Atman, Witness, and Experience
Some Swamiji claims: “One cannot experience the Atman is the witness, it is what experiences.”
Obviously, this is a very rough and approximate formulation. This statement is both wrong and right in different ways. (a) In the very early days, when I began to develop my meditation exercise, I ‘sensed’ the vague presence of an observer (somewhere present in the background of my experiential world). Or, you could say, I vaguely sensed that I was being ‘seen’ or that my meditative performance was being performed for an ‘outside’ observer. Perhaps, it would also be accurate to say that I sensed its vague presence outside my meditative world, but touching upon its edges. Later, when I was trying to help other people meditate, I discovered that some sensed this presence too and yet others had to ‘let go’ in order to sense this presence. I am guessing that this is the idea of Atman as a ‘witness’. Some were fearful and afraid of this presence as well. If you say that to sense the vague presence is to experience that presence, the Swamiji is wrong. If you see this vague sensing of a presence (or sensing the vague presence of something) as not experiencing, the Swamij would be right. (b) Does the Atman experience? If you keep the word ‘experience’ sufficiently broad (or nebulous), yes, that is true. Self-awareness is obviously ‘aware’ (working purely at a linguistic level); self-consciousness is obviously ‘conscious’ (I say this in my note as well to understand the access). In this sense, yes, the Swamiji is right. However, the Swamiji is wrong if we claim, which we have to, that experience (as we know it today) requires some kind of bodily constraint (i.e. the presence of an apparatus to experience). We have to say here that self-consciousness is not tantamount to ‘experience’. Then the question opens up: if self-consciousness is not ‘experience’ what else is it? I have no answer except to say that it is ‘self-consciousness’, period. It is also further true, on both accounts, that sentience does not experience self-consciousness but merely accesses it. In that case, the next problem: what does this access generate? Some or another kind of experience or not? If we cannot provide some kind of a satisfactory answer, the word ‘access’ is an occult word and does no work. (These are not the only set of problems, but it does indicate why understanding ‘enlightenment’ is far, far more difficult than achieving that state.)
I think this is what Darshanas are. They try to make sense of ‘enlightenment’ by developing some kinds of frameworks to make it intelligible. They do not ask the question, how is ‘enlightenment’ possible? They take it as a given that it is both possible, realizable and achieved. The questions are: what is it? How to make sense of it? These Darshanas reflect on the ‘experience’ of enlightenment (huh? ‘the experience of enlightenment’?) by developing theories that try to make logical, linguistic and cognitive sense. The debates between the exponents of these different darshanas are not about enlightenment; they are about the consistency of the descriptions of the state of enlightenment. One major obstacle here is our natural languages: we are constrained by these languages to speak only about ‘existence’ but not about the ‘real’. We can speak about ‘non-existent’ objects, it is true, but only by conferring ‘existence’ to them in an imaginary or conceptual way. We do not know how to speak about a realm beyond existence, which however, is real. Atman, as I say, does not exist but is real. Atman is not out ‘there’ in the world (it does not exist) but it is ‘there’ (it is real, but it cannot be ‘there’ if it does not exist).
Our natural languages are languages about existence and its opposite non-existence. We need to develop a way of talking that allows us to speak, even when you are not at all speaking about the world. We need to communicate in the world, using languages which can only talk about the world, to say things ‘about’ something else, when there can be no ‘aboutness’ (i.e., when there is no reference or content) to this language.
I do not know whether I am intelligible or not. This is a huge, huge problem to talk about the state of enlightenment.