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Is that essential nature constituted by mere intelligence as Sugata and Kapila hold; or is the soul as Kanada thinks, essentially non-intelligent, comparable to a stone, while intelligence is merely an adventitious quality of it; or is it essentially a knowing subject? The soul is mere intelligence, the Purvapakshin maintains; for the reason that Scripture declares it to be so. Up.
The non-intelligent ahamkara thus merely serves to manifest the nature of non-changing consciousness, and it effects this by being its abode; for it is the proper quality of manifesting agents to manifest the objects manifested, in so far as the latter abide in them.
The former alternative is inadmissible, since you will not allow to consciousness the quality of being a knower; and so is the latter since, as explained above, the non-intelligent ahamkara can never become a knower. Moreover, neither consciousness nor the ahamkara are objects of visual perception. Only things seen by the eye have reflections.
The fact is that the highest Self is in its causal or in its 'effected' condition, according as it has for its body intelligent and non-intelligent beings either in their subtle or their gross state; the effect, then, being non-different from the cause, and hence being cognised through the cognition of the cause, the result is that the desired 'cognition of all things through one' can on our view be well established.
Perception and the other means of knowledge show this world with all its sentient and non-sentient beings to be of a non-intelligent and impure nature, to possess none of the qualities of the Lord, and to have pain for its very essence; and such a world totally differs in nature from the Brahman, postulated by you, which is said to be all-knowing, of supreme lordly power, antagonistic to all evil, enjoying unbroken uniform blessedness.
Other bodies also are fictitiously shaped by my avidya; for they are bodies or effects, or non-intelligent or fictitious creations, as this my body is. The whole class of intelligent subjects is nothing but me; for they are of intelligent nature; what is not me is seen to be of non-intelligent nature; as e.g. jars.
Then desirous of providing himself with an infinity of playthings of all kinds he, by a series of steps beginning with Prakriti and the aggregate of souls and leading down to the elements in their gross state, so modifies himself as to have those elements for his body when he is said to consist of them and thus appears in the form of our world containing what the text denotes as sat and tyat, i.e. all intelligent and non-intelligent things, from gods down to plants and stones.
Brahman is the Self of it. Up. Similarly other texts also teach that the world has its Self in Brahman, in so far as the whole aggregate of intelligent and non-intelligent beings constitutes Brahman's body.
Universalists are unable to perceive the least resemblance between the circumstance of one intelligent body re-forming or changing the condition of some other body, intelligent or non-intelligent, and the circumstance of a bodiless Being creating all bodies; of a partless Being acting upon all parts; and of a passionless Being generating and regulating all passions.
But to this we reply that permanent non-perception of intelligence proves its non-existence. This consideration also refutes the hypothesis of things commonly called non-intelligent possessing the power, or potentiality, of consciousness.
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