Resurgent Culture - Chapter-1.4.3 - Swami Krishnananda.

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Sunday, September 05, 2021. 6:40.AM.
Chapter 1: The Goal of Life-4.
4.The Changeless Consciousness.. (Continued)-3
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Further, that we have a memory of sleep shows that a kind of perception was going on even in sleep, for there can be no memory without a previous perception, and no perception can have a meaning unless it is attended with consciousness. If memory has a meaning, the conscious perception that ought necessarily to lie antecedent to it cannot be denied. 

We had consciousness, and we existed as consciousness in deep sleep; but we knew it not. Some mysterious darkness was veiling us. And this veil is nothing but the inactive latency of the possibility of objective experience in terms of the phenomenal categories described above.

The Vedanta, thus, takes us beneath the surface and makes us dive into an ocean where we discover the pearl of truth, the truth that we are essentially not only conscious existences but consciousness itself. We are not beings possessing consciousness as an attribute of ourselves, for then we would be reduced to unconscious bases of a conscious attribute. 

This cannot be, because the knower can never be said to be an unconscious principle. The knower ought to be consciousness, not even a mere possessor of consciousness as a quality. Our existence then, is an indescribable splendour surpassing all light and radiance known to us in this world. Saints and sages point out that words are not meant to describe the transcendent Being, for all speech, together with the mind, is in the position of an after-effect and cannot be expected to illumine its own cause and presupposition. 

This consciousness, which is our primal essence, cannot be conceived to be limited in any way for the very idea of the limitation of consciousness would prove that consciousness is beyond limitation. The idea of a boundary proves that there is simultaneously the idea of the existence of something outside the boundary. To set limits to consciousness would be a self-contradiction; the limitation cannot be outside the purview of consciousness. Consciousness is infinite.

The consciousness of the continuity of our personalities through the various vicissitudes and changes of life goes to prove that it itself is changeless. The fact that it is indivisible proves that it is infinite. To know this, then, is to know truth. This alone can be the great uncontradictable experience. This we really are. In knowing this we know ourselves as we truly exist. This defies all diversity, and, consequently, all desire, attachment, hatred, anger prejudice, and the like.

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Next - 6. The Underlying Unity

To be continued ....

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