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Integral approach to knowledge in Vedanta. Part 1
Presentation by Vladimir and discussion with the UHU team.
Since many of you were not present during our discussions with Rod and Rudy, it would be interesting for me and for us, I suppose, to see how far we can understand this conceptVedantic paradigm and develop it in some way in order to discover the major platform for our University.
On the other hand if we are only presenting the bits of knowledge and experiences, which is also very nice in itself, then, as I think, it cannot serve the purpose of our seminars to discover the integral paradigm of knowledge.
So before we go into discussion I would like first to present to you the concept of integral paradigm as it was seen in Vedanta. This concept is a starting point for us and not the final thing. Of course, it has its own finality and its own perfection already, because it is based on Vedic vision, which is more or less integral. It is an interesting view, for it has another perception of consciousness. The faculties of consciousness are treated here differently than in the later Sankhya and Yoga schemes of knowledge. The Epistemology of Vedanta maintains that every faculty of consciousness: sight, hearing, speech, mind, body and prana (breathing in and out), have their own universal and even transcendental domains. So, if in a later Sankhya we see these faculties treated as senses, as the doors forthe information to flow into the mind, called‘manas’, treating the mind as the synthesizerof this information, then in Vedanta it was seen quite differently.
The Sankhya’s paradigm has developed later (appr. 500 BC) when the rational mind and structure of consciousness was finally formed and dominated the previous developmental stage of consciousness, appearing for the first time on the historical arena. This shift of paradigm which happened several times in the history of mankind was clearly defined by Sri Aurobindo as a shift from the Vedic to the Vedantic and from the Vedantic to the Sankhyaic paradigm. And it is in Sankyaic paradigm that we all live and think even now, where mind is seen as the one which dominates and treats all the faculties of consciousness as its own senses. We believe that the mind is the only leader of our life, and all the other sense are only feeding it with information, giving it access to the outer or inner reality.
But in the Vedantic paradigm, which was a sort of transition from the Vedic to the Sankhyaic, these faculties were seen differently, they were having their own domains, so to say. Seeing and Hearing and Speech were treated in an equal way with the Mind. Mind was not dominating them yet. Mind was a part of this process of cognition, or one of the streams of consciousness.
So, if we look through the eyes of Vedanta, we will find another view on Man and Universe. These faculties are always mentioned in dvandvas, pairs, and I will write them on the board in Sanskrit terms, butwill translate them to you:
So we have:
CHAKSHUS and SHROTRAM, Seeing and Hearing;
MANAS and VAC, Mind and Speech;
PRANA and APANA or ANNA, Breathing in and out, or Life-force and Body.
PRANA,
VAYU
MANAS, SHROTRAM
SOMA, DISHAH
CHAKSHUS, VAK,
ADITYA AGNI,
APANA,ANNA
(pict.1)
When Bhrigu approaches his father Varuna and asks him: “Teach me about Brahman”, adhīhi bhagavo brahmeti, he hears the answer: annam, prāṇam, cakṣuḥ, šrotraṃ, mano vācam iti. These six faculties are the definition of Brahman. It is a very interesting view, for Brahman, and you can see it for yourself, is not something which is abstract and present only beyond, it is also presented here as consciousness and as these six faculties.
All of them have their representation not only in the individual frame but also in all domains in the Universal and even in the transcendental plain. For instance, if we take the Word, there are four levels of speech as I mentionedit before:
1)Transcendental, Parā Vāk,
2)Pašyantī, Intentional-Cognitive,
3)Madhyamā, Cognitive-Formative
4)Vaikharī, Expressive
Dominique: Can you redefine prana and apana?
Vladimir: yes, Prana is breathing in, and the Apana is breathing out. And Annam is matter.
I will have to build it from the beginning, I guess, for otherwise the whole concept will not become clear. So if we review these six we will see that there are not yet the five senses of the Sankhya system, which comeslater. There is no taste and smell incorporated into the system, there are only: seeing, hearing, and touch of the Sankhya.
Now we could see an interesting relation between these six faculties. If Vāc is an expression of šrotram, and it is quite interesting, for šrotram is a perceptive faculty, and we dealt with it, last time in Aurelio’s presentation, when he led us through hearing fromwithin the womb to the outside, and when we have opened our eyes finally then we could see the difference between the seeing and the hearing, because hearing together with seeing is something different altogether. There is a domination of the seeing faculty over the hearing, though the hearing faculty always stays at the background, so to say.
Thus Vac as the vibration of consciousness was seen as an expression of this all pervading space of Hearing, because Hearing isthe faculty of sustaining the whole multitude of things in oneness. Now, once in this oneness, in this space of oneness, which is known to us as space, there is a vibration, this vibration is the expression of it: Vac, Speech or Sound, which later takes Form in manifestation.
Here we have another view: if šrotram is perceptive then vāc is active presentation of this perception. Sri Aurobindo also defines speech as an active representation of this all-pervading hearing-perception. Is it clear? Hearing is like a layout or like a substance within which, when it is vibrating, we perceive the sound.
Next is another pair. So cakṣus, seeing is perceptive. We have two perceptive faculties: seeing and hearing and nothing else. Think about it. So to be perceptive they have to be passive, in order to absorb or to take in. Everything is being calm down when we wantto hear, we are shutting down our activities, we are becoming passive and then perceptive. So the active part of Hearing is the Word, and of Seeing is the Thought. And here we are dealing with another concept of thinking, which we are not used to. But if we look at it from the Vedic or Vedantic point of view we will find that the Mind has a particular quality or characteristic: to dwell on the image of things, to hold them, to fix them in consciousness. And the concentration of the power of the mind to hold it in order to give it an expression, Vac, that expression of Vac is compared with Agni, whereas Manas is compared to Soma, and the oblation of Soma into Agni nourishes the flame of Agni, the expression. I cannot go now into the details of this profound psychological imagery, which we study in IPI in our sessions.
Neeltje: I still have a question, a little before. If seeing and hearing were the first expressions of Brahman, they have only the perceptive quality and not other, because it goes out?
Vladimir: They don’t have only the perceptive qualities, they have also active qualities. Seeing-Thinking; Hearing-Speaking;
Neeltje: Ah, you take them as one: seeing-thinking, etc.?
Vladimir: They are one. And they are not one, because when you are active, when the process of seeing becomes active, you hold the object or the image of thing in front of your consciousness. How do you hold it, by what power? By the power of the mind! The Power of the mind has this capacity to hold, to fix things within the consciousness and thus to observe and to see them. Now to observe you have to hold, and to hold you have to use the power of thought, thinking. Thinking for us has become something else altogether. In Sankhyaic paradigm it is completely different already, about which we have hardly any idea, what it actually does, and how it does it. It is a process of some kind of logic and so on, if we go to Greeks we will find another view on thinking, which finally resulted in what is known to us as “I think that’s why I exist”- is our modern paradigm.
But in Upanishads we will find that thinking and speaking are always together, where the speech is an expression of something which is already there, fixed by the mind. So to express something which is there, to express it in speech, and speech is an expression of that holding or dwelling of consciousness on the image of things. – That is Vedic paradigm. We are talking about something which is beyond our rational structure of consciousness.
Neeltje: Sorry, but our human instrument is… our seeing goes through the eyes, afterwards eyes were created, you would say, something like that, and the mind was created, etc. I feel that the first faculty of seeing is the original faculty, from where we have this word ‘seer’, from which other faculties were created later.
Vladimir: Yes, it is a universal faculty. And they were recognized as the universal faculties. Every creature in the world has all these faculties. Every creature sees, hears, etc. If seeing can be described as a direct evidence of the truth, direct in a sense, as the Russian proverb says: ‘better to see once than to hear 100 times’. To see once means that it is there, it is surely there, you have already touched it, as it were, even though it can be a miraculous thing, a mirage, which is not there, an illusion. But in a way seeing was seen in the Vedic tradition as the major faculty of revelation, Drishti. Revelation of the Truth. Sri Aurobindo says in Savitri: ‘But who had seen the body of the King?’ And that is exactly that, that nobody saw His Body, of the King, of the Lord. Have we seen his body? Who has come to the final revelation or manifestation of the Divine, which will be only then when we could see him?It is not that we would hear about him as usually do. We hear about him all the time but we don’t really see him, we don’t come into concrete touch with him in his manifested form.
So if Seeing is a direct evidence of the truth, then šrotram can be defined as indirect. Indirect in a sense that you can hear about it but you don’t see it, it is not there yet in its form. So everything which is not there yet manifest, but has an intention to be manifested, has a will, and this will is Vac, it is Vac which brings something which wants to be manifested out of Unmanifest. It is the Will of the Lord.
Matthijs: Vladimir, how is then these Prana and Apana, if we follow this logic?
Vladimir: Here, when Prana and Apana appears, the manifestation comes into being. These four: cakṣus-šrotram, manas and vāc, are considered to be Brahma chatuṣpād, Brahman on the four legs. It is through these four that the Spirit gets manifested in the world as Prana and Apana. There was a separation between Heaven and Earth. These were seen as heaven and earth, this (manas) is our father, and this (vāc) is our mother, earth. This is meaning (artha) in linguistic terms, and this is speech (vāc) or the sound of speech. The meaning and sound were one at the beginning but then they got separated. By what they got separated? By Prana. And Prana manifested itself in matter as Apana. For those who study with us Upanishads it says a lot, especially regarding the viewon Death in the Aitareya Upanishad, where matter was caught by the Spirit, by the means of Death, by the means of Apana. Apana is a breathing out, as bringing spirit into matter. What is annam, matter? In Sanskrit it lit. means ‘eatable’, it is from root ad, to eat, ppp. “Eatable”, carrying within the spirit.
Now, this is Brahman in manifestation, as Prana and Apana. Does it make sense? These are the fundamentals and they take time to settle down in our understanding. So if you have questions, you are most welcome, before we proceed, because I want to show how these develop later and especially how they can lead us to the conception of integral learning.
Bhavana: You said that it was a part of the evolving or devolving series in the middle. Can you explain why would we go back for this kind of vision?
Vladimir: It is an interesting question. Why should we at all go back? Can’t we simply go forward without looking back? (22.09)
Well there is a good answer to this question. Why should Hegel or Derida study Aristotle? What is the point? If we are advanced so much why should we at all look back and study Plato and before Plato? What IS our consciousness and how it can be perceived? Why do we need those beginnings? We need them for some reason. And of course there is an answer given by Gebser: we have to integrate all the structures of consciousness, for they all are present within us. We are not only rational beings, we are also mythical, magical and even archaic beings. In our embryo life we have an archaic consciousness, which is still waiting to be integrated into this final integral stage.
Now if we look back to these developmental changes: shifts of paradigms, we find ourselves understanding our own consciousness deeper. We are adding to our consciousness other structures, we are widening our possibilities, getting a historical depth within our own individual consciousness, as it were. It sounds very reasonable and it is true, it has its own effect which is beyond reason. That is why we are attracted to those beginnings. Why do we need to study Vedas? It is so profound! this archaic structure, this luminous beginning. It gives us all the keys to understand what happened later in the next shift and the next and so on.
You asked me what is the difference between Vedic and Vedantic paradigm, and why we are dealing with the Vedantic and not the Vedic one? I can only say that the Vedic is not reachable for usyet. The Veda is to be still discovered. And in the Vedas we cannot find any such interest in building up any educational system. Veda haddifferent approach to knowledge, as Sri Aurobindo says: ‘Veda is not logical. It does not confute anything.’ It is not interested to build up a system in which we will educate ourselves. It puts experiences next to each other even though they may contradict in logic terms to each other. So these seemingly contradicting experiences are adding to the perception of a higher consciousness a new dimension in the Vedic epistemology. So every time when they seem to contradict to each other, though they are true in themselves, they are building up or widening understanding of that profound consciousness of Brahman. That was the method of the Veda. We cannot go into it in details without spending much time. But in Vedanta these intuitions of the Veda were put into structure. That intuitive knowledge was deconstructed and put into the language which is more suiting for our understanding. These faculties, for example, were described as devatas, deities. They are not senses yet in Sankhyaic terms, but deities, the universal representatives of Purusha.
Purusha, according to Aitareya, was brought forth by the Atman for the sake of manifestation, who concentrated on him his power of consciousness: Tapas. Purusha was heated up with this energy, his faculties one after another broke forth.
His mouth broke forth and from the mouth Speech and from the Speech - Fire.
His nostrils broke forth and from the nostrils Breath and from the Breath Wind, Vayu, Cosmic Vital Energy.
His eyes broke forth and from his eyes Sight, cakṣus, and from the Sight Sun.
His ears broke forth and from the ears Hearing, šrotram, and from the Hearing Space. Etc. etc.
Now you can see the beauty of this paradigm. It is that all the manifestation came into being because the faculties were already there. The light of the Sun appeared not because of some big bang and then later we developed our sight but because there was a sight, a need to see, that is why the Sun, all the suns, appeared to support this faculty of His Sight, which later will be recreated in the individual frame. Or the Hearing which created Space from which we already can hear, because the Space is the foundation of hearing.
So the Vedantic paradigm puts into another order all the Knowledge which was there in the Veda, and of course the Vedanta refers to the Veda as the highest authority of Knowledge.
What is surprising most is that Vedanta is highly appreciated in the West as philosophical in its nature, whereas the Veda is treated as barbaric.