Consciousness and substance: The primal forms of God

Abstract

In his Guest Editorial in Volume 6, Number 3 of this Journal, John White (1987) has warned seekers of enlightenment about what they should not do, but has not said what they should.I wish he had.Another matter to which I wish to draw attention is his statement, citing Da Love-Ananda, that there is a nonphysical reality (Being or God) that is uncaused and infinite and is the source of all that there is.How can we be sure that this is a fact?White has not tried to substantiate his observation.But in the major Hindu philosophical systems, with which he seems to be familiar, there are several arguments in favor of it.One may be cited.Stated briefly, we can know the world of objects only through the responses of our senses to them.Said another way, all the qualities of whatever we perceive are our "creations."So, if we can know the world of objects by some means other than the senses, we shall be able to perceive it in its "pure state," without any qualities, the "reality behind appearance."This is called "direct" or "unmediated" knowledge.A technique that all the major schools of Hindu philosophy recommend for the purpose of obtaining direct knowledge is the practice of yoga as systematized by Patanjali (Bernard, 1958).As can be seen from some of the procedures described by him, particularly withdrawal of the senses (pratyaahara), concentration (dharana), and contemplation (dhyaana), they are aimed at reducing or helping the practitioner to ignore, to the extent possible, the input of information to the brain from internal and external sources: physical sensations, thoughts, imagery, out-of-body experiences, and so on.If the practitioner succeeds in this effort, what follows, stated briefly and simply is this: as one is not conscious of events in the physical environment nor of psychological events, one loses awareness of the passage of time.In other words, time stands still for the practitioner.