Advaita Vedanta

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

Page 63

A Modern Understanding of...
On awaking from dreamless sleep I feel sure, we are told, that during the period of that sleep there was no mental state. 13 We are told also that this assurance relating directly to something that is past cannot but be a case of memory. But nothing that was not once known can possibly be remembered. It follows that the absence-of-all-mental-states that is now remembered was somehow known in that dreamless sleep, from which, in turn, it further follows that this knowledge of...could not have itself been a mental state, all mental states having been, professedly, absent then. It must have, therefore, been mere consciousness standing aside all mental states. This knowledge of...was but introspection, it being presumed that if introspection can reveal a positive mental state, it can also reveal the absence of all such states.
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This absence as revealed in dreamless sleep is, according to the Advaitin, the primaeval object, logically the first object of introspection as its (introspection's) self-negation-a selfnegation that forms at the same time a dark positive ground capable of developing, in other interests, into different stages of objectivity and also into detailed objects. Objectivity as this primary self-negation cum dark positive ground is precisely what is known in Advaita as māyā.14
The second phenomenon that the Advaitin analyses is what he calls 'knowledge of a thing as unknown'. Normally, when we know an object as such and such, some aspects of it are, in the same cognitive situation, implicitly admitted although they cannot be said to be known in the way one knows that object as such and such. The reality of that object, for example-meaning by that its being there (for whatever
13 The word 'mental state' is used here in a wider sense, covering submental states like percept, body-sense, etc.
14 We are also told by the Advaitin that on awaking from dreamless sleep we remember another thing also. It is that there was a feeling of peace (bliss) too during the sleep. The important point to note in this connexion is that according to the Advaitin this feeling too is no mental state. Really, it is non-different from pure consciousness.
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