Resurgent Culture - Chapter-1.4. - Swami Krishnananda.

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Sunday, August 15, 2021. 10:30.AM.
Chapter 1: The Goal of Life-4.
4.The Changeless Consciousness.. (Continued)-2
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The methods of philosophy are usually certain developments of the logical methods of thinking and rationalistic processes of thought. Our faculties of understanding, thinking, feeling and willing are, however, found to be subject to certain fixed categories, such as quantity, quality, relation and mode, or, to put it concisely, space, time and cause. On a careful examination it is seen that, even as the findings of science are not ultimately reliable due to their being influenced by the changing characteristics of the senses of perception and the instruments of observation, the philosophical method, as it is usually understood by many, is not free from certain types of subjection to outward laws. 

It may be that these restrictive laws are so intimately related to the constitution of the mind that it is ordinarily impassable to distinguish between the operation of these laws and the ways of thinking. But, nevertheless, it is a restriction to the fuller freedom that is necessary to make any categorical judgment of truth. For we can never see, or hear, or even think anything outside the limitations imposed on us by the presence of such fundamental categories of phenomenal experience as space, time and causation. The moment we think, we think in terms of space, quantity, extension and succession. 

This is an old prejudice of the mind, which it is not able to overcome. This inseparable relation that is mysteriously established between our essential modes of thought and the laws restricting them goes by the names of relativity, phenomenality, and the like. And under these circumstances, truth unchangeable cannot be known. Truth can brook not limitation of any kind, for it is established not on any other proof of knowledge or mode of perception, but in itself.

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The foregoing analysis reveals the fact that our entire waking experience, being confined to the heavy operations of the categories of the understanding, or thinking, is unsuited to any genuine attempt at the discovery of truth. Our dream-experience fares no better: it is, in the structure of its activities, similar to the waking experience. Unfortunately, we know of no other conscious human experience than waking and dreaming. 

Thus it is that we often hear it said that truth is not given to the human mind. Profounder methods of philosophy, such as those adumbrated in the system of the Vedanta, take into consideration the deeper implications of the state of deep sleep, which has been very unwisely set aside by most of the Western philosophers in their analyses. We are bereft of all consciousness in the state of dreamless sleep, we cannot know ever our own existence then. But that we do exist in sleep cannot be gainsaid. Our existence here seems to be asserted notwithstanding the absence of the consciousness of existence! 

But if you think carefully you will notice that no assertion of any kind is possible without some sort of consciousness. And yet, what is it that makes us affirm ourselves in sleep? Definitely, not direct perception. We have a memory of having slept and of our having existed prior to our falling asleep. Yesterday I was, and today I am—thus does the individual assert itself. A phenomenon of this type discloses the fact of there being a connecting link between the state preceding sleep and the one succeeding it. 

The prior and the later states being involved in consciousness, we cannot, as we have already observed above, suppose that the link between them can be an unconscious principle. The link, too, has to be a conscious one. We never assert that we are ignorant beings in our essence; even a stupid man does not wish to be called so. The essence of intelligence is continuously affirmed, even unwittingly.

To be continued ...


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