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You know very well, as an old mahatma, that you can cognise matter now with your sixth sense as well as with your five while in a perfectly normal condition, that you could not cognise except in trance- conditions before, and which even then you could only cognise incorrectly.
By bringing in the quinquennial series, Vandin wishes to assert that the five senses are competent to cognise there respective objects and that besides these senses and their objects there is neither any other sense to perceive nor any other object of perception. Besides the five senses Ashtavakra contends for an additional sense namely the Mind and accordingly cites the number six.
What is it after all, to cognise? Undoubtedly we arrive at it by forming judgments. I form a judgment about some object; for instance, I say to myself, what is in front of me is a tree. How do I arrive at saying that? I can only do it if I already know what a tree is. I must remember my conception of a tree. A tree is a physical object. If I remember a tree, I therefore remember a physical object.
For, if the substance is eternal and unknowable and unchangeable, it is tantamount to nothing. Nothing can be nearer non-existence than eternal unknowableness and unchangeableness. If, on the other hand, the substance changes, then it is not unknowable, or uncognisable, for by cognising its changes we cognise it. Changes are the only things that we can cognise.
The difference as regards feeling between man and the lower animals is one of degree and not of kind. The inorganic is less expert in differentiating its feelings, therefore its memory of them must be less enduring; it cannot recognise what it could scarcely cognise.
For the sentient subject has perished, and the object of sensation has perished; and the cognising subject has perished, and the object cognised has perished. And how can one subject cognise what has been apprehended through the senses of another? and how is one subject to take to itself what another subject has cognised?
You can have matter moving much, or little, and in all conceivable ways; but you cannot have matter without any motion more than you can have motion without any matter that is moving. Its states, its behaviour under varying circumstances, that is to say the characteristics of its motions, are all that we can cognise in respect of matter.
Now all these souls are deficient in insight into the true nature of the highest reality, their understandings being obscured by Nescience operating in the form of beginningless karman; and hence those texts only are fully useful to them which teach that there exists a highest Brahman which the souls in the state of release may cognise as non-different from themselves, and which then, through its own essential nature, qualities, power and energies, imparts to those souls bliss infinite and unsurpassable.
True, discontinuity, where development is normal, is on a very small scale, but this is only the difference between looking at distances on a small instead of a large map; we cannot have even the smallest change without a small partial corresponding discontinuity; on a small scale too small, indeed, for us to cognise these breaks in continuity, each one of which must, so far as our understanding goes, rank as a creation, are as essential a factor of the phenomena we see around us, as is the other factor that they shall normally be on too small a scale for us to find it out.
We recognise certain varying states or conditions of matter and give one state one name, and another another, as though it were a man or a dog; but it is the state not the matter that we cognise, just as it is the man's moods and outward semblance that we alone note, while knowing nothing of the man. Of matter in its ultimate essence and apart from motion we know nothing whatever.
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