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PREFACE
Vedanta grateful
The text embodies the few lectures I delivered on Advaita in 1974 at the L. D. Institute of Indology, Ahmedabad. I am to the Director of the Institute, Pt. D. D. Malvania, for his having kindly invited me to deliver these lectures and equally grateful for his arranging their publication in the form of a small book.
All transcendental philosophy - often called metaphysics is a guarded presentation of a sort of experience which has for its content something beyond Nature, Nature' meaning what is in space and/or time and governed by the law of causation. True, such experience can never be adequately described, which means that no one who does not already have that experience can form any clear or complete idea of it from that description. But there are two ways of escape from this difficulty. One of these is that the presentation may be guarded, which in its turn means three things: (i) part of the presentation is clear, definite and true to facts - I mean that part which, for whatever reason, is concerned directly with normal experience, (ii) the remaining part is clearly shown as logically inferred from this part (i), and (iii) the remaining part is as clearly stated as one in such predicament is capable of stating it. This is the first way of escape from the difficulty mentioned above. The second way of escape, not denying that every statement should be as clear and definite as possible, is, for one who states his supernatural experience, to go on offering inevitable suggestions at every crucial turn of the description and, for the hearer, to pick them up cleverly and follow them authentically in his own experience. In my lectures I have played the role of the hearer.
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The first of the ways of escape is the way of logical (conceptual) philosophy, and the second is philosophy as living experince dominant throughout. Only, in the second case the experience, though quite definite so far as it is present experience, is also half indefinite in So far as it anticipates authentically though, but in a new depth-dimension of one's definite present experience, - a series of further experiences to be had one after another in that new dimension. The whole series of experience in that new dimension is, again, indefinite not only because the experience is only to be had, i. e. not already there but also because there is no conceptual clarity either about it. And yet the series is undeniable because it has been suggested inevitably. Experience is not exhausted in (i) what is definitely present experience and (ii) what is conceptually definite, i. e. logically inferred. Suggestion also is experience of a sort and quite
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