What every human being perceives at any given time is deeply real, having a vital immediacy and relative importance that is essentially non-transferable, and cannot be effectively conveyed to another human being who does not independently have the same feeling at that moment of time. So, there is something incommunicably authentic about a ‘peak experience’, springing from a deep sense of self-transcendence in a human being. The danger lies in making that subjective experience the chief yardstick for all objective comparison, not only of actual but of past, present and future states, and even of all possible states of experience. Ethically the failure to recognize the transcendental and the immanent, the unique as well as the universal, as primary pairs of opposites in constant interaction, can consolidate moral backsliding, as well as become an obdurate obstruction to moral growth and refinement. Even worse, one may settle, as many do, for a convenient dualistic contrast between the ideal and the existent, the distant and the immediate, the ineffable and the tangible. This can only intensify rajasic restlessness and tamasic abdication, as well as notoriously aggravate sattvic self-righteousness, which in turn reacts upon tamas and rajas.

 Furthermore, any canonical dualism alienates a human being from the rich diversity and minute degrees of human striving, imperfection and attainment, from the highest possibilities as well as souls in distress. One is alienated from the highest possible beings who exist at any given time on earth or elsewhere, and also from human beings who are at the lowest levels of striving for subjective reasons that are all too difficult to ascertain. The tension of the subject-object dichotomy confines one’s perspective, perceptual range and capacity, as well as one’s circle of affinities and one’s degree of empathy. At the worst, it consolidates the absolutization of the relative. That is what conventional external religion does, and also popular, over-simplified science. All knowledge, in fact, which is packaged and pedantically transmitted through mass education, consolidates the absolutization of the relative, the limitations of human beings and the human condition, the narrowing of the horizon of human experience even in the sensory realm and certainly beyond it, and also hardens one’s judgments and reactions concerning other human beings, both as subjects and even as objects. Altogether, it narrows the base of one’s awareness and the capacity to extend and alter, enlarge and deepen, one’s sympathies, ideals and psychological states. It produces the smug boundedness as well as the false finality of one’s perceptions, concepts and perspectives. Above all, and this is extremely crucial, it limits the inherent focus of one’s motivation and the force of the inward stimulus in oneself to self-correction, to self-realization, to self-striving and to self-transcendence.

 Given an initial grasp of the distinction between the term ‘absolute’ by itself and the term ‘absolute’ as contrasted to the ‘relative’ the various meanings and uses of these terms may be rightly understood.

 First of all, consider the Basic Proposition that the Absolute is out of all relation to conditioned existence and is, therefore, inconceivable and indescribable. This means that nothing can be logically predicated of it in words and signs, owing to the limits of logic and of language. The Basic Proposition concerns the meaningfulness and legitimacy of predication as well as the incommensurability and ineffability of the Absolute as an object of cognition or comprehension, apprehension or awareness. But, it does not rule out, either in principle or in practice, a consubstantiality between the core of one’s own being and the intrinsic self-existent nature of the Absolute. Not does it in the least vitiate the meaningfulness of meditation, the bliss of contemplation, or the potency of philosophical negation in the realm of particulars, wholes and worlds.

 Secondly, the terms ‘absolute’ and ‘relative’, as a pair of predicates, convey a vital sense of opposition or contrast. But, since nothing can be predicated of the Absolute, whatever the sense of the term ‘absolute’ as a predicate opposite to the sense of the term ‘relative’, this sense cannot properly be predicated of the Absolute. That is, the very contrast between ‘absolute’ and ‘relative’ cannot be turned back as a basis for attributing anything to the Absolute. Similarly, whatever sense the term ‘relative’ has as a predicate, this cannot properly be taken to establish or convey the idea of something related to the Absolute by opposition. That is why one cannot possibly maintain that the Absolute thinks or feels, in any sense that embodied beings can grasp. Any of the verbs we use in relation to our consciousness, in relation to ordinary human cognition, feeling or conduct, cannot be applied to the Absolute simply because all these everyday words have built-in limits and limitations that arise not only out of their customary use but even out of their conceivable use. Even the greatest conceivable thought or feeling cannot by itself limit or characterize the attributeless Absolute.

 The most primitive relational predicates, such as ‘the same as’ and ‘other than’, are inherently inapplicable to the Absolute. The Absolute is peerless and incomparable. There is nothing outside the Absolute which could in any respect resemble it. Nor can anyone truly say that anything or everything is other than the Absolute, or that, in relation to the Absolute, all else is unreal. To attempt to do so is to oppose everything else to the Absolute, which is actually to limit it and to overlook its omnipresence. We should discern the latter truth just as clearly as we can recognize the former. The intrinsic relativity of all attributions and predicates sharpens our meditative awareness of the supreme transcendence of the Absolute. It also deepens our mystical apprehension of the most pristine metaphors given by the sages, especially Absolute Space, dimensionless and unbounded, or Absolute Motion and Consciousness, or Absolute Duration. These pregnant analogies point to the all-inclusiveness of the Absolute, to the omnipresence, omniscience and omnipotence of the Absolute, as mirrored in time, in space, and in all contexts. But all cognitive identifications of similars and contrasts, equivalences and opposites can apply only to our increasing if inevitably incomplete apprehension of the Absolute.

Raghavan Iyer
The Gupta Vidya II