Journey or Progress 3

Materialists and scientists may argue – what is pure consciousness? Can anybody define the same? Since it is not definable and not discernible through senses, it therefore does not exist. So pure existence is a Utopia as which exists can be realized by senses. If we cannot realize it how can we say that it exists? The response to the same as given by those who have undertaken the journey and have realized the same is – we can neither define, nor realize pure consciousness because impure state cannot realize the pure state. If so, it would first have to become the pure state itself to know that pure state. Only those who have gone beyond the apparent world of names and forms can explain that pure state, but there is only a handful of divine beings belonging to that category. They are the greatest teachers of all ages. Therefore the distinction will remain for almost all of us and dualism is bound to remain. As Sri Ramakrishna says, a salt doll goes to measure an ocean but gets dissolved. So it cannot provide its feedback to others about the ocean. Anybody attempting to go beyond the world of senses is like the salt doll, except of course the greatest teachers.

On a different trajectory, Bell's theorem was an important discovery in scientific world, which proved the existence of non local information sharing among different quantum particles, which could not be explained by any prevailing scientific theory. Therefore a new concept called Quantum Consciousness was floated which is yet to find universal acceptance among scientific community. Quantum world in many ways is a mysterious world which mocks the world of sensory perception, as any attempt to perceive and expose a quantum variable with precision and certainty is an impossibility and only probability distribution can represent the behavior  of this mysterious world. It has therefore broken the prevailing scientific dogma that direct perception by senses is the only irrefutable proof of existence. Anybody who knows Heisenberg's uncertainty principle knows this - you can measure with certainty only one of the variables but not both. Any attempt to measure the other will change the state. But that cannot disprove that the second variable does not exist.

According to those great teachers who have witnessed it, the journey unfolds in the following way – Material universe as projected in the senses, i.e. impure consciousness without any idea about the pure state or the atheist stage, the impure consciousness and its pining for the pure state as worship of a personal God, the symbol of the pure state or the stage of dualism, the impure consciousness and its realization that the pure state has somehow being reflected as impure in the apparent universe, but still treating it as separate or the qualified monist stage, and finally the impure consciousness merging into the pure state with realization that it is actually the pure state that had been appearing as impure through ignorance or the advaita stage, which knows that one grand unique infinite eternal consciousness pervades anything and nothing other than that consciousness exists and it is a state of everlasting bliss.

Gita, Vedanta, Sri Ramakrishna's gospel, Swami Vivekananda’s work, as well as other scriptures, are unanimous here. According to them the journey is real, whichever path we follow. At the end of a path of dualism where we treat the pure consciousness as separate and worship it, we are able to realize our unity with it. All paths eventually lead to the same state of realization. In the beautiful words of Sri Ramakrishna, there are various paths to get onto the roof, but once we have reached the roof, we’ll find that it is made of the same material as that of the stairs. The stairs of impure consciousness and the roof of pure consciousness, according to great men who have traveled the path, are in reality the same material, the same pure consciousness  only appearing as different.