Transpersonal Philosophy

  Siguiendo a Patanjali hemos dicho que Yoga es samadhi. Y que el Yoga del Conocimiento, el Ñana Yoga, sería entonces “estar siendo la Conciencia de Samadhi”, que es una Conciencia de Bienaventuranza (Chidananda Rupa). Enfoquemos nuestra mente Buddhi sobre el samadhi por un instante. Sankaracharia, uno de los grandes maestros del Advaita Vedanta hindú, habla de dos tipos de samadhi: savikalpa (sujeto a diferenciación) y nirvikalpa (no sujeto a diferenciación). Savikalpa samadhi es el estado anímico consciente de Bienaventuranza en el que el Sujeto y los objetos de conocimiento mantienen identidad propia y diferencia de unos con respecto a otros. Con un ejemplo. Supongamos que contemplas una rosa y te embriaga tanto su belleza que tu Alma transforma su configuración y entras en un estado de absorción en la Belleza. En este estado de samadhi, tú te encuentras entremezclada con la rosa, pero se mantienen las identidades diferentes de la rosa y tú. Como dice Sankar...

  When a part of the body is anesthetized, for example, the legs, the feeling that I am not the legs is clear. To consider that I am the body I have to feel it. Actually, I am calling “my body” the nervous sensation that my memory has cataloged as my body. My grandfather had his leg amputated due to gangrene. My father had not told him that they were going to amputate his entire leg, and he went into surgery thinking that they were only going to amputate a couple of his toes. As the anesthetic wore off from his system, he began to complain that he had pain in a foot that he didn't have. This is called in medicine the persistence of a phantom limb. But the entire physical body is like a phantom limb that appears or disappears in images of joy or pain. At this very moment, your cerebral cortex appears only as a concept from this phrase, but in 10 minutes it will disappear like a ghost. You don't feel it and for it to exist in your experience you have to make a menta...

  Cuando nos anestesian una parte del cuerpo, por ejemplo, las piernas, la sensación de que yo no soy las piernas es clara. Para considerar que yo soy el cuerpo tengo que sentirlo. Realmente, estoy llamando “mi cuerpo” a la sensación nerviosa que mi memoria ha catalogado como mi cuerpo. A mi abuelo le amputaron una pierna por gangrena. Mi padre no le había dicho que le iban a amputar toda la pierna, y entró en el quirófano pensando que sólo le iban a quitar un par de dedos del pie. Según la anestesia se disipaba de su sistema, comenzó a quejarse diciendo que le dolía un pie que no tenía. Esto se llama en medicina la persistencia de un miembro fantasma. Pero todo el cuerpo físico es como un miembro fantasma que aparece o desaparece en imágenes de gozo o dolor. En este mismo instante, tu cortex cerebral aparece sólo como concepto a partir de esta frase, pero en 10 minutos desaparecerá como un fantasma. No lo sientes, y para que exista en tu experiencia tienes que hacer ...

 

  The bard is blind for having seen the Goddess of Beauty bathe naked. Many are the names of Tiresias. The Argentine bard Jorge Luis Borges had a vision in light of his intimate blindness. Legend has it that when the battle of Contarf ended, that feast of crows in which the Norwegians were defeated, the Great King of Ireland quickly called his court poet, repeating what the kings of Mycenae once did. He asked him to compose a song of victory and greatness, as if both things went together, as if war could make someone great. He gave him a year to compose it and some gold, some say a rare ring on which was inscribed the name of an old dragon. When the year completed its journey, the poet presented an extensive panegyric full of great literary figures, a dazzling manifesto in which the sword was called “oar of battle” and “helm of justice.” He recited it with the confidence of someone who masters his craft, without looking at the manuscript and with a hypnot...

I am pleased to include here the opening excerpt from Ramana Maharshi's Nan Yar (Who Am I?) . Ramana, along with Nisargadatta and Aurobindo, are the greatest representatives of Advaita Vedanta in the 20th century.     Who Am I? (Nan Yar?) As all living beings desire to be happy always, without misery, as in the case of everyone there is observed supreme love for one’s self, and as happiness alone is the cause for love, in order to gain that happiness which is one’s nature and which is experienced in the state of deep sleep where there is no mind, one should know one’s self. For that, the path of knowledge, the inquiry of the form “Who am I?”, is the principal means. 1. Who am I ? The gross body which is composed of the seven humours (dhatus), I am not; the five cognitive sense organs, viz. the senses of hearing, touch, sight, taste, and smell, which apprehend their respective objects, viz. sound, touch, colour, taste, and odour, I am not; the five cognitive sen...

  That which knows all things and is known by none is the subject. Thus it is the supporter of the world, that condition of all phenomena, of all objects which is always pre-supposed throughout experience; for all that exists, exists only for the subject. Every one finds himself to be subject, yet only in so far as he knows, not in so far as he is an object of knowledge. But his body is object, and therefore from this point of view we call it idea. For the body is an object among objects, and is conditioned by the laws of objects, although it is an immediate object. Like all objects of perception, it lies within the universal forms of knowledge, time and space, which are the conditions of multiplicity. The subject, on the contrary, which is always the knower, never the known, does not come under these forms, but is presupposed by them; it has therefore neither multiplicity nor its opposite, unity. We never know it, but it is always the knower wherever there is knowledge...

 To clarify the concept of the Volitive Soul, it is necessary to understand well what the Will is, which leads us first to the understanding of the world as an Idea and then to the understanding of the world as Will. The sense in which Schopenhauer uses the concept "Idea" is the same as that of my concept "representation."    So then the world as idea, the only aspect in which we consider it at present, has two fundamental, necessary, and inseparable halves. The one half is the object, the forms of which are space and time, and through these multiplicity. The other half is the subject, which is not in space and time, for it is present, entire and undivided, in every percipient being. So that any one percipient being, with the object, constitutes the whole world as idea just as fully as the existing millions could do; but if this one were to disappear, then the whole world as idea would cease to be. These halves are therefore inseparable eve...

“The world is my idea:”—this is a truth which holds good for everything that lives and knows, though man alone can bring it into reflective and abstract consciousness. If he really does this, he has attained to philosophical wisdom. It then becomes clear and certain to him that what he knows is not a sun and an earth, but only an eye that sees a sun, a hand that feels an earth; that the world which surrounds him is there only as idea, i.e., only in relation to something else, the consciousness, which is himself. If any truth can be asserted a priori, it is this: for it is the expression of the most general form of all possible and thinkable experience: a form which is more general than time, or space, or causality, for they all presuppose it; and each of these, which we have seen to be just so many modes of the principle of sufficient reason, is valid only for a particular class of ideas; whereas the antithesis of object and subject is the common form of all these classes, is that form...