Advaita Vedanta

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

Page 17

A Modern understanding...
coanaesthesia they appear to be as much free as not, perpetually alternating between freedom and fusion. Their stuff contains some dominant duller elements, called rajas and
tamas.
8
Phosphorescence of cognition, or, for the matter of that, of any mental state, is entirely an objective property belonging to it. A cognition that is revealed to introspection as an object is revealed ipso facto as phosphorescent. Introspective awareness of cognition is thus widely different from its phosphorescence: introspection stands apart as subjective in relation to that phosphorescent cognition as an object. The cognition in question may indeed be subjective relatively to the thing that is cognised, but, assuredly, it is an object visa-vis introspection.
There is, however, a basic distinction, here too, between psychological and spiritual introspection. As awareness, both indeed are subjective vis-a-vis their objects. But because the object of psychological introspection is only knownness which is in no sense subjective, this type of introspection, in spite of being awareness and, so far, subjective, is logically as much an object too, like any cognition at the primary level. Spiritual introspection, on the other hand, dissimilar in this respect to any primary cognition, in so far as what it reveals it reveals as subjective, cannot itself be an object again to another ulterior awareness. Psychological introspection is on a par, so far, with ordinary cognitions, and one may not unreasonably claim that its existence has, therefore, to be known by another cognition which, now on a par with spiritual introspection (because its object is awareness as subjective) would refuse to be revealed by still another cognition. Spiritual introspection is self-revealing; logically, psychological introspection is not so.
It often appears that the Advaitin has taken all introspection to be self-revealing. If this is so, it is because he has not recognised any psychological introspection. Anuvyavasāya,