Advaita Vedanta

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

Page 67

A Modern Understanding of...
In all the cases mentioned above-from the cognition of an object as real to illusion detected as illusion there is knowledge of something as unknown. Only, in the case of illusion detected as illusion one comes to be aware of this knowledge of something as unknown' through its denial. Again, as much in the cognition of an object as real as in the cognition of it as false, knowledge of X as unknown is a type of knowledge (of X) which is free from the intervention of a mental state. As knowledge in these two cases has nothing to do with a mental state, it means that what we have here as knowledge is mere consciouness. As differentiated from the pure consciousness experienced in dreamless sleep, it does indeed still refer to an object X that is known. But this reference is as free as introspection referring to a mental state. Besides, even pure consciousness as dreamless sleep is not without all reference. It refers still to the absence of all mental states, absence being specifically mentioned as an object.
All the cases mentioned above--from dreamless sleep to illusion detected as illusion-understood in the ordinary way people understand thern, involve some basic contradictions. In dreamless sleep it is knowledge of the absence of all knowledge, in the other cases it is some form of knowledge of a thing as unknown. The only reasonable way to get rid of such contradictions is to recognise levels or types. Some present-day linguistic analysis and symbolic logicians who recognise types just for this purpose have yet understood them as only levels of consideration (in there terms, levels of language), intending thereby that there are no corresponding levels of realities, some realities having higher ontological status than some others. This they could not admit because, for various reasons they were committed to the empirical-the perceivable as the only level of reality. Free from that inhibition 17, the Advaitins
17. This does not mean that transcendentalism is more naive than em
piricism. In the history of philosophy, both Indian and Western,transcendentalists and empiricists have always argued with one another. Even so in the present days. Only it is a matter of accident