World of Philosophy

Author(s): Christopher Key Chapple, Intaj Malek, Dilip Charan, Sunanda Shastri, Prashant Dave
Publisher: Shanti Prakashan

Page 110

(2.)
She instantaneously apprehends - cognitively, and not as a matter of inference - a second generalization, that this devotionally-qualified lovingness, amorous feat, belongs to class of emotional stirrings (bhavas) that is present in all men that are overcome by a stinging longing for a lover. That this is a mark of universal guna comes to possess one who has become irreversibly besotted by the lover's sensuous image in his mind's eye (like Prajapati seeing Usa with a hidden desire-eye from behind his unflinching divine-eyes), that he inwardly dissimulates and embarks on all manner of narcissistic excesses in order to impress the queen in his life and draw this virtual goddess closer to his own emergent self.
In other words, a parallel cognitive process follows even as the melodious words of the atithi's devotional chant fall on her innocent ears, evoking a second-order, albeit transcendental perception, in the projected Devi here. There is another self-constitution subtly at work underneath the ordinary sensory contact (positivist empirical sense-data as-is correspondence) that her outward senses have made with this apparition. This latter perception (per-intro-extro-spection) is en-gendered (literally) by the association or samyukta-samyoga of the intentional noeta with the sameness it bears to the sensorial excitement evoked upon hearing, say, a Mirabai imploring the elusive gopi-infatuated Krishna to return to his real lover's cot. The isomorphism is not any less, though of a differential modal order, that phenomenologically transcends the given empirically fired category of understanding united with sensation (Kant's misnomered 'intuition'). So the same-same biting love-notes ring clear with another level of meaning and with it a synthetic percept's son (no a prioris givens here) that reaches all the way down, registering a knowing-concept (jnanagrahaka) which is an awareness that another desirous self is hungrily lusting to make intimate contact with the deep recesses of her otherwise inert, unsuspecting and uneventful self (jivatma indeed).
So the question arises: who is having whose darshan? Which way is the traffic, the thin literalism of the song notwithstanding? And what is this experience about? Consider, even the trope of darshan is subverted or inverted in this process, in as much as the real darshan or fill of vision-feelingperception is to be savored, relishingly consumed, not by the deigned sadhu, but by the wonder-filled, awesomed, sadhvi herself (maangoo teri darshan to liyo mera darshan): it is she who is supposed to have the darshan in terms of the thick plot in which the spirit or what is really the vibhu - extensional pervasion - of the inert, feelingless self moves in mysterious ways; he has already come with a savikalpa pre-structured perception of her as the darling and twinkle of his pupilating eyes - no god of small things this one, but the goddess of his enlarged heart whose lull-alibi is serabi jaa ja ja jaa, o
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