This is an impromptu-extemporaneous statement presenting one of the most fundamental problems that is dealt with by mankind, and I might state the problem this way: How do you communicate the truth, or at least indicate the truth, when the only tools you have to work with are all of them lies. This problem has been wrestled with in past religious philosophy and the approach of the Buddhist has been in the form of a purely negative use of language. It is the problem of trying to communicate the consciousness of the non-dualistic reality in terms that are essentially dualistic. All conceptions exist by contrast with their contradictories or opposites, and even all perceptions exist by such a principle of contrast. But what we are doing is in terms of concepts and while pointing towards a non-dualistic reality, they are inevitably defined in terms that involve dualism. There is concerning every concept, that, which it is not. And yet in a non-dualistic reality, there is necessarily a fusion, as it were, of the concept A and the concept not-A.

The method that was used by Nagarjuna was to employ a radical system of negation. The formula which arises comes down to us in this form: You ask the question, "What is ultimate reality?" And the answer which Nagarjuna gives is, "that it is not-being and also not not-being; it is not both being and not-being, and it is not neither being nor not-being." While this on strict analysis does not imply an absolute nihilism, yet on the other hand psychologically it has the effect of suggesting an absolute nihilism and has been historically so interpreted. The problem that we tackle is the more difficult problem of trying to approach this problem in terms of a positive statement. It is probably the most difficult task that the human intellect has ever had to face.

Now the problem arises in connection with certain communications that came after the publishing of the Philosophy of Consciousness Without an Object. One of the correspondents who is especially qualified for an understanding of what is written in The Philosophy, has evidently misunderstood my use there, of the conception of the unconscious taken from Von Hartmann and Dr. Carl G. Jung. He has interpreted it as being used by me in an ontological sense, when in point of fact I was merely adapting an already existent usage, in an empiric sense. Now maybe you have some difficulty with the distintion between these two terms, and to understand them you would have to have some years of philosophy tucked away in your mind. I won't attempt to do that this morning.

Now this illustrates a point that has bearing upon my willingness to accept a postponement of the return home, in order to guard what has been formulated from a misinterpretation or a misapplication. This a critical critical point. I found on reflecting upon it, I came upon this very difficulty of trying to use the intellect to communicate a meaning, that in the last analysis is non-dualistic.

Perhaps a bit of review of what is involved in the developement of the philosophy know as Introceptualism would be of help to us at this time. The ordinary naive view of man surrounded by a world of objects, is to view those objects as real and as being essentially self existent. That means the whole cosmos as well as the more immediate world surrounding us, and ultimately it means all those more subtle objects which we call concepts. The naive view is that we are dealing with something real. Careful analysis shows, however, that this view has to be modified. We found over the period of centuries of thought that we do not deal with an external world as it is in itself, but rather with the world as it appears through certain forms of our cognition. The full statement of this shift of point of view was given by Immanuel Kant, primarily in the Critique of Pure Reason, but his thought was the result of centuries of thought preceding him. The point he made was that we carry with us forms that determine the nature of our experience and of our conceptual cognitions. He suggested forms such as space and time, which he called the transcendental aesthetic, and the forms of the understanding.

It is a rather difficult subject. But I may suggest what is involved here by using a figure, which I have used before in other tapes, to the effect that man here is in a capsule, (Dr. Jung used the figure of a box hung up by a thread in his last work) that in that capsule there are certain windows, and our cognition of the world about is only through those windows. The forms of the windows, as it were, determine the forms of our experience. He had a border-line conception which he called the ding an sich, or the thing in itself, as an existence beyond the windows, and that we did not know. We only knew the effect of the thing-in-itself as it appeared through the windows. And we carried with ourselves those forms which decide our cognition.

Now we may interpret yoga as the collosal achievment of building a door in the capsule whereby the seeking self may leave the capsule and come into Reality as it really is, and also the power to return. In the case of genius, we may say that something of this exists, but more in the sense of a rent in the capsule, whereby the reality, as it is in itself (in some measure), is cognized by genius; but they are not masters, because it is a rent and not a door that can be opened and closed.

I'd like to suggest here, that the true thing-in-itself is the Clear Light referred to repeatedly in the Tibetan Book of the Dead. To realize the Clear Light is to realize Reality, but that Reality does not consist of the forms we experience and think here, it does not consist of a cosmos od worlds and suns and galaxies, perhaps without number, but of the Pure Clear Light.

I would like to suggest further that although we have the naive tendency to think of ourselves of beings surrounded by things of all sorts....... mountains, rivers, cities, dwellings, etc. , that while we naively think of these as existences apart from consciousness, yet we all have no knowledge of any existence whatsoever, that is totally apart from consciousness. The only valid affirmation of existence, is an affirmation of an existence in consciousness. Speculation concerning that which is totally outside consciousness is meaningless. We are not capable to predicate of it either existence or non-existence, if we are responsible in our judgements; it is essentially meaningless. Only that which in some sense exists in and for consciousness has any meaning for us; we can make predications validly of only that.

Now the whole developement of the thought of The Philosophy-of-Consciousness-Without-an-Object starts with this recognition. Our analysis of consciousness, as we find it in our ordinary waking state, consists of these three elements. That there is an object before us which we cognize, and that is everything whatsoever, everything seen or otherwise sensed, and everything that is thought, an object before consciousness. But we have the dim sense to begin with, that there is a somewhat, which we habitually call 'I' , which cognizes those things, and in fact one of the fundamental yogas is the search for the actual realization of that 'I' . As we ordinarily deal with it, it is an assumption and a conception only. We assume it, but in our ordinary searching we cannot find it, for if we think we have found it, when we have evolved the concept of self, careful analysis will reveal that the true self lies behind and is cognizing that conception which we have projected. The time may well come when one realizes that that which he is now seeking can never be an object before consciousness. He cannot cognize it the usual way.

Ceasing the effort to discover it as an object, and sinking back into it may be the key to the opening of the door that leads out of the capsule. It is known by another means of cognition, which I have called Knowledge through Identity. It is known not by sensation, not by conceptual cognition, but by Knowledge through Identity. Thus we have determined that our doors to knowledge are more than two, but are three. And most of all, thought, in philosophical and other forms, has down through the ages impled that there are only two doors of cognition, sense perception and conceptual cognition. And even this is affirmed by the Buddhist logicians, Dignaga, and not so much by Dharmakirti. Therefor the revolutionary contribution in the philosophy is the assertion that there is a third door of cognition. And with this, Sri Aurobindo does agree. This changes the picture.

But beyond the realization of the Self, there is a still more profound Realization, wherein one ascends to a position such that the whole secular universe disappears as secular, and exists only as Divinity, and on the other hand, that the subject to consciousness which appears to be in the beginning unique, separating one self from other selves, becomes a transcendental self, or Paramatman, which carries within it the Selhood of all creatures. Thus standing in the Divinized middle-world, as it later proved to be, where all is sacred, then the Divinity, which is now all that is objective, and the pure Subject, the Paratman, both vanish into a more ultimate reality (and that more ultimate reality is what I have called "Consciousness-without-an-object and without-a-subject") yet containing within it the potentiality of all objects and of all selves.

This leads us away from the two positions known as Realism, which is the identification with the object in some sense, whether gross or subtle, over the whole range of coarse materialism up to the subtler ranges of the new Realism on one side, and of Idealism on the other, where those philosophies that are called Idealism or Spiritualism, in the philosophic sense of the word, are not an orientation to consciousness but an orientation to that which is conscious. (It is so defined in the dictionary.) Therefore this philosophy that is presented here is neither Realism nor Idealism since it is oriented to the Consciousness itself, and this made it necessary to invent a term to represent it, and that term is " Introceptualism. " The distinction here may seem subtle but it is very important. Ultimately it leads to the view that the comprehensive realization of Reality is a state of consciousness without content, where everything is the pure light of consciousness and that the experience of a universe, and I mean a cosmos; I mean everything that is objective whatsoever, is produced by a process of obscuration. We see things because our consciousness, to that extent, is obscured or blanked out, not necessarily a complete blanking out, but a partial blanking out that can be variable; and that is the meaning of "Substantiality is inversely proportional to Ponderability," or "Reality is inversely proportional to Appearance." Now here we do have involved a notion of at least relative unconsciousness. It is through relative unconsciousness, and only through this, that we are aware of the world. If we were fully conscious, we would know no world, nor would there be any self.

Now we come to the use of the unconscious as it is employed by Von Hartmann and by Dr. Jung. These are empiric concepts, essentially. We know from our experience that contents do arise in our ordinary consciousness, namely from the consciousness which we call relative consciousness, subject-object consciousness or waking consciousness. We know that contents arise in this zone, the source of which we cannot trace. The oustanding examples of this are the dream images and the fantasy processes of the waking state.

Let me make a little footnote remark here concerning the fantasy process lest you view it as trivial. Actually, Dr. Jung speaks of conscious fantasy as one of the highest functions of all. No doubt it is involved in producing Alice and Adventures in Wonderland, but it is also involved in the Newtonian integrations, and that is one of the most important developements of all. It is involved in the integrations of an Einstein.

Yet how do we get these precipitations in our relative consciousness? From whence do they come? There is a blank. This was noted by Von Hartmann and by a physician that was contemporary to him, and was later employed by Freud and especially Dr. Jung. It became very important in the psychology of Dr. Jung. We are speaking here of something which we may call a psychical continuum which is akin to our relative conscious processes of the waking state but are not traceable by the consciousness of the waking state and therefore they were called 'unconscious'. This section of the physical continuum was called by Von Hartmann and Jung 'the unconscious', but while that appears to be a predication concerning that part of the psychical continuum, are we capable of making that predication? Do we know that it, from its own point of view, is unconscious? The answer is: Unless one has broken out the capacity that is aroused by Enlightenment, he cannot answer this question. Aurobindo says that the unconscious is simply another way of consciousness, a statement with which I agree. So, in thinking about this, what Von Hartmann, Jung and Freud have done is to project upon a portion of the psychical continuum an unconsciousness that really exists in our relative subject-object consciousness. The unconsciouness is really there. This every day consciousness cannot trace these processes, therefore it is unconscious with respect to them; it only knows the products that emerge in the relative consciousness. Get the argument. That's all we know about it. So when we speak of the unconscious as an entity in the psychical continuum which we think of as being itself unconscious, we are on ground that we don't know; we can't predicate that. What we have actually done is projected a zone of unconsciousness in our own ordinary consciousness upon that, and that's all there is to it.

This zone, which in the last analysis includes everything other than our waking relative consciousness, may indeed be All Consciousness, and I so affirm. It is the thesis implied in the very title of the book, The Philosophy of Consciousness Without an Object. All is consciousness, but not necessarily this type that is ordinary waking consciousness, which is subject-object consciousness. This other consciousness can be consciousness by identity, or through identity (to use my prepositions), and even something beyond that, for consciousness through identity implies the fusion of the cognizer and the cognized, and beyond is the consciousness where both the cognizer and the cognized vanish in the still vaster ultimate that is implied, and I have developed that in the volume. Therefore, in referring to the terms that have been employed by Von Hartmann and Dr. Jung, I'm merely using empiric conceptions and reinterpreting them, as you have heard me reinterpret them this morning, as being essentially a projection of a limitation in our ordinary relative consciousness, but not a true predication of the state of this other portion of the psychical continuum.

Now here is where we come into some difficulties. We use the psychical continuum as a conception that helps us to reach to a certain point, but it is a conception that stands in contrast with all that which we call physical, for instance. That's our ordinary implication.

In other words, it is the 'other' of the supposed physical existence. There we are still in a dualistic position and so we have to say that everything I have said this morning is a lie as we ascend into that unity where the contrast of physical and psychical no longer exists. But maybe I have succeeded in using lies to suggest some adumbration of the truth in a positive sense that may not suggest simply complete nihilation, but rather the completeness of an all-enveloping consciousness which is no longer merely a relationship between a knower and a known, but the container of the potential knower and the potential known. This seed, transcending sensation as well as conception is the ultimate reality and it is all-conscious; but from it, a universe, a cosmos may be projected and this process of projection is by a deliberate, partial obscuration of consciousness, and that gives us objects. We know all when we cognize nothing.