Questions & Answers
Pariprasna
April 2021
QUESTION: Can the mind of a man comprehend the witness who is not revealing Himself? What is the way? MAHARAJ: The witness cannot be comprehended as an object by the mind. Because, immediately it is seen as an object it ceases to be witness or the seer. It is just like the eye. We see all things with the eye, but the eye cannot see itself in the way in which it sees other things. Yet its existence is not doubted. So also there is a centre of consciousness which is not the object of perception, but through whose power all perceptions are possible. If we are to have an experience of it in itself, we have to eliminate from its field all perceptions and all the instruments with which it is in identification in the process of perception. For example, there are the senses, the mind, the intellect, the will, etc. The luminosity of the seer is percolating through all of the instruments of perception and thus the seer is in identification with all of them and is not able to recognize his autonomy. Now to realize the separateness of the instruments and recognize their separateness from himself, it is a very difficult exercise in inward concentration, and so the Upanishads compare it to the separation of a very subtle stalk of a blade of grass from the fibrous materials adhering to it. If this could be done and the witness recognized in his isolation, then there will be comprehension of one’s essential nature as the unaffected witness. Of course it is not the mind that ultimately comprehends, because all the mental faculties have to be objectified and then there is no power of comprehension for them. The witness has to be realized as pure Self-awareness, which is another name for Samadhi. QUESTION: How did the Jivatma originate? When one becomes a Jivanmukta has he got to take any future birth? When one becomes a Mukta, what becomes of the Atman, the ‘I sense’? MAHARAJ: The Hindu spiritual tradition has two metaphysical positions. One is the pure absolutist point of view for which everything objective is a mere appearance, the pure subject alone being the real. An appearance means something that is experienced, but does not exist none the less in the way it is experienced. From this point of view, the universe, inclusive of the Jiva, is an appearance only. It does not actually exist, and the reason for its origination as also of the world, does not therefore arise.
33 The Vedanta Kesari
PA G E D O N O R : S R I V I N AYA K S U TA R , B E L A G AV I
Srimat Swami Tapasyananda Ji (1904 – 1991) was one of the Vice-Presidents of the Ramakrishna Order. His deeply convincing answers to devotees’ questions raised in spiritual retreats and in personal letters have been published in book form as Spiritual Quest: Questions & Answers. Pariprasna is a selection from this book.
