Advaita Vedanta

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

Page 24

The Absolute as...
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the mental states to have been dissociated, to whatever extent, from their objects and, as subjective so far, reduced, to that extent, to introspection itself. Mental states are subjective, not because they are phosphorescent- for there are many phosphorescent things which are not subjective--but because they are found to be subjective by (spiritual) introspection. Not that they are not experienced as objective. What is demanded when introspection discovers that just in so far as they are mental they are subjective, is that this objectivity is precisely what has to be got rid of. The objectivity is no doubt experienced, but it is at the same time an experience of a demand for dissociation from it.
One could, of course, argue the other way about, One could say that it is rather the detected subjectivity which has to be got rid of. But that would be from a new stand-point altogether -- the standpoint of pan-objectivism-from which even the subjectivity of introspection=pure consciousness ought to have been denied. As a matter of fact, pan-objectivists have persisted in denying it either through an altogether new interpretation of consciousness or through its simple wholesale rejection. Short of that pan-objectivist attitude, then, mental states which are experienced as dissociated from the objects they refer to have to be understood as demanding dissociation even from their own objectivity and demanding, in that context, to be identical, in the long run, with introspection itself which constitutes ultimate freedom from all that is object. This is also what introspection itself testifies to when it detects the mental states as themselves to whatever extent subjective.
The Advaitin is not for pan-objectivism. His is professedly a human philosophy, treating man somehow as the focal point for all consideration of the world and not treating him as an item along with other items of the world. Even those who understand man as such an item along with other items have to consider him as after all an evolute of a higher