It has neither a beginning (origination) nor an end (culmination).įrom a common sense point of view, it may be argued that “Knowingness” cannot exist on Its own in the absence of a knower and something to be known. But brahman, The Knowingness, as the Upanishad says is Infinite, without limitations or edges or endpoints.
There are two endpoints for anything in this world - one is the beginning and the other is the ending. Unending Beingness and Knowingness is the nature of brahman. The taittirIya Upanishad explains brahman as: Posted in Q and A | Tagged brahman, consciousness, creation, pointers, Upanishad Consciousness, brahman and mokSha See the article I wrote about ‘states’ of consciousness ( ). The book ‘A-U-M’ tells you all about the ‘states of consciousness’ and that their ‘substratum’ is turIya. Swami Dayananda’s definition is ‘limitless self-effulgent awareness the self-revealing’. Q: Maybe I’m asking about consciousness with a lower case ‘c’ – I just want to know how you would define that word.Ī: Nothing special here. Probably the most famous ‘definition’ (as far as that is possible) is the one in the Taittiriya Upanishad (2.1.1): satyam j~nAnam anantam brahma – Brahman is real/truth/existence – knowledge/consciousness – limitless.Īnd in 3.1.2, the same Upanishad says that one should strive to know that from which all these beings are born, that in which they live and exist, and that to which they return – that is Brahman.īrahman is the sRRiShTi sthiti laya kAraNa – the cause of the creation, maintenance and destruction of everything.Īnd so on! There are lots of ‘pointers’ but no definition as such, as explained in the answers above. Q: Do you have the perfect definition of Consciousness as per Advaita Vedanta?Ī: Traditional Advaita prefers to use ‘Brahman’ as referring to the absolute reality, although the aitareya upaniShad says ‘praj~nAnaM brahma’, which is translated as ‘Consciousness is Brahman’. Continue reading → Posted in Ramesam | Tagged appearance, Causality, cause, effect, gaudapada, mandukya, shankara, Upanishad, world Q.449 Definition of Consciousness And it is much more impossible for the real to be the cause of the unreal. The real cannot be the cause of the real.
Nor can the real be produced from the unreal. Meaning: The unreal cannot have the unreal as its cause.
He avers that cause-effect relationships do not exist. Gaudapada says that we are prisoners of an unwavering belief in cause-effect relationships. (Before him it was a lineage of Sages preceded by the lineage of Gods – see here). With him started the human form lineage of teacher-disciple. The most “radical version of Non-dual teaching” goes back to Revered Gaudapada (of 5th or 6th CE) who forms a watershed mark in the Advaita tradition.