Advaita Vedanta

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

Page 23

14
A Modern Understanding..
Unlike mere unreflective notice of subjectivity, introspection is pure subjectivity experienced as distinct in itself and with an ontological status, with a being of its own, not as mere transcendental presupposition of the form 'I=I'. This is pure subjectivity, I experienced in its maximum dissociation. It is pure consciousness, though still the self-revealing individual I. The Advaitin calls it jīvasāksin. In a later section il will be shown that even this subjectivity is not consciousness at its purest form. For the time being, however, we stop with introspection.
But introspection as the purest form of subjectivity is still only one of the elements of the individual person, called T. Why should it be, as it has been taken by the Advaitin, the sole reality of the individual person, everything else-every mental state, the body and whatever else is bodily—being all faked ? The Advaitin has even gone further and held that this pure consciousness is the sole reality of the whole world, the only ultimate being, the only reality. What does he mean by all these ?
If introspection were of the psychological type (as distinct om the spiritual), mental states as its objects, however different from physical things, would be different equally from that introspection. Like physical things, they, though qualitatively different from them, would be over there, to be just picked up and known. There would be no question of reducing them to, understanding them in terms of, introspection. These states, however short-lived, and, therefore, their whole field, called mind (antahkarana), would then have to be understood as constituting the individual person quite as much as that introspection and coordinately with it. So is the case with body and bodily states too, including sensations and percepts (indriya-yrttis): they would equally constitue the individual person. But if introspection proper, as we have already decided, is taken as of the spiritual type, it is just what discovers