United States or Tanzania ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
In the case of the Lord, on the other hand, who is in the enjoyment of self-established supreme bliss, it can in no way be maintained that he must be joined to a body, consisting of all sentient and non-sentient beings, for the purpose of enjoyment. That view also according to which a 'body' means no more than a means of enjoyment is refuted hereby.
Consciousness is eternal and incapable of change. This self-luminous consciousness, further, is eternal, for it is not capable of any form of non-existence whether so called antecedent non-existence or any other form. This follows from its being self-established. For the antecedent non-existence of self-established consciousness cannot be apprehended either through consciousness or anything else.
If that consciousness which has a jar for its object were itself apprehended as non-limited in time, the object also the jar would be apprehended under the same form, i.e. it would be eternal. And if self-established consciousness were eternal, it would be immediately cognised as eternal; but this is not the case.
In Massachusetts even Puritans who declined to acknowledge the form of church government prescribed by the self-established ecclesiastical authority were practically aliens, compelled to bear the burdens of church and state, and without a chance of making themselves felt in the government. And yet, from their own point of view, the position of the Puritan rulers was totally illogical.
Any instrument of knowledge proving the non-existence of consciousness, could do so only by making consciousness its object 'this is consciousness'; but consciousness, as being self-established, does not admit of that objectivation which is implied in the word 'this, and hence its previous non-existence cannot be proved by anything lying outside itself.
The two clauses 'to its own substrate' and 'at the present moment' have to be supplied in this second definition also. Consciousness is not eternal. It was further maintained by the purvapakshin that as consciousness is self-established it has no antecedent non-existence and so on, and that this disproves its having an origin.
That there can be but one such principle, may be proved a priori; for were there two or more, each must refer to some other, by which its equality is affirmed; consequently neither would be self-established, as the hypothesis demands. And a posteriori, it will be proved by the principle itself when it is discovered, as involving universal antecedence in its very conception.
Word Of The Day