Spiritual Message for the Day – Sublimation of Object-Consciousness by Sri Swami Krishnananda

Baba Times Digest© | 4 May 2015 16.14 EST | New York Edition

Sublimation of Object-Consciousness

Divine Life Society Publication: The Study and Practice of Yoga by Swami Krishnananda

The knowledge of the purusha is the knowledge of the Absolute. This comes by meditation on the purusha as the Ultimate Principle. No other kind of meditation can lead to liberation, though it can lead to various experiences, or powers. Also, it is the most difficult type of meditation because it requires qualifications not merely of the will or the thought, but also of the moral consciousness and the emotions.

There is a total disparity of character between the pure state of the purusha and the conditions of ordinary perception through the mind. In other words, there is a great difference between the status of consciousness in the state of the pure purusha and the condition of consciousness in ordinary world awareness.

Spiritual consciousness is different from world perception, but many people do not understand this. They are, again and again, brought to the wrong conviction by the habits of the mind that, somehow or other, the conditions of world experience will persist even in God-consciousness. World experience is different in character from spiritual experience, and those conditions which are necessary to rouse a spiritual experience in oneself are to be acquired before a meditation in this direction can be attempted.

All that we see here with our eyes and sense with our senses is the only reality for us. That is why we cling to the things of the world so much. Therefore, it is a herculean task, indeed, to bring the mind round to a new type of conviction, which is what is called viveka – right appreciation and a perception of the character of Reality.

Sattva and the purusha – namely, the mind and the ultimate consciousness, purusha – are opposed to each other in their characters. The purusha is infinite, whereas the mind is externalised. This is the primary distinction. The mind cannot have infinite awareness. It is always projected outwardly through the senses, whereas the purusha is eternally aware of an infinitude of being. This is a great difference indeed.

Externality and eternity cannot go together; they are different intrinsically. Eternity is not externality. The externality that is the character of mind perception, or any kind of world perception, is involved in a time process, which is what is called duration – a passage or a movement of time – whereas there is no such passage or duration in eternity. It is an eternal ‘now’, a word with which we are familiar but which meaning is not clear to us.

There is no such thing as past, present and future for the purusha, but there is such a thing as past, present and future for the mind. There is a sudden awareness of a totality of existence and, therefore, there is an abolition of all duration and time-consciousness. There is an extinction of the difference created by the time process, as well as the difference created by the interference of space between objects. The mind cannot comprehend everything at one stroke.

For the mind there is successive perception but not simultaneous perception, whereas in the purusha there is simultaneous perception – an awareness which is the grasping of everything at one stroke. Therefore, the purusha and the mind are different. The inability to grasp the difference between these two is called bhoga – enjoyment, experience. All the processes which the mind undergoes are called bhoga. And we are all fond of bhoga only. That is why we cling to the world so much. There is a fear that when the mind is freed from conditions which bring about bhoga, there will be no joy. We identify contactual experience with pleasure; this is a habit of the mind. Therefore, it is not easy to wean the mind from this habit. It is difficult for the mind to believe that there can be pleasure in the purusha, because what pleasure can be there in a condition in which we are severed from all contacts?

This is what the mind will think, and what it does think. With great effort of intellectual understanding, sometimes we are convinced of the possibility of bliss even in the purusha.  Purusha jnana, or knowledge of the purusha, arises by svartha samyama – meditation on one’s own essential nature, or the purpose of the spirit. It is enough for the mind to understand and appreciate that the purusha is consciousness in nature. And consciousness has to be indivisible, by the very nature of it, which means that it is infinite, unconditioned by objects, space and time. Therefore, any experience in terms of space and time or objects is contrary to the nature of the purusha. Hence, there should be an effort exercised upon the mind to sublimate object awareness into spiritual awareness.

Spiritual contemplation is a process of sublimation of objectivity into universality. When this kind of meditation is practised,  purusha jnana arises – knowledge of the purusha comes. But this is a hard task because the conception of the purusha is not provided to the mind usually, in ordinary world experience. The nature of the purusha does not mean the nature of the individual self. It is the nature of the Universal Self. Purusha is a name that we give to the Absolute itself – that which comprehends all things. A complete absence of taste for things which are seen as well as unseen has been described as vairagya. This meditation cannot come to a person who has a taste for things which are outside. It is not merely an absence of sense-contact; it is an absence of taste itself. ‘Vitrishnasya’ is the term used. A dislike arisen on account of the non-cognition of value in things which are external – this is called vairagya. And a persistent practice of this condition, the maintenance of this awareness, called vashikara samjna – that is called abhyasa.

When there is an acquisition of this understanding and an establishment of oneself in this status of meditation, one becomes the substratum of everything as a result of this. As the substratum of all things, there is no need for this consciousness to move towards objects, because it is the substratum of even the object. As the result of this, again, there is knowledge of everything. One who has become the substance itself, as the substratum of all things, naturally gets endowed with this knowledge. This knowledge is called taraka – that which takes one across the ocean of sorrow. This taraka knowledge is of such a nature that its object is everything, as different from the mental knowledge which is provided to us now, at present, which has only certain objects as its contents, and not all objects.

All knowledge, and knowledge of every condition of everything, every state through which one passed, through which one passes and through which one has to pass – all these will become contents of this awareness.  ‘Simultaneous awareness of all things’ and ‘simultaneous awareness of every condition of all things’ is called sarva jnatritva (omniscience). And this is designated by the term ‘vivekajam jnanam’, knowledge born of discriminative understanding. It is also called taraka, the saving knowledge. This contemplation is the only technique, the only method, the only means of the salvation of the soul.

Kaivalya, or ultimate independence of the spirit, arises when there is equanimity of the structural character of sattva and the purusha. Sattva means the mind, or we may call it prakriti; purusha is the consciousness. When there is similarity established between the two, then the one does not remain as an object of the other, nor is one a subject in relation to the other. When the two become one on account of the intense purity of the experiencing consciousness, infinity enters into experience. This is kaivalya, this is moksha.

Vairagya and abhyasa, and tivra samvegatva – intense ardour of the aspiring spirit is required in order that success may become imminent.

The methods of Patanjali are savitarka, savichara, sananda and sasmita samadhis. These stages are the gradual sublimations of world-consciousness, or object-consciousness, by diminishing the distance between the subject and the object of meditation, which takes place automatically and for which there is no need for any special effort. The distance that separates the experiencing consciousness from its object becomes less and less as one advances more and more. Samyama is the abolition of this distance itself. There is a complete transcendence of spatial awareness in samyama.

Excerpts from: Sublimation of Object-Consciousness - The Study and Practice of Yoga by Swami Krishnananda

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