Secret of Consciousness!

If you study the Upanishads and such mystical text of high spiritual significance, you will realize that the Supreme Being, the Absolute, is designated in its primordial condition as a Supreme Darkness due to excess of light. This adjective or qualification ‘due to excess of light’ must be added. It is darkness because of the excess of light. When you look at the sun directly for a few minutes and then look elsewhere, you will see only darkness. The sun has dazzled you to such an extent that all else appears as darkness. The intensity of light is such that it looks like darkness to the eyes of man. There is the hymn of the Rigveda called 'Nasadiya Sukta', regarding the original condition of creation, wherein it is said, “Tama asit tamasa gudhamagre”; Darkness there was; at first concealed in darkness.

Generally, to know is to know an object; and if it is not to know an object, it is not to know anything at all. Do you know the reason, what is the necessity to fall asleep every night? The necessity is psychological and, to some extent, highly metaphysical. The whole body, the whole nervous system, the entire psychological apparatus becomes active in the process of the perception of objects. And without our knowing what is happening, the senses get tired. The reason is that perception is an unnatural process from the point of view of consciousness as such. Perception of an object is the alienation of an aspect of our personality through the avenue of a particular sense in respect of its object. All this is difficult for many to grasp. This is a highly psychological secret. Consciousness is indivisible. Consciousness is undivided; it is incapable of division into two sections – subject and object. On the basis of this fact there cannot be a division between the seer and the seen in the process of perception.

In dream what do you see when things are not there? What happens in dream is that there is an alienation of the mind into the objects of perception; and the mind itself becomes the objects seen there. There is tension created due to the separation of a part of the mind into the object and a part of it existing as the perceiving subject. That is why we are restless in dream. We cannot be happy. It is neither waking nor it is sleep. It is very difficult to be happy in this condition because a tense situation of consciousness is created. What happened in dream, the same happens to us in the waking condition also. Just as the mind in dream divided itself into two sections i.e. the perceiving subject and the object that was seen; in the waking state also, it divides itself into the subject and object. It is like a divided personality. It is as if your own personality has been cut into two halves. Just as in dream you did not know that you were dreaming, in this waking also you do not know that you are in a state similar to dream. In deep sleep the senses and the intellect withdraw themselves into their source. There is no perceptional activity, and so the absence of perception is equated to the presence of darkness; the cosmic Primeval condition of the creative Will of God, before creation, a state appearing like darkness, or night – the night of the birth of Krishna and Jesus and the night of Siva. ………..OM SHANTI!