Advaita Vedanta

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

Page 38

The Absolute as...
necessarily in the process of self-liquidation nothing more need be done if we only hold on to it. The reference in the intrinsic process of self-liquidation will eventually disappear of itself.
But this account is based on ekajīvavāda and stands or falls with that. As soon as you and he are recognised as independent subjects coordinate with me, ekajīvavāda collapses. It cannot be said that the apparent individuality of each of these subjects is eventually that of the corresponding mind and body, only wrongly attributed to them. For even if we assume that, what it would all come to is that in each case including the case of I, there is a non-individual pure consciousness as a final truth, and that, in turn, would mean that there are many such pure consciousnesses. True, there being no other criterion of individuality at this state, logically these so-called many non-individual pure consciousnesses have to be taken as one and the same. But with the Advaitin, no final judgment comes from logic. Logic has no independent say; it either only strengthens (chiefly by way of refuting contrary possibilities) what one has already experienced or proposes what one is to experience, their being in either case concrete living experience that supersedes logic. What one is to experience is not, again, in Advaita, just what is logically proved. It is in the minimum, what others (in the Advaita fold) have already experienced (and what as so experienced have been recorded in the Scriptures), what, in other words, are livingly suggested in one's own experience and therefore demand to be livingly experienced, though after requisite discipline of mind, In the living experience known as intros. pection there is no living suggestion, no living demand, as to how the non-individual pure consciousness that I am to experience should be identical with what he or you are to experience. Rather, he and you being from the beginning experienced as distinct subjects-either distinct in themselves or distinct from me--and contrary living suggestions not forthcoming, the demand is that when the individualities of mind