UNDERSTANDING ATMAN - BRAHMAN AS WAVE AND WATER

                                          

           

Understanding  Atman- Brahman As Wave And Water

      

A broader and secular understanding of Atman and Brahman, the crown jewels of the Upanishads and Vedanta, offers perhaps the most metaphysically parsimonious and existentially potent framework ever conceived. Far beyond narrow, sectarian or ritualistic perceptions, it speaks to all humanity. Freed from limited theological dogma, it applies with equal force to theistic and atheistic worldviews, to the believer and the sceptic alike, for it requires no supernatural postulate and rests on direct inquiry.

Phenomenologically, Atman denotes the irreducible first person givenness of consciousness itself, the prereflective, self luminous awareness that any thought, any doubt, any denial must already presuppose. It is not the ego, not personality, not memory, not biography, but the very condition of experiencing, ever present and undivided.

                                        

Cosmologically, Brahman denotes the totality of what is, the impersonal, lawful, infinite plenum that precedes and conditions all particular manifestations. Not a creator God above the world, but the very being of the world, ceaseless, boundless and self existent, within which all forms arise and dissolve.

The logical relation is mereological and non dual. The part is constituted by the whole and cannot possess an essence alien to it. The whirlpool exemplifies this. It is not superimposed upon the river but is the river's own self organising activity rendered transiently distinct by form and momentum. Analogously, Atman is not inserted into Brahman but is Brahman's reflexive capacity localised temporally, Brahman knowing itself in human form.

                                

This yields a dual aspect anthropology. Qua Atman we pursue agency and coherence. Qua Brahman we confront impermanence and interdependence. I believe , ' Human Liberation' is holding both truths without reduction, to live simultaneously as wave and water, particular and universal, with radical clarity within the world rather than escape from it.

( Avtar Mota )

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