According

and concepts—heat and cold, ease and disease,
moral and immoral—belong to this group. And
‘degree’ is a matter of human convention; in reality,
human intelligence has cut into pieces, for convenience
of measurement, what is actually a continuous
flow. So passivity and activity are two conventional
terms indicative of the two extremes of a single
continuum.
Evolution of Consciousness
As we live in a world of conventions, our explanation
of things, of acts and facts, must also be conventional.
This is what the Vedantins indicate by the
expression vyavaharika satya, conventional truth.
Hence, though intuition or basic consciousness is
one homogeneous ‘force-substance’, it appears and
acts as many, a fact testified to by our experience.
How this is brought about has been shown by the
scientists through the theory of evolution. But this
is an explanation from the point of view of matter.
How the bricks of the universe, the subatomic particles,
have slowly built up the exceedingly beautiful
universe is now known to a very large section
of humankind. It is an extremely slow process that
began when there was no one to observe and will
continue when there will be no one to adore or
weep. But from the point of view of consciousness
it is a different story altogether, somewhat similar
to the biblical Creation story: ‘And God said, Let
there be light: and there was light.’ But in the Bible
the Lord had to utter one word to create one thing,
then another word to create another thing, and so
on. This means Creation took some time, however
little, to come to the state we are in. Whereas from
the point of view of consciousness the one appears
as many in an instant—the entire universe with its
unimaginable varieties of things, of processes and
finished products, appears in the twinkle of an eye.
From the almost unconscious deep sleep, through
light dreamless sleep, to the waking state, if one
tries to observe carefully, one will find how from
one homogeneous consciousness of being alone
we wake up to this maddening multiplicity. If we
have developed sufficient control over our mind,
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Consciousness 19
we can give it the suggestion, before falling asleep,
that it should try to observe the change that occurs
when we pass from the deep-sleep condition to the
dream state. Then we shall find that here also, from
the unity of being, comes the dream multiplicity all
of a sudden. In both the above cases it is a sudden
change: unity suddenly bursts forth into multiplicity.
No intervening process is involved in it:
that which was appearing as one—that too, a vague
one—appears as many the next moment. But we
have no doubt that it is the same I-consciousness,
the observer, that persists all through.
The Strata of Consciousness
The above phenomena of deep sleep, dream, and
waking state lead us to assert that: (i) There are
varying strata of consciousness giving us different
kinds of experience. (ii) One stratum appears to be
absolutely homogeneous. No, we cannot even say
that, for appearance needs two things: the thing
appearing and the person to whom it appears. But
this state is a vivid experience of something that
positively exists. The word ‘experience’ also confuses
us in the same way. In fact, there is no word
to express this state adequately; yet it is a positive
something and the basis of everything else. (iii)
In all other strata there is the experience of a subject,
the knower, and of an object, the known. But
the subject permeating the objects is always one,
whether the object be one or many. All objects are
held together by the subject, whose ‘appearance’
means annihilation of the entire object-world; the
opposite, however, is not true. This annihilation
does not necessarily mean that the objective world
goes out of existence. It simply means that there
remains no informer to say whether the world of
objects exists or not. Someone has to testify to the
existence of things. In the absence of such a person,
who will say that such-and-such a thing exists? (iv)
Though at any particular moment there might be
only one object present in our mind, the objective
world, as such, is a multiplicity: objects are discrete
and distinct, one from another. They are held together
and utilized by the subject.
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