Cosmic Station

In Vedanta synchronic identity is the central question. Why is every state of consciousness saturated with selfhood. We don’t have to think about it, there it is, firm as an anvil. The -Kena Upanishad (ca.500 B.C.) asks in the opening statement which gives it its title kena - by what agent.

 

 “Willed by whom does the directed mind go towards its object? Being directed by whom does the vital force, that precedes all, proceed (towards its duty)? By whom is this speech willed that people utter? Who is the effulgent being that directs the eyes and the ears?” 

 

 This appears to be a version of a Cartesian theory of a director self behind the curtain but it is rather the opening of the typical progress of a dialectic in which each position is sublated in a higher synthesis. The immediacy of each state of consciousness, its self-effulgence, is the core of non-dual meditation. The mind body complex irradiated by consciousness is the source of our awareness of the world. Simply being what it is and embedded in the world allows native capacities to manifest. They do not exist as it were in the dark, a priori, waiting for a world and are not in any Platonic sense formal. 

 

 It occurred to me this morning that certain meditations on the cakras, yantra (mystic diagrams) and mantra can have a Kantian a priori effect, sort of, by being a background which organises all inputs both intellectual and sensory in a formal manner. The world reaches us on their wavelength. Is that what realisation is, being stuck on the same cosmic station?