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The Sankara School of Vedānta [CH. becomes revealed; but the revelation itself cannot be revealed again. I may be conscious, but I cannot be conscious of consciousness. For consciousness as such, though ever present in its immediacy, cannot become an object of any other consciousness. There cannot be any such thing as the awareness of an awareness or the awareness of the awareness of an awareness, though we may multiply such phrases in language at our pleasure. When I remember that I have been to Trinity College this morning, that only means that I have an image of the way across the commons, through Church Street and Trinity Street; my movements through them are temporally pushed backward, but all this is a revelation as image at the present moment and not a revelation of a past revelation. I cannot say that this present image in any way reveals that particular image as the object of the present revelation. But the former revelation could not be held to be distinct from the present one; for distinction is always based on content and not on revelation. Revelation as such is identical and, since this is so, one revelation cannot be the object of another. It is incorrect to say that “A is A” means that one A becomes itself over again. It is owing to the limitations of grammatical terminology that identity is thus described. Identity thus understood is different from what we understand by identity as a relation. Identity understood as a relation presupposes some difference or otherness and thus is not self-contained. And it is because it is not self-contained that it can be called a relation. When it is said that A is identical with A, it means that on all the various occasions or contents in which A appeared it always signified the same thing, or that it had the same shape or that it was the same first letter of the English alphabet. Identity in this sense is a function of thought not existing by itself, but in relation to a sense of opponency or otherness. But revelation has no otherness in it; it is absolutely ubiquitous and homogeneous. But the identity of revelation of which we are speaking does not mean that the revelation signifies the same thing amidst a diversity of contents: it is simply the one essence identical in itself and devoid of any numerical or other kinds of difference. It is absolutely free from "now" and "then," "here" and "there," "such” or “not such” and “this "or" that." Consciousness of the self-shining self taken in this way cannot be regarded as the relation of an appearance to an object, but it is the fact of the revelation or the entity of the self. If we conceive
| SR No. | 007593 |
| Book Title | History of Indian Philosophy |
| Original Sutra Author | N/A |
| Author | Surendranath Dasgupta |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
| Publication Year | 1922 |
| Total Pages | 2517 |
| Language | English |
| Classification | Book_English |
| File Size | 125 MB |