Advaita Vedanta

Author(s): Kalidas Bhattacharya, Dalsukh Malvania
Publisher: L D Indology Ahmedabad

Page 13

A Modern Understanding...
may be an order of relative subjectivity among them, and each of these may have phases relatively more toward the subject than others. But these questions we may ignore for the present. The main point here is that the mental is more subjective than the bodily. That mental states have a sort of subjectivity which is freer than that of body is almost universally recognised. If the behaviourists and others of their kin demur, let them note, first, that body itself is either mine or yours or his, and often even felt as I, you, or he, which is not necessarily the story of other things of the world, and, secondly, that though many statements of peculiar mental occurrences and behaviours can be reduced to ones that need not mean these, this does not affect other simpler statements which are not so reducible. Whether these simpler statements point or not to existent mental states as qualitatively diffe. rent from physical ones depends entirely on the theory of meaning one upholds. Like most Indian thinkers, the Advaitin upholds the commonsense theory of meaning which is that whatever is spoken of in a way exists exactly that way, unless in particular specific cases there are reasons to the contrary.
These states are mental, but they are objects at the same time. Felt, in themselves, as relatively more subjective than either body or physical things, they are yet experienced as objects to, and discovered too that way by, introspection (anuvyavasāya)5 or mental perception (mānasa-pratyakșa), as the case may be, quite in the same way as things of the world
as an illusion. Yet the illusory detected as illusory is not wholly dissociated from the space in which other things are. As corrected, it is indeed no longer assertable to be in that space-it cannot be asserted as the resident of the ordinary world--and yet, even then, its to be in that space, to be a resident of the ordinary world--is not wholly denied either.
This is what is called introspection in ordinary psychological literature. Very soon we shall be speaking of quite another sort of introspection which, as distinct from psychological introspection, will be called spiritual introspection (sak şi-jñāna).
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