः कर्म दैवम् इति संप्रचक्षते ।

pUrvajanmajanitaM purAvidaH karma daivam iti saMprachakShate |

• prayatna, vyavasAya, krti -- are other words for effort, determination, volition,
• as niyati -- is another word for fate or destiny.
• baddha and mukta -- are well-known equivalents for 'bound' and 'free';
• dishta -- is also used in the sense of 'pre-ordained'.
• svatantra and para-tantra -- self-dependent and other-dependent,
• sva-chhanda and para-chhanda -- self-guided and other-guided,
• sv-Adhina and par-Adhlna -- self-governed and other-governed,
• Atma-vasha and para-vasha -- self-willed and other-willed, self-determined and other-determined,

are pairs of words which express different aspects of the same idea.

Compare
na khulu parataMtrAH prabhudhiyaH--(Mahima-stuti) and
sarvaM pravashaM duHkhaM sarvaM AtmavashAM sukham; (Manu, iv.106);

'The Lord's volitions are not controlled by others', and 'Self-dependence is bliss; other-dependence is misery'.

The word aham-kAra, in Samskrt, stands for

• (a) asmita, '1-am-ness', egoism, the sense of separate individuality focussed and concentrated by desire, emotion, vAsanA, trshnA, libido, will-to-live;
• (b) 'I do', 'I make', 'I act', (free-will);
• (c) 'I am the doer, actor. maker, of my own doings, etc., accompanied by elation, pride, arrogance.

All the meanings are obviously closely allied.

The One True Seeing

From the transcendental metaphysical standpoint, the standpoint of the Eternal, Infinite, Universal One-Consciousness (of Aham-Etat-Na), or paramArthika-drshti, all are equally, and together, illusions. This is also a siddhAnta, or established conclusion, entirely in accord with the one afore-mentioned.

Compare Bhagavad Gita

ईश्वरः सर्वभूतानां हृद्देशे, ऽर्जुन! तिष्ठति,
भ्रामयन् सर्वभूतानि यन्त्रारूढानि मायया ।

IshvaraH sarvabhUtAnAM hRuddeshe, &rjuna! tiShThati,
bhrAmayan sarvabhUtAni yantrArUDhAni mAyayA | (xviii.61)

प्रकृतेः क्रियमाणानि गुणैः कर्माणि सर्वशः,
अहंकारविमूढात्मा कर्ताऽहम् इति मन्यते ।

prakRuteH kriyamANAni guNaiH karmANi sarvashaH,
ahaMkAravimUDhAtmA kartA&ham iti manyate | (iii.27)

Following Samskrt texts and observations may also be considered here.

Yoga Bashya says:

एकमेव दर्शनं, रूयातिः एव दर्शनं ।

ekameva darshanaM, rUyAtiH eva darshanaM |

Tn current orthodox interpretation is different, but another permissible one is:

एकस्मिन् वस्तुनि परमात्मनि, अनेकतादर्शनं, भेददर्शनं, भ्रान्तिः, मित्यादर्शनं;
अनेकेषु 'दृश्य'पदार्थेषु, एकतादर्शनं, अभेददर्शनं, परमात्मदर्शनं एव एकं सत्यं सम्यग् दर्शनं;
रूयातिः, प्रत्यागात्म मूलप्रकृत्योः पुरुष प्रकृत्योः, अन्यता रूयातिः, विवेकेन ज्ञानं

ekasmin vastuni paramAtmani, anekatAdarshanaM, bhedadarshanaM, bhrAntiH, mityAdarshanaM;
anekeShu 'dRushya'padArtheShu, ekatAdarshanaM, abhedadarshanaM, paramAtmadarshanaM eva ekaM satyaM samyag darshanaM;
rUyAtiH, pratyAgAtma mUlaprakRutyoH puruSha prakRutyoH, anyatA rUyAtiH, vivekena j~jAnaM |

'To see the One in the Many, is the On(e)ly Right and True View; to see Many instead of One, is Illusion'. The former is the 'transcendental', the latter the 'empirical' or 'experiential', view. The former underlies ni-gama, deduction; the latter, anu-gama, induction; tarka, or anu-mAna, negative or positive inference, connects the two.

• pAram-Arthika sattA is 'essential reality of being, in the true sense'.
• vyAva-hArika sattA is 'practical, empirical, existence'.
• prAti-bhAsika sattA is 'illusive appearance, false existence'.

Strictly, the second and the third are the same; they differ in degree; not in kind, as the first does.

In the Madhyamika system, of Maha-Yana Buddhism, sam-vrti-satya seems to be the equivalent of vyAva-hArika sattA. The word param-Artha-satya, is common to the Madhyamika school and Vedanta; as, in fact, are, all important ideas and many other words.

paramArtha-drshti may also be called sam-pUrNa, or samashti-, or ananta-, or sama-, or sAmAnya-, or kendriya-, drshti, in different aspects, i.e., the complete, or all-comprehending, or infinite, or equal, or universal, or central, (centripetal) view.

So vyava-hAra-drshti would be khanda-, or vyashti-, or s-Anta-, or, vishama-, or, vishesha-; or apa-kendra-, drshti, 'the part-ial, or separative, or finite, or un-equal, or particular, or non-central (centrifugal), view.

paurusha-karma-daiva

Regarding these views, Maha-bharata (Shanti p. ch.239) says:

Some call it purusha-kAra, human manly effort; others daiva, divine ordainment, yet others svabhAva, (law of) nature. But the fact is that the three, paurusha, karma, daiva, all three are inseparable aspects of the same fact, with reference to phala, vrtti and sva-bhAva, fruit (result of action), active movement (striving), (law of) nature (which connects the two).


We thus see that the two ideas are intimately connected, nay, are different aspects of the same fact--the idea of necesary causation and the idea of causation by free-will. As the one is an illusion, so is the other, neither more nor less.



Why Strongest Wish is Free Will

Note here, in these very words, how intimately contradictions are blended together; ambi-valence in uni-valence. In one sense, the idea of necessary causation, i.e., causation by an irresistible power, is based solely on our experience of causation by our own unchecked free-will.

In another sense, necessary and free are the very opposite of each other. The word 'auto-matic', meaning 'mechanically necessary and unavoidable', and also 'self-moved', i.e., 'free', finds reconciliation for these two opposed senses only when Autos is understood as the Great Self, whose ordinances are necessarily unavoidable, because there is None-Else, even to oppose, much less compel.

In a psychological sense, while each choice, each exercise of so-called free-will, is determined by the predominant motive, still, inasmuch as that motive is nothing apart from or outside and independent of the moved individual, inasmuch as the Jiva or self entertains the motive, identifies itself with it as its strongest wish, therefore the individual self feels that it is making the choice, of itself, by itself, i.e., of its own free-will, and actually does so. To be guided by a motive is to be guided by oneself as identified with that motive.

From another standpoint, from which that motive is not predominant (but some other is, as it must be, necessarily, for individual existence means attachment to a 'this' and a corresponding wish or motive), it is regarded as something outside the Jiva, to be rejected and struggled against, instead of being implicitly obeyed as one's very inmost self.

In Yoga and Theosophy, this other standpoint which may be regarded as higher, is provided by the 'subtle' body or sUkShma-sharIra as distinguished from the sthU1a or grosser; these are dealt with in a later chapter.


We can understand both, only by understanding how the Changing is contained in the Changeless--
• that there is in reality no change;
• that there is in reality no succedence and no precedence, but only simultaneity;
• no causation of one part by another part, but only the un-arbitrary coexistence of all possible parts, by the one Changeless Necessity of the Nature of the Absolute;
• and that whatever appears as a particular necessity of any special relation between one part and another part is only an illusive reflection, appearing from the standpoint of the particular parts concerned, of the One in that particular 'many'.

The Necessity of the Changeless we can understand; indeed we can understand it so well that we are almost inclined to call it a truism. The 'necessity' of the 'changing' is what we cannot understand, and are very anxious to understand; but we can never understand it, in the way we imagine and describe the fact of change to ourselves; because it is the very reverse of a truism, its opposite extreme; because it is false, not a fact; because there is no change.

Only by understanding this can we understand the whole situation, by reducing change to changelessness; by realising that, while, from the empirical standpoint of the successive particular 'this-es', there appears change, from the transcendental standpoint of the universal Self, it disappears altogether in the rock-like fixity of the constant Negation of the whole Not-Self, i.e., of all the parts of the many Not-Self, at once, by Self.

saidevo
08 March 2008, 09:27 AM
The Self's Standing Library

A slight illustration may perhaps help to make the thought clearer. A large library contains billions of different permutations and combinations of the words of a language, each permutation or combination having a connected serial as well as individual meaning. The library, as a whole, contains all these at once in an evercomplete and finished condition.

Yet if any individual character out of the thousands whose life-story the library contains, endeavoured to picture out its own life-story, realise it in every point, it would do so in what would appear to it, from its own standpoint, only a succession.

In the library of the universe, God's Mind, the volumes are countless; each volume, a life-story without beginning or end; sole author, the One Self; readers, pseudo-infinite in number and pseudo-eternal in time; they all also, only the Author Him-Self; each volume, again, tells only the same story, but in an order which is different from that of every other. Each Jiva-memory too is such a library.

Soul's Life in Each Body-Cell

Or take this other case, which may come even nearer home. Each one of us is living in the whole of his body, at every point of it, and at every moment of time. But let him try to define, to realise, to throw into distinct relief, his consciousness of every one of these points of his body. So far as he can do so at all, he will be able to do it only in succession.

The whole of the universe, the whole of Not-Self, is the body of Self. The latter lives in and at each point of the former, completely, at once; lives in the way of innumerable mutually contradictory and therefore counterbalancing and neutralising functions; and it lives in each one of these points in the same way as in every other. Each point, to itself, therefore, seems to live, in these innumerable ways and functions, in an endless succession which constitutes its sempiternal, un-dy-ing, life.

That Which Is-Not: Maya

The nature of this endless Becoming, this endless World-Process, this cause and effect combined, is embodied in that most common and most significant name of Shakti-Energy, viz., Maya ('mAyA'), even as the whole Nature of the Absolute is embodied in the Pranava.

Maya, as explained by books on Tantra, is yA-mA reversed; yA and mA being two complete Samskrt words which mean, when put together as a sentence, 'that which is not'; is as well as not, sad-asat, existent and notexistent; truly mysterious to the outer view.



'White' Tantra-shastra is a very important class of Samskrt literature, of which only the veriest fragments are now extant. It seems to have dealt with many departments of physical and superphysical or occult science, especially in their bearing on yoga-practice. Most of the books now available under the name of Tantra, are hodgepodges of Vedantic ideas and foul black magic practices and mystery-mongering.

For another allied word, bhrama or bhrAnti, illusion, see footnote at p.159, supra. mA, is also the name for Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth and splendour, the mother of Kaama, Eros; and another name of Kaama is Kan-darpa, meaning elator, 'arouser of pride', and also the opposite, 'breaker of pride'.

The significance of this Puranic mythology appears when we remember them in the terms of Yoga-sutra; a-vid-yA, nescience, 'that which is not', another form of mA-yA, gives birth to asmi-ta, egoism, whence arise rAga-dvesha, love-hate, and abhi-nivesha, stubborn tenacity.

mA also means to measure, to limit; and mA-yA is thus only another form of mAtrA matter, (see pp.173,195, supra), it is the finitising, limiting principle, which makes the all-inclusive Universal appear as the separate, separatist, egoistic, individual and particular.

Matter, mother, mates, matrix, matris, matr, mAtA, all are the same; from Skt. mA, to measure; nir-mA, to make, create, manifest. Matter measures Spirit, defines it, sets limits to it, makes it manifest. So does the mother the child.

It may be noted that asmitA, 'I-am-ness', has three stages of growth and development:

• (a) 'I-am', syAm, 'may I be', 'may I continue to be', 'may I always be', 'may I never cease to be';

• (b) 'I am great', bahu syAm, 'may I be much more', 'may I be greater than others';

• (c) 'I am many', bahudhA syAm, 'may I be many and yet more many', 'may I be more and more numerous'.

In other words, (a) self-preservation (by food), (b) self-enhancement (by possessions), (c) self-multiplication (by progeny).

In yet other words, the appetites or urges of (a) hunger, (b) acquisitiveness, (c) sex.

Love-hate and the tenacious clinging to that conglomerate of thoughts, emotions, volitions, which makes up a separate-feeling personality or individuality or ego-complex, are connected with and arise out of all these forms of egoism.

The subject is discussed at length in The Science of the Emotions; also in The Science of the Self.


Samskrit Grammar's First Aphorism

The extant Tantra-books dealing with Shakti in a personal aspect, give to it a hidden name consisting of the single letter 'i', इ, even as they call various other gods by single letters. (See Tara-sara-Upanishat for instances.)

This letter stands naturally between 'a', अ and 'u', उ, as should also 'm', म being only the outer sheath of 'i', though it is thrown to the end, because of the fact that it appears as negation after affirmation.

But this 'i', placed between 'a' and 'u', coalesces with and disappears entirely into 'a', in the conjunction which brings out of the joined vowel-sounds, 'a' and 'u', the vowel-sound 'o'; for AUM is pronounced as OM.



This is taken from Pranava-vada, mentioned before. The very first aphorism of Panini's famous grammar is, अ-इ-उ-ण; the last letter may be regarded as a blind or substitute for म्; so that the whole aphorism is the exact equivalent of A-(I-)-U-M.


This is in accordance with the grammatical rules, allowing of a double sandhi*, (coalescence of letters), of archaic Samskrt, the deliberately 'well-constructed', 'polished', 'refined', 'perfected' language; the complete grammar of which, if we only had it, would show, as tradition says, in the articulate development of vibration after vibration, sound after sound, letter after letter, word after word, and sentence after sentence, the corresponding articulate development of the vocal apparatus, as well as of the world-system to which that language belongs.**



* Instances of this (double sandhi are frequently met with in such ancient works as Ramayana, Mahabharata, and Puranas.

** See on this point, works on Mantra-shastra, Nandikeshvara-Karika, Aumkara-Sarvasva, etc.


That this coalescence and disappearance is just, is plain from all that has been said as to the nature of Shakti, which ever hides in Self; disappears into Not-Self whenever Self acts upon that Not-Self; and goes back again to Self, through and after Negation.



This it does, it must be remembered, in the one single way of lending to, and at the same time withdrawing from, the Not-Self, its own being.

प्रकृतिं पश्यति पुरुषः प्रेक्षकवद् उपस्थितः सुस्थः ।

prakRutiM pashyati puruShaH prekShakavad upasthitaH susthaH |
--Sankhya-Karika, verse 65

'Purusha, fixed, self-contained, like a spectator, witnesses Prakrti';

This beholding, this witnessing, this 'imaginative attention', by Self, is the affirmation by it of Prakrti, Not-Self; which affirmation alone gives to it all the existence it has; it is Consciousness which energises and makes possible all the phenomena that physical science deals with; per contra, the not beholding, the turning the face away from the dance, of Prakrti, by Self, is the negation by it of Prakrti; which negation amounts to sleep and pralaya; it is the Principle of Consciousness, in its form of Un-consciousness, (which, in practice, is consciousness of something else) which 'dissolves' the phenomena that physical (including psycho-physical) science deals with.


When we endeavour to consider it apart from the others, it will still not be separated from 'm'; and then, too, it will identify itself with the hidden affirmative, whereby power manifests and appears forth, in many-formed results and effects, rather than with the overt negative.

Shiva and Shava

This has been indicated in exoteric Hinduism in the relation between Shiva and his consort Gauri; Gauri, in her many forms, is the implied and affirmative aspect of ichChA, while Shiva is its overt aspect of abolition and negation only;



शेते, सर्वस्मिन्, इति शिवः ।

shete, sarvasmin, iti shivaH |

'He who sleeps in all, is Shiva.'

जच्छति, इति गौः; ई, गति व्याप्ति प्रजन कान्ति असन खादनेषु;

jacChati, iti gauH; I, gati vyApti prajana kAnti asana khAdaneShu;

'That which goes is Gauh; that which goes, pervades, produces (young), desires, throws away, eats up, is I (== EE, as in 'see'); She who does all this is Gauh-i, GaurI'.


in His being, this Gaurl hides inseparably as veritable half of His frame, so that hymns addressed to Her declare that 'it is only when conjoined with her, Primal Shakti, that Shiva becomes able to prevail and energise; otherwise, cannot stir at all.'



शिवः शक्त्या युक्तो यदि भवति शक्तः प्रभवितुं,
न चेद् एवं देवो न खलु कुशलः स्पन्दितुम् अपि ।

shivaH shaktyA yukto yadi bhavati shaktaH prabhavituM,
na ched evaM devo na khalu kushalaH spanditum api |
--Saundarya Lahari (verse 1)

'Shiva', व, minus व, i, is 'Shava', शव, which means 'corpse', lifeless, powerless.

Strictly, destruction and negation belong to the Hara or Rudra aspects of Shiva; his creative aspect, in the Shaiva Agama, is called Bhava (corresponding to Brahmaa of the Puranas), and his preservative aspect, Mrda (Vishnu); Shiva stands then for Brahma. Current pairs of words are also Shiva-Shakti, Gauri-Shankara, Bhava-Bhavani, etc. But Gauri (the White) has also her other aspect of Kali (the black) ; and abolition of the world's turmoil is Shiva's Peace.

bahula-rajase vishvotpattau bhavAya namo namaH,
prabala-tamase tath saMhAre harAya namo namaH,
jana sukha kRute sattvodriktau mRuDAya namo namaH,
pramahasi pade nistraiguNye shivAya namo namaH |

--Shiva-Mahima-stuti (verse 30)

saidevo
11 March 2008, 12:20 PM
Three Aspects of Shiva: Correspondences of the Three Shaktis

Because of its special connection with Negation is this Necessity, this Shakti, treated of together with Negation; not as a fourth ultimate.

This ever-present Necessity, the very Nature of the triune Absolute, of the succession of the World-Process, appears as, and is, that which we call Shakti, Might,--('It may be', 'may be', from shak, to be possible, to be able; )--Ability, Power, Force, Energy, etc.

In other words, as Negation is the Nature of the Relation between Self and Not-Self, so this Necessity, which inheres in the combination of the three, and is not separable from any, may be regarded as the Power of that Nature of Self and Not-Self which makes inevitable that Relation.

This Relation immediately flows from, or better, is only another form of, that Necessity, and the Necessity is therefore treated as being more closely connected with the Relation, i.e., Negation, than with the other two factors of the Absolute.

In this Maya-Shakti we see repeated, the trinity of the Absolute, the primal impress of which is always appearing and reappearing endlessly everywhere. Each of the factors of the Absolute repeats in itself, over again, that trinity, in the shape of corresponding aspects.

In Pratyag-Atma,

• Sat corresponds to Etat, the manifest seat of action, whereby the existence of Self appears forth;

• Chit corresponds to Aham, which is the manifest seat of knowledge; and

• Ananda to Na (asmi) wherein lies the principle of affirmation-negation, attraction-repulsion, i.e., desire (or want, as negation of fullness, followed by fulfilment, as negation of want or lack or limitation).

In Mulaprakrti again,

• Rajas, mobility, corresponds to Etat;
• Sattva, illumination, knowability, to Aham; and
• Tamas to Na (asmi), denial (of Self), darkness, dullness, grossness, inertia, heaviness, clinging, materiality (opposite of Self), substantiality, possessability.

In the Maya-Shakti of Negation, the triplicity appears as the energy of:

• (a) affirmation, attraction, enjoyability, A-varaNa, enveloping, veiling, corresponding to Aham;

• (b) negation, repulsion, distraction, flinging away, vi-kshepa, corresponding to Etat; and

• (c) the revolution-process of alternation, balancing, sAmya, ap-AvaraNa, san-kshepa or prati-shthApana, unveiling (the Truth) and steadying (the mind, establishing it in the contemplation of the Truth), corresponding to Ananda, the spiral dance of Shiva, tamas and Na.

The meaning of this may become fuller and fuller as we proceed, for no work that endeavours to describe the essence of the World-Process, can help imitating that process (going round, and round) more or less, combining the simultaneity of all and everything in the Absolute with its gradual development in fuller and fuller repetition in the succession of 'the relative' of the World-Process.



Blinding, Misleading, Restoring and the Various Triads

There is no current triplet of Samskrt words, like Sat-Chid-Ananda, or sattva-rajas-tamas, to express the three forms, functions, or aspects, of Shakti spoken of in the text above.

The words used here, at least the first two of them, are met with in the extant works of Advaita-Vedanta, as describing the workings of Maya-Shakti, but in a somewhat different sense, explained below.

The powers of

• srshti, creation, emanation, throwing forth,
• sthiti, maintenance, keeping together, and
• laya, or samhAra, reabsorption, destruction, neutralisation, balancing up,

which are currently ascribed to Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva, or rajas, sattva, and tamas, respectively, seem to mean the same three aspects, in essence.

Looked at in another way,

• samhAra would be reabsorption or attraction,
• srshti would be throwing forth or repulsion, and
• sthiti would be maintenance or the balancing of the two.

In this view, the correspondences of the triplets would also have to be read differently. As to these variations, see the remarks in the next chapter.

visarga, vikshepa, AdAna, i.e., 'throwing out', 'moving about', 'taking back', respectively is another triad of words sometimes used to describe the kinds of Shakti. Static, kinetic, dynamic may be regarded as another Shakti-Energy triad.

See also the note at the end of this chapter on the jnAa-ichChA-kriyA shaktis, mentioned in the Puranas and emphasised by the Shaiva school of practical and devotional religion-philosophy.

• AvaraNa would then correspond to jnAna (cognition, avidyA and asmitA of Yoga);

• vikshepa to kriyA (action, the rAga and dvesha of Yoga); and

• sAmya (or 1aya of the quartet of the hindrances to yoga-samAdhi mentioned in Vedanta-works, viz., kashAya and ras-AsvAda--which may be regarded as the unpleasant and pleasant or hateful and loving varieties of AvaraNa--and vikshepa and laya or sleep) to ichChaA or desire, the abhi-nivesha of Yoga).

The word 'correspond', in the preceding sentence, means only that

• A-varaNa (from vr, to cover up, to envelope), 'veil,' 'curtain', 'wrapping', 'cloak,' which blinds the intelligence, is of the nature of 'cognition ', but is wrong cognition; 'I', instead of knowing Self, and knowing It-Self as Self, knows not-selves, and knows It-Self as a not-self.

• So, vi-kshepa (from vi, intensive prefix, and kship, to fling), dis-'trac'-tion, at-'trac'-tion towards a wrong object, being drawn or flung astray, corresponds to 'desire' for a not-self, and includes appurtenant 'action' also.

• To complete a triad, we may add sAmya, equi-lib-ration, or, perhaps better, sva-stha-tA, sve mahimni prati-shthitih, return to and abiding in Self, 'firm esta-blishment in the greatness of Self.'

In plain everyday language, Maya is asmitA-kAma-krodha, 'egoism (pride)-lust-hate, i.e., passionate egoistic desire which veils (A-vrNoti) the eyes to the Truth, and then drags (vi-kshipati) the so-blinded person into the wrong direction.

A person, obsessed or possessed and ridden by a mad desire, shuts his eyes to the truth of things, their due proportion, and the consequences of conduct; and rushes insanely in pursuit of that object.

The counter-actives of A-varaNa and vi-kshepa, attachment and infatuation, are vai-rAgya and abhyAsa, detachment from the world of sense (by surfeit and revulsion) and persistent practice of studious contemplation of Self (See The Essential Unity of All Religions, pp. 326,593-4, of second edn.).

The following beautiful lines of poetry occur on p.122 of The Mahatma Letters; they seem to be Master K.H.'s own composition, and are illuminative in this connection:

"No curtain hides the Spheres Elysian,
Nor these poor shells of half transparent dust,
For all that blinds the Spirit's vision
Is pride and hate and lust."

Shakti-traya, 'triad of Shakti', is referred to in the following texts, among many; they mostly mean the functions of 'creation-preservation-destruction', the three chief forms of causation-effectuation:

नमो नमस् तुभ्यम्, असह्यवेग शक्ति-त्रयाय्, अखिल धि गुणाय,
प्रपन्नपालाय, दुरन्त-शक्तये, कदिन्द्रियाणाम् अनवाप्य वर्त्मने ।

namo namas tubhyam, asahyavega-shakti trayAyä, akhila-dhi-guNAya,
prapannapAlAya, duranta shaktaye, kadindriyANAm anavApya-vartmane |
--Bhagavata, 8.3.28

"My respects again and again unto You, the formidable of the forces of the threefold potency of [making, unwinding and keeping up] the complete, unto Him who, to the intelligence appearing as an object to the senses, gives shelter and who, with His difficult to overcome energies [see B.G.16:21], is unattainable for the ones who on the path cannot control their senses." (www.srimadbhagavatam.org/canto8/chapter3.html)

नमः परस्मै पुरुषाय वेधसे, सद्-उद्भव-स्थान-निरोध-लीलया,
ग्रहित-शक्ति-त्रितयाय, देहिनां अन्तर्भवाय नुपलक्षयवर्त्मने ।

namaH parasmai puruShAya vedhase, sad-udbhava-sthAna-nirodha-lIlayA,
grahita-shakti-tritayAya, dehinAM antarbhavAya änupalakShayavartmane |
--Bhagavata, 2.4.12

"My obeisances to the Supreme Personality of Godhead, who for the maintenance as well as the winding up of the complete whole of the material creation, by His pastimes assumed the power of the three modes while residing within as the One whose ways are inconceivable."

शक्तित्रय आत्मिका तस्य प्रकृतिः, कारण आत्मिका,
अ-स्व-तंत्रा च सततं, विद्-अधिष्टान-संयुता ।

shaktitraya AtmikA tasya prakRutiH, kAraNa AtmikA,
a-sva-taMtrA cha satataM, vid-adhiShTAna-saMyutA |

--Mahabharata, Shantiparva, ch.238

त्वं शक्तित्रय-आत्मकः, जगद् उत्पति स्थिति लय त्रिविध शक्ति आधार आत्म कत्वात्

tvaM shaktitraya-AtmakaH, jagad-utpati-sthiti-laya-trividha-shakti-AdhAra-Atma-katvAt

--Bhashya on Ganapati-Atharva-Shirsha-Upanishat, at the end of Ahnika-Chandrika

By the Law of Analogy, broad correspondences would be the triads of prANa-buddhi-sharira, biotic-intelligent-physicochemical energies, ojas-sahas-balam, vital-intellectual-mechanical élan; sympathic-cerebrospmal-muscular pathic-systems; affectional-(plexal or glandular)-sensor-motor organs, kandas (chakras, pithas)-jnAnendriyas-karmendriyas; Soma-Surya-Agni, ida-pinga1a-sushumna nAdis, (left sympathic, right sympathic, spinal cord); and so on.

saidevo
14 March 2008, 08:44 AM
prANa and buddhi

This Maya-Shakti is said to be the prANa and buddhi, 'vitality and intelligence' of all the world;



Symbolised as Radha and Durga respectively (vide Devi-Bhagavata, IX.ch.50) corresponding to the motor and sensor nerves and organs, karm-endriyas and jnAn-endriyas respectively.


it is their whole wisdom and whole wealth; it is the power of desire for the maintenance of the world's things, and also for their destruction.

Many are its aspects and corresponding names. One half of it--that which appears in the Affirmation, "I (am) this"--is a-vidyA, nescience, error, illusion, imperfect knowledge, separative intelligence, which binds the Jiva to the downward arc of the wheel of samsAra. The other half--which is embodied in the Negation--appears as vairAgya and vidyA (or viveka, viveka-khyAti) satiation with the pleasures (and also the allied miseries) of the world, and discriminative knowledge, clear understanding, of the distinction between Eternal and Ephemeral, which lead the same Jiva on to the upward arc of the Wheel.

In its completeness, it is mahA-vidyA, fulfilled and perfected knowledge, unifying wisdom of buddhi and 'pure reason', which frees the Jiva from all bondage, makes of him an Ishvara (in the strict and technical sense), and guides his life on that second arc in that condition of yoga, union, of reason with desire and action, which makes the true free-will of de-liberate conscious universal love and philanthropic activity; and thus confers true liberty, true mukti.

They who desire to grasp, or fling away, the things of the world, physical or subtle, worship Shakti in her form of a-vidyA, or vidyA, respectively, in one or other of their many aspects; they who desire the wealth and fullness of the Spirit, worship her as mahA-vidyA or parama-vidyA, the Great Wisdom.



या, मुक्तिहेतुर, अविचिन्त्यमहाव्रता, त्वं
अभ्यस्यसे सुनियतेन्द्रियतत्त्वसारैः,
मोक्षार्थिभिर् मुनिभिर् अस्तसमस्तदोषैः,
विद्यासि, सा, भगवती, परमा, हि, देवि!

yA, muktihetura, avichintyamahAvratA, tvaM
abhyasyase suniyatendriyatattvasAraiH,
mokShArthibhir munibhir astasamastadoShaiH,
vidyAsi, sA, bhagavatI, paramA, hi, devi!
--Durga-Saptashati, 4.9

"You are the supreme knowledge that is the means of moksha, which is faultless, and practiced by those who have control over the senses and are desirous of moksha."

द्वे विद्ये वेदितव्ये, ... परा चैव अपरा च;
अथ परा यया तद अक्षरं अधिगम्यते

dve vidye veditavye, ... parA chaiva aparaa cha;
...
atha parA yayA tada akSharaM adhigamyate |
--Mundaka Upanashad I.i.4-5

I-i-4: To him he said, '"There are two kinds of knowledge to be acquired – the higher and the lower"; this is what, as tradition runs, the knowers of the import of the Vedas say.'
I-i-5: Of these, the lower comprises the Rig-Veda, Yajur-Veda, Sama-Veda, Atharva-Veda, the science of pronunciation etc., the code of rituals, grammar, etymology, metre and astrology. Then there is the higher (knowledge) by which is attained that Imperishable.

Two Main Philosophies--Worships

As Philosophies may be broadly divided into those of Change and those of the Changeless, and activities into egoistic and altruistic (the division always being by predominant characteristic, never by exclusion or abolition of the other, but only by subordination of the other), so Worships may be also broadly classified into those of saguNa and those of nirguNa.

nir-guNa, the Attribute-less, is the Absolute, Its worship is the steady realisation of Its nature, in and by

• (1) appropriate perpetual vision of the Changeless, the Universal Self,
• (2) individual-self-denying, renunciant, other-helping actions,
• (3) universal benevolence, constant prayer for the peace, shAnti, welfare of all.

sa-guNa is 'possessed of attributes'; It has as many glorified and magnified shapes as the heart-desires and ideals of worshippers. As Nirguna is Shiva, 'Benevolent Sleeper in all', so Saguna is essentially Shakti, 'Wakeful Power', 'Ability';

• and all objects of worship and prayer, from the most primitive fetish to the highest gods and 'madonnas' and 'babies' of the most splendid pantheons and the most elaborate mythologies, are but embodiments, more or less concrete, of this Shakti;

• and all are as real as (neither more nor less real than) the individual selves and heart-desires of the worshippers.

• The worshippers help the gods, and the gods the worshippers, with exchange of appropriate 'nourishment', as between all the kingdoms of nature; as, indeed, between a worker and his 'instruments'; sometimes the 'instrument' is less than, in other cases far greater than, the individual worker. (Vide Bhagavad-Gita, vii.21, and iii.11).

• Prayer is only the endeavour of a weaker will to put itself en rapport with, to identify itself with, and so draw nourishment and power from, a stronger Will, a greater source of Power.

prANa-prati-shtha, 'esta-blishment of prANa, life', in an image; vivification, vita-lisation, of it by mind-force, intense thought-concentration; by means of japa, (litany), etc., is A-vAhana, 'invitation, bringing in', nir-mANa, 'formation', of a good or a bad spirit, deva or krtyA, good or bad elemental (or elementary);

(see Mahattna Letters, Index-references, for distinction between the two); which spirit is as much an instrument (only more living) as an engine, a gun, a factory, a steamship, a human or animal servant.

As regards the two main classes of 'worship', up-Asana; here too we have the same perpetual swing between the two; the worship appropriate to ni-vrtti, Rennuciation, and the worship belonging to pra-vrtti, Pursuit.

All 'new' religions are only re-forms; from multi-farious 'idol'-worships and sectarianisms towards uni-tarianism and solidarity. So, Buddha taught philosophical religion, by reaction against the numerous more or less gross and vicious sects and worships that were prevalent.

But again, by reaction against Buddha's emphasis on the simple life and asceticism, ending in nir-vANa ('extinction'); by reaction against this, began the worship of thousands of images of Buddha, and installation of these in great temples, and luxurious ceremonial.

This culminated in the worship of hundreds of varieties of Taaraas, female goddesses, and, ultimately, the Bachhanalian orgies and horrors of Vajra-Yaana. Each object of worship, god or goddess, is but an apotheosis and anthropomorphisation of a desire, good or evil.


Each worship leads on, in course of time, by cyclic necessity, to the next.

The worship of Maha-Vidya is the same as the worship of Shakti's consort, Pratyag-Atma, whose supremacy She ever insists on, and in dutiful and loving subordination to whom, and for the fulfilment of whose universal law of compassion to all selves, She--as Gayatri, mother of Vedas, wisdom-illumined will that knows how to draw upon the inexhaustible stores of Nature (Shakti herself)--confides high sciences and powers gradually to the Jivas walking on the Path of Renunciation, for the humble service and helping of all fellow Jivas.

Shakti and Mula-prakrti: Same Yet Not Same

One point should be specially noted here. As there is confusion in extant Samskrt works between Pratyag-Atma and Param-Atma, so there is also confusion as regards Shakti and Mula-Prakrti or Prakrti. And the confusion is not unnatural.

Because Shakti is connect-ed with, con-fus-ed in, both Pratyag-Atma and Mula-Prakrti, and is herself hidden, there is a natural tendency to regard her only as the one or the other.

Throughout Devi-Bhagavata, for instance, she is now identified with Self, mentioned under the epithet of Shiva, and now with Mula-Prakrti. Thus, Shakti, personified, is made to say: 'Always are He and I the same; never is there any difference betwixt us. What He is, that am I; what I am, that is He; difference is due only to perversion of thought.'

But the distinction is also pointed out at the same time: 'He who knows the very subtle distinction between us two, he is truly wise, he will be freed from samsAra, he is freed in truth.' (Ref: Devi-Bhagavata, III.vi.2-3, verses starting with 'sadA ekatvaM...' and ending with 'nAtra shamsayaH'

Again it is said: 'At the beginning of creation, there were born two Shaktis, viz., prANa and buddhi, from samvit, Consciousness, wearing the form of Mula-Prakrti.' (Ref: Devi-Bhagavata, IX.1,6,7, verses starting with 'mUlaprakRutirUpiNyAH...' and ending with 'prANabuddhayadhidaivatam'

Of course it is true, in the deepest sense, that Shakti is not different from the Absolute, but only Its very own Nature, svabhAava; and, as Mula-Prakrti is included in the Absolute, therefore Shakti may also be identified with Mula-Prakrti, without which it cannot manifest and truly would not be.

At the same time it is desirable and profitable to make the distinction--even though a distinction without a difference--from the standpoint of the limited, wherein thought must be and move, and has deliberately to be and move, taken in its partial, 'perverted', successive, form. The fact, also, that the words are different, and are used not always interchangeably but often differently, implies that a distinction is intended between Shakti and Prakrti.

saidevo
18 March 2008, 07:38 AM
parA and aparA prakrtis

In Glta (vii.14, ix.13, vii.5) also, Krshna speaks of his daivI mAyA, dur-atyayA, 'difficult to cross', 'difficult to escape and transcend'; his daivi prakrti, divine nature or power; and again of his two Prakrtis, aparA, lower, and parA, higher, the former of which, he says, consists of the various elements which Sankhya describes as issuing from Mula-prakrti, while the latter is jIva-bhUta, (the life of) the 'Jivas that uphold and carry on the work of the world'.

The meaning of such passages would probably be easier to follow if what has been said above as to the nature of Self, Not-Self, and Energy which is the Necessity of the Nature of these two, is borne in mind.

• As avidyA, this primal Energy turns more towards Not-Self and becomes aparA-prakrti, which name is used to cover not only the force which leads the Jiva outwards, but also the objective manifestations of Not-Self which it especially brings out, and into which it leads the Jiva.

• As vidyA, it turns more towards Self, and is parA-prakrti, the source of subjective life; nay, which, as consciousness, in Self, of Not-Self, is life, and so includes all jlvas. (For another aspect of the fact indicated, that is to say, another interpretation of the verse, which, however, is perfectly consistent with this, and brings out only another aspect of the truth, see the NOTE following this chapter.)

• As the two together, she is daivI-prakrti, in which vidyA and avidyA coalesce into mahA-vidyA, regarded not as knowledge, but rather as Shakti, Energy, which utilises all knowledge, for the carrying on of the World-Process.

NOTE to Chapter 11
Aspects of daivI prakrti

This note is intended as a continuation of the foot-notes at pp.167,190,191,229, above, in connection with buddhi and manas, and with the triads of (i) sat, chit Ananda, (ii) sattva, rajas, tamas, and (iii) srshti, sthiti, 1aya.

The first two of these triads, and those of (iv) jnAana, ichChA, kriyA, and (v) dravya, guNa, karma, are, as indicated in the text of this and other works, of essential importance for clearing up much obscurity and confusion in Samskrt literature, and for understanding the whole scheme of the World-Process.

The correspondences with each other, of the various factors of these triplets, have been pointed out here, and have been dealt with in detail in Pranava-vada. But they are argued here on their inherent merits, and, so far, have not been supported by 'testimony' from current Samskrt-works.

It is true that if, as is claimed here, metaphysics are no less 'self-evident' than mathematics, no 'testimony' is needed for the conclusions of the former, any more than for those of the latter. But the claim is obviously not admitted by very many. Also, while solutions of simpler problems of mathematics are undoubtedly clear of themselves at every step, yet when we come to more complex ones, even veterans of the science are not unoften glad to have their work checked and verified by others. With this idea the following collection of quotations and references is given here.

Four Basic Triads

As said before, the triads belonging to Prajyag-Atma and Mula-prakrti repectively, viz., sat-chid-Ananda and sattva-rajas-tamas, especially the latter, are to be found at every turn in the old books.

But the vitally important triad belonging to Shakti as Cause or kAraNna, viz., jnAna-ichChA-kriyA, is, for some reason, rare. So also is that which belongs to Shakti as Condition or nimitta, viz., desha-kAla-kriyA, or Space-Time-Motion; kriyA here being sometimes replaced by avasthA or krama or hetu or nimitta, so that the triplet becomes equivalent to place-time-circumstance.

Yet without its due application in the work of interpretation, the ideas, facts and laws, of brahma-vidyA and Atma-vidyA, metaphysic and psychology, do not become a-par-oksha, 'directly experienced'; do not come home; are not realised in the first person.

Even in the Tantra literature of the Shaakta school, the present writer has been informed by friends learned therein, Shakti is usually referred to as tri-guNA, and its three forms of subdivisions are mentioned only as sattvikI, rAjasI, and tAmasI Shaktis. It is therefore desirable to gather together, for the purpose of confirming, with additional confidence 'the reasoned faith' of the reader, by means of 'trustworthy testimony' out of the experience of the ancients, these rare statements, scattered here and there over distant parts of Samskrt literature.

The correspondences may first be tabulated for convenient reference.
..........chit..........sattva..........jnAna..........guNa
..........sat...........rajas............kriyA...........karma
..........Ananda.....tamas..........ichChA........dravya

• The first triad belongs to Universal Consciousness;
• the second to Universal Matter;
• the third, to individualised consciousness;
• the fourth to particularised matter.

It is rather curious that none of the earliest, best known, and most studied 'major' ten Upanishats mentions sattva-rajas-tamas expressly. If we include two more among the 'major', viz., Shvet-Ashvatara and KaushItaki, as is sometimes done, because Shankar-Acharya has commented on them, then we find that Shvet-Ashvatara uses the word tri-guNa, without separately naming the three; but Shankara names them as the three. The same Upanishat says that the sva-bhAvika shakti of the Supreme is triple, jnAna-bala-kriyA: here clearly, ba1a, 'power', 'strength', stands for ichCha, desire-force (see Shveta., iv.5; v.5-12; vi.2-4,8). Among the later 'minor' Upanishats, Jabala, Krishna, Rama-Purva-Tapani, Nada, Tripad-vibhuti-Narayana, Maitri, Maitreyi, equated with pashyantI; yet ichAhA sits midway too between jnAana and kriyA.

(For the Sanskrit verses of the passages quoted below, check the book from p.250 onwards.)

Devi-Bhagavata
tatvaj~jAnAdibhutaM ... ichChA-j~jAna-kriyAshrayam -- VII.ch.32

"The Supreme Being, whose garment is 'sat-chit-Ananda', appears densified by karma in a material body, which becomes the locus of the attributes or faculties of cognition-desire-action."

Thirty-five Million Nerves

Devi-Bhagavata, VII.ch.35
vishvaM sharIram ... ichChA-jnAna-kriyAtmakam

Goraksha, Mukti-sopAna
iDApi~galasuShumanAH ... jyotiromiti

Nirukta VII.ii.i; See also Gita, xv.12.
titna eva devata ... sUryon dyusthAnH

The purport of these last quotations is that 'out of thirty-five millions of nerves in the human body, ten are chief; out of these ten, three are the most vitally important, viz., iDA, pinga1A, and sushumnA, which respectively run along left, right, and middle of the spinal column, and correspond with Chandra, Surya, and Agni (i.e., Moon, Sun, and Fire, or middle, upper, and lower, or bhuvah, svah, and bhuh, or astral, mental, and physical worlds respectively), and with ichChA,jnAna, and kriyA'.

Three Principal Deities

Devi-Bhagavata
ahamo mahatashchaiva ... shaktidA -- XII.ch.4
ichChAshaktyA kriyAshaktyA j~jAnashaktyA samanvitA | -- XII.ch.4

'Thou art sung as the Nature of Mahan-Atma, (Mahat-Buddhi); thou art hymned as Shabala-Brahma, in Balanced Repose: thou art also the Supreme Might beyond all. Thou givest us ichChA-kriyA-jnAna.'

(ii) The succeeding extracts show the correspondences of ikshA-kAma-tapana, jnAna-ichChA-kriyA, with jnAna-bala-kriyA, Sarasvati-Kaali-Lakshmi, chit-Ananda-sat, sattva-tamas-rajas, Vishnu-Rudra (Shiva)-Brahmaa, and sukshma-kAraNa-sthUla (i.e., astro-mental--causal--physical) bodies, respectively.

upodghAta of guptavatI-tIkA
on durgA-sapta-shatI

... 'tadaikShat bahu syAm prajayoya', 'soakAmayata', 'tattapoatapyata', 'tattapoakuruta', ityAdi ... shaktorapi trirUpatvam +
mahAsarasvati cite! mahAlakShmi sadAtmike!,
mahAkAli AnaMdarUpe! tvattatvaj~jAnasiddhaye,
anusaMdadhmahe, chaMDi! vayaM tvAM hRudayAmbuje |

on rahasya-tarva
mahAlakShmIrbrahmatvaM mahAkAli rudratvaM, mahAsarasvati viShNutvaM prapede |

Three Deities and Three Bodies
Devi Bhagavatam

rajoguNAdhiko brahmA, viShNuH satvAdhiko bhavet,
tamoguNAdhiko rudraH sarvakAraNarUpadhRuk |
sthUladeho bhaved brahmA, liMgadeho hariH smRutaH;
rudrastu kAraNo dehaH, turIyastvahameva hi | -- XII.viii.

jnAana-ichCha-kriyA correspond to vijnAnamaya-manomaya-prANamaya koshas and Isha-sUtra-virat or sarvajna-hiranyagarbha-vAishvanAra and prAjna-taijasa-vishvAnara also. (See Vedanta-sara, and Advanced Text Book of Sanatana Dharma, p.170)

tasya checChAsbhyahaM, daitya! sRujAmi sakalaM jagat |
sa mAM pashyati vishvAtmA, tasyAhaM prakRutiH shivA | -- III.xvi.

[i]ichChAsbhyahamiti, "parAsya shaktirvividaiva shrUyate, svAbhAviki
j~jAnabalakriyA cha" iti shrutyuktabalashabdoditA |
"ichChAshaktirumA kumArI" iti shiva-sUtroditA chetyarthaH |[i] --
Nilakantha, Tika on above.

How can Maha-Kaali and Rudra, the Destructive Aspect, be connected with Ananda, Joy? Joy results from fulfilment of Desire: and Desire is Hate as well as Love. The Victor in battle triumphs and rejoices. Rudra and Kali are usually represented as dancing; macabre though that dancing be.

saidevo
24 March 2008, 01:19 AM
(iii) The same correspondences are supported by the following, with the further statement that creation--preservation--destruction (srshti--sthiti--laya) belong to rajas--sattva--tamas respectively.

Devi-Bhagavata
nirguNA ya sadA nityA vyAkRutA avikRutA shivA,
yogagamyA akhila AdhArA turIyA yA cha saMsthitA |
tasyAstu sAtvikI shaktI rAjasI tAmasI tathA,
mahAlakShmIH sarasvatI mahAkAlIti tAH striyaH | -- I.ii.

viShNo cha sAtvikI shaktistayA hIno apyakarmakRut;
dRuhiNo rAjasi shaktirmayA hInohyasRuShTikRutaH;
shivo cha tAmasI shaktistayA saMhArakArakaH | -- I.viii.

Ne-science and True Science

(iv) Shakti as sa-guNA, "possessed of properties', 'in operation', 'functioning', 'kinetic', and as a-vidyA, ne-science, error, passion, is the object of adoration to the 'pursuant', those whose minds are turned world-wards; (in all the thousands of different forms of objects of devotion which persons worship in any time or clime, in accord with their particular shades of heart-desire and stages of intellectual development).

As nir-guNA, 'functionless', static, and as vidyA, true-science, true-knowledge, realisation, she is revered by the renunciant, who wants 'Self-dependence', the supreme bliss of moksha, the liberty of the Higher Self, 'freedom' from 'dependence on an-Other', which dependence on another (the lower self) is the supreme misery.

The worship of nirguNa shakti is the same as the worship of Shiva (the Supreme Self), who also is said, in Puranic symbology, to bestow moksha. Many schools of thinkers and devotional systems of votaries give her many names: 'tapas, tamas, jada, a-jnAna, mAyA, pradhAna, prakrti, shakti, aja, vi-marsha, v-vidyA; and so on. None is despised for lacking Vishnu or Rudra; everyone is scorned who lacks Shakti-Power. She is also known as [b]mahA-mAyA, niyati, mohini, prakrti, vAsanA, bhuvan-eshvari, the Meaning of praNava, the Desire of the Infinite'.

Devi-Bhagavata
saguNA nirguNA sA tu dvidhA proktA manoShibhiH |
saguNA rAgibhiH sovyA nirguNA tu virAgibhiH | -- I.viii.

svAtaMtryeNa chariShyAmi tapastIvraM sadaiva hi;
pArataMtryaM paraM dukhaM, mAtaH! saMsArasAgare;
svAtaMtryAnmokShamityAhuH paMDitAH shAstrakovidAH | -- V.xvi.

chetasA nirvikalpena yAM vyAyaMti munIshvarAH,
praNavArthasvarUpAM tAM bhajAmo bhuvaneshvarIm | -- VII.xxvii.

Madhava, Sarva-Darshana-Sangraha, Purna-prajna-darshana'.
mahAmAyA iti, avidyA iti, niyatiH, mohinI, iti cha,
prakRutiH, vAsanA, chApi, tava ichChA, ananta! kathyate |

For other verses, whose purport is given above, see p.218, supra. Many other names of Chiti-Shakti-Superconsciousness are given in the 5th ch. of Maha Upanishat, which is part of Yoga Vasishtha.

Three Gunas and Three Yogas

(v) artha-shakta (arthyate, 'that which is desired', is artha, object, purpose, intention, the thing meant, etc.), and dravya-shakti, ('substance,' the desired object), are used in the following, in substitution for, and as synonymous with, ichChA-shakti. bala, strength, power, as a synonym for ichChA, we have noted before; bhakti is also used as such.

Devi-Bhagavata

guNAnAM lakShaNAnyeva vitatAni vibhAgashaH |
... tistrashcha kathitAstava | -- III.vii.

Vishnu Bhagavata
satvaM rajastaM iti nirguNasya guNAstrayaH;
...
dravyashaktiH, kriyAshaktir, j~jAnAshaktiriti, prabho! -- II.v.

dvitiyastu ahamo yatra dravya-j~jAna-kriyodayaH | -- III.x.

ya etAnmatpatho hitvA, bhakti-j~jAna-kriyAtmakAn,
kShudrAn kAmAn chalaiH prANaujuShaMtaH, saMsaraMti te |

yogAstrayo nayA proktA, nRuNAM shreyovidhitsayA,
...
na nirviNNo, na atiskto, bhaktiyogo asya siddhidaH | -- XI.xx.

Neutral Witness of the Three

The last three verses say that jnAna-yoga, the yoga-method of philosophical meditation, suits those whose temperament is not that of the men of action, who do not like restless activity; for persons of the opposite temperament, karma-yoga, the regulated performance of duties and of acts of self-sacrifice, is the best way of achieving the purpose of life; for the man of the midway, or emotional, temperament, who is neither greatly attached to, nor strongly detached from, the world, the method of devotion, bhakti-yoga, is the best. The following verses express the same main ideas in a different setting.

Vishnu Bhagavata

udAsInamiva achyakShaM, dravya-j~jAna-kriya AtmanAm
kUTastham imam AtmAnaM yo veda, Aproti shobhanam | -- IV.xx.

vyAnenetthaM sutIvreNa yuMjato yogino manaH
saMyAsyati Ashu nirvANaM dravya-j~jAna-kriyAbhramaH | -- XI.xiv.

etatpadaM tajjagadAtmanaH paraM, sakRudvibhAtaM, savituryathA prabhA,
yathA(a)savo jAgrati, suptashaktayo, dravya-kriyA-j~jAna-bhidAbramAtyayaH || IV.xxxi.

sattvaM rajastam iti trivRuda ekamAdau sUtraM mahAnahamiti pravadaMti jIvam;
j~jAna-kriya-artha-phalarUpatayA urushakti brahmauva bhAti sadasachcha tayoH paraM tat | -- XI.iii.

(vi) The sensor organs express buddhi and jnAna-shakti; the motor-organs, prANa and kriyA-shakti.

Vishnu Bhagavata

taijasAniMdriyANyeva j~jAnakarmamayAni cha | -- III.v.
taijasAniMdriyANyeva kriyAj~jAnavibhAgashaH |
prANasya hi kriyAshaktir, buddhervij~jAnashaktitA | --- III.xxvi.

It should be noted that, in this chapter of the Bhagavata, occurs another verse, which says that kriyA-shakti belongs to aham-kAra, whereas our conclusion is that ichChA-sbakti is its proper co-efficient or function or power. This is only one of the many inconsistencies and perplexities which seem to beset the question. But it is not impossible to solve the inconsistencies and disentangle the perplexities, by careful reference to different viewpoints.

The fifth chapter of Maha Upanishat, above alluded to, says that the same functioning appears now as manas, now as buddhi, again as ahamkAra. In the 'subtle regions' of mind, even broad distinctions are difficult to fix, because all is always in a fluid condition, continual flow and flux. In this very instance, the ahamkAra which is said to possess kriyA-shakti seems to be what, in the last section of this note, is called manas in contradistinction from mahat-buddhi; and it is said to have three subdivisions, vaikArika-manas, taijasa-buddhi, and tAmasa-bhUtadi, which last is ahamkAra proper. Vedanta-sara assigns antah-karaNa to sukshma-sharira (also called taijasa in the individual form and sUtrAtmA in the universal); makes it consist of the three koshas, viz., vijnAnamaya, mano-maya, and praNa-maya; and assigns to these, the jnAna, ichChA, and kriyA shaktis, respectively.

Preponderance midst Inseparables

(vii) The three, sattva--rajas--tamas, are utterly inseparable though distinguishable; they manifest by turns, one preponderating, the others subordinated, at any one time and place. 'They suppress, support, produce, also, one another, by turns, and always cling on to each other'.

Brahma Sutra
vaishopyAt tu tadvAdastadvAdaH | -- II.iv.32.

Bhagavad Gita
na tadasti pRuthivyAM vA divi deveShu vA punaH |
sattvaM prakRutijairmuktaM yatsyAdebhiH syAttribhirguNaiH || -- XVIII.40

Devi Bhagavata
anyo&nyamithunAH sarve, sarve sarvatragAminaH,
...
na eShAmAdiH saMprayogo, viyogo vA upalabhyate | -- III.viii.

Sankhya Karika
prItyaprItiviShAdAtmakAH, prakAshapravRutiniyamArthAH,
anyonyAbhibhava Ashraya janana mitunavRutyashcha guNAH | -- 12 (see also Anugita, 21)

a-jnAna is Unreason and Unreason is Desire

(viii) The characteristics, properties, functions, consequences, implications, allies, corollaries, etc., of sattva--rajas--tamas are very numerous; in fact, all phenomena whatever are classifiable under these three. The more important ones are mentioned in Bhagavad-Gita, chs. xiv, xvii, xviii; Anugita, chs. xxi to xxviii; Manu, ch.xii. There are many seeming incongruities in these statements; but they are mostly reconcilable by the view that sattva corresponds to jnAna-knowledge, rajas to kriyA-action, and tamas to ichChA-desire. Obscurity is greatest with regard to the last, appropriately enough, one might say, for one of the principal meanings of tamas is obscurity, darkness! Thus,

satvaM, j~jAnaM, rajaH karma, tamo&j~jAnamihochyate |
-- Bhagavata, XI.xxii.

"sattva is jnAna; rajas is karma;' quite plain and simple; but 'tamas is called a-jnAna', not ichChA, straight. In order to make sure that a-jnAna is the same as ichChA here, one has to go a roundabout way.

malam aj~jAnamichChaMti saMsAraMkurakAraNam |
aj~jAnAdbadhyate lokastataH sRuShTishcha saMsthitiH |
-- S.S.Vimarshini, i.2.

"ajnAna is mala, seed of samsAra"; it is obviously the same as a-vidyA. The synonyms of a-jnAna, given in one of the quotations in (iv) above, help to show that it stands for ichChA.

Bhagavad-Gita, (iii.37, vii.27; x.11; xiv.5-17), is perplexing. It puts together:

• (a) sattva, nirmalatva or freedom from impurity, prakAsha or illumination, an-Amaya or freedom from disease, sukha or joy, jnAna or knowledge;

• (b) rajas, rAga or attachment, trshNA or thirst for life, karma or action, lobha or greed, pravrtti or activity, Arambhah karmaNAm or initiation of new actions and enterprises, ashamah or restlessness, sprhA or desire (whether emulous or envious), duhkha or pain;

• (c) tamas, ajnAna or ne-science, ignorance, error, moha or confusion and blind clinging, avaraNa or veiling, pramAda or carelessness, inadvertence, A-lasya or indolence, nidrA or sleep, a-prakAsha or non-illumination, and a-pravritti or non non-enterprise, dis-inclination.

About the alliances of sattva here, there is no difficulty. The connection of rajas with rAga, trshNA, lobha, requires explanation; the text says, in full, that rajas is rAg-Atmaka, 'ensouled by attachment', is trshNA-sanga-samudbhava, 'is born of, or gives birth to, addiction to the thirst for life, the will to live', and 'rajaso lobhah sanjAyate', 'greed is born from rajas'.

The reconciliation may be found in these turns of phrase. pra-mAda seems to be derived from the same root as the English word 'madness'. Its fellow-derivatives are madana, the 'mad-dener' or Eros-Cupid, mada or pride, also intoxication, un-mada or madness, madya, alcohol, etc.

mohana has an allied sense also. tamas, a-jnAna, a-vidyA, moha, pra-mAda, AvaraNa, mala, etc., all stand for blind clinging, obstinate arbitrary desire which throws a veil over the luminous eye of reason, blinds it, overpowers knowledge, is thoughtless, capricious, un-reason-able, is, in fact, the very essence of un-reason, a-jnAna.

Love-Hate, Desire, Passion, is obviously arbitrary Un-Reason. Unreasoning passion, as Love, creates; as Hate, destroys: Reason only mediates, mantains, brings about sthiti or pAlana, preserves, keeps up some sort of balance between the two, helps to make law and order: as Vishnu-sattva between Brahma-rajas and Rudra-tamas.

tamas and moha sometimes mean unconsciousness, swooning, and slumber. In excessive 'perplexity' over conflicting desires and interests, 'not-knowing' what to do, persons faint away, and then they come out of that trance or slumber with some one desire preponderating.

A moment of moha or laya, oblivion, 'the waters of Lethe', intervenes at every change of 'heart', every change of strong desires or states of being, or worlds or planes, every birth-and-death, AvaraNa-vikshepa, and constitutes an initiation, a dIkshA, in which the Jiva dives into the Infinite Self or store-house of Desire-Energy and energies, and then emerges with a 'new' experience, of success or failure, a power gained or lost. The moment of 'confusion' experienced by one learning to swim, between the imminent drowning and the sudden floating at ease, is a familiar illustration.

saidevo
26 March 2008, 09:08 AM
Forms of Un-Reason

Some other helpful texts are,

Manu Smriti
sattvaM j~jAnaM, tamo aj~jAnaM, rAgadveShau rajaH smRutaM |
sattvasya lakShaNaM dharmaH, rajasastu artha uchyate,
tamaso lakShaNaM kAmaH; shreShTayaM eShAM yatottaraM | -- xii.24-26,38.

Bhavishya Purana, Madhyama Parva, Bhaga 1,ch.1;
Kurma Purana, Purva, ch.11.

dharmashcha, arthashcha, kAmashcha, trivargas triguNo mataH |;
sattvaM, rajaH, tamaH cheti; tasmAd dharmaM samAshryet |

Mahabharata, Shanti Parva, ch.157

rAgo dveShaH, tathA moho, harShaH, shoko abhimAnitA,
kAmaH, krodhashcha, darpashcha, taMdri cha, AlasyaM eva cha,
ichChA, dveShaH, tathA tApaH, para-vRuddhi-upatApitA,
aj~jAnam etat nirdiShTaM, pApAnAM chaiva yAH kriyAH |

"sattva corresponds to jnAna and dharma; rajas to rAga-dvesha and artha; tamas to a-jnAna and kAma. Each preceding one is higher and better; dharma is best and should ever be clung to. Love, hate, infatuation, elation, pride, like, dislike, sorrow, burning jealousy at another's prosperity all this is Un-reason; as also all sinful actions."

Foot-Note 2, p.136, of Secret Doctrine, vol.I, says, quoting K.P.Telang's translation of the 3 Gita-s (S.B.E.series). "The original for Understanding is Sattva, which Shankara renders Antah-karana, refined by sacrifices and other sanctifying operations. In Katha, ... Sattva is rendered by Shankara to mean Buddhi a common use of the word." To this H.P.B, adds, "Whatever meaning various schools may give the term, Sattva is the name given among Occult students of the Aryasanga School, to the dual Monad or Atma-Buddhi, and Atma-Buddhi on this plane corresponds to Prabrahman and Mulaprakrti on the higher plane."

Explanations, Reconciliations

(ix) The three functions or properties and characteristics of sattva, rajas, and tamas are stated more specifically and categorically in the following, in connection with chitta or mind.

chittaM hi prakhyA-pravRutti-sthiti-shIlatvAt triguNam |
--Yoga-bhashya, I.i.

prakAshashIlaM sattvaM, kriyAshIlaM rajaH, sthitishIlaM tamaH |
--Yoga-bhashya, II.18.

sthitikAraNam manasaH puruShArthatA, sharIrasmeva AhAraH |
--Yoga-bhashya, II.28.

prakAshaM cha pravRuttiM cha mohameva cha pAMDava |
--Bhagavad Gita, xiv.22.

prIti-aprIti-viShAda AtmakAH prakAsha-pravRutti-niyama arthAH |
--Sankhya-Karika, 12. See also 13.

sukha-duHkha-mohAH prIti-aprIti-viShAdAH |
--Sankhya-tattva-kaumudi, 12.

shAMta-ghora-vimUDhatvaM iti vA syAd ahaMkRuteH |
--Bhagavata, III.xxvi.

namaH shAMtAya ghorAya mUDhAya guNAdharmiNe,
nirvisheShAya sAmyAya namo j~jAnaghanAya cha |
--Bhagavata, VIII.iii.

prakAsho buddheH, chAMchalyaM manasaH, AvaraNaM ahaMkRuteH |
--Foot-note to Shiva-sutra-vimarshini, III.i.

"The function of buddhi-sattva is prakAsha or prakhyA, illumination, making known, prIti, cheerful joyous affection and satisfaction, shAnta-tA, peacefulness; of manas-rajas, is pravrtti, chanchalya, kriya, restless enterprising activity, a-prIti, discontent, ghora-ta, vehemence, dire-ness; of ahamkAra-tamas, is sthiti, niyama, AvaraNa, steady obstinate clinging to one thing and veiling of other things, with a regularly fixed purpose, and also vishAda and moha, cheerless desolate yearning and pining, muDha, perplexed and confused as to the truth, the right course of action, and as to whether the heart's desire will or will not be gained."

(See also my Yoga-Concordance-Dictionary, pub.1938; references and explanations under chitta, pravrtti, sthiti. kriyA, prakhyA, etc.)

The Ultimate In-divis-ible

The three inseparable but distinguishable aspects or faculties of chitta or mind, the single 'internal organ', antah-karaNa, (in contact with the five external aud at least seemingly separate five sense-organs and five motor-organs), are buddhi (or mahat), aham-kAra, and manas. chitta is the summation of the three. It is, in fact, the soul with three functions, the psychical 'individual', corresponding to the body with three properties (i.e., sensable qualities, substantiality, movement), the physical 'singular', viz., the aNu or atom of which Bhagavata (II, xi) says:

charamaH sadvisheShANAM, aneko, asaMyutaH sadA,
paramANuH, vij~jeyo nRuNAm aikya-bhramo yataH |

"The ultimate indivisible 'particular', 'many', i.e., multitudinous, but uncompounded, i.e., each separate from all others, whence arises men's illusory notion of the 'final unit' or the singular is the paramANu." (See also Vaisheshika-Sutra, I.ii.3,6, for summum genus and final singular or particular, or 'infima species')."

For all practical purposes, this chitta of Yoga is manas of Nyaya, its singularising, finitising, principle, principle of 'attention', of 'the hot place in consciousness' (in William James' phrase), of focus in the field of consciousness, which is the cause of the actuality of 'one knowledge only at a time', Nyaya Sutra, III.ii.56-62;

while buddhi is the cause of the possibility of all knowledges simultaneously included in that infinite field; but this 'comprehensive' kshetrajna quality of buddhi is not clearly brought out in current Nyaya and Vaisheshika works; some of these later works however distinguish two kinds of cognition, anubhava and smrti, i.e., direct perception and memorial; and the latter is said to cover all three divisions of time, while the former is confined to the present.

• Vedanta speaks of 'the tetrad of the inner organ, antahkaraNa-chatushtaya, viz, manas--buddhi--ahamkAra--chitta;

• Sankbya, of mahat (or buddhi)--ahamkAra--manas;

• Yoga, of chitta with three shIla-s or characteristics;

• Nyaya mentions buddhi and manas separately (Sutra, I.i.9),
• • makes jnAna or cognition (together with other phenomena) a 'mark' or characteristic of AtmA/[b] (I.i.10),
• • identifies [b]jnAna with buddhi (I.i.15), and
• • states the distinguishing characteristic of manas to be prevention of more than one 'knowledge' (or 'experience') occurring at one time (I.i.16).

• But Nyaya-Bhashya (on I.i.16) says: "Memory, reasoning, acceptance of testimony, doubt, intuition, dreaming, jnana or knowledge, inferential conjecture, experience of pleasure, desire, etc., are 'marks' of manas; and besides these, also this one peculiarly, viz., the non-occurrence of more than one 'knowledge' at a time."

• And Nyaya-vartika-tatparya-tlka (on the same) seems to identify buddhi (which as said above is expressly declared in the sutra to be identical with jnAna) with manas, thus:

buddhirj~jAnasAdhanamiti | buddhyate aneneti vyutpattyA mana uchyate |

Functions-Faculties of Mind

The reconciliation and explanation of all these may be found in the statements that:

buddhayahaMkRutmanorUpaM chitam | --Shiva-sutra-vimarshini, iii.1

anubhyamAnasya asya AtmalAbho anubhavashcha aMtaHkaraNaniShTaH,
iti manasi rajoguNodaye, ahaMkAre tamoguNadaye, buddhau cha sattvaguNodayarUpAyaM vRuttiH | --Spanda-karika-vivrti, iv.20.

"chitta consists of buddhi--ahamkAra--manas', which make up the 'inner organ'; and of these, manas expresses rajas; ahamkAra, tamas; and buddhi, sattva."

yadetad viShayavAsanAchChuritatvAt nityaM tadadhyavasAyAdivyApArabuddhyahaM-
kRunmanorUpaM chitaM, tadeva atati, chidAtmakasvasvarUpAkhyAtyA
sattvAdivRuttyavalaMbanena yonI: saMcharati, iti AtmA aNurityarthaH |
--Shiva-sutra-vimarshini, iii.1.

aNuH jIvaH, aNiti shvasiti iti aNuH, dehapuryaShTakaprANAdyAshrayaH chitamayaH pramAtA |
--Shiva-sutra-vimarshini, Appendix iv.

Desire-Force as Jivas

ichChA shaktitamA kumArI | --Shiva-sutra-vimarshini, i.13.
chitaM vai vAsanAtmakam | --Yoga-Vasishtha, Chudala-upakhyana,

• This three-functioned mind or chitta is aNu, atomic, because it 'breathes' aniti, expands and contracts, and keeps moving incessantly, atati, and hence is called the AtmA-jIva-aNu;

• AtmA, really Omnipresent, therefore motionless, appears as moving (atati) when, colored by desire-vAsanA, it puts on a-khyAti (a-vidyA, a-jnAna), non-knowledge or forgetfulness of Its-Own-Nature, and, instead of Omnipresent, becomes aNu, a limited atom;

• when enveloped in the triple organ and the five tan-mAtras, it is the experiencer-chitta;

• this sheathing is due to desire, will to live: the essence and core of mind may well be said to be desire;

• while, no doubt, the three aspects of the mind are co-equal, yet, if a 'distinction between the prophets' may be made at all, we would have to say that very soul of soul is desire;

• for desire, emotion, the ruling passion, makes the individuality, the peculiarity and character of the person, is the individualising, finitising, characterising, distinguishing principle; any given person feels his separate existence most fully and keenly when he is expressing a particular emotion most intensely;

• creation of krtyAs, (Tibetan tulku) 'artificial' elementals and devas, by means of mantras, i.e., manana, ideation, with intense desire, is only an illustration of this fact, as also the theosophical doctrine of 'individualising' of souls from lower into human kingdom under stress of intense emotion, like 'crystallisation' under stress of chemicophysical forces corresponding to emotions;

• 'desire is the shakti par excellence, shakti-tama;' cognition and action are shaktis only with the energy borrowed from desire.

This is also the significance of the otherwise somewhat obscure verse:

aparA iyam, itas tu anyAM prakRutiM viddha me parAm,
jIvabhUtAM, mahAbAho! yayA idaM dhAryate jagat |
--Bhagavad-Gita vii.5.

"My parA or higher prakrti is that which manifests as jIvas, souls, individuals (of countless grades of definition, group-souls, etc., one within another), and thereby carries on and upholds this moving world."

In other words, this parA-prakrti is much the same as daivi-prakrti or shakti, energy, force; and aparA-prakrti is mUla-prakrti, matter. The three guNas, in different aspects, belong to both, as indeed also to Spirit or pratyagAtmA.

Energy, force, power, though abstract, in a general sense, yet always manifests as, in, and through, concrete 'individuals', human and non-human. Hence inevitable morphisation of the one Atma-shakti, in many degrees of definition, first into pratIka-s, nature-forces of the Vedas, Agni, Mitra, Varuna, Indra, Surya etc., distinguished by functions, without ascription of any sharply-defined concrete human or other shapes; and then into pratima-s, more concretely anthropomorphic deities of Puranas, with well-defined but changeable shapes in subtler matter, as abhimAni devatAs, ruling over and guiding (not so much intellectually as vitally and inspirationally) masses of corresponding 'nature-spirits' of all kinds, made of subtler or superphysical matter, or consisting of vegetable and animal bacteria and bacilli (yakshANi and rakshAmsi--after whom human or semi-human races of yaksha-s and rAkshasa-s seem to be named, because of the prevalence of such microbes in their bodies), as also 'animal-souls' of masses of animals and men; and finally into quite human and historic deities, avatAras, of Puranas and other national legends and sagas, ruling more intellectually (comparatively) 'rational-souls' of masses of men.

saidevo
29 March 2008, 10:47 AM
Singular and Universal--Identical

The already-quoted verses of Bhagavata (VIII.ii), speaking of 'triple Shakti, of the nature of I-feeling, egoism', indicate the same thing as the Gita-verse.

This aham-dhlH, 1 -feeling, is aham-kAra of Sankhya and Vedanta, and asmitA of Yoga, which is but the second stage, phase, or form of a-vidyA, primal Error, by which the Infinite illusorily regards itself as a finite 'body', 'an atom', and 'finitises' itself.

This aNu, or ANava-mala, 'atom stain' or 'atom-substance', takes the place, as the third subdivision of energy, viz., sAmya, mentioned on p.238, supra, from a different standpoint.

gopitasvamahimro asya, saMmohAd vismRutAtmanaH,
yaH saMkochaH, sa evAsya ANavo mala uchyate |
svAtaMtrayahAnirbodhasya, svAtaMtrayasyApi abodhatA,
dvidhA ANavaM malam idaM svasvarUpApahAnitaH |
--Shiva-Sutra Vi.i.3.

We have seen above that manas, chitta, or jiva is aNu: Upanishats repeatedly declare that Brahman, Supreme AtmA, is 'larger than the largest and smaller than the smallest', is infinite and infinitesimal both, (the word for 'large', viz., mahAn, having a special fullness of significance which will appear in a moment).

We have also seen that one of the quotations above, from Bhagavata, expressly says that the 'atom', the 'final singular', is 'many' and yet also the cause of the illusion of singularity, 'oneness', i.e., of many ones. A quotation from Spanda-kartka-vivrti will help to show how 'extremes meet', and not only meet but are identical.

paramArthe tu naikatvaM pRuthak^tvAd bhinnalakShaNam;
prathak^tvaikatvarUpeNa tattvamevaM (?kaM) prakAshate |
yatpRuthak^tvamasaMdigdhaM tadekatvAnna bhidyate;
yadekatvamasaMdigdhaM tatpRuthak^tvAnna bhidyate |
dyauH kShamA vAyurAdityaH sAjarAH sarito dishaH,
aMtaH karanatatvasya bhAgA bahisvasthitAH | -- IV.21

"In transcendental and supreme experience, oneness or identity is not distinguishable from 'separate' (or rather complete and perfect) singularity (kevalatA, of yoga). Separate-singularity which has no fringe of uncertainty of any kind about it, cannot be distinguished from true (universal) oneness; and vice versa. In that supreme experience, the broad firmament, all-bearing earth, ambient air, blazing sun, rolling oceans, rushing rivers, ever-receding quarters of space all these are seen to be but portions, projected without, of the one my 'internal organ' within" i.e., they are all seen as constituents of the One impartible Consciousness which has illusorily divided itself up into a 'without' and a 'within'. 'Empirical' and 'universal' Ego are identical.

Mind is World-Process

Following verses of Yoga Vasishtha, 111.ch.84, are to same effect.

chittameva hi saMsAro, rAgAdikleshadUShitam;
tadeva tairvinirmuktaM, bhavAntaH iti kathyate |
garvaM abhyantare chittaM bibhartti trijagannabhaH;
ahaM ApUra iva tad yathAkAle vijRubhbhate |
yo ayaM chittasya chidbhAgaH, sA eShA sarvArthabIjatA;
yachchAsya jaDabhAgashcha, tajjagat, so, a~ggaH!, saMbhramaH |
chittaM sAdhyaM, pAlanIyaM, vichAryaM, kAryaM Aryavat |

"The chit-element in chitta, is seed of omniscience; the jada-element in it, is all this jagat, moving illusion. chitta, mind, contains all the World-Process within itself. It should be reflected upon, controlled, cultivated, refined."

After all, is it not literally true, that every experience, and all that is contained or implied in it and by it, all its contents, is a mood of mind, a vrtti of antah-kararNa, i.e., of the Self identified with, or imagining It-Self as, an antah-karaNa? To think, to say, 'this is my-self's experience, that is another-Self's experience, this mountain is outside of Me'--is not all this, My experience or thought? Is not all distinguishing of one-Self and another-Self, together with both the thus distinguished selves, within the One Self which distinguishes? Indeed there is Only One Self which includes all selves and all not-selves, all thoughts and all things, all subjects and all objects.

It may be mentioned incidentally, that Pranava-Vada makes abam-kAra the summation of chitta-buddhi-manas, instead of chitta the summation of ahamkAra and the two others. As said before, this implies only a slight difference of standpoint, an emphasis on aham rather than on kAra.

Aspects of Mind: Names Vary with Functionings: All of One and Same Mind

(x) A few quotations regarding the three 'faculties' or 'functions' of this 'inner organ' may help to make the subject clearer.

It is true that the ancient works lay stress on the indivisible oneness of mind, manas, in all its psychoses i.e., the psyche's functionings, moods, modes; thus:

कामः संकल्पो विचिकित्सा श्रद्धा अश्रद्धा
धृतिर् अधृतिः ही: धी: भी: इत्येतत् सर्वं मन एव ।

kAmaH saMkalpo vichikitsA shraddhA ashraddhA
dhRutir adhRutiH hI: dhI: bhI: ityetat sarvaM mana eva |
--Brhad-Aranyaka, 1.v.3.

"Love and passionate desire, resolve, doubt, faith, disbelief, patience, impatience, modesty, clear insight, fear--all these are but manas, mind."

These psychoses (mind's functions, mentations), are typical of the scores mentioned in different works of various schools of philosophy; e.g., Alochana, pure sensation, and pratyaksha, perception (which are the basis of all other mental operations, trayasya tatpUrvikA vRuttiH, as said, in Sankhya Karika, 30, and pratyakShaparA pramitiH, in Nyaya-bhashya, I.i.8), adhyavasAya, or ascertainment, abhimAna, egoistic desire, sankalpa or vyavasAya, resolve, viparyaya or viparyAsa, error, samshaya, doubt, vikalpa, imagination, svapna, dreaming, nidrA, sleep, praty-avamarsha or pratyabhijnA, recognition, ichChA, desire, rAga, liking, dvsha, disliking, krti, volition, abhi-sandhi, determination, anubhava, experience, presentation, smrti, memory, etc.--all these are only moods of the one mind.

brahmaNaa tanyate vishvaM 'manasA' eva svayaMbhuvA |
manomayaM ato vishvaM yan nAma pari-'dRushya' te || 50
yatra saMkalpanaM tatra mano asti, iti avagamyatAm || 52
saMkalpa-manasI bhinne na kadAchana kenachit |
saMkalpajAte galite svarUpaM avashiShyate || 53
yasya cha AtmAdikAH saMj~jAH kalpitAH, na sva-bhAvataH || 57
vikalpa-kalita-AkAra-'desha-kAla-kriyA'-AspadaM || 123
chito ruupaM idaM brahman kShetraj~jaH iti kathyate |
vAsanAH kalpayan so api yAti 'ahaMkAra'-tAM punaH || 124
ahaMkAro vinirNetA akalaMkI 'buddhir' uchyate |
buddhiH saMkalpita AkArA prayAti manana AspadaM|| 125
'mano' ghanavikalpaM tu gachChati indriyatAM shanaiH |
pANi-pAda-mayaM dehaM indriyANi vidur budhAH || 126.
evaM jIvo hi saMkalpa-vAsanA-rajju-veShTitaH |
duHkha-jAla-parIta-AtmA kramAd AyAti nIchatAM || 127
iti shaktimayaM cheto, ghana-ahaMkAratAM gataM |
kosha-kAra-kRumir iva svayaM AyAti bandhanaM || 128
kvachinmanaH, kvachidbuddhiH, kvachij j~jAnaM, kvachit kriyA |
kvachid etad ahaMkAraH, kvachii chchittam iti smRutaM || 130
kvachit prakRutir iti uktaM, kvachin mAyA iti kalpitaM |
kvachin malaM iti proktaM, kvachit tama iti smRutaM || 131
kvachid bandhaH, iti khyAtaM, kvachit puryaShTakaM smRutam |
proktaM kvachid avidyA iti, kvachid ichChA iti sammataM || 132
'manaH' sampadyate lolaM kalpanA-kalano-nmukhaM | (146)

--Maha Upanishat and Yoga Vasishtha

"Self-born Brahma spreads out the worlds by manas.

• Wherever there is sankalpa-ideation, there is manas at work. There is no difference between the two. When ideation ceases, Self Al-One remains. It is indicated by such names as AtmA.

• By and in ideation, Space-Time-Motion appear, and chit-consciousness becomes kShetra-jna, cogniser of the 'field', the 'This'.

• Ideating vAsanA-desires, it becomes aham-kAra--ego-ism;

• that, making determinations, free of doubt, a-kalanki, becomes buddhi;

• that, forming an 'image', becomes manas:

• that, densifying, crystallising, becomes indriyas, sensor-and-motor-organs; these make up the body.

Thus the jIva-soul, binding itself with bonds, like the silkworm imprisoning itself in a cocoon spun by itself, falls lower and lower into denser and denser matter.

This one and the same manas-Mind, according to its various functionings, is named now manas, now buddhi, now jnAna, again ichChA, then kriyA, now aham-kAra, now chitta, or prakrti, or mAyA, or malam, or karma, bandha, puri-ashtaka, or a-vidyA.

All these are but various names of various functionings of one and the same ideating manas-Mind."

saidevo
30 March 2008, 09:22 AM
Samskrta Equivalents

Still it is possible to distinguish three broad classes of functionings among these phenomena.

avasAyo, abhimAnashcha, kalpanaM cheti, na kriyA
ekarUpA, tatastritvaM yuktaM ataH kRutau sphuTam |
--Tantraaloka (of Abhinavagupta), ix.238

manashcha mantavyaM cha, buddhishcha boddhavyaM cha,
ahaMkArashchAhaMkartavyaM cha, chittaM cha chetayitavyaM cha...
--Prashna Upanishat, iv.8.

"... the mind and the content of thought, understanding and the content of understanding, egoism and the content of egoism, awareness and the content of awareness, ..."

adhyavasAyo buddhiH, abhimAno ahaMkAraH, manaH saMkalpam |
--[b]Sahkhya-Karika[b], 23.24.37.

buddhi-ahaMkRun-manaH prAhuH bodha-saMraMbhaNa-eShaNo;
karaNaM bAhyadevaiH(iMdriyauH)yan naiva, api(tu) aMtarmukhaiH kRutam |
bodhaH shabdAderviShayasyAdhyavasAyaH, saMraMbhaH ahamAtmAbhimAnaH eShaNAmichChA saMkalpaH |
kLuptiH, matiH, syatishchaiva, jAtA bhinnArthavAchakAH,
ichChA-saMraMbha-bodhArthAH, tena aMtaHkaraNaM tridhA |
--Tantraaloka (of Abhinavagupta), ix.

mano, buddhir, ahaMkAraH, chittaM, karaNam AMtaram;
saMshayo, nishchayo, garvaH, smaraNaM viShayAH ime |
--Shabda-kalpa-druma, art. antahkaraNa.

yadA tu saMkalpavikalpakRutyaM tadA bhavet tan maMna ityabhikhyaM;
syAd buddhisaMj~jaM cha yadA pravetti sunishchitaM saMshayahInarUpaM;
anusaMdhAnarUpaM tat chittaM karaNamAMtaram;
ahaMkRutyAtmavRuttyA tu tadahaMkArataM gaMtam |
--Devi-Bhagavata, VII.xxxii.

So far there is no difficulty. There is a clear consensus in the above texts, that

• buddhi is that faculty of the mind whose function is to ascertain facts, [b]adhyavasAya, bodha, syati, nishchaya;

• aham-kAra, to ego-ise, to connect all experiences with self, to reduce them to the sake of the selfishly-desiring self, abhimAna, sam-rambha, mati, garva;

• manas, to resolve upon which course to follow between doubtful alternatives, kalpana, mantavya, eshaNA, ichChA, klrpti, samshaya or sankalpa-vikalpa;

• chitta, to memorise, to connect before and after, past and present and future, and also all the three, in itself, smaraNa, anu-sandhAna.

Clearly the three first correspond to jnAna, ichChA, kriyA.

But when we seek for direct texts, we find some perplexing inconsistency here as in the case of sattva, etc., (vide section viii, supra, of this note, and the references to Gita). Thus,

j~jAnamapi sattvarUpA nirNayabodhasya kAraNaM buddhiH; but
tasya kriyA tamomayamUrttirmana uchyate vikalpakarI; and
ichChA asya rajorUpA ahaMkRutir AsId ahaMpratItikarI |
--Tattva-sandoha

(It should be noted that the quotations from Kashmira Shaiva works, throughout this Note, are all taken from Mr. J.C.Chatterji's excellent publications under the auspices of the Kashmir State.)

In these lines jnAna--sattva--buddhi are brought together all right; but kriyA and manas are joined to tamas instead of rajas; and ichChA and ahamkAra are allied to rajas instead of tamas.

Spanda-karika-vivrti (iv, 20), however, as we have seen in section ix, supra, of this note, assigns the correspondences rightly.

Meaning of abhi-mAna

Vatsyayana, Kama-sutra, I.ii.44, uses abhimAna in the sense of desire, expressly.

dAMDakyaH bhargavakanyAM kAmAdabhimanyamAnaH saMbadhurAShTo vinnAsha |

(This sentence is repeated in Kautalya, Artha-shastra, I, vi.)

"King Dandaka, desiring lustfully to violate the daughter of the Rshi Bhargava, was destroyed with all his kith and kin, and all his kingdom was laid waste and became dense jungle".

Valmiki, Ramayana has a verse which uses the word in the same sense: "Does the king's son carefully avoid lusting after the wives of others?".

kacchin na paradArAn vA rAjaputro abhimanyate |

We may, on the whole, take the following to be the net result.

• buddhi is the principle or faculty of cognition, knowing, understanding, intellection, reason, which ascertains and decides, 'this is so'; it corresponds to sattva;

• • Samskrt names for its operations are: adhyavasAya, nishchaya, bodha, jnAna, upa-labdhi, etc.

• aham-kAra is the principle or faculty of desiring (whereby the separateness of one-self is primarily accentuated), wishing (willing being, so to say, midway between wishing and acting), and of self-reference, individuation, personalisation, egoism, hence self-complacence, pride, etc.; it corresponds to tamas;

• • Samskrt words for its functionings are ichChA, abhi-mAna, sam-rambha, garva, eshanA (in the sense of vAsanA, craving, etc.).

• manas is the principle or faculty of action, volition, conation, determination (of what to do), resolve (after vacillation), attention (after distraction); it corresponds to rajas;

• • Samskrt words for its activities are kriyA, eshanA, (in the sense of seeking, anu-eshanA, going after), samshaya-vimarsha, sankalpa-vikalpa.

chitta is the summation of the three, with the special feature or function of memory (and expectation), connecting before and after;

• • Samskrt words here are chetayate, smaraNam, anu-san-dhAnam.

The name chitta, for individual mind or soul, is appropriately formed from the root-word chit which means consciousness generally, chetanA, chiti. The Universal Consciouness or Chit, including all time, past, present, and future, is obviously the locus and the means of all memory.

A portion, a slab, so to say, of this Universal Consciousness, gathered into a separate aggregate, with a definite reach backward and forward in time, becomes a chitta in this individual 'memory'--and an individual is but a 'memory', a biography, a number of experiences in a certain order, so that individuality is lost and disappears, when, and to the extent that, memory is lost and disappears--the three other functions, of buddhi, etc., are all incorporated.

Perpetual Gyration of the Three

The order of succession and rotation of the three classes of psychoses, cognitive, affective, conative, is indicated in the following:

j~jAnajanyA bhavedichChA, ichChAjanyA bhavet kRutiH,
kRutijanyA bhavechcheShTA, cheShTAjanyA bhaved kriyAH | --Shandilya

"Out of knowledge arises desire; out of desire, krti (or prayatna), i.e., volition: out of that, effort; out of that, action."

j~jAnapUrvodmivA lipsA, lipsApUrvA abhisaMdhitA,
abhisaMdhitapUrvakaM karma, karmamUlaM tataH | -- Mahabharata, Shantiparva

"First comes knowledge (of a thing); then the wish to obtain it; then the purposeful effort, abhi-sandhi; then the action; then the fruit."

jAnati knows; then ichChati, desires; then yatate, endeavours--this is one of the commonplaces of Nyaya. It is obvious that intention, purpose, will, volition, conation, innervation, exertion, muscular effort, are all intermediate states of transition from desire to action.

In Puranic mythical and anthropomorphic symbology, for purposes of concrete devotional worship,

• Vasudeva-Krshna (an incarnation of Vishnu-sattva, representing knowledge, wisdom);
• his brother Sankarshana-Bala-rama (of Rudra-tamas, representing the anger-half of desire);
• his son Pradyumna (of Kaama-Eros, representing the love-half thereof);
• and his grandson A-niruddha (the 'unrestrained', representing action, rajas),

stand, respectively, for chitta, buddhi or mahat, the two subdivisions (anger and love) of ahamkara, and for manas respectively (Bhagavata, III, xxvi.)

For a description and illustration of the inhibitive, veiling, blinding, (AvaraMa), distracting, diverting, selective, misdirective and incentive, (vikshepa), preserving, steadying, (sthiti), fixing and regulating (niyama) effects of feeling, passion-desire-unreason, and of its connection with tamas, see Hoffding, Outlines of Psychology, ch. VI.7. Thus, "... Feeling itself may have a hindering effect ... But the step once taken, feeling is the faithful guardian of what has been acquired. Then its inertia" (tamas) "is of use to knowledge" (sattva), etc. (See also Herbert Spencer, Psychology, vol. I, p. 110).

saidevo
03 April 2008, 10:05 AM
Intermediate Stages

(Some more notes, which had gathered on the margins of my personal copy of the previous editions of this book, may be incorporated here).

smRutiH vyatIta-viShayA, matiH AgAmi-gocharA,
buddhiH tAtkAlikI j~jeyA, praj~jA traikAlikI matA |
--Nyaya

"smrti, memory, has the past for object; mati, expectation, opinion, the future, the coming; buddhi, perception, the present, that which is immediately before it; pra-jnA, the higher mentation, thinking, ranges over and covers, simultaneously, all three divisions of time."

shushrUShA, shravaNaM chaiva, grahanaM, dhAraNaM tathA,
uhA, apoho, arthavij~jAnaM, tattvaj~jAnaM cha, dhIguNA |
--Kaamandaka’s Neetisaara or Kaamandakineetisaara

"'Wish to hear i.e., to learn, scientific curiosity'; attentive listening i.e. absorption of knowledge; apprehension; retention; inferential reasoning and acceptance of a fact; (similar) rejection or refutation (of an alleged fact); understanding of purport and purpose; knowledge or grasp of the essential truth (of a subject)--these are the eight functions of dhIh, intelligence"; (from dhA, to place, to do, to deposit; dhiyante pad-arthAh asyAm iti dhIh, that in which all meanings of words, i.e., notions of things meant by words, are deposited; dhI is a synonym for buddhi).

saMj~jAnaM, Aj~jAnaM, vij~jAnaM, praj~jAnaM, medhA, dRuShTi, dhRutiH, matiH,
manIShA, jUtiH, smRutiH, saMkalpaH, kratuH, asuH, kAmaH, vashaH,
iti sarvANi eva etAni praj~jAnasya mAmadheyAni bhavanti |
--Aitareya Upanishad 3.2.

"Sensation, perception, concrete or factual knowledge, abstract thought or conceptual knowledge or generalisation, retentive intelligence, view (or outlook, doctrine), resolute fortitude (or determination), opinion, independence of mind, propensity, memory or recollection, imaginative ideation, volition, asu or prANa or innervation (of a motor organ or muscle, with nerve-energy, by volitional effort for action), kAma-desire, vasha-capability or will-power all these are only different names (of different aspects or functions) of pra-jnAna-consciousness."

Mind is Brahma, is All

yadA manasA manasyati, 'maMtrAn adhIyIya' iti, atha, adhIte;
'karmANi kurvIrya' iti, atha kurute;
putrAMshcha pashUshcha ichCheya' iti, atha ichChate;
'imaM cha lokaM amuM cha ichCheya', iti, atha ichChate;
mano hi AtmA, mano hi loko, mano hi brahma, manaH upAsva iti ||
--Chhandogya Upanishad, vii.3.

"By manas-mind, man resolves, 'may I study mantras', and studies; 'may I do (such-and-such) acts', and does; 'may I desire children and domestic animals, and (the joys and riches of) this world and also the next', and desires; manas is the soul, the Self, is all this world (i.e., all these worlds, all this, all objects); it is Brahma; manas should be meditated on, propitiated, worshipped, given devotion to (i.e., should be purified, elevated, strengthened)";

chittaM chetayate |--Chhandogya Upanishad, vii.5.

'chitta remembers'.

The same three functions, jnAna-ichChA-kriyA, cognition-desire-action, with the fourth all-connecting all-including memory-expectation-consciousness, are clearly indicated in these sentences of the Chhandogya.

Incidentally, it may be noted that Plato, in Republic, Bk. iv, (Jowett's translation), distinguishes "three principles of the Soul, Reason, Desire, and Passion or Spirit or Anger"; which is very feeble; in view of what Indian tradition says, from Upanishats downwards; "passion or spirit or anger" is only one part of 'desire', and "reason" only one part of 'cognition', and 'volition-action' is not discerned and counted at all by Plato.

Mahabharata, Shanti-parva, chapters 238,254,258, (also 203,268,281, and others) say:

agre eva mahad-bhutaM, ashu, vyakta AtmakaM, manaH,
dUragaM, bahudhA-gAmi, prArthanA-saMshaya AtmakaM |
manasastu parA buddhiH, buddher AtmA paro mataH |
buddhir vikurute bhAvaM, tadA bhavati sA manaH |
vyavasAya AtmikA buddhiH, mano vyAkaraNa AtmakaM |

"mabat-manas manifested first, fast-rushing, far-travelling, ever-going, desiring-and-doubting (affirming-and-denying, imagining-and-effacing)." ... "Beyond manas is buddhi; beyond buddhi is AtmA" ... "When buddhi undergoes emotion or any definite functioning with reference to a specific object, it becomes manas." ... buddhi determines, resolves, ascertains, makes sure; manas expounds, specifies."

'May this My Mind be Holy'

There is a grand hymn to Manas, of six mantras (verses), in Yajur-Veda, which emphasises the all-enmeshing quality and speed of the mind:

yaj jAgrato dUraM udaiti daivaM, tad u suptasya tathaiva eti,
dUraMgamaM, jyotiShAM jyotir ekaM, tan me manaH shivasaMkalpaM astu |
yat praj~jAnaM, ut cheto, dhRutishcha, yaj jyotiMratar amRutaM prajAsu,
yasmAn na Rute kiMchana karma kriyate, tan me manaH shivasaMkalpamastu |
yena idaM bhUtaM bhuvanaM bhaviShyat parigRuhItaM amRutena sarvaM,
yasmishchittaM sarvaM otaM prjAnaM, tanme manaH shivasaMkalpaM astu | ...

"This Mind of mine, which wanders far when (I am) awake, and comes back (to me) when (I am) asleep; which is the one Light of lights; which is known as pra-jnAna and chetas and dhrti, (knowledge, desire-memory, and will-vohtionaction), Immortal Inner Light of all living beings, without which nothing can be done, which encompasses all past, present, and future worlds, in which are interwoven all the minds of all beings may that Mind of mine ever ideate holy thoughts, ever function auspiciously, beneficently."

chitta has been said in some of the above texts, to connect all three divisions of time.

• As memory, it is cognition of an object with the additional cognition of 'past-ness', in the sequence of its experience;
• as expectation, of future-ness;
• as direct perception, of presentness;

(see The Mahatma Letters, p.194, re Time).

Other texts assign the same power to prajnA; others to buddhi; they ascribe reasoning also to the two: it is obvious that reasoning, inference, proceeds from past experience to future similar experience, connects memory and expectation.

The incessant flow and flux, the kaleidoscopic assumptions of ever new forms and figures by the very same few pieces of differently coloured glass, which goes on perpetually in these subtle regions of the mind, has been referred to before; each function passes into another, imperceptibly as it were.

Compare the statement in The Mahatma Letters, p.187: "As no two men, not even two photographs of the same person, nor yet two leaves, resemble, line for line, each other, so no two states in Deva-chan are like."

But this does not mean that the states cannot be grouped into great broad classes. Clouds at sunset in the rains are never still, are ever changing their shapes and colors; but the main seven colors, or the three yet more primary ones, are always there, and distinguishable.

Deva-chan, (? Tibetan for Skt. deva-jana or deva-sthAna, god=world) svar-ga, ('where sva, Self, goes'), may be said to be the Dream-world par excellence); all [b]mano-maya and vijnAna-maya; but of waking dreams, so to say, vivid, 'real'; sva, Self, Mind, has much more control over Matter there; Matter is much more plastic.

Group Individuality

Incidentally, the fuller the comprehension of the Nature of Mind and mental processes, the clearer will be understood the teachings of the Masters (Master El Maurya and Master Kuthumi--sd), as regards after-death states of normals and abnormals, suicides, 'accident-killed', elementanes, ghosts, shells, lower principles, higher principles, disjunctions of the principles from, and fresh conjunctions with, each other, etc.

Each individual flowing into and out of all others; individual within and without other individuals: the principle of individuality-Manyness as well as all individuals, within the Principle of Universality and the One-Universal--this seems to be the key to the problems of personal as well as Impersonal Immortality and all subsidiary questions; the subject will come up for treatment again, later on.

In this connection, an extract from Herodotus (History, Bk.IV, ch.184), which is referred to in the Secret Doctrine (iv, 331) will be found suggestive: "around another salt-hill and spring of water, dwell a people called the Atarantians, who alone of all nations are destitute of names. The title of Atarantians [Atlanteans] is borne by the whole race in common; but the men have no particular names of their own. ... Near the salt is a mountain called Atlas, ... so-lofty ... the natives called it 'the Pillar of Heaven', and they themselves take their name from it, being called Atlantes ..."

A group of persons, not having any distinctive, differentiating, particular names, everyone being known as and called 'Atarantian', presumably had some sort of a 'group-individuality' also; somthiug like that of herds of herbivores, or the populations of termitariums and bee-hives.

Jigar
03 April 2008, 11:21 AM
smRutiH vyatIta-viShayA, matiH AgAmi-gocharA,
buddhiH tAtkAlikI j~jeyA, praj~jA traikAlikI matA |[/B]
--Nyaya

"smrti, memory, has the past for object; mati, expectation, opinion, the future, the coming; buddhi, perception, the present, that which is immediately before it; pra-jnA, the higher mentation, thinking, ranges over and covers, simultaneously, all three divisions of time."


I lack the sense of Smirthi, simultaneously while calling it a draw of memory

mastenam,

saidevo
06 April 2008, 06:14 AM
Scattered vs. One-Pointed Will

In the last-quoted Mahabharata text, occurs the word vy-avasAya. Ordinarily, it means resolution, determination, in the actional sense, rather than the cognitional; f.i. Gita, ii.41: "The resolute, determined, buddhi, will, is one-pointed, single-minded, keeps one aim before it (and therefore acts, and achieves that aim); while the irresolute ones dream of many objects and fritter away their energy in endless vague plans."

Here, by vyavasAya is meant 'determination to act' rather than 'ascertainment of fact'. The cognitional sense is usually expressed by adhy-ava-sAya, as in many of the other texts quoted above. The word vy-A-karaNa has now come technically to mean grammar; because grammar 'specifies' and 'limits' the proper use of language.

Ego-istic Proud Desire

abhi-mAna and its derivatives, as meaning ego-ising, self-referring, self-emphasising, self-asserting, prideful, overbearing desire, occur in the following texts:

evam eShA&skRut sarvaM krIDArthaM 'abhimanyate' |
evam eSha mahAn AtmA sarga-pralaya-kovidaH,
vikurtrANaH prakRutimAn 'abhimanyati' abuddhimAn;
lIyate triguNairyuktaH tAsu tAsu iha yoniShu,
sahavAs-nivAs-AtmA "n-anyo-ahaM" iti manyate |
yAni chAnyAni dvaMdvAni prAkRutAni sharIriShu,
'abhimanyati, abhimAnAt', tathaiva su (?sva-)kRutAn api;
vastrANi chAnyAni bahRun 'abhimanyati' abuddhimAn |
'abhimanyati' asambodhAt tathaiva trividhAn guNAn,
sattvaM-rajas-tamashchaiva dharmArthau kAma eva cha--
"aham etAni" vai sarvaM, "mayi etAni" iMdriyAni cha;
akSharaH kSharaM AtmAnaM abuddhistu 'abhimanyate' |

--Mahabharata, Shanti-parva, chs.308,309,310.

"This mahAn-AtmA, for the sake of krIdA, Play, abhimanyati, puts upon Him-Self, takes on, a-buddhi, a-vidyA, i.e., prakrti, with its three gunAs; enters into these countless yonis, species of living things, identifies It-Self with Its companion, its garment inside which it dwells; and thinks [note these words] "I am Not anything Else than this body" (--instead of thinking its whole Thought, "than My-Self"--); thus, it abhi-manyati, imagines, as attached to It-self, all these outer garments, vastrANi, made up of sattva-rajas-tamas, dharma-artha-kAma, [note the correct order]; It thinks "I am all these", "all these are in me", these indriyas, sensor-motor-organs which make up this body. Thus the Infinite abhi-manyate, desirefully imagines It-Self to be finite."

abhitaH, sarvataH, manyate (ti), Atmani Atopayati, 'aham etad etat smAn' iti |

"May I be so-and-so, I am so-and-so"--this imposition of other things upon Self is abhi-mAna.

chitiH pratyavamarsha AtmA | chinoti cha, dhArayati cha, iti, chayamAt chit |

"The essence of chiti is re-cognition, prati-ava-marsha, ability to recognise that this is the same as was perceived before. It gathers up and preserves and holds all experiences."

(For other quotes, check: Mbh. Shanti, ch.427; also chs.108,180,316,317,357; Ann-gita, ch.26; Vayu Purana, Srshti Prakarapa, ch. iv; etc.

(See also Durga-Sapta-Shati, and my Manava-Dharma-Sarah, in which these and other synonyms, and names according with transformations during gradual manifestation, vyakta-pary-Aya and aham-kAra-pary-Aya, of Mind-Brahma, are repeated over and over again, and explained etymologically; whereby the transformations become intelligible).

Altru-istic Renunciant's Socialism

We have seen before (pp.121--131) how certain texts play, in riddle, with the word anyat. Another text of the same kind occurs in Mahabharata, Shanti=parva, ch.325:

na-anyad anyad iti j~jAtvA, a-anyad anyatra varttate |

It occurs in the course of a great debate between the lady (philosopher-yogini) Sulabha and king Dharma-dhvaja Janaka (of the famous dynasty of Janakas, philosopher-kings, also known as vi-deha; one of whom, Sira-dhvaja Janaka, was the father of Sita and father-in-law of Rama).

Dharma-dhvaja was a disciple of the Sankhya Teacher Pancha-Shikha. The text quoted has a different meaning, in the immediate context; but that meaning is of no particular significance; the other interpretation, of deep significance, is also possible here, as in the other cases (pp.121--131), and is appropriate also, in view of the nature of the whole discussion on 'philosophy, in theory and in practical daily life'.

shatravo na 'abhimanyaMte', bhakShAn niShkRutAn iva |
--Valmiki Ramayana, II ch.88,24--29.

"Enemies never harbour any proud desire to attack the kingdom of Ayodhya (even after Rama has gone away to the forests, on his fourteen-years' exile, because it is guarded by his fame, and the fame of the good and strong government established there); they avoid it like poisoned food."

07140081 yAvad bhriyeta jaTharaM tAvat svatvaM hi dehinAm;
07140082 adhikaM yo 'abhimanyeta', sa steno daMDaM arhati |
--Bhagavata

"(For the renunciant sanyAsi) necessary food is the only right possession; he who desires more is as a thief, and should be punished."

Faculty-Psychology: Separable and Indistinguishable

These additional texts will, it is hoped, enable the reader to judge more confidently the import and the correspondences of the three factors of the several triads which have been dealt with in this note.

The word 'faculties' has been used above wittingly. It is true that modern western text-books profess to have given up the old 'faculty-psychology'; and the abandonment is justifiable, but with reservations.

We have seen above that the ancient Upanishats strongly affirm the indivisible unity of the mind; but that does not entail the avoidance of all classification of psychical phenomena, and of the consequent discernment of corresponding 'powers', shaktis, i.e., 'faculties', in the soul.

The doctrine of 'faculties' was run to an extreme. There ought not to be a running to the opposite extreme. It has been pointed out that the three functions of the mind are distinguishable but not separable. From this it does not follow that the word 'faculties' should not be used in connection with the mind; for 'faculties' may also be regarded as distinguishable but not separable.

Strictly, prthaktva, separateness, separability, complete and perfect, does not exist even in the realm of matter: for the most utterly separate-seeming pieces of matter are found, on scrutiny, to be floating in and connected together by a subtler kind of matter of which these separate-seeming pieces are, directly, or indirectly some sort of condensation.

The organs of audition, vision, etc., may be said to be separate, but scarcely the 'faculties' thereof, which all inhere, as 'powers', in the indivisible soul. And even this separateness of the organs is not quite perfect separateness. Even physically they are connected together by nerves.

And in abnormal psychical states, persons have 'seen' with the 'navel', while their eyes were tightly closed and bandaged; and 'optophones' have been recently invented.

The indication is that the potentialities of all kinds of sensations are present in all the sensor-nerves--on the general principle that all is everywhere and always--though one potency preponderates and has become act-ual in one special nerve; as is easy to understand when we remember that evolutionists have ascertained that all the sensories have differentiated out of one primal nerve of 'touch' (as moderns say, of 'audition', as ancients say, though some verses of Anu-Gita, which refer to sparsha-vidyut, 'touch-electricity', seem to lend some support to the modern view also).

We have also to remember that, with progress of psycho-physical research and discovery in the 'localisation of functions', it is being established more and more clearly, every day, that certain nerve-parts, nerve-tissues, nerve-lobes, and ganglia, preponderantly serve as channels and organs of one or another of the three main functions of the mind; so that the 'inner organ' is beginning to be seen as not wholly dissimilar from the outer organs; and vice verse.

In short, the distinction between 'distinguishability' and 'separability' too, is but one of degree, ultimately; for buddhi, which 'distinguishes', is itself jada, 'unconscious', being a transformation of Prakrti, or Root-matter, as Sankhya says; and Prakrti again is but an 'idea', in turn, an 'eject' and 'project' of Consciousness, made of veritable Conscious-stuff; 'without' and 'within' being facets of the same; appearance of contrast and opposition here also being only illusory, such as underlies all dvam-dvam, pairs of opposed relatives, of the World-Process; while Continuity, Organic Unity, and, finally, complete Unity and Identity of all (in One Universal Consciousness, imag-in-ing all-things al-ways) is the real fact.



In one way, Sankhya may be said to go beyond the extremist 'behaviourists' of Pavlov's and Watson's (Russian and U.S.American) Schools; but the very great difference between the two is that Sankhya affirms 'mind' as a fact, though material; while the latter regard it as an illusion, as non-est, and thus stultify their own opinions and minds; for they would be also only 'conditioned reflexes', therefore liable to change with changed conditions, therefore unreliable and untrue.

saidevo
11 April 2008, 12:55 AM
Intuition and Intellection

(xi) Finally, the difference or distinction between buddhi and manas may be indicated from a somewhat different standpoint.

Bergson among recent philosophers in the West is specially noted for having pointedly drawn attention anew to the fact, latterly tending largely to be overlooked there, "that deeper than any intellectual bond which binds a conscious creature to the reality in which it lives and which it may come to know, there is a vital bond".

"Our knowledge rests on an intuition which is not, at least which is never purely, intellectual. This intuition is of the very essence of life, and the intellect is formed from it by life, or is one of the forms that life has given to it in order to direct the activity and serve the purpose of the living beings that are endowed with it."

"Kowledge is for life and not life for knowledge."

"One thing is certain, that if you are convinced by this or any other philosophy, it is because you have entered into it by sympathy, and not because you have weighed its arguments as a set of abstract propositions."

"Consciousness of living is the intuition of life." "Reality is life."

"Why is there any reality at all? Why does something exist rather than nothing? Why is there an order in reality rather than disorder? When we characterise reality as life, the question seems so much more pressing, for the subject of it seems so much fuller of content, than when we set over, against one another, bare, abstract categories, like the being and nothing that Hegel declared to be identical. It seems easy to imagine that life might cease and then nothing would remain. In this way we come to picture to ourselves a nought spread out beneath reality, a reality that has come to be and that might cease to be, and then again there would be nought. This idea of an absolute nothing is a false idea, arising from an illusion of the understanding. (see p.120 supra) Absolute nothing is unthinkable. The problems that arise out of the idea we seem to have of it are unmeaning..."

"Why, at ordinary times, does it seem so certain that it is material things that endure, and that time is a mechanical play of things that themselves do not change? It is due to two fundamental illusions of the mind ... The reality of life is essentially freedom ..."

The above quotations are taken from a little monograph on Bergson's Philosophy of Change by Mr.Wildon Carr. They help to show how near he has come to many Vedantic conclusions

• that a theory of knowledge is but a part of the theory of Life (which is knowledge plus desire-feeling plus action);

• that our knowledge differs with our attitude;

• that sympathy means understanding, and antipathy, misunderstanding, (the vedanti would add that rAga, interestedness, implies error in understanding, and vai-rAgya, disinterestedness, true understanding);

• that our daily life is based on illusion (Vedanta would add that the basic illusion is that which takes finite for Infinite, and vice versa, and all others follow from it); and that freedom is real life (final freedom, moksha, from that basic illusion).

But though Bergson has come so near, he would probably not yet quite accept the exact Vedantic conclusions. His own 'attitude' is one of rAga, of inclination towards change and progress always, rather than of vi-rAga and inclination towards changelessness. Characteristically, Bergson's philosophy is known as 'the Philosophy of Change'. He is a worshipper of Shakti-Power, not of Shiva-Peace (see p.180, f.n., and p.242, f.n., supra).

Universal and Individual Mind

At the same time, he has done good service by his work, and particularly by laying stress on Intuition as contrasted with, or at least, distinguished from, Intelligence; stress, which is likely to make certain aspects of Yoga and Vedanta clearer to the modern mind. In a certain aspect, his Intuition (including Instinct) corresponds with mahat or buddhi (identified with chitta); and his Intelligence with manas (including aham-kAra).

anayoreva (buddhimanaso) chittAhaMkArayo aMtarbhAvaH |

manasshchApi, buddheshcha, brUhi me lakShanaM param;
etAd adhyAtmaviduShAM paraM kAryaM vidhIyate |
buddhiH AtmA&nugA atIva, utpAdena vidhIyate,
tadAshritA sA vij~jeyA, buddhistasya eShiNI bhavet |
buddhir utpadyate kAryAt, manastu utpannmeva hi |
buddherguNavidhAnena manastadguNavad bhavet |
--Mahabharata, Vana-parva, ch.183

buddhiH AtmA manuShyasya, buddhiH eva Atmano gatiH;
yadA vikurute bhAvaM tadA bhavati sA manaH;
indriyANAM pRuthagbhAvAd buddhirvikriyate&skRut;
shraNvati bhavati shrotrAM, spRushatI sparshaH uchyate;
yadA prArthayate kiMchit tadA bhavati sA manaH |
--Mahabharata, Shanti-parva, ch.254; see also ch.203

sarvadA sarvabhAvAnAM sAmAmyaM buddhikAraNam;
hrAsaheturvisheShashcha; pravRutiH ubhayasya tu |
sAmAnyam ekatvakaraM, visheShastu pRuthaktvakRut;
tulyAryatA tu sAmAnyaM, visheShastu viparyayaH |
--Charaka, I.i.

"Distinguishing of the characteristics of buddhi and manas is one of the final and most important duties of the psychologist. buddhi is general awareness, which clings to the Universal Self, and is always a-search for It, i.e., for the Unity in all things; and is wholly dependent upon it; making its generalisations only by diligently discerning unity or similarity in diversity. It becomes manifest in and by utpAda, up-rising, (appearing above the threshold of consciousness), and then takes shape as general concepts or laws and generalisations, vidhiyate.

manas on the other hand, is utpanna, 'uprisen,' active, selective, attentive mind, 'risen above' the threshold of consciousness (laya-sthAna). buddhi specified, particularised, by a vi-kAra, a change, a 'formation', a condensation, by 'wanting something' definite, by selecting something out of the whole field (kshetra) and concentrating on it, becomes manas; it 'takes birth' and shape in a 'purpose', a kArya, when it wishes to do something; (otherwise it remains a sub-consciously or supra-consciously all-embracing 'great' memory, 'great self', mahAn AtmA, mahat). Because buddhi, as the first transformation of primal Prakrti, has the three guNas, therefore manas (including aham-kAra), the second transformation thereof, also manifests the three in operation.'

Desire-Energy the Egoism-Maker

According to the Sankhya-scheme, aham-kAra, the principle of egoistic desire, in its three subdivisions,

• as rajasa-taijasa, gives birth to manas;
• as sAttvika-vaikArika, to the ten sensor and motor organs;
• as tAmasa-bhUtAdi, to the five sense-objects, tan-mAra-s, and the corresponding bhUtas, i.e., the sensable-qualties or sensations-as-such, and their substrata.

The reason why manas as the chief indriya, organ or instrument, of the subject-consciousness, on one side; the ten outer organs, in between; and the five great classes of 'objects', on the other side; should all be derived from aham-kAra, in the Sankhya scheme, may be explained thus.

It is Desire-Energy which connects Subject and Object, and makes the subject an organism, investing it with organs made of the same 'material' as the 'objects' as will appear more fully in the later chapters. This Desire-Energy is the very core of the separate ego, the very principle of egoism, as said above. It connects an '1' with a 'this', spiritual Jiva with material atom, or rather, indeed, it marks off and makes the individual Jiva out of Universal Spirit, and singular atom (or singular 'body') out of pseudo-universal Matter. Hence, it may well be said to be the source from which the two sets of products, subjective and objective, the instruments, karaNas, organs (subdivided into (i) manas, as chief, and (ii) the other ten, as subordinate), and (in) their objects, are all derived.

The element or feature of generality, universality, 'commonness,' 'sameness', sAmAnya, (which belongs to buddhi), corresponds to unity, sameness of purpose or intention, and co-operation; and it makes for the increase, the expansion, of every bhAva, 'existence', 'concept', (and sympathy), by inclusion of more and more 'propers' under the 'common'.

The element of vishesha, particularity, speciality (which belongs to manas), corresponds to 'difference' from each other, to divergence of purpose and intention, to separateness and misunderstanding, and makes for decrease and decay, contraction and enfeebling, of all kinds of 'existence', 'principles', 'concepts', into minute details.

We have seen above how extremes meet; and how the perfectly minute, the infinitesimal, the utterly singular, the true point and moment (or instant), is the genuine 'here and now', and is indistinguishable from the perfectly vast, the Infinite, the utterly Universal, Boundless Circumference, Unlimited and Eternal.

saidevo
12 April 2008, 08:42 AM
Correspondent Pairs

The fundamental ideas are the universality of the Self and the singularities of the Not-Self. Out of this pair, and always bound up with each other in inseparable Relation, issue all other corresponding pairs, as said before. Of these pairs, the following may be mentioned here for our present psychological purpose.

• amUrta and mUrta, formless and formed, abstract and concrete, ideal and material;
• prakrti and vikrti, unmanifest nature and particular manifestation or transformation;
• sAmAnya and vishesha, general and particular, (the name for the unbreakable relation between the two being samavAya, in the technicology of the Vaisheshika system);
• jati and vyakft, species and individual;
• para-sAmAnya and apara-vishesha, summum genus and infima species or rather singnlaris (the ultimate or highest universal and the final or lowest particular or singular or individual);
• samashti and vyashti, whole and part;
• pratika and pratimA, nature-force and anthropomorphous 'image';
• pratyaya and nAma-rUpa, concept and name-form;
• shAstra and krtya, science and application;
• naya and chAra, theory and practice;
• siddhAnta, raddhAnta, mUla-sOtra, or bija-mantra, and prayoga, principles and execution;
• buddhi and manas, Intuition-instinct and Intelligence;
• pratibhA and tarka, insight of genius and argument;
• yoga-ja jnAna and prAkrta-jnAna, siddha-drshti and laukika-drshti, satya-jnAna and mithyA jnAna, true and intuitive understanding by love and sympathy i.e., 'common-feeling', and false intelligence or misunderstanding by antipathy or diverse and opposite feeling;
• vayam and aham, We and I;
• sarva-hita and sva-hita, the good of all and the good of myself;
• a-khanda-chetana and khanda-jnAna, continuum of consciousness and particular partial knowledge;
• kshetra and vishesha, vishaya or lakshya, general field of consciousness, and particular objective or focus of attention therein;
• a-vyakta and abhi-vyakta, latent and patent, un-manifest and manifest;
• an-ud-buddha and ud-buddha, un- or sub- or supra-conscious and conscious;
• supta and jAgrat, dormant and wakeful;
• nirodha and vyutthAna, obliviscence and reminiscence, inhibition and exhibition;
• jIva and deha, soul and body, which is "the soul made visible";
• yuga-pat and a-yuga-pat, simultaneous knowledge of many or all, and successive knowledge of particulars, one by one, which are the respective characteristics of buddhi and manas.

Brain as Inhibitor-Focusser

All these pairs are allied, are aspects of each other. And the process of yoga-development of the soul seems essentially to consist in regulating, restraining, controlling, selectively and attentively turning in one direction (by sam-yama), and inhibiting along all other directions (by nirodha), the activity (vrtti) of chitta-manas-aNu, after minimising its egoistic restlessness (by vairAgya), and making its emotional or 'affective' tone as placid (full of prasAda) as possible, by various means mentioned in Yoga-works.

In this way, individual mind or ahamkAra-manas deliberately orients itself towards, and makes itself the channel, vessel, receiver, missionary, of Universal Mind, Mahat-Buddhi; and replaces intelligence by intuition.

All the ways of prayer are but ways of such opening of oneself to the inflow of the larger Self; and all 'willing' is also but a disguised form of 'prayer'; for every exercise of individual force and free-will is ultimately and really but the working of the Universal Force of Universal Self-Will.

A further quotation from Bergson, (from a report of his address as President of the Psychical Research Society, in 1913), may help to illustrate the relationship between buddhi and manas, and also, incidentally, the methods of soul-education, mind-development, and psychical extension and expansion of faculty.

"Formerly it was held as a scientific dogma that the brain was the store-house of memories. ... (The truth rather is) that it is the function of the brain to recall things remembered, an instrument to bring back the remembrance of an action, and to prolong the action in movements, and enable the mind to make adjustment to life. The brain is not the seat of memory, not an organ of preservation. It is the organ by which the mind adjusts itself to environment, prepares the body for the realisation of what the mind has apprehended. It marks the useless part of the past, and lets through only those remembrances which are useful to serve the present. Consciousness transcends the brain, is partially independent of it, and preserves the whole of the past intact in every detail.

"... In certain cases, as when drowning, or in battle, the total past of a man is unmasked, and the whole of it comes rushing in, because the normal necessity of fixing attention on the present, and still more the future, in order to live, is relaxed, and all the faculties of attention turn back to that past which it is the business of the brain normally to hide from him, in order that he may keep his attention concentrated on the present and the future. ... The inference from the fact that the consciousness is a larger reality than the brain ... is ... that the separation between individual consciousness(es) may be much less radical than we suppose. ... Consciousness in individuals passes into that of other individuals, and is not cut up as it seems to be."

'Present' and 'Conscious'

All these remarks may not be endorsed, exactly as they stand, by the Yoga-system of practical or applied psychology; but their general trend seems to agree with that of the latter. Thus, in the full sense, Consciousness, or, if that word be preferred, (the 'Unconscious, or the Principle of Life and Consciousness), preserves not only the whole of the past intact, but also already and always contains the whole of the future also, according to Nyaya and Yoga-Vedanta; and it is this fact which makes memory and expectation possible.



The Unconscious is, after all, nothing so very mysterious; i.e., it is not more mysterious then anything else!

You listen to a question of many words, or a long lecture. All the mass of words goes into your ears. Each complete word-sound or sentence-sound produces a meaning, an ap-prehension, a concept, an idea, in your mind, and then disappears. 'Disappears' means--goes into the Un-Conscious or sub-or-supra-Conscious.

Then, when the question is completed, you make a reply; when the lecture is finished, you get up and make a long criticism. The thoughts, notions, ideas, come welling up in your Mind or 'Consciousness' from 'nowhere', from the Unconscious; and you go on clothing them in words, which also come welling up from the same 'nowhere'.

Every sentence, every pageful, you speak or write or read, illustrates the same process. You have an enormous, indeed an infinite, collection of 'things', of 'books'. You cannot use all of them at once. Strictly, you can use only one particular thing, at one time, in one place. But this 'one' is undefinable, is in-de-finite. It is always a more definite (on rather, less in-de-finite) core, plus a less definite (or rather, more in-de-finite) fringe.

Everything shades and fades away into everything else. The selection of goods, the almirah of books, that you are more frequently using, in any given time and place, day, month, year, or lifetime, and room, house, town, country--that is your 'conscious', comparatively. The rest is your Unconscious, again comparatively.

Finite conscious plus the remainder of the Infinite, is Universal Mind, Total Unconsciousness or Consciousness just as you please to call it. Each portion of that Mind is 'conscious' to or in some one Jiva, one individual, so that the whole of the Unconscious is Conscious, too, in the Totality of all pseudo-infinite Jivas, at every moment of pseudo-eternal time, in all pseudo-infinite space.

As the 'present' is a 'slab' or 'chunk' of time, cut out of the Time-Continuum, over which individual memory-expectation can range, so the 'conscious' is a 'slab' or 'block' or 'piece', cut out of the Consciousness-(or Un-consciousness)-continuum, over which individnal memory-expectation can range. This Universal Mind, Brahmaa, the flrst manifestation of Brahma, is called Umm-ul-Kitaab, 'Mother of Scriptures, Revelations', in Sufism.


Nyaya-sutra, III, ii, 42, expressly says,

smaraNaM tu Atmano j~ja-svAbhAvyAt |

"Memory (of the past, and also of the future, which is called expectation) is possible only because the very nature of Self is that of Eternal All-knower." The Bhashya on this explains that Self is in constant contact with all knowledge, of past, present, and future.



Psycho-Analysts' Extremism

What about the claims of psycho-analysts, if what is said above is correct? The substance of them stands and remains valuable, after pruning of all exaggerations. They draw the lives too hard and fast between 'suppression' and 're-pression', 'unconscious' and 'pre-conscious' and 'fore-conscious', normal forgetting and abnormal forgetting, etc.; and, for many mental phenomena, they have quite unnecessarily coined new and imposing-looking words, difficult to remember, and themselves very liable to be 'suppressed' and 'repressed' into the 'unconscious'.

If we only bear in mind the facts

(1) that all the 'abnormal' phenomena, which psycho-analysts have noted, studied, and expounded, are only 'excesses' of those emotional experiences which all 'normal' persons undergo, now and then, more or less;

(2) that three fourths of the cure of psycho-neurotic trouble consists in persuading the patient gradually to introspect and understand the true nature of his malady, and

(3) that the remaining fourth of the cure is achieved by so strengthening the patient's will, that he becomes able to control his excess of emotion--

if these facts are borne in mind, psycho-analytic literature becomes very helpful in understanding Yoga-literature; and Yoga-literature becomes suggestive of ways to persuade the patient and strengthen his will.


Re-Education by Introspection

pratyak-chetana, 'turning the mind's eye inwards from outwards', is the great feat, the miracle, which 'makes the whole world new'; it is the one sole secret of real conversion, real re-education, 'second birth', re-generation.

The system of yoga of [b]Yoga-sutra, seems to be a system of profound education, of training of the mind and brain for more and more effective use; like the training of the eye or the ear or the hands. It may, indeed, be called, not inappropriately, 'the Science and Art of Attention'.

All possible sounds, all possible colours and forms, are there, in space ever existent in the universe; but human eye, human ear, is not, in the first place, so constructed as to be able to catch all kinds of them; and, in the second place, of those that it can perceive, it actually perceives only those towards which it is diligently and attentively turned. It is much the same as with telescopes and microscopes; their powers are limited, and they must be very carefully adjusted, if they are to show with the greatest possible effectiveness, what is wanted to be seen.

The brain seems to be an 'organ', the physical coefficient of the psychical 'inner organ', as the eye-ball or the ear-mechanism is that of the 'faculty' of vision or audition; and its realm and domain is the 'field of consciousness' generally. All possible psychical (or psycho-physical, or spirituo-material, for the two are utterly interdependent and inseparable) experiences, thoughts, emotions, plans, are always existent in the total whole.

The individual mind, manas-brain, catches and manifests such of them as it turns, or is turned, towards. To turn, deliberately, and not be turned, helplessly; and not only turn one's face, intellectually, towards the face of the object sought to be 'understood', but to enter with one's heart, vitally, into the heart of it: to identify one's own life and being with that other's life and being, by sympathy, by love--this is, it would seem, to replace intellect, which works from 'outside', by intuition which works from 'inside'.

Generally speaking, we 'understand' what we love, intuitively; the mother intuitively perceives the requirements of the child; she fails, very often, because undeveloped or ill-cultured but insistent intellect interferes; in order to 'understand' another properly, we must 'get into his skin', 'see with his eyes'; the meaning and definition of samAdhi, in yoga-works, seems to be just this. Yet intellect and intuition have to check and correct each other too.

Great Discoveries, Intutional

After the needed understanding has been gained through intuition, it may be utilised in various ways by intelligence. To apply to requirements, to carry out into 'action', is preeminently the work of manas; as to 'ascertain' what the facts and laws and great general principles are, is that of buddhi.

All great discoveries, in their first form of luminous hypothesis, may be said to be the work of such intuition; subsequent concrete details and utilisations, and devising of means to ends, on the basis of that hypothesis, are the work of intelligence.

If these views are correct, it is obvious that there is no opposition or radical difference of any kind between intuition and intellect; they may even be said to be degrees or aspects or counter-parts of each other, and to pass into each other, at times insensibly.

Every act of 'attention' is, strictly, a focusing of the mind for the inflow of 'intuitional' knowledge. Yoga, (in the sense of 'inhibition of other mentations', so as to make possible the 'exhibition' of some one other, or a few others), so regarded, is, as said in Yoga-bhashya itself, a constant feature of the mind, and belongs to it in all its moods and at all its stages of development.

But it is only when dhAraNA, selection or concentration, dhyAna, attention or contemplation, samAdhi, meditation, raptness, rapport--it is only when these attain a certain degree of efficiency and success, and, yet more so, when the intuitional knowledge or experience, and the extension of faculty aimed at, refer to things outside of the daily routine of life, to matters superphysical and metaphysical, that the word yoga is used of them conventionally and technically.

It will have been observed that the Buddhi and Manas (corresponding generally to Intuition and Intellect), dealt with in the present section, xi, of this note, are not quite the same as the buddhi and manas which, with aham-kAra, constitute the three faculties of the chitta-mind. Yet they are not altogether different either. In a sense, Buddhi-Intuition may be said to be the same as Mahat or Mahan-Atma, the Great Soul, the Universal Mind, of which the individual chitta is a reflection; while Manas- Intellect would include the triad of buddhi-ahamkAra-manas.

Puranic Metaphors

In psycho-physical Puranic mythology (mithyA-jnAna, primal error, which invests with mUrti or form that which is a-mUrta, formless, whence it follows that the whole of this World-Process is one vast Mythos), the Buddhi and Manas that are now being dealt with are symbolised as Vishnu and Brahmaa respectively, (Shiva then standing for Atma), on the scale of brabm-Andas, 'eggs of the Infinite', 'orbs' of Heaven. Thus

mahAnAtmA matirviShNurjiShNuH shaMbhushcha vIryavAn |
buddhiH praj~jA upalabdhishcha tathA khyAtiH dhRutiH smRutiH,
paryAyavAchakaiH shabdairmahAnAtmA vibhAvyate |
--Anu-Gita, xxvi.

mAnasasya iha yA mUrttirbrahmAtvaM samupAgatA,
tasya AsanavidhAnArthaM pRuthivI padmamuchyate |
tasmAt padmAt sambhavad brahmA vedamayo nidhiH,
ahaMkAra kti khyAtaH, sarvabhUtAtmabhUtkRut |
Mahabharata, Shanti-parva, ch.180

"Vishnu, Jishnu, Shambhu, mati, buddhi, prajnA, upalabdhi, khyAti, dhrti, smrti, (names of various aspects of intelligence and memory), are all synonyms for Mahat or Mahaan Atma From the 'navel'-lotus, the central being, the 'womb', of Vishnu or Narayana, 'sleeping' in the waters of space, as sub- or supra-consciousness or Dormant Memory or Universal Mind, there arises Brahmaa or Ahamkara, who is the soul of all beings; whence arise all the five root-kinds of sens-able matter, etc.; and the scene of whose activities and manifestations is the Earth, described as a lotus. This lotus, with irregular petals, some large, some small, is spread out on the surface of the ocean, upside down; the centre of the lotus is the North Pole, and the great Capes are the apices of the irregular petals; the whole of the earth-globe, in turn, is an off-shoot as it were, from the 'solar' plexus or sun-heart of the larger Vishnu of the solar system."

Unfortunately, the metaphor of the Puranas has ceased to be metaphor, and is being taken literally, with endless mischief as consequence. artha-vAda, rUpaka, allegory, symbolism, has indeed become an-artha-vAda, baneful misinterpretation in unhappy India for many centuries now.

yajvan
12 April 2008, 04:41 PM
Hari Om
~~~~~~



• samashti and vyashti, whole and part;
• buddhi and manas, Intuition-instinct and Intelligence;

Nyaya-sutra, III, ii, 42, expressly says,

smaraNaM tu Atmano j~ja-svAbhAvyAt |

"Memory (of the past, and also of the future, which is called expectation) is possible only because the very nature of Self is that of Eternal All-knower." The Bhashya on this explains that Self is in constant contact with all knowledge, of past, present, and future.

"Vishnu, Jishnu, Shambhu, mati, buddhi, prajnA, upalabdhi, khyAti, dhrti, smrti, (names of various aspects of intelligence and memory), are all synonyms for Mahat or Mahaan Atma From the 'navel'-lotus, the central being, the 'womb', of Vishnu or Narayana, 'sleeping' in the waters of space, as sub- or supra-consciousness or Dormant Memory or Universal Mind, there arises Brahmaa or Ahamkara, who is the soul of all beings;

Unfortunately, the metaphor of the Puranas has ceased to be metaphor, and is being taken literally, with endless mischief as consequence. artha-vAda, rUpaka, allegory, symbolism, has indeed become an-artha-vAda, baneful misinterpretation in unhappy India for many centuries now.


Namaste saidevo,
your post brings many interesting subjects to HDF... this notion of memory is covered as one item in the Chandogya Upanishad. There is a beautiful conversation/teaching between Sanatkumara and Narada in kanda (canto or chapter) 7. Narada as ajnanin, or one not fully-Realized, yet a mantravit (one well versed in the sutras and mantras as well learned in all the veda's, sciences, etc.) approaches Sanatkumara and makes the request "Revered Sir, Please teach me".

The conversation that ensues is one of my favorite teachings of this grand book. Sanatkumara's dialog (also known as Skanda)covers 26 components.

The 13th, is on smara (स्म) or memory, remembrance, recollection. This smara allows order to exist in our lives and in the universe overall. It provides for a well regulated system to occur. Sanatkumara brings the value of smara to Narada's attention.Now is this the final (ultimate) point of Sanatkumara's teaching?

Surely not as Narada asks 'is there something superior to this smara, self-existence, and if so, may I know about it?'. Sanatkumara replies 'Yes, there is something more than this also. This self-existence of yours of which you are conscious is not the ultimate reality.' It is also an effect of something superior to it' and Sanatkumara then goes to point 14 and talks of hope or aspiration.

Yet w/o memory this next point is not possible...your post mentions the following:

But it is only when dhAraNA, selection or concentration, dhyAna, attention or contemplation, samAdhi, meditation, raptness, rapport--it is only when these attain a certain degree of efficiency and success, and, yet more so, when the intuitional knowledge or experience, and the extension of faculty aimed at, refer to things outside of the daily routine of life, to matters superphysical and metaphysical, that the word yoga is used of them conventionally and technically

Without memory, one would not recall how to assemble these 3 items (again and again) for their benefical use. These 3 items together, combined, is the formula for saMyama offered by Patanjali muni. It is with these 3 components working in concert that intuition can be fully developed as other parts of the intellect also recieve benefit from this clarity.

If the HDF reader wished to know a bit more on this subject of saMyama they could take a look at this post:
http://www.hindudharmaforums.com/showpost.php?p=9745&postcount=5

We have not talked much about this on HDF as the conversation leads to siddhi and many people tend to go side-ways :rolleyes: discussing this matter.

You mention
metaphor of the Puranas has ceased to be metaphor, and is being taken literally, with endless mischief as consequence

Yes, I see this. As the wisdom offered is on a broad scale, and talked about in symbols (samketa), the underlying truths have been mis-placed, missed or just not seen. That is why the wise are needed in this day and age.

Thank you for this post... a most rewarding read.

pranams


1. saMyama (संयम) defined by Monier Williams Dictionary is considered holding together , restraint , control;concentration of mind. Yet I find this a mediocre 'clinical' definition, devoid of practice or experience.

saidevo
13 April 2008, 11:34 PM
Namaste Yajvan.

Your explanation of saMyama in the post
http://www.hindudharmaforums.com/sho...45&postcount=5
is most rewarding, and agrees with what Bhagavan Das says above.

Since yama is basically 'restraint' or 'control', saMyama is 'holding together' of that yama in a sustained state through its three components dhAraNA, dhyAna, samAdhi.

Of these three components, the first two again involve control, while the third is the state of release, of union, of oneness, being equal (sama-Adhi) with the foundation.

saidevo
13 April 2008, 11:42 PM
Many Names of the Same One: Synonyms of Atma-Brahma-Manas: Their Explanations

The names of Universal Mind-Soul-Body, Intellectus-Animus-Corpus-Mundi, (which constitutes the 'contents 'of the Logion I-This-Not), each signifying an important aspect or characteristic, are etymologically explained in the following verses of Vayu Parana (and Mahabharata). (check pp.291-294 for the verses)

mano, mahAn, matiH, brahmA, pUH, buddhiH, khyAtiH, IshvaraH,
praj~jA, chitiH, smRutiH, saMvit, vipuraM cha, uchyate budhaiH |
...

• Because this World-Mind manifests first of all; is greater than all the guna-s and tattva-s, attributes and elements, that spring from it; and, in measure, is immeasurably Immense, therefore is it named MahAn, the Great.

• Because it mentates the effortful evolution of all things and beings from smaller and subtler states to larger and denser, therefore is it Manas, Mind.

• It understands, knows, budhyate, all things, and distinguishes useful from harmful, therefore it is Buddhi.

• It knows, vindate, all, and its excellence is such that it also knows that it knows; also it abides, vidyate, in everything, and everything abides it; therefore it is Sam-vit.

• It weighs (by arguments); analyses (facts and views); forms opinions with reference to the requirements of the individual; therefore is it Mati.

• It shapes a body, puh, of and for the tattvas, elements, and fills it, pUrayate, with kind gifts (experiences), and then dwells, shete, in that body as in a house or town, purl; therefore is it known as Puh and Puru-sha.

• All awareness, khyAti, all experience of joy and sorrow, depends upon it, and because it is 'famously' known and declared, khyAyatA, by many attributes and many names, therefore is it called KhyAti.

• It knows all; has power and is sovereign over all, ishate, ishte; commands and controls all things and beings and worlds; and is not ruled by any other; therefore is it Ishvara.

• It 'knows supremely', pra-jnA, the subtlest mysteries, and the planets (which are to the Sun as sensor-and-motor-organs are to a living organism) are Its progeny, pra-jA, therefore is it Pra-jnA.

• All forms, all cognitions, all volitions, all actions, and all fruits of all actions, are stored up, chinoti, in it, for ever; therefore is it Chiti.

• All work, past, present, and future, it remembers ever, smarate; therefore is it Smara, Memory.

• Because it is vast, brhat, because it expands itseif, and expands, spreads out, brmhaNa, all worlds, all things and beings, all feelings and emotions, in infinite space, salila-akAsha, therefore is named BrahmA.

• Because it is all knowledge, jna, therefore is it JnAna.

• Because it enhances, gives intensity and extensity, vipulata, ample scope, to the pairs of opposities, two-s, dvam-dvam-s, therefore is it known as Vipura.

• It is known as Bhava because it is the source and fount of all becomings, bhu.

• Because it knows the 'field', the object, of consciousness, and also the knower of it, i.e., it-Self, it is known as Kah (also, Yah, Sah; He, Who, What; all pronouns which cover all objects, as well as the subject, of consciousness).

• It attains all objects, Apnoti: it takes all, A-datte; it eats, tastes, all things, atti; it extends continuously over all, A-tata, san-tata, satatam, ever; because it negates, mA, and transcends, ati-eti all This, Etat; and, while thus negating all Else, It-Self-remains Self-established, moveless, eternal; therefore is it named AtmA, pre-eminently.

• It reaches all, rchChati; therefore is Rshi.
• It enters into all, vishati; therefore is Vishnu.
• It possesses all the lordlinesses, marks of sovereignty, bhaga; therefore is Bhaga-vAn.

• It is RAga, because desire stirs in it and is controlled by it.
• Because it protects, avati, all who meditate on it, therefore is it AUM (OM).
• It knows all, therefore is Sarva-jna, omniscient.
• It is the home, refuge, ayana, of all souls, nara-s; therefore is it NAr-AyaNa.

• Because the first, Adi, of all gods, therefore is it Aditya.
• It produces and protects, pAti, ail progeny, praA; therefore is it PrajA-pati.
• Because it is the greatest of all gods, therefore is it MahA-deva.

• Because it pervades all, is, bhu, in all, peculiarly, vi-shesheNa, therefore is it Vi-bhu.

• Because all 'sacrifices' are offered to it, are for it, therefore it is Yajna personified.

• Because it surveys, darshana, the whole World-Process and ranges over it all in mighty flights (of imagination), therefore is it Kavi (ka, world, vi, bird, world-bird).

• Because it is the Womb of Gold, garbha of hiraNya, Source of Golden Light, enveloped in Golden Light, (physical as well as mental), therefore is it Hiranya-garbha (the Sun).

• Because it makes all things, vi-shesheNa, rachayati, therefore is it Vi-rinchi.

• It is Vishva-rUpa, because all worlds, vishva, all forms, rupa, are its forms.

• Because it is not born from any thing else, but only from It-Self, therefore is it Svayam-bhu.

• Because it is the One and only Immortal, eka a-kshara, and also because it is ultimately named by eka a-kshara, the One-lettered (tri-une) Word-Sound (AUM) Om, therefore is it Ekakshara.

By such synonyms, paryAya-s, which are used for It by turns, 'coming one after another', paryAyaNa, is the Universal Mind known.

Theosophical Technical Terms

In the language of earlier theosophical literature,

• AtmA, the first principle, would correspond (on the cosmic scale) with Pratyag-AtmA or the Abstract and Universal I;

• Buddhi, the second principle, with Universal Mind, all-inclusive Intuition or infinite sub-and-supra-consciousness, or the collective I, the We, the 'I am and am-not all this-s';

• Manas, the third principle, with the singular or individual I, 'I am--and, again, later on--I am not this particular this', the particular mind with its successive experiences of the nature of knowledge, feeling, and activity, and its particular recollections.

These remarks have to be understood as subject to the explanation that, for practical purposes, every sUtr-AtmA 'thread-soul', 'group-soul', or larger individuality, serves as 'genus' or 'universal' to the jiv-AtmA-s or smaller individualities which are included within it, which live and move and have their being in it (see ch. xiii, infra).

In the same theosophical language, we may say that instinct is the 'mystic' participation of the individual soul in the life of the astral group-soul or sUtr-AtmA; and intuition, in the life of the buddhic group-soul.

Every individual understands, knows i.e., feels, the sensations of any part of his body, because he is identified with that part, vitally; so we understand instinctively and intuitionally i.e., we feel, the experiences of those 'other' Jivas whom we love and who are therefore no longer 'other' to us but indeed parts of ourselves.

If we can identify ourselves with all, if we can realise our oneness with all, we will understand or feel all. "To know all is to excuse all", as the proverb says, because to know all is not possible without loving all, and to love all is not only to excuse all as one excuses oneself, but to help all as one helps oneself.

(With this we finish this long Chapter XI.--sd)

yajvan
14 April 2008, 01:59 PM
Hari Om
~~~~~

Namaste Yajvan.

Your explanation of saMyama in the post
http://www.hindudharmaforums.com/sho...45&postcount=5
is most rewarding, and agrees with what Bhagavan Das says above.

Since yama is basically 'restraint' or 'control', saMyama is 'holding together' of that yama in a sustained state through its three components dhAraNA, dhyAna, samAdhi.

Of these three components, the first two again involve control, while the third is the state of release, of union, of oneness, being equal (sama-Adhi) with the foundation.


Namaste saidevo,
yes the sandhyA of saM+yama is most excellent.

Yet may I offer the following... the sense of contol may be mis-leading to many. The word control comes with the following:
dominate, command, to hold in check and more extremely to eliminate or prevent the flourishing or spread ( like in controlling a forest fire perhaps).

Why am I not a fan of the word control? It suggests effort. With effort expended saMyama becomes a fleeting idea that one does not capture.

This saMyama is more towards the notion of holding together, gently, then 'restraining or controlling' . It's a very delicate thing that happens when practiced.

Yet if I had to define it i.e. the Monier Williams Dictionary offer, I would not do much better then their entry, but would add one operative word, formula. This saMyama is the formula for (gently and with minimum effort) holding together dhAraNA, dhyAna, samAdhi within the field of consciousness.

Yet we as humans are trained to expend effort , yes? Work hard and you are rewarded, study hard get good grades, hit hard in football; yet now someone says try less, and the less there is effort the more this saMyama works... what? Our DNA stands-up and says this is not so...how can not-trying bring success?

This is in fact the case. It is the notion of delicate, the ease of application, the lightness of effort, and all this is summed up in this beautiful word intent. The formula is based upon intent.

Intent is the least amount of effort expended that still has direction and bears fruit -and this is saMyama, a function of intent. This is what is missing in the definition of this most noble word saMyama.

pranams,