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VEDANTA-SUTRAS.
above, the non-intelligent ahamkâra can never become a knower. Moreover, neither consciousness nor the ahamkara are objects of visual perception. Only things seen by the eye have reflections.-Let it then be said that as an iron ball is heated by contact with fire, so the consciousness of being a knower is imparted to the ahamkåra through its contact with Intelligence.-This view too is inadmissible; for as you do not allow real knowership to Intelligence, knowership or the consciousness of knowership cannot be imparted to the ahamkâra by contact with Intelligence; and much less even can knowership or the consciousness of it be imparted to Intelligence by contact with the essentially non-intelligent ahamkåra. Nor can we accept what you say about 'manifestation.' Neither the ahamkâra, you say, nor Intelligence is really a knowing subject, but the ahamkâra manifests consciousness abiding within itself (within the ahamkâra), as the mirror manifests the image abiding within it. But the essentially non-intelligent ahamkåra evidently cannot manifest' the self-luminous Self. As has been said 'That the non-intelligent ahamkâra should manifest the self-luminous Self, has no more sense than to say that a spent coal manifests the Sun.' The truth is that all things depend for their proof on selfluminous consciousness; and now you maintain that one of these things, viz. the non-intelligent ahamkâra—which itself depends for its light on consciousness-manifests consciousness, whose essential light never rises or sets, and which is the cause that proves everything! Whoever knows the nature of the Self will justly deride such a view! The relation of manifestation cannot hold good between consciousness and the ahamkâra for the further reason also that there is a contradiction in nature between the two, and because it would imply consciousness not to be consciousness. As has been said, 'One cannot manifest the other, owing to contradictoriness; and if the Self were something to be manifested, that would imply its being non-intelligent like a jar.' Nor is the matter improved by your introducing the hand and the sunbeams (above, p. 38), and to say that as the sunbeams, while manifesting the hand, are at the
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