Brhadaranyaka Upanisad on the Organs and their Objects

The theme of the opening of section 4 of the Brhadaranyaka Upanishad may be expressed according to the inflexions of solution namely dissolution and resolution. All sounds are resolved back into sound as such, touch into touch as such, all sorts of awareness into consciousness as such. Thus is achieved the dissolution of the individual consciousness into absolute consciousness.

“When through these successive steps, sound and the rest, together with their receiving organs, are merged in Pure Intelligence, there are no more limiting adjuncts, and only Brahman, which is Pure Intelligence, comparable to a lump of salt, homogeneous, infinite, boundless and without a break, remains.” (commentary by Sankara on II.iv.11)

The ‘lump of salt’ refers to the famous metaphor of the dissolution of a lump of salt in water. The one taste of salt is found in all the solution. Yes, the objection goes, but there you mention only the objects being merged in the consciousness of them; what of the very organs of perception? This is a very cogent objection and it moves the analysis away from what might be considered a form of idealism back into the realism of the person in the world. Sankara’s answer is a profound switch to a seeming materialist monism.

 “True, but the Sruti considers the organs to be of the same category as the objects, not of a different category. The organs are but modes of the objects in order to perceive them, as a lamp, which is but a mode of colour, is an instrument for revealing all colours. Similarly, the organs are but but modes of all particular objects in order to perceive them, as is the case with a lamp. Hence no special care is to be taken to indicate the dissolution of the organs; for these being the same as objects in general, their dissolution is implied by that of the objects.” (ibid)

 As I understand it, this is a shift into a higher onto-epistemological gear from the simpler meditation on the resolution of all awareness into consciousness as such. Now we have to consider the organs and the objects as being capable of flowing into each other because they are both material and the one Absolute Consciousness is the substratum of both. This is what underlies the possibility of the object as it really is being in me as a consciousness. We know the object as it is through our awareness of it. This is profoundly different from the idealist view of the object being identical to our awareness of it, incoherent as that is. Berkeley spotted this and asked: Why not drop the object away altogether? Thus his philosophy of Immaterialism.