Tract on Cognition

Objects are fabrications of the light of consciousness. Cognitive process involves rise of determinate cognition, which is preceded by the indeterminate.

This indeterminate has four stages, viz., tendency to rise, commencement of the process of rising, completion of the process of rising and discharge of its causal function.

Ordinarily a perceiver is not conscious of these four stages of his consciousness. Each perceived object is a momentary collocation of a number of variegated manifestations.

This world of limited manifestations is experienced in two ways, unveiled and partially veiled.

In unveiled experience the external objects are perceived or apprehended as merged in the cosmic consciousness and in partially veiled as external objects.

In between these two experiences, there are innumerable forms of experiences which are different from one another.

In the manifestation, both individual subjects and objects are manifested universally as in the case of aesthetic experience of drama and poetry.

At empirical level or ordinary experience, they are manifested as individuals.

When this power of consciousness is active, it reacts to the external objects, to perform different perceptual and physical actions. This knowledge is simply an affected state of consciousness. Shifting of attention from one object to another is not usually taken notice of. One act of knowledge fades into the next.

These acts of knowledge are so interlinked to each other that it is not possible to say exactly when one act of knowledge begins and the other ends.

It is overcome when we become aware of the gap between any two items arising in each succession of determinate knowledge, and we are thrown to our true nature.

Process of knowing rises like two waves, the subjective and the objective in the sea of cosmic consciousness.

The subjective wave has the capacity to receive the reflection while the objective to appear as the object of it which leads to its cognition.

The act of knowing consists not in bringing the subject and the object closer to each other culminating in the identity of the two. What actually results out of unification of the two is pure consciousness.

The process of memory is the power of consciousness, which can retain the effects of the external stimuli received at the time of perception and is able to revive them at the time of subsequent perception of a similar thing so as to make the unification of the experiences of the present and the past possible.

The process of differentiation is that function of consciousness which makes out each manifestation as either subject or object.

When all projections get dissolved, there arises the true nature of consciousness.

Since manifestation is the very nature of consciousness, it is natural for it to assume all possible forms. This nature of consciousness differentiates Itself from what is not self.

Now, if the Consciousness appears in all perceptible forms, it may be seem to be of transitory nature. This apprehension loses its ground as soon as one realises the all-comprehensiveness of consciousness since there is nothing apart from consciousness which may require to be represented by it.

It is by virtue of getting manifested that what is inherent in consciousness appears as different from it like our own ideas at the time of imagination or dream.

Just as nothing is lost nor anything gets added to the sea with the rise and fall of waves even so there is no substantial loss or gain to the Consciousness due to the manifestation of forms.

Each manifestation subsists in Consciousness as its inherent attributes, in the same way as our ideas subsist within us before being expressed.

The terms “real” and “unreal” are inadequate to define this relationship between consciousness and its manifestation.

Therefore, consciousness is beginningless, endless and independent of all what appears as other than it. It contains within it all that is in existence by virtue of being existence as well as itself.

Hence, manifestation is its illumination like sun of the sun, which sees and knows through the agency of the individual. As such, there is nothing which can know consciousness except for consciousness itself.

Therefore, the knowledge of consciousness is an act of consciousness looking at consciousness.

This holds good on all levels of existence, be it perceptual, mental, ideational or spiritual.

Perception is made possible only when consciousness operates on the sensory data via manas. Even the non-being owes its existence to consciousness on account of being just ideational.

The nature of consciousness is thus self-luminous, self-conscious and free from limitations of time and space.

The process by which one can know one’s true nature is move within oneself even at the time of perceiving of an object in the world outside. This is the yogic process, i.e. being constantly conscious.