Prasnopanishad and The New Psychology

BY PROF. V. A. THIAGARAJAN, M.A.
(The Central College, Bangalore)

LOGIC and consistency, said Samuel Butler, are luxuries which should be reserved for the gods and the lower animals. But the history of thought has been a persistent attempt to convert this luxury of the lower man, whose life is a compromise only because it is a muddle, into the necessity of the truth seeker. A rigorous intellectual discipline becomes necessary when one takes all knowledge for one’s domain. Many specific problems which troubled the mind of the ancient world have now been relegated to the realm of the pseudo-sciences. New sciences have developed. But it is true now, as ever before, that the seeker after light cannot afford to cherish some private darkness, or lead a life which is at variance with itself. That is why, as in the peace-chants of the Upanishads, even physical well-being is integrated with the quest of the summum bonum, the general aim being to make a man a Jnana-thriptha, and give him a sense of realised satisfaction.

This is perhaps best illustrated by taking a few concrete examples. The Prasnopanishad, for example, poses a series of questions. What is the origin of life? How did life enter the body? What happens to man after death? How many gods are there? What is the relationship between man and the ultimate reality? Obviously, these are problems which do not lend themselves to the method of experimentation. Although the method of experimentation is not altogether lacking in the ancient world, they are in the main used to make the problem more concrete, and to that extent may be regarded as experimental analogies. They may be said to form the poetry of science. The synthesis of life is expressed, for example, by a Homeric simile, “As the flowing rivers that tend towards the sea having reached it, merge in the ocean, and all their names and forms disappear, and people speak only of the ocean, so the sixteen kalas of this seer, resting in Him alone, having reached Him disappear in Him.” An analogy may enforce a conviction, but is not itself an argument. A more common method adopted in the quest of truth is the ancient Socratic method of disputation. But the defect of the Socratic method is that it is an unequal combat between an able dialectician, and a novice whose ideas are diffuse and whose expression is nebulous. There is a slight shifting of the ground, and the defeated party is not necessarily convinced, though he is often silenced. Starting with the question what is it that shines by day, when one arrives at the conclusion that the light of the spirit shines by day and by night, one feels at times that the conclusion is not on the same plane as the premises. There is a gradual switching off, of the lights, but that does not necessarily make for illumination.

A more common and a more satisfactory method is the heuristic method, the method of discovery. To the enquirer who desires to know the nature of the Eternal, he is asked to wait and brood over the problem until the sleeping spirit of truth is liberated. This is compared to a churning of the fire-sticks–where the latent spirit of fire in the fire-stick leaps forth into a flame.

If this Promethean ideal which gives to us the emergent value of life, and transforms existence into a thing of beauty, is not to be a mere freak of individual achievement, but an objective heritage in which every one can participate by a realization of one’s own wondrous own, the unique value of the spirit must be gained by a method which is as sound as the goal that is reached. In any sound system of thinking the method is as important as the goal, for that alone assures us that there is no snag in the argument.

The importance of right method has been associated with the name of Descartes in the history of thought. Method in philosophy is what a dictionary is in literature. It stands as the common medium of thought. Bacon too desired that all personal, racial, and popular pre- possessions of the mind should be eliminated before the mind becomes a fit instrument of discovery. But it was Descartes who taught men to reject all prima facie conclusions by a process of negation. He gave to doubt the precedence over assertion. In the Indian system of thought, this process of verification and rejection is dramatised, by giving the purva-paksha to one person and the siddhanta to another. In both cases nothing is accepted un-examined, although in the process, the Cartesian maxim Cogito, ergo sum, is inverted, like an hour-glass drum, into a not less valid, Sum, ergo cogito. If, in spite of this method of doubting everything except the doubter, of many a proposition over which schools of thought have put their Q.E.D. have now become fresh subjects of discussion, it either means that the fringe of ignorance over the bounds of knowledge have not been completely lifted, or that something more is necessary than right method. Just as in economics money is not a mere medium of exchange, but has its own intrinsic value as metal, and this in turn influences prices, so also in all philosophical discussion, the mind is not a mere instrument of cognition. It has its own scale of values. “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.” It affects our ethical conceptions also. “There is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so.”

The new psychology takes precedence over older schools of thought because it insists upon an exact study of the mind, the foot-rule of thought. The name of Freud is specially associated with the discovery of layers of consciousness. He distinguished four layers of thought–the fore-conscious, the subconscious, the unconscious, and the primary unconscious. The fore-conscious gives to us the superficial aspect of life. The subconscious contains all that we have thought and known. The unconscious is the home of repressed thoughts and feelings, which come out in dreams. The primary unconscious connects us with racial heritage. All these are matters of familiar knowledge.

Indian thought, like the new psychology, insists upon an exact assessment of the measuring rod, the mind of man, and would fain strip thought of all the colouring which the mind gives to it. Indian thought differs from Freudian psycho-analysis in that it would fain regard these levels of consciousness, as a sequence in time also. Further, while Freud gives to us only two stages of consciousness, the waking and the dreaming, Indian thought insists that a plane shall have three points of agreement, and adds to these two sleep-consciousness also. Indian thought agrees with Freud that the dream is often a concatenation of the day’s events where the spirit “sees all that has been seen and unseen, heard and unheard, perceived and unperceived, real and unreal.” But it goes beyond Freud and gives to sleep that importance which Shakespeare recognised when he called it ‘Nature’s soft nurse’ and ‘the balm of hurt minds.’ It is not regarded as a blank space of the mind, or a mere hyphen between two activities, but is regarded as part of the continuity of life and the home-coming of the spirit, the bird going to the tree to roost. The Prasnopanishad says: “The mind and what can be thought of, the intellect and what can be comprehended, the ego and the object of egoism, the memory and its object, the light and what can be lighted up, the prana and what is to be sustained–all these rest in the superior Atman in deep sleep.”

This has far reaching consequences. This three-plane study, by showing to us a stage of endurance where the personality survives though the mind as such is absent, reduces the mind of man from the level of a cogniser to the object of cognition. It makes the mind of man, as Wordsworth did a part of Nature and adds it to the Sun and the Moon and all that we behold on this green earth. Further, Freudian thought, in so far as it recognises only two planes of thought, the waking and the dreaming, tends to explain what is higher in man in terms of the lower, intellect in terms of sex. It is guided by a law of parsimony. Whatever lies beyond it is regarded as an illusion and to this realm is relegated even the consciousness of the divine. Indian thought on the other hand feels that the existence of the sub-conscious implies a super-conscious, just as in light the infra-red implies the existence of the ultra violet. If the mind is to be a thermometer of truth, it should be graduated not only at the freezing point, the sub-conscious, but should also be graduated at the boiling point, the super-conscious. It is only in relation to these two that normal consciousness is normal. It is only then that the pursuit of truth becomes identical with intellectual rectitude. “The pure world of Brahman belongs only to those in whom rests not falsehood, deceit, and guile.” Looking at it from an opposite point of view, the Prasnopanishad also says: “He who tells a lie perishes root and all. So let us not tell a lie.”

It is only when the mind of man becomes a precision instrument characterised by intellectual and moral rectitude, that it can balance the cosmos. With a clarified sense of awareness, knowing the range of the mind, and the method to be pursued, let us turn to the questions originally propounded. Whence are we? Of what scenes the actors and spectators? What is the relationship between man and the ultimate reality?

The one-pointed quest of life becomes identical with the one-pointed goal of life. “The supreme undecaying One he verily attains who knows the indestructible, the pure, without shadow, colour or body.” Knowing is thus identical with being, and the being is also a becoming. Apparently it looks absurdly simple, as though one were to say, “he who knows that there is money in the bank becomes a rich man.” But the proposition means something more profound than that. It means that true knowing is an awareness in the eternal Now. If the Prasnopanishad gives to us peace with understanding, it is because, as it says, “For them verily is Brahmaloka, who have penance and abstinence, and in whom truth abides.”