Advaita Vedanta

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

Page 35

A Modern Understanding of...
vaitin, the final truth, for, first, substantively, it is but pure positive subjectivity, and, secondly, the final withdrawal as a process has again to be withdrawn from, this last withdrawal being absolutely non-different from that substantive pure subjectivity, being different only in name.
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There is somthing novel about the warning statement too. Ordinarily, whatever knowledge we have through a statement is conceptional, not direct. But the warning statement in question occasions direct awareness of subjectivity. This is possible because, like statements which point to things bodily present before us, this warning statement points to the ground which has all along been present. This is the Advaita theory known as sabdāparoksavāda. The Advaitin, however, would not object to other means for reviving the awareness of pure subjectivity. The warning statement is requisitioned in order to correct the Mahāyāna infatuation with bare transcendence.
Spiritual introspection as self-revealing pure subjectivity is, as we have shown, not tied to the mental states it refers to. Either this reference is all pseudo or even as reference it is free.
Even if one understands the introspection under consideration as psychological, even then its reference to the mental states introspected may not be as compulsive as that of these states to their objects. Even psychological introspection can conceivably get away from the need of referring and realize its pure being as subjectivity untarnished if it is made to concentrate on one particular mental state, viz. the conviction (reached through systematic analysis) that from out of every mental state and, therefore, from mind itself as their objective substratum introspection, which had stood so long as undistinguishedly fused there, is to get dissociated in its free subjectivity. This demand on which introspection now concentrates is undoubtedly an objective mental state, but as a demand for the realization of subjectivity proper it is an object that continuously dissipates itself, making room for