Advaita Vedanta

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

Page 27

A Modern Understanding...
novel entity involving, quite unlike other things of the world a novel feature, called freedom or dissociation from all that is object, and understanding everything that is apparently objective as only a symbolic representation of subjectivity that way, the Advaitin concludes that pure subjectivity = pure consciousness is not merely the final essence of the genuine reality, the abiding entity behind-all that is mental and bodily, it is equally the truth of everything of the world.
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That introspection = pure subjectivity is the final essence of all that is mental and bodily is evident from another simpler consideration. Extra-bodily things can at most be mine; none of them, singly or together, are ever felt as I. Body and its states, on the other hand, and whatever more dissociate than these are called mental the mind and its states-are as much mine as also felt as I. Of these two, again-mineness and Iness—I-ness is felt to be more genuine than mineness from the subjective point of view : the mineness of body and mind is related to their I-ness exactly as the in-itself-ness of an extrabodily thing is related to its mineness. As between body (and its states) and mind, again, there is undisputed prefer ence for I-ness in the case of mind : somehow the mental is experienced as more of the nature of I than the bodily. As for I itself, it is never experienced as mine but only as I, the expression 'my self' being understood exactly in the way the expression its identity' is understood where the identity is not different from the 'it' except verbally. Of 'mine' and 'I', now, the latter is more original and the former derived from it-anything is mine only in so far as it is related to I. It follows that where something is spoken of as both 'l' and mine', it is more I than mine. As extra-bodily things are never spoken of as 'l' they are not of the nature of I, though as related to I they may well be mine. So far they are independent of I. But not so one's body and mind and their states. As both mine and I, they are originally of the nature