Advaita Vedanta

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

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The Absolute as...
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art'. This second procedure we have already discussed. Many of the Advaitins are for this second procedure. This second procedure is parallel to divine grace in religion as distinct from communion through one's own effort. But, then, just as between such grace and self-made communion there is not much of fundamental difference, the two being practically two sides of the same state of affairs, or the same state of affairs looked at from two different angles, so is the case with deliberate passing over to the īśvara-sākşin stage and being made to reach the stage through reawakening warning statements. The former is intuition, i.e. my intuiting the truth and the latter is revelation of that truth to me. Intuition and revelation are, like communion and grace, two sides of one and the same situation. Be it noted further that intuition or revelation of the 1śvara-sāksin is finally the same thing as intuition or revelation of Brahman.
At the jiva stage where there is little freedom from objects there is an awareness all through of other individual jivas, you and he. Likewise, at the stage of jiva-sākşin toothe stage of pure individual 1-subjectivity-where there is freedom from all objects, there is the awareness of you and he, maybe with their objective sides still hanging on to them. I, even at this stage, is not only aware of itself as pure subjectivity, it is aware of itself as a speaker, and addresser, too and, therefore, of a you as a listener, and what is equally important-of itself as being understood by that listener to be a possible ‘you'-in other words, as a he10 As, however, there is no determination as to who definitely is here the you to be addressed, I is here understood as only a possible he, i.e. as any subjectivity. A definite particular X is spoken of as any X only when it is understood as just an instantiation of x-ness where X-ness is understood as the dominant theme, It follows that when I understands itself, from the point of view of a possible you, as a possible he, what it understands
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He, we have already seen, is one who could be a you, who, in other words, is a possible you. He is the same thing as a possible you.