न तत्र सूर्यो भाति न चन्द्रतारकं नेमा विद्युतो भान्ति कुतोऽयमग्निः । तमेव भान्तमनुभाति सर्वं तस्य भासा सर्वमिदं विभाति ॥
na tatra sūryo bhāti na candratārakaṃ nemā vidyuto bhānti kuto'yamagniḥ tameva bhāntamanubhāti sarvaṃ tasya bhāsā sarvamidaṃ vibhāti
There the sun shines not and the moon has no splendor and the stars are blind; there these lightnings flash not, how then shall burn this earthly fire? All that shines is but the shadow of His shining; all this universe is effulgent with His light.
~ Verse 2.2.11
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Acharya Prashant (AP): “There the sun shines not and the moon has no splendor and the stars are blind; there these lightnings flash not, how then shall burn this earthly fire? All that shines is but the shadow of His shining; all this universe is effulgent with His light.”
Beautiful. One does not feel like speaking on it; it is almost an act of irreverence, and also an act that cannot ever fully succeed. It is probably enough to just read it and re-read it and keep reading it. Anyway, I will attempt to say something.
“There the sun shines not and the moon has no splendor and the stars are blind; there these lightnings flash not, how then shall burn this earthly fire?"
All the objects that you have in this universe are no more there. Where? In the purest state of the mind, because the purest state of mind is a point of pure subjectivity. What is pure subjectivity? The subject and the object merge into one. The fundamental separation that is at the root of our misery is dissolved. So, neither are there objects, nor is there the light that acts as the bridge between subjects and objects. When objects are not there, when light is not there, how can any separation be there? How can the universe be there?
In some way this is a most honest description of pure subjectivity, and in another way this is a great method to shock the mind out of its regular patterns of perception. Mind has a pattern, it imagines. Even in its imagination it cannot conceive seeing something sans light; it cannot conceive existing sans objects or space. And here the sage is shocking the mind out of its regular mode of experience. He says there is that possibility in which there is nothing that you know of, not even time. This befuddles the mind, and when the mind is befuddled, then it becomes a little receptive to something that is not in its usual patterns, in its normal habit.
“All that shines is but the shadow of His shining; all this universe is effulgent with His light.”
All that you experience in your dualistic perception arises from that something special that we just referred to. Otherwise, you can have the fire, you can have the stone, you can have a great wall just behind the fire, and you can have a body exactly similar to yours but without any consciousness, and there would be no fire experienced by the body. You can have a body, a sensory mechanism that is a total replica—in the material sense—of your body, and yet it would know nothing, see nothing, hear nothing, experience nothing. Brahman is that special something at the foundation of all your experiences, and you experience the world; therefore, Brahman is said to be the foundation of the world.
There is no objective world sans the subject to experience it. And in spite of the presence of the objective world, the subject would experience nothing were it just a material entity arising out of the material world. Had the subject been just a material entity born out of the material world, the subject wouldn’t have been able to experience the material world. Some reactions might have happened. This mic is gathering my voice right now, the sound waves are hitting some electronic and mechanical system within; but you cannot equate it to the ears. The camera is gathering my image, but there is a fundamental difference in quality between the eyes and the camera.
There is a fundamental difference in quality between the brain and the mind. The brain is absolutely material, and we agree that it can be replicated one day; we are already cloning cells. But the mind? There is something related to the mind that is just not material, and that is everything, because everything is in that. Is there the universe without consciousness? So, everything is in consciousness, and consciousness is from that which we are calling as Brahman , that special something, that miracle. Therefore, it is said that the entire universe arises from Brahman ; in other words, consciousness arises from Brahman .
When you say consciousness arises from Brahman , what you are actually saying is that consciousness does not arise from material alone. Like everything else with the Upanishads, read this statement also in negativa. ‘Consciousness arises from *Brahman*’ is to be read as, consciousness does not arise from material alone.
Questioner (Q): You said consciousness is not dependent on material…
AP: Material alone .
Q: Still, consciousness can be considered as a function of the material, because if someone’s brain is damaged or someone dies, consciousness ceases. How is consciousness, then, independent of the material? What is the role of the material in consciousness? Or is this the case just for me?
AP: It is just for you. See, your material, which is your brain, determines your particular consciousness. What we talk of or what we experience is not pure consciousness but personal consciousness, and personal consciousness obviously depends on the person, which is the body. So, no more body, no more personal consciousness. What we are saying is that the mere presence of the brain is not the presence of consciousness itself. Neurons, the entire nervous system is necessary, but not sufficient. Remove the brain, and the entire sense of personal ‘I’ is gone, no doubt about it. But the brain by itself does not suffice to produce the ‘I’. You could take it like this: Consciousness is impersonal but personalized through the brain.
Q: So, this verse is referring to the impersonal consciousness?
AP: Impersonal consciousness, and that is called pure consciousness or Ātman . Which means, the more your consciousness is dependent on your brain, which is your body, the more you are in a state of bondage. Therefore, liberation is about liberating your consciousness from the bundle of conditioning that your body is.
Q: So, the personal consciousness could be the forces which are driving me—fear, anxiety, lust, for example. And that is…
AP: Everything, all of that.
Q: …because the material is heavily driving that consciousness?
AP: But do not ask, “What then is impersonal consciousness?” Do not ask, “What is pure consciousness?” because pure consciousness is actually simply a dissolution of all that which you know as normal consciousness. Limited vision, limited perception, the fear, the greed, the lust that you just talked of—all that is personal consciousness, and all these things are introduced as stains or distortions in the consciousness by the brain.
So, the brain is the storehouse of the various impressions and the various latent tendencies, and when the brain exports all these things that it has into consciousness, what you get is your impure or personal consciousness.
Q: So, the pure consciousness is trying to manifest itself through…
AP: See, the brain is the vessel, pure consciousness is infinite. But if the vessel is dirty, then anything that you put into it will also get dirty, and that dirty consciousness is called personal consciousness, and that’s what we live in. The dirt in the personal consciousness comes from the brain, which is the body. Therefore, the scriptures talk so much about disidentifying from the body, because the bodily tendencies are what is distorting or corrupting the consciousness.
Q: You said consciousness cannot arise in the case of cloning. But the natural way of birth is also an application of genes; it is almost like cloning. There, by default, the personal consciousness is evolved. So, a personal consciousness could be cloned also.
AP: Obviously.
Q: So, is there any chance that pure consciousness is still there?
AP: No. When you say pure consciousness is still there, you are locating it in space or somewhere; you are trying to talk of pure consciousness from within the impurity of your brain. So, that kind of speculation is bound to fail. The maximum we can do is talk of the impurities.
See, that is the reason why Buddha’s teachings were successful in a space where classical Vedanta was corrupted: because Buddha would only talk of that which needs to be disallowed or falsified. He would not talk of what Ātman is; he would rather talk of how the ego masquerades as the Ātman . He would, therefore, not talk of pure consciousness; he would only talk of how impure our consciousness is.
The moment you start talking about pure consciousness, you get into this particular trap. You start speculating, imagining, and you start conducting thought experiments, that if a thing is cloned, then will it have pure consciousness, impure consciousness. The problem is that when you are conducting all these thought experiments, you do not realize that you are sprinting, galloping within the boundaries of conditioned space-time. And from within these boundaries, you are trying to speculate about something that is beyond the brain by definition.
So, it suffices to say that our consciousness is impure, our consciousness is stained by all the stuff that the brain is carrying as memory, as conditioning, as impressions. What will happen if consciousness is liberated from the unworthy company of the brain? Let’s not talk about it.
I was once asked: When one is no more body-identified, where does his consciousness live? The fellow was happily imagining that consciousness is something that floats in space, pure consciousness, and impure consciousness is something that you absorb from space; because you have absorbed it, now it comes in contact with the brain and therefore gets stained. Whereas, pure consciousness is like waves and those waves are floating in space. This kind of speculation just doesn’t help. Therefore, I aver that we should talk of falsenesses. We should not venture too much into the Truth. It won’t help.
Somebody was giving this example that, you know, pure consciousness is like radio waves and your brain is the receiver. So, just as voice is heard from a radio set only when the radio set is there—when the radio set is not there, then, irrespective of the presence of waves, you will hear no sound—similarly a fellow is conscious only when the body is there. When the body is not there, consciousness will still be there, just as the radio waves are there even if the radio is not there. Consciousness would still be there even when the body is not there.
This is a very flawed example. You are assuming that consciousness is something that floats in space, whereas the fact is that space is a construct of your brain. What you are saying is: here is the brain and pure consciousness is floating in the space. So, you are imagining that space is distinct from the brain. You are saying that impure consciousness is in the brain, in contact with the brain, and pure consciousness is floating in space, and you think that this is a great model. This is a stupid model because the space you are talking of is itself a construct of the brain. So, what do you mean by space outside the brain?
There is no space outside the brain. Space is all inside the brain. No brain, no space.
But we like to construct smart models like those, and they don’t help. Therefore, let’s restrict ourselves to negativa.
