The Eternal Message Of The Gita-The Seer And The Seen-II

Sri Ramakrishna

oi-Staff

By Staff

Tuesday, March 3, 2009, 18:07

Only the 'seer' never changes. The consciousness of Being, this immediate certitude which I had as a child, and which I have even now as a man, this consciousness of Being remains independent of any change. Who, then, is conscious of the modifications? 'That' cannot be an object of knowledge. Even when the ego-consciousness disappears, as in deep sleep or in swoon, the consciousness of Being does not disappear: It is a direct intuition which does not enter into the categories of existence or non-existence. We cannot hold it before us and say: 'This is the consciousness of Being.' It is the light of the 'seer' which permits us to know all the objects of perception.

In our ignorance, however, we identify ourselves with the 'seen'. The Gita denounces our mistake as follows: 'All actions are only accomplished by the gunas, the qualities of Nature, Prakriti. He who is deceived by egotism thinks, "It is me who acts".' (Gita, 3.27) This initial error is developed in us as soon as we come into contact with the world and interpret this contact as 'ours'. In this way the 'I' arrogates all sensory and mental processes to itself.

The error of arrogating all sensory and mental processes to itself will be exposed by a serious analysis of the nature of an experience that we may have had, and of which I will give an example: I am in the Bay of Mont St. Michel and, one evening, I am walking along the immense beach, admiring the sun which is setting in the sea. At some distance the Mont St. Michel rises up before me, and my attention is successively going to the sound of the waves coming to die down at my feet, to the beauty of the sky, and to the mist gathering around the spire of the abbey. I'm afraid to venture on the quicksands, and I am experiencing a thousand other sensations. Of this 'seen' I am the 'seer'... until the moment when I wake up: Everything that I had thought to be real was only a dream!

What lesson can we draw from this experience? To the ego of the waking state it is clear that all beings and objects of the dream were unreal. However much the ego of the dream—the sailor that I then was—looked upon itself as the 'seer', in reality it was part of the 'seen' in the same quality as all the objects perceived and all the sensations experienced. The 'seen' and the 'seer' of the dream state are both simultaneously the 'seen' to the 'seer' of the waking state. Can we apply this conclusion to the objects and sensations of the waking state as well?

The Mandukya Karika (II, 4) assures us that, by the very fact that these objects and sensations are perceived in the sensate world, they are unreal. And, in fact, if the ego of the waking state would examine without bias what its nature would be, it would realize that its various states, its various aspects, belong to the 'seen'. It would realize its unity with the whole of beings and objects perceived.

In this respect the dream experience is significant: On waking up the dream appears as
a non-dual whole. In the series of objects of consciousness—the sound of the waves, the sky and the Mont St. Michel—the consciousness was not centred in me, the sailor, for nature and me formed but one integral whole. To think that I, the sailor, was looking at the Mont St. Michel, would be as inaccurate, as absurd, as to think that the Mont St. Michel was looking at the sailor! Nature, prakriti, is one undivided whole. It is through ignorance, ajnana, that the consciousness is being claimed for oneself, thereby opposing oneself to the 'unconscious' objects.

In fact, on waking up the 'I' of the dream appears to have had no more consistency than the objects which it believed to know. So with what right and with what logic would you attribute consciousness to this 'I'? As to the consciousness itself, neither the dream nor the waking state altered it; it does not become unreal on waking up, it only changes its expression. If the consciousness of Existence in the dream would prove to be unreal, then how could it reappear in the waking state? The consciousness of Being is Existence which never becomes non-existent.

About the author

Swami Siddheswarananda

Swami Siddheswarananda (1897-1957) was a monk of the Ramakrishna Order, and for twenty years until his death, the spiritual head of the Centre Vedantique Ramakrichna at Gretz, France. This commentary of the learned Swami on the various themes of the Gita was orginally published in French in the 'Bulletin of the Centre Vedantique' during 1955-57. This article is the fifth instalment of a series of about a dozen articles, each independent in itself. English translation and editing was done by Mr. Andre van den Brink.

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