Advaita Vedanta

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

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A Modern Understanding...
from it. Even positive concentration on a state (or anything whatsoever) is not possible till one withdraws from its surroundings. Spiritual introspection not only withdraws from the surroundings, it seeks to withdraw even from what is left over. Withdrawal here is from the latter's presentedness, from it as an object, and the result is its liquidation into subjectivity, its reduction to the subjective act of withdrawal itself and pari passu the understanding of it as symbolic construction. In spiritual introspection, the so-called reference to the mental state is thus self-liquidating, nullifying the content, dialectically enough, as soon as it is said to be held to. Not that there is no reference, but the reference is ever vanishing. As ever vanishing, it claims to be, at the ideal stage of perfection, really no reference at all and is, during the period of vanishing, a sort of free reference, resisting, as it does, any kind of compulsive entanglement in it. Its free reference to the object-here to mental states—is the same thing as its withdrawal from that, only symbolically interpreted in a forwardlooking language. Spiritual introspection is never compelled to refer to any object.
This is, of course, an alternative here. The alternative is mere withdrawl, bare transcendence, without any positing of positive subjectivity, such transcendence being neither positive nor negative. Not positive because no subjectivity is posited, and not negative for the following reason.
Though it is said that the presentedness, i.e. the objectivity of mental states, is negated, what is really negated here is only the genuineness, the ultimacy, of objectivity, not that objectivity as after all there. so that what is intended is not so much negation as viewing from outside. : 1 This is a new characteristic feature of spiritual introspection not
touched before. 2 In Pātañjala Yoga it is called nirodha, taking place at a higher level
of citta than where ekāgra takes place. The conscious samādhi at this higher level is wholly negative, called asam prajñata, as distinct from the sam prajñāta at the ekāgra level. Nirodha has, by some, been called as parśa-yoga, Some, again, call it apronidhana-yoga.
5. called nirplace. The comprajnata, by some,
evel is wholly at the ekagra leve a proạidhana-yox