Advaita Vedanta

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

Page 14

The Absolute as...
re experienced in-and one may add, though unnecessarily, 'as discovered that way by-the primary first order cognition. Mental states which are primary cognitions are said to be objects to introspection, and other states which are non-cognitive-feelings and wills, for example-are objects for mental perception. There is, of course, a difference of opinion among the Advaitins regarding whether mental perception is itself a case of introspection or not.
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Mental states are objects. Yet, not only as experienced at the primary unreflective stage but even discovered by introspection, they evince relative freedom, forming a class apart from other things of the world and also from body. When I am introspectively aware of my cognition of X, where that X is a thing of the world, no doubt that X too appears before the introspection, but that it does only as loosely attached to that cognition, tending all the while to slip from it, attention being focussed more on the cognition side than on it; and what all this means is that the mental side not only demands a sort of freedom but has actually half attained it. We may feel more assured of this if we distinguish this act of introspection from another of its kind where, instead of being aware of the cognition-of-an-object, we are aware rather of the object-as-cognised. The object in this latter case stands more in the focus and cognition hangs on to it adjectivally in order just to bring to the focus of reflection characters of the object that were not noticed before.
If this latter type of reflection is also called 'introspection' as it has been by some, it would be introspection of a new kind altogether. It is either merely a better, though secondlevel, cognition of the very object of the first level, with some of its features now revealed for the first time-in which case it is widely different from what we normally understand by the term 'introspection', being similar to that only in so far as it is reflective, or it would mean mere abstraction of the knownness of the object that was known, asserting that known