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Up. Up. Up. Now, 'Hearing, 'reflection, and 'meditation, are helpful towards cognising the sense of these Vedic texts.
And that that self-luminous knowledge which you declare to be borne witness to by itself, really consists in the knowledge of particular objects of knowledge such knowledge abiding in particular cognising subjects this also has been proved previously.
To the objection that if being a cognising subject constituted the essential nature of the Self it would follow that as the Self is omnipresent, there would be consciousness always and everywhere, the next Sutra replies. How is this known? Since Scripture says that it passes out, goes and returns. Up.
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.
That cognising subject is himself something fictitiously superimposed on Brahman! This may not be, we reply: he himself would in that case be something to be negatived, and hence an object of the 'terminating' cognition; he could not therefore be the subject of cognition! Well, then, let us assume that the essential nature of Brahman itself is the cognising subject!
From this it would follow, we reply, that such 'terminating' knowledge would not arise at all; for that the destruction of what is something permanent can clearly not originate! Who moreover should, according to you, be the cognising subject in a cognition which has for its object the negation of everything that is different from Brahman?
Even if the Pradhana were inferred by some reasoning different from the arguments so far refuted by us, our objections would remain in force because, anyhow, the Pradhana is devoid of the power of a cognising subject. The Pradhana thus cannot be established by any mode of inference. And even if it be admitted; on account of the absence of a purpose.
No one can bring intellectual difficulties to a being to whom cognising was a foreign process, nor moral difficulties to one who knew no conflict of wills, nor sorrows to one "all breathing human passion far above." If we picture the ideal of all mankind as thinking our thoughts, willing as we will, feeling as we feel, we are united to Him by an intellectual, moral and emotional bond of sympathy.
It is a true paradox that ignorance like obliviscence forms part of the process of human cognising. Probably in the truth of things memory is of the essence of mind. Thoughts naturally and spontaneously reproduce themselves. The past of experience tends automatically to carry forward into the present.
The next Sutra refers to the reasons set forth for his view by the Purvapakshin and refutes them. Where the cognising person is one only, repetition of the same matter under a new heading can only be explained as meaning difference of object enjoined, and hence separation of the two vidyas. The next Sutra refutes the argument founded on a rite enjoined in the Mundaka.
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