THE BECOMING, THAT
IS, THE JIVA
AND THE BEING,
THAT IS, THE ULTIMATE
According to Vedanta, the
doer/experiencer is the one who has identified with one’s BMI (Body, Mind,
Intellect). If you don’t identify yourself with your BMI ,
you are not the doer/experiencer. But who is this ‘you’ that is being talked
about? That is the clinching issue. There is a triple personality that we
should know of in order to know ourselves. The first is the outer personality,
by which I mean, not the external personality that others see in us, but the
personality that we claim in our heart of hearts as ‘I’. This outer personality
of mine includes my BMI , along
with all the innermost thoughts that I know are mine, and therefore my ego
also. By the ‘outer personality’ we are here linking together the ‘concrete
body’ (sthula-sharIra) and the
‘subtle body’ (sUkShma-sharIra) – purely
for the purpose of clarity of this exposition .
But behind the BMI there exists the JIva which gives it life. Without this, the BMI
cannot express itself. The corresponding English word ‘soul’ may be used most
often though it may not have all the connotations that ‘JIva’ has. “What dies when separated from the soul is the body; the
soul does not die” (Ch.U. VI–11-3). This soul is nothing but the spark of the
Absolute Consciousness (B.G.: 7-5; 15–7) and therefore it is sentient. From the
seventh chapter of the Gita we know that His own divine Energy – called Cosmic
Nature (PrakRti) – is
two-fold. One is superior and the other is not so. This latter is the source of
all matter. It manifests actually as eight-fold matter, namely, the five
elements, mind, intellect, and ego. In its manifestation as the five elements PrakRti constitutes all of what science
has unfolded about the universe and all of what it continues to unfold. In the
manifestation in each individual as one’s mind-intellect-ego, PrakRti constitutes all “the actions of
one’s past lives individualised and earmarked for this life together with the
accumulated tendencies from all one’s past lives” (Shankara’s Commentary on
B.G.: 3–33).
The Superior
prakRti (parA-prakRti) is what becomes all the souls. Each soul takes several bodies
(physical appearances) one after the other just as the same individual dons
different clothes -- (B.G.: 2–22). In all these different appearances of the
same soul, though it takes
different bodies, the same mind sticks on to it -- (B.G.: 15–7, 8). But the
memories of the mind do not go with it since they stay in the brain and perish
along with it. However, in each such life of the particular soul, the mind
accumulates tendencies (vAsanAs) that
go on with it into succeeding lives where it gets other bodies. It is the set
of these tendencies that gives a character to the mind. This character is a
mixture of the three basic strands of
prakRti – the divine (satva), the dynamic (rajas) and the dull (tamas).
Without BMI the soul cannot express itself as an individual.
Without the sentient soul, mind is just inert matter. But when it sticks on to
the soul in the latter’s physical expression through BMI ,
it gets (a borrowed) sentience. Now the soul interacts with the universe of
matter as well as with the other living beings. But even this interaction has
to take place only through the medium of the BMI .
There is therefore a seemingly endless play of the sentient Consciousness
within and the insentient universe of matter outside through the medium of the BMI . In this play, the sentient Consciousness within, which is nothing
but the spark of the Absolute, is called ‘Purusha’ or Self. We shall use the word ‘Purusha’ in this context
systematically. ‘Purusha’ has the inbuilt meaning of ‘resident in the
body’ which aptly describes what we are talking about. Everything else,
including the interaction with other beings, is of course prakRti. This interplay of puruSha and prakRti is what constitutes our passage through life.
Now the Lord says: There are two purushas:
(15–16). They are: the perishable purusha (also
called ‘empirical self’) and the imperishable purusha. The perishable one expresses itself through the BMI . When the BMI vanishes
in the cycle of time, it can no more express itself. So this personality is termed “Perishable” (kShara).
It is this Perishable PuruSha – whom we shall hereafter denote by ‘PP’ for convenience
of brevity in writing – who does all the work in the external world and thinks
all the thoughts.
It is he, the PP, who is the ‘I’ of ordinary conversation. Vedanta says it is not ‘the real I’ because of the perishability
of PP. He is the mutable, thinking, acting personality, subjected by Ignorance
to the outward workings of PrakRti. We said the soul expresses itself
through the BMI . But in so
expressing itself, it invariably makes the mistake of thinking it is just the
PP and nothing more. In other words, the soul commits the colossal error of identifying itself with the BMI .
This colossal error is the beginningless ignorance. And here starts all the
problems of life. All the pleasure and pain, ups and downs, light and darkness,
good and bad, that the BMI suffers
through, are mistakenly assumed by the soul as its own experiences. Not only
this. All the actions of the BMI
are also appropriated by the soul.
Thus arises the common expression:
‘I am the doer’, ‘I am the experiencer’. The PP (or, what is the same thing, the soul in its present state
of oneness with the PP) is involved in the actions of Nature. He reflects the
different workings of the modes of Nature. He associates himself with the doings of prakRti and thinks he is the doer. He
identifies himself with the play of personality and clouds his self-knowledge
with the ego-sense in PrakRti so that he thinks himself as the ego-doer of
works. (B.G.: 3-27).
The
second purusha is ‘the Imperishable PuruSha’ – which we shall
denote hereafter by ‘IP’ for convenience of communication. It is a higher,
deeper, reality -- some exponents call it ‘inner reality’ – than the PP. It is
the eternal impersonal self within. It is the ‘sat-chid-Ananda’ (Existence-Knowledge-Bliss) of Vedanta. The full
Sanskrit term is “akshara-purusha” -- ‘akshara’ meaning ‘imperishable’. It has no share in the action and
movement of the PP except to support it by its presence and be a non-participating
witness (-- to be explained in the sequel).
Some one pinches my body. It hurts.
Who feels this hurt? I feel the hurt. Who is this I that is speaking? It is the
PP. Why does the PP feel the hurt? Because it has identified itself
with the BMI . Therefore it becomes the experiencer (‘bhoktA’).
Recall that the soul has already fallen into the colossal error of thinking
that it is the PP and nothing more. Not only do I feel the hurt, but I flare up
at the other person. Who is this I that is flaring up now? It is again the PP. Why
does the PP flare up? Because it has identified itself with the BMI . As a consequence of this identification, it not only experiences
the hurt, but falls into the trap of the gang of peace-breakers like anger and
ego and flares back. So it becomes the ‘kartA’
(doer).
What does the Lord say on this now?
He says: Of the two puruShas the imperishable is never hurt and can never be hurt. “This
cannot be cut into pieces; this cannot be burnt; this cannot be tainted; this
cannot be dried”: (B.G. : 2–24). So He says: “My dear Arjuna, You (the PP / soul) are wrongly identifying
yourself with this BMI . Don’t do this. Identify yourself with the IP within you. Then
there will be no hurt. Only Happiness”. This is the bottom line. This is the
essential philosophical content of the entire teaching of the Gita. This is the
message of all spiritual teaching. This is the grand recipe for happiness. Vedanta comes to our help in
analysing this message for us. Vedanta reduces everything to five fundamentals:
·
'sat' (Existence) -- revealed
by the fact that it 'exists' (asti
·
'chit' (Consciousness) -- revealed
by the fact of 'knowing' (bhAti)
·
'Ananda' (Bliss) -- revealed
by the fact of 'happiness' (priyam)
·
'nAma' (Name) -- everything
has a name
·
'rUpaM' (Form) -- every
visible thing has a form.
The
first three are permanent, eternal. Each one of them constitutes what we called
the IP. The last two are ephemeral, transient. Our BMI
belongs to the last two above. Anything in our experience belongs to this
‘Name’ and ‘Form’.
When somebody pinches me I feel the
pain. It is really the BMI that
senses the pain and reacts to it. But the BMI
would not have done it if 'I' were not there. (for example, a dead body) – that
is, if the sentience, borrowed from the IP within, were not there. It is the
association of 'I' with the BMI
that makes 'me' feel and react. The ‘superimposition’ of BMI and of its experiences on the ‘I’ is the
problem. When I, the one whose outer personality is called so-and-so, ceases to
associate the 'I' with the BMI and
remains what it should be, namely, the IP, there should be no feeling of pain
and no provocation for a reaction or action. This is what Krishna
says to Arjuna.
Thus
all action happens only when the association of the permanent facet of man
namely the 'sat-chit-Ananda' facet of man is associated with the 'nAma-rUpa' facet of the same man. Actually
it should be said the other way. The ‘nAma-rUpa’
facet and its goings-on are superimposed on the ‘sat-chid-Ananda’ facet. It is this superimposition that is the
actor and the reactor. It is this superimposition that is the feeler, the thinker.
Who makes this superimposition? It is the empirical Self, the JIva. All that Vedanta says is this: Get
over this mixing up of the 'sat-cit-Ananda'
with the 'nAma-rUpa'.
Thus to the question “Who is the
‘We’ in the statement ‘We are identifying ourselves with the BMI’?” the answer
comes now. ‘We’, the agent or subject who does the identification is the
PP/soul/ ‘empirical self’ who expresses himself through the BMI . If we do not so identify then the hurt or pain
which affects the body, mind, intellect will not be ‘felt’. (Easy to say this!
But at this point it has to be granted at least as an academic truism). At
least this is what Krishna says. It is at this
point of the discussion we have to spend considerable thought on the key-words
“non-participating witness” in the paragraph above that introduced the
IP. It is in fact the punchline of Vedanta, particularly of advaita.
The IP (Imperishable puruSha) is the
real I within us, and he does not do any action, he does not think any
thoughts, he does not feel any emotions. He is unaffected, unperturbed,
uncontaminated, unsullied by any of the happenings to the PP (Perishable
puruSha). He is the One introduced by Krishna
very early in the Gita in verses 23, 24, 25 of the 2nd chapter and
later, in many other contexts. He, being the real ‘I’, can therefore very well
say: “I am not the doer or the experiencer”. Like the street light that
witnesses everything that happens under the light but is itself neither the
doer nor the experiencer of the happenings. He is the non-participating witness
to everything that happens to the PP. At the final end of the theory of
non-duality one is told that the knower, the known and the knowledge are all
one. But, ordinarily, the knower is the subject and the known is the object.
The subject which knows the object is the centre of consciousness. It exists,
and it knows. The object only exists.
The
JIva (the soul) is the subject of all
experience. It is a complex of Consciousness (ChaitanyaM) and Matter. When
objects are in relation to the subject we have the stream of presentations
called Vrittis. When there are no objects there will be no presentations
but the consciousness that lights up the presentations will remain. That
consciousness is the Witness, the non-participating Witness. Objects are not
presented to Consciousness as such. They are directly presented to the JIva (the soul) and only indirectly to
the Witness. There can be no relationship between Consciousness and objects,
because they belong to different orders of reality, like the rope and the
snake. The subject, the centre of consciousness, is experienced directly in an
intuition, like an ‘I-feeling’ (aham-pratyaya),
but the object is known only from the outside like ‘this-feeling’ (idam-pratyaya).
Then
how did this Pure Consciousness become the JIva
or the empirical self and how was the JIva
made the subject of all experience? Strictly speaking, there is no ‘becoming,
no making, no transition, no transformation’. Pure Consciousness (Atman, Brahman) does not undergo any change of form or character. JIva is only Brahman in an empirical dress of BMI
in which the sprouting of the thought of distinctness from Brahman has occurred. This thought of individuality is the Ego, the
starting point of the JIva. JIva
is therefore Consciousness conditioned
by Ignorance in the form of an ego of individuality. The Self can have no
direct knowledge of the world except through the apparatus of the BMI . This apparatus as well as the small world
which becomes the object of its knowledge is spoken of as the adjunct (upAdhi) of Consciousness. All this
adjunct is matter. Consciousness (‘Chaitanyam’)
which has this limited portion of matter for its adjunct is the JIva. Each JIva has its own knowing apparatus and moves in a small world of
its own, with its own joys and sorrows and thus has its own individual
existence. Though the Self is one, the JIvas
are many.
Shankara draws attention to this
fact of one Self and several JIvas,
for instance, in his commentary on (B.G.: 2-12) where the Lord says There
was never a time when I was not there nor you were not there, nor these leaders
of men nor that we, all of us, will come to be hereafter. He comments: ‘The
plural number (in we) is used following the diversity of the bodies, but
not in the sense of the multiplicity of the Self’. Generally in his
commentaries, Shankara
uses two illustrations to bring home this point. One is the sun appearing as
many reflected images in different pools of water. If the waters are dried up
the several images get back to the original sun. The other illustration is the
infinite space being delimited by artificial barriers. If these barriers are knocked
down there will be no occasion to speak of the different spaces. These two
illustrations of the exact mode of conceiving the relation between the Self and
the Soul gave rise to two schools of argument in later advaita, namely, the argument of original and its reflection (bimba-pratibimba-vAda), and the the argument of delimitation (avaccheda-vAda). The former is the VivaraNa school and the
latter is the BhAmati school.
Thus when Consciousness is
conditioned by its association with Ignorance or Matter it is no longer Pure
Consciousness but a complex of both, called JIva,
the soul. This does not mean however that Matter or Ignorance is outside of the
Reality of Consciousness, because that would contradict non-duality. The
relation between Self and Soul has therefore to be conceived in the following
way.
The addition of the adjunct is only
a difference in the standpoint that we adopt. There are two standpoints – the
intuitive and the intellectual. The intuitive is that of immediate and direct
realisation. It is the method of the mystics. There is no dualism of subject
and object there, nor that of doer and the deed, nor that of agent and enjoyer.
These distinctions of duality arise only in the intellectual method of looking
at reality. That is why the Gita says that it is “beyond the intellect” (B.G. :
III – 43). It is the nature of the intellect to break up the original unity and
revel in these distinctions. At this intellectual level what we are doing is
actually a come-down in the level of perception. The JIva is now perceived in relation to its own small world, the
subject in relation to the object and the doer in relation to the deed. The
Self thus reflected in the medium of the intellect becomes the JIva. As per the VivaraNa school, the Atman or the Self is the original, the
intellect is the reflecting medium and the JIva
is the reflected image. In the case of the BhAmati school, the Atman is the infinite space, the
adjuncts (upAdhis) are the limiting
barriers and the JIvas are the small
spaces.
The reflection idea is used skilfully by Kapila
MahaRshi in his exposition of Vedanta. “The presence of the Supreme Lord can be realized just as the sun is realized
first as a reflection in water, and again as a second reflection on the wall of
a room, although the sun itself is situated in the sky. The self-realized soul
is thus reflected first in the threefold ego and then in the body, senses and
mind”.
The JIva is thus a complex of Consciousness (Chaitanyam) and
matter. It is Pure Consciousness with a limited adjunct of matter, namely, the BMI . This limited adjunct is spoken of as the
Ignorance (avidyA)
of the JIva. Stripped of its adjunct
the JIva loses its individuality and
is then nothing but Pure ChaitanyaM. The analysis of the three states of
waking, dreaming and sleeping is intended to show that Consciousness is the
only constant factor running through them all. Even in the sleeping state, this
Consciousness is there. That the soul does not see in that state is because,
although seeing then, it does not see; for the vision of the Witness can never
be lost, because it is imperishable. But then no second thing exists there
separate from it which it can see. (Br. U. IV – 3-23). Shankara quotes this
passage in his commentary to Br.S. II-3-18 and adds his own explanation: This
appearance of absence of awareness is owing to the absence of objects of
knowledge, but not owing to the absence of consciousness. It is like the
non-manifestation of light, spread over space, owing to the absence of things
on which it can be reflected, but not owing to its own absence.
It is in the fourth state called ‘turIya’, that transcends the three
states of waking, dream and dreamless sleep, all traces of Ignorance disappear.
When the JIva is thus disassociated
from Ignorance and therefore from all material vesture, the spiritual core of
the JIva comes into its own. Shankara
sets forth (in his commentary on Br.S. I-3-19) the nature of this transcendence
of all adjuncts in the following way. A white crystal placed by the side of
something red or blue appears red or blue on account of the adjunct. But in
reality the crystal is only white. It does not ‘acquire’ its white colour but
only shines in its own natural colour.
Before the onset of true
enlightenment the Spirit (Consciousness) on account of its association with the
BMI appears as the JIva. But the rise of true knowledge does make a real difference. All
false notions disappear and Spirit rises to its true stature. The self-hood of
the empirical self falls to the ground and the Self shines forth in its
original splendour. To know the highest truth is only to know the self in its
true nature. The moment true enlightenment dawns on man he realises that he is
no other than the non-dual self, that very moment he sheds his finitude and
rises to his full stature. There is no question of the JIva merging in anything other than itself. It simply comes to
its own.
In truth there is no entity as the JIva at all. It is not among the things
created. It is a false creation due entirely to adventitious (‘Agantuka’) or incidental circumstance,
that is, coming from without and not pertaining to the fundamental nature. “The
idea of embodiedness is a result of nescience. Unless it be through the false
ignorance of identifying the Self with the body, there can be no embodiedness
for the Self” .JIva has always
remained Brahman. Only the adjuncts
have to be removed for this truth to stand out. Once this realisation is there,
the finitude of the JIva will
disappear, as also its misery and its supposed agency and enjoyership. “When
that Brahman, the basis of all causes
and effects, becomes known, all the results of the seeker’s actions become
exhausted” (Mu.U. II–2-8). The transmigration of the JIva which is due to its false association with the adjuncts, will
also come to a close. That is when the ego-thought of separateness from the
Supreme Self, with an ‘I’ of its own, will get destroyed. That is what we mean
by saying ‘JIva attains mokSha’. The two things are simultaneous,
like the simultaneity of disappearance of darkness with the lighting of a
match. But that does not mean that JIva
‘reaches some destination’ or ‘obtains something’. ‘JIva sees the Truth’ simply means that it sees that it is itself Brahman. In other words, it wakes up to
the Truth that was always there. Not waking up to the Truth was the Ignorance.
Ignorance is not in Brahman, which is
pure and self-illumined, but in the JIva.
So long however as the latter does not realize his identity with Brahman, ignorance is said, rather
loosely, to envelop Brahman.
All the injunctions that are given
by the Vedas to man are given to him in his state of ignorance because activity
is natural to man in that state. The Self is never the doer. The injunction is
only a restatement following what is given in experience. All the ritual purifications through chanting
of mantras and the results of such actions are enjoined on, and enjoyed by,
that entity which has the idea “I am the doer”, as stated in the Mundaka
Upanishad mantra “One of the two enjoys the fruits having various tastes, while
the other looks on without enjoying” (Mu. U. III-1-1). The misery that falls to
the lot of the JIva, the empirical
self, is entirely due to its fancied association with its adjuncts. This
association imagines such ‘realities’ as ‘I am a brahmin’, ‘I am a renunciate’,
‘I am a JIva’ and the like. When the JIva sheds these imagined realities and all
adventitious adjuncts and realises its true nature by a discrimination between
the permanent and the ephemeral, then there is an end of all its misery. Except
by such knowledge of the Ultimate Self, misery and finitude cannot be overcome. The Lord's promise is: To those who are constantly devoted and
worship Me with love, I grant the concentration of understanding by which they come unto Me. (B.G. : 10-10) Out of compassion for
those same ones, remaining within My own true state, I destroy the darkness
born of ignorance by the shining lamp of wisdom. (B.G. 10-11) That is why one says: Only by God’s Grace
the non-duality is realised!
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