None of this can be thought, let alone understood.
It is precisely this that leads most people to deride the Sanātana dharma: it would be ridiculous to waste time attempting to overcome reason, which would be a deception, because (one’s own) reason is true. The refusal of the Sanātana dharma is founded upon a begging the question; but what can the adepts do, if one does not realize that representational thought as such was deliberately pre-refuted at its very appearing, among others by Zeno of Elea—if reason cannot even comprehend the nature of the most elementary evidences that it nonetheless ordinarily lives (such as movement), how can one think that it should be the measure of judgment of reality?
It is indeed the ordinary mind that “thinks,” an I, and the I is the thoughts; and reason (or what Western thought means by reason) is the name that the ordinary man gives to what he believes to be his own I when he persuades himself—needless to say, in a purely self-referential manner for consolatory aims—that the bundle of thoughts he happens to like is somehow particularly valid. Ordinary living is grounded in mistrust, in mental reservation, and therefore in falsity, in deception; this is not a criticism, much less a moral one, but an elementary psychological–existential observation: ordinary language is fallacious, what one intends cannot be intended by the other, because the means of communication is inadequate to reflect thoughts, even aside from tones and undertones; and thoughts, in turn, are not communicable either as such or in their entirety with respect to premises and implications, but only in extreme synthesis—which means unavoidable equivocability, and it is precisely this that generates mistrust and falsity as the matrix of the ordinary mind.
All this descends from the fact that reality is not understood, because if one has only representations and concepts of a thing it is inherent in this that one knows only an appearance (one sees a tree, but not even a botanist or a microbiologist knows what a tree is), and reality cannot be understood because there is a pane of glass—transparent yet distorting and obscuring—that separates the mind from reality; this pane is the I, that is, representation.
He who ignores his own true nature does not know his own mind and is convinced that he can truly know the external through his own mind—that is, he “believes he knows”: the cognitive structure itself is fallacious, what one believes or does not believe is secondary; thoughts are, besides being fatuous, intrinsically erroneous as representations, one ignores what one believes one knows, one ignores that he who knows is in turn falsifying. To be the I, as is evidently understood, does not mean to be egoistic, not because, as Nietzsche noted with astonishment, even altruism is only a form of egoism (as is religious devotion moreover), but because the ordinary biological-cognitive structure in itself is centered upon its own experience and its own knowledge—this has been obvious for millennia even in the texts of Western philosophers, at least some of them, who take for granted that one can learn only beginning from what one knows: he who believes himself to be the I necessarily can only bring everything back to the I.
Now, either one realizes this or one does not; one may at most report the last hymn of the Ṛgveda:
“Mighty Agni, as Lord, you unite us with all that exists; high you blaze in the Dwelling of Iḷā; lead to us all the Treasures.
Come, gather, pronounce a single word; let your minds be united in the single Gnosis, like the ancient gods who each obtained the Portion assigned, having reached the unified Knowledge.
A single mantra they obtained, in assembly—one mind and one knowledge.
I utter for you the single mantra and offer a single Oblation, in which every one of yours is contained.
United in a single aspiration, all attuned in a single heart, with a single mind, let us enjoy the intimate unity among all of us”.
The Tantric condition, on the contrary, implies as a precondition that the I, every I of the individual, be brought back to its proper role as an evanescent apparition. For representational thought, the I is the totality of the waking conscious mind in its entirety: every thought—arising from boredom, reflection, learning, memory, relation, symbol, contact, intuition, sensation, emotion, unconscious, dream, and whatever else—is an element that constitutes the I.
Clearly, part of the thoughts converge in constituting the substance of the I, its metaphysical and psychological notion, while others are accidental; yet the I, as Descartes said, is omnes cogitationes. When one says that there are many I’s instead of a single one, one means simply that in each plane or situation, or in each instant if one prefers, what occupies the waking conscious mind is an aggregate of thoughts: each aggregate of thoughts is an I, whose nature depends on the nature and origin of the thoughts that station themselves, displace one another, and overlap without there being any awareness of it—if not perhaps afterward—because the core of the thoughts that constitute the heart of the aggregate in act remains what it is, forged by habits (if instead it is the core itself of the aggregate that is replaced, then the mind is divided, which is precisely what the term schizophrenia means).
But only the yogī can witness the spectacle of the dance of his own I’s, whereas “mortals” do not see the plural nature of the I and even believe that their mind exhausts itself in what is in reality nothing but an autosuggestion.
A romanticized and inauthentic proof of the plurality of the I was given by Pirandello: it is not so much that each person is many I’s as the persons with whom they relate, but rather the implied observation that ordinary people judge those they know based on what they see them say and do; this reveals the representational structure of the mind: since I am I, he is what he appears to me to be. It does not even occur to them that what one sees, knows, or reads of a person are his acting I’s, that is, portions of an I which, although natural, cannot, insofar as they are portions of parts, reveal the whole of which they are expressions. This is not primarily because each constantly judges others due to morality, but rather because the very structure of the ordinary mind is the I that believes in the existence of persons—simply thinking entities external to itself; and this belief generates judging (thus, morality has a metaphysical genesis, which is precisely what Nietzsche teaches—mostly confusedly—and what Heidegger will call metaphysics as such).
Stopping thoughts, that is, witnessing their spontaneous self-liberation, as Padmasambhava reveals, is precisely the discriminating mark of the surpassing of subjectivity—what the Philalethes calls the opened entrance to the closed palace of the King: if thoughts stop, consciousness not only continues but finds itself naked, like a clear sky free of clouds, the I is suspended, and the mind is freed—there are no entities, there is no flowing of time. This, according to the Tantra, is one of the moments of yogic progression, the realization of emptiness (śūnyatā), which follows the awakening of Kuṇḍalī and is normally attained in samādhi (absorption, which is not necessarily ecstatic, if one understands that term as implying swoon). From that moment—which may repeat itself—consciousness changes: it has realized, thanks to the light caused by Kuṇḍalī, that the I is not the sole conscious energy of the mind, and it experiences that the I can temporarily cease altogether.
Jīvanmukti is first the experiencing that the I does not exist in itself, then the slow implementing of the pure nature of mind, the ātman, in life itself; and it is in this progression that one knows, lives, and “is” the effective states of mind—mind as it is once the false structures have fallen away. Yet, under a purely expository profile, it must be pointed out that one must not describe what is no longer there nor describe what or how one is, because one is what one is, whereas common thoughts belong to what was and is no longer; it is, however, certainly true that analyses a posteriori are necessary to the progression itself (they constitute “discrimination,” viveka, a very particular modality of mind whose thread is exceedingly easy to lose), but only on condition that one never stops at any of them—this, all adepts warn, would indeed be an entification.
The ātman is not an I or a super-I, nor a “Self,” as it is always translated, tragically and comically, generating obvious misunderstandings; yet it is not that it is not also individual, being indeed properly the true nature of mind. It is not that the yogī becomes the ātman or is only the ātman, nor that he perceives it as external to himself, although it is as external as it is internal to the mind as a whole; nor is it that the I’s cease to exist—they will cease only with their cause, which is the body—but they are no longer lords or subjects, rather the patterns toward which each one is inclined. In the reality of the unbound mind, it is essentially said, all these conditions—that is, ātman and I interrelated in various proportions—interpenetrate to the point that one can ascertain their co-presence.
It is evident that here the foundations of reason—the principles of non-contradiction, identity, and the excluded middle—have no place; but this is literally what the Tantra say, and in Western thought Nietzsche, poetically, and Heidegger, theoretically: whether there is “another logic”, effective or not, can evidently be known only by the yogīn, not by neuroscientists or psychologists. The chidākāśa-dhāraṇā of Tantra, one of the countless intermediate stages described in the texts, is precisely this: the inner wall of the forehead is a window through which ‘one’ sees one’s own I acting, directed according to the inscrutable ways of the ātman.
What, then, is the ātman in Western terms? Who or what are this or these I’s? Can one assert as a substantial predicate of the perfected mind the plexus “ātman plus I's”? If the revealed Tantra affirm that they cannot discursively define these conditions, by reason of the fact that discursive language is a sequence of entities that represent entities whereas pre-theoretical reality is non-sequential and does not consist of entities, one may well imagine how much less Western thought could do so, where words are crystallizations of presupposed abstractions. (The revealed texts were pre-theoretical states inscribed in sequences of words which, to the eyes of those who do not see those states, appear discursive: “he who does not know That, what can he make of these verses?”—Ṛgveda.)
The ātman is a portion of the Brahman, or a small set of little drawings or vocal emissions for those who are not themselves a portion of Brahman; esoteric texts are operational indications for reaching these states, always and only—never descriptive or conceptual texts. The Ṛṣi (poet-seers) and the yogīn (a yogī is one who has obtained realizations; practitioners are sādhaka, aspirants) say and repeat that authentic reality is not reducible to concepts; and Westerners contrive definitions where Ṛṣi and yogīn indicate aims and means using words. He who lives authentic reality has no need to read any text, unlike he who seeks the way; but he who seeks the way, if he does not know that words are only words, will remain where he is.
One reads very often—indeed practically always—that there is no object to be known nor any subject that knows. This sentence does not mean asserting that there is nothing or that there is a Whole (eternally motionless or hallucinatorily fluctuating according to one’s mood), such a binary choice as the representational mind can infer. This sentence simply and logically means that what prevents effective understanding (vidyā) is precisely the representational mind.
To approach the Sanātana dharma it is a precondition to suspend the rational mind and to enter the “other beginning”—the many students of Heidegger have read dozens and dozens of times of this “other beginning, different from representational thought founded on subject and object”; well, it is this, evidently because Heidegger, as he repeats dozens of times, dwelt in the Lichtung, the illuminated clearing, not because he had read Tantra or Veda. It is thus no wonder that all his thought revolves around the speculative attempt to rediscover the authentic sense of time.
The “this-side” of the dichotomy between subject and object is properly a dimension of Consciousness that is a portion of the Consciousness that is reality; and for this very reason reality, for the yogī, ceases to be conventional and becomes authentic. To say that mind and reality are Consciousness does not at all mean saying that they “are only in the mind”; it means saying they are Consciousness. Conventional reality “exists” just as authentic reality “exists”; they are phenomenally the same reality—this is obvious and indubitable in Tantra. Saṃsāra and nirvāṇa are the same thing, the Tibetans always say; and they are purely Tantric Buddhists.
But this is likewise obvious for the various Indian Tantric doctrines; perhaps the terms in which it is said change, whether discursive expressions tend to use “monistic,” “pluralistic,” or “dualistic” vocabulary; but one thing is the substance of Tantra and another the expressions in which the substance is said. Then clearly there are Buddhist or Hindu philosophies which say that phenomena are only mind, such as the Cittamātra school, or Yogācāra, or certain currents of Vedānta; but these are, precisely, only philosophies—not revealed texts—philosophies, that is, thoughts of those who believe they explain reality by reason, without having direct access to authentic reality. And all this—the difference between conventional reality and authentic reality—is then what in countless Western texts is alluded to, by some with full awareness, by others as a stylistic trope, with the formula “seeing face to face,” an expression also Pauline, indeed most captivating yet, however, insidious: seeing face to face whom?
If one realizes, through repeated experience, the answer to this question, then one has glimpsed authentic reality—this is precisely the intermediate aim of Tantra.
Continue in Part III