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more. The seer is not dissociated from the seen. There is nothing to act as a bar or a
distinguishing line between the subject and the object. The universe no more stands
there as an object of experience, it is the Subject of All-Experience. Here, the Universal
Spirit is what it is; none is there to know it, or experience it. It is experience pure. It is
experience itself, not an experience of something. Nothing can be said about it, for there
is none to say anything. This is the final attainment (Turiya).
The seventh stage is also called, sometimes,  liberation while living (Jivanmukti). The
body may be there, but it is no more a body for the knower. What a liberated soul feels,
no one else can understand. There is no standard by which one can judge that person.
The state is beyond imagination. What happens to the soul in liberation, one has no
means to measure or convey. The Goal of life is reached.
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CHAPTER XII
THE SYSTEM OF YOGA
PATANJALI S PRESCRIPTIONS FOR MEDITATION IN LIFE
Meditations which are more occult in nature consist mainly in the exercise of the will,
charged with a determined understanding. This system, too, has a philosophical basis,
though it takes an intensely practical turn when the exercise commences. This type of
meditation is psychic in the beginning though spiritual in the end, a process by which
one places oneself in a closer affinity with the objects of the world. By continued
habituation to the subsisting relationship between oneself and the things of the world
one gets into their substance and, in a sense, embraces the very roots of objectivity. The
meditational techniques prescribed in the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali border upon a cosmic
association of oneself with objects, stage by stage, commencing with particular things
chosen for the purpose of meditation, and gradually expanding the area of action into
other objects, culminating in the concentration of consciousness on that great reservoir
of all things, the universe of elements and forces.
The object of meditation is generally regarded by novitiates as some isolated, individual,
localised unit with no connection with other units, or other locations. That it is mostly
taken to be so has been observed often in our earlier studies. This is the normal way of
human appreciation. The segmentation of object is caused by a notion in the mind,
according to which the object is a point of definition, by which set of characterisation,
definitions which apply to other objects do not apply to this particular concerned object.
The mind associates name and form with objects. It cannot think, conceive, or visualise
an object as it is in itself. The objects, when they are presented to human perception and
cognition, are already conditioned by these associations, viz., name and form.
There is a form given to the object of concentration. The form is a peculiar nexus of
composition which distinguishes it from other forms. In fact, the differentia which
isolates from other objects the particular point of concentration is the complex of
formation - Rupa, the network of definition. But the mistake lies in the position that the
form itself is taken to be the object. The metaphysical essence of the object is identified
with the phenomenal form with which it is invested, and this identification is made
worse by another imagination that it exists in its own status and bears no relation with
others.
It was observed that the universe is an organism and not a society of isolated fragments.
As it does not constitute an assemblage of differentiated parts but stands unified within
itself, the empirical notion of the object cannot bear the test of deeper investigation.
There is a basic error in the very act of sensory perception. The inward organic
relationship which obtains between things at their back does not become the object of
perception. What is cognised is only the form. It is difficult to explain the intricate
involvements which contribute to the very subsistence of this name-form complex of the
object. The form of the object is a temporary abstraction from a larger possibility of
which also it is capable, but of which it is divested due to the particular intentions and
abilities of the observing principle, observer, the percipient, or, rather, the desires of the
individual. There are researches which have concluded that the constitution of a
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particular object does not merely depend on the nature of the relationship to a
percipient, but it also depends much on its own individual appetitions. The status which
an object occupies, the form which it assumes and even the relationship it bears to
others are all determined by the basic affirmative force which maintains its given
complex-form. The object is just this much, viz., the name-form nexus. One has to
stretch the imagination somewhat to understand what all this means.
The secret of this way of interpreting the structure of objects is in the foundations of the
Samkhya system of analysis, which, with some modifications, is now being propounded
in the fields of present-day science. The pioneers in modern physics have come to the
conclusion that the object so-called is not an existent something, but an abstraction, and
the meaning of this word has to be clear to us. An abstraction is a philosophical concept
by which what is intended is the segregation of a specific group of characters from the
infinite possibilities of the universe by shutting out all such possibilities for the sake of a
tentative convenience or a necessity arising out of a type of affirmation of individuality,
which is what is called the  object . While there is an infinitude of resources at the
background, there is a vast sea of potentials, one does not wish to present oneself as a
sea, but would like to be projected as a percentage of the possibilities of this vastness,
and become, for all practical purposes, one among the many and not the only one that is
at the source. The analogy of the waves in the ocean is well known, but it does not
explain the matter fully, because every wave is like every other wave in its essence.
Though the size, the force, or the shape of a wave may differ from those of other waves,
the quintessential base of one wave is the same as that of other waves. But, here, in the
case of the objects that are being contemplated in this fashion, the case is different. One
object is not like another object. There is an essential difference in the very structure of
the objects, which arises on account of the difference in the nature of the self-
affirmation, the central force, or the nucleus of the individuality, which is in every
object, and which isolates itself, and has to isolate itself, from other such centres of
affirmation, for its most surprising non-altruistic satisfaction. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]