The Spiritual Import of the Mahabharata and the Bhagavad gita-19.13.

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06/11/2017.

19: True Knowledge : 13.
1.
The more we move towards subjectivity, the more we are tracing our steps in the direction of paradise, heaven, the region of angels, or God experience. The more we move towards objects and external comforts and involve ourselves in sensory things, the more we head towards the hell of religions. Hell is objectivity and paradise is subjectivity, so that, when supreme subjectivity is realised as the All-in-All Being, we have attained liberation or moksha.

All this, though it appears to be a little bit clear to us for the time being, is beyond the grasp of ordinary reason. Always the objects stand before us, staring at us as reality, and prakriti tries to grapple with purusha as a contending party trying to defeat it, swallow it and absorb it into itself, so that oftentimes we are led to the erroneous conclusion that the world of matter is the only reality. Consciousness is swallowed by matter; purusha is lost in prakriti.

This is what has happened to us these days, so that we think only of the world, only of things, only of objects, only of physical comfort—nothing else. This is the fate of consciousness when it befriends matter to such an extent that it cannot anymore exist as an independent reality or value.

2.
But the Samkhya analysis distinguishes consciousness from matter. That the knower cannot be the known is a crux of philosophical analysis, and the known cannot be the knower. Kshetrajna and kshetra are two different things.

If the known is the knower, or the knower is the known, the whole language is tautological and loses its meaning. If the known is the knower, or the knower is the known, we do not know what we are saying.

The two are distinct, and this drawing the distinction between the knowing consciousness and the known objectivity is the Samkhya. But, this distinction is tentative and relative, because even the distinction between two things cannot be known, unless there is a transcendent comprehensibility of the so-called knower and the known.

How do we know that ‘A’ is different from ‘B’ unless we are more than ‘A’ and ‘B’? Here is a victorious note struck by the Vedanta philosophy, which rises above the Samkhya distinction of prakriti and purusha.

To be continued ....

Swami Krishnananda

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