Advaita Vedanta

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

Page 69

A Modern Understanding of...
tance here-contradictions met with in one such consideration cannot be removed by another.
Basic contradictions met with in a first-level consideration can be removed, if at all, in another higher-level one, and it is removed there because the contents now is viewed in its essential transcendent character, the accident being viewed now as either the self-negation of that transcendent character or as its function-either symbolic construction, the essence just symbolized in the language of the accidental, or created by the essence-as-transcendental-will just to demonstrate the freedom of that essence in another fashion. If, therefore, in our present case, knowledge at the ordinary empirical level involves such basic contradiction it can be freed from that when in its essential form it is understood, at a higher-level, as non empirical, i.e. as non-mental--when, in other words, it is understood as autonomous pure consciousness. Kant's apriorities are the appropriate contents of pure consciousness at different higher levels. Advaita is concerned with pure consciousness itself-either in its free reference at the level of ( spiritual ) introspection or higher up as over-personal consciousness, God, limiting itself into pure individual centres of subjectivity and symbolizing itself, through grades, into the world of objects, including mental states, or, still higher up, as the self-contained impersonal pure consciousness withdrawn into itself.
It must be noted, however, that ways in which the Advaitin has sought to demonstrate the separateness of consciousness, viz. through the analysis of dreamless sleep and of the cases of knowing a thing as unknown, are none of them convincing if consciousness has not already been understood as subjective in the sense of being dissociable from mental states, and, there. fore, as virtually separate from them. There are people, for example, who hold that consciousness, even as introspection, is an object among objects, its subjectivity, like that of any