Monday 24 April 2023

Here and There with Sankara and Bergson

Katha Upanisad: 2.i.10: What, indeed, is here is there; what is there is here likewise. He who sees as though there is difference here, goes from death to death.

 

This is the deep meaning of sadhana. You are not aimed elsewhere, you are here and now already there. What keeps us tethered to this point where we act is the nature of consciousness which is adapted to action or designed to navigate through the world. We do not have to strive which the meaning of the effortless effort that the sage discourse on. In the commentary by Sankara on this sutra he refers to the limiting adjuncts viz. the body and the senses. In Bergson’s well known depiction of the memory cone this is the point P intersecting the line of history. Living exclusively at that point is to be utterly submerged in the everyday practical reality. Being too far away from that point is to be in the grand flux of imagination and memory as a dreamer lost in reverie. All states whatever are immediately self-luminous and therefore reveal the nature of identity. Now we are practical then we are speculative and yet only the ‘mass of consciousness’ is taking on various forms of limitation. 

 

“This being so, anyone who - being deluded by ignorance, consisting in seeing differences that are natural to limiting adjuncts; sees, perceives; here, - in this Brahman, which is not a plurality; as though there is a difference; feels such differences as, “I am different from the Supreme Self, and the Supreme Brahman is different from me", he gets, death after death, he becomes subject to repeated death after death.”(commentary)

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