Ayam aham asmīti: Self-consciousness and Identity in the Eighth Chapter of the Chāndogya Upanişad vs. Śankara’s Bhāşya

Raveh, Daniel

doi:10.1007/s10781-007-9031-7

Cited by 7 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 3 publications

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“…Various characterizations of dreamless sleep are given. Some texts characterize it as a state of oblivion, while other texts describe it as a mode of unknowing or non-cognitive consciousness that lacks either the outer sensory objects of the waking state or the inner mental images of the dream state (Raveh 2008). It is this second characterization that we find in the later texts of the Yoga and Vedānta schools.…”

Section: A Classical Indian Debatementioning

confidence: 82%

Dreamless Sleep, the Embodied Mind, and Consciousness: The Relevance of a Classical Indian Debate to Cognitive Science

Thompson¹,

Windt²

2017

Preprint

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One of the major debates in classical Indian philosophy concerned whether consciousness is present or absent in dreamless sleep. The philosophical schools of Advaita Vedānta and Yoga maintained that consciousness is present in dreamless sleep, whereas the Nyāya school maintained that it is absent. Consideration of this debate, especially the reasoning used by Advaita Vedānta to rebut the Nyāya view, calls into question the standard neuroscientific way of operationally defining consciousness as “that which disappears in dreamless sleep and reappears when we wake up or dream.” The Indian debate also offers new resources for contemporary philosophy of mind. At the same time, findings from cognitive neuroscience have important implications for Indian debates about cognition during sleep, as well as for Indian and Western philosophical discussions of the self and its relationship to the body. Finally, considerations about sleep drawn from the Indianmaterials suggest that we need a more refined taxonomy of sleep states than that which sleep science currently employs, and that contemplative methods of mind training are relevant for advancing the neurophenomenology of sleep and consciousness.

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Section: A Classical Indian Debatementioning

confidence: 82%

Dreamless Sleep, the Embodied Mind, and Consciousness: The Relevance of a Classical Indian Debate to Cognitive Science

Thompson¹,

Windt²

2017

Preprint

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“…An explicit generalisation of this idea to all beings is made at 6.9.2-3, further amplified in hints at transcending death (6.14-16). That idea is further developed in chapter eight (see also Raveh 2008 This experience seems to be Chāndogya Upanis . ad 6's way of achieving that boon alluded to repeatedly in the early Upanis .…”

Section: Ementioning

confidence: 87%

“Become This Whole World”: The Phenomenology of Metaphysical Religion in Chāndogya Upaniṣad 6–8

Frazier

2019

Religions

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Implicit in Heidegger's 1920-1921 Phenomenology of Religious Life is an account of religion as a radical transformation of the very structures of experience. This article seeks to apply that account to a classical Indian discourse on reality and the self, Chāndogya Upanis . ad chapter six. This classical source-text for two thousand years of Hindu theology advocates a new 'religious life' achieved through phenomenologically reorienting the very structures of cognition toward the broadest truths of reality, rather than the finite features of the world. The goal is to create a new form of primordial subjectivity with an altered relationship to phenomena, finitude, and the divine. The article proceeds in two parts: The first section brings out Heidegger's theory of religion through a reading of Heidegger's 1920 Phenomenology of Religious Life with the help of his lectures, On the Definition of Philosophy, from the previous year. The second section tries to demonstrate the value of integrating traditional textual/historical scholarship in the Chāndogya Upanis . ad with Heidegger's method. The juxtaposition aims to both (1) foreground the phenomenologically transformative goals of this influential Indian text, and (2) challenge Heidegger's scepticism about the religious value of metaphysical reflection.This article looks at what it means to enter a new 'religious life' by phenomenologically reorienting the very structures of experience toward the broadest truths of reality-that is, by shifting one's perspective so fundamentally that the world is experienced in terms of its universal features, rather than its finite, transient details. Heidegger's 1919-1921 lectures on 'The Phenomenology of Religious Life' described his vision of what the Christian experience can and should be. But they also contained a broader theory of religion, taking it to be a cultural form that alters the most basic patterns of our experience of the world in such a way that it reorients our sense of identity, values, and behaviour. Complimenting this, they also demonstrated a ground-breaking method of reading that seeks 'to penetrate therewith into the grounding phenomena of primordial [religious] life.' Here, we apply this to a classical Hindu text that aimed to create a new form of experience which alters one's relationship to phenomena, finitude, and the divine. 1 In the Chāndogya Upanis . ad, a 6th century text that shaped Hindu understandings of divinity for two millennia, a father asks his 'swollen-headed' son whether his teachers have passed on a special kind of truth that does not just fill the mind, but also transforms it: 1 The Upanis . ads are generally taken as introducing proto-philosophical ideas about metaphysics, identity, causality, and selfhood, that would later be refined in India's scholastic traditions. Texts, like the Chāndogya Upanis . ad, a c.7th century reflection on language and meaning, universalisation and essence, and finitude and immortality, highlights the uses of philosophical thinking as a spiritual exercise...

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“…The state of clear light is then conceived as a state of consciousness different from any other conscious state such that it lacks thoughts, cognition and perceptual experience (see Olivelle 1998). For these contemplative traditions, the state of clear light doesn't involve an ordinary state of consciousness with a subject-other distinction (Holecek 2016;Raveh 2008)-i.e. an 'I' who is aware of 'something'.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Is Lucid Dreamless Sleep Really Lucid?

Alcaraz-Sánchez

2022

Rev.Phil.Psych.

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Recently, the construct ‘lucid dreamless sleep’ has been proposed to explain the state of ‘clear light’ described by Tibetan Buddhist traditions, a special state of consciousness during deep sleep in which we’re told to be able to recognise the nature or essence of our mind (Padmasambhava & Gyatrul 2008; Ponlop 2006; Wangyal 1998). To explain the sort of awareness experienced during this state, some authors have appealed to the sort of lucidity acquired during lucid dreaming and suggested a link between both phenomena (Thompson 2014, 2015; Windt 2015a; Windt et al. 2016). Whilst these authors appeal to a non-conceptually mediated form of lucidity, which doesn’t consist of reflective awareness and propositional thought, the question as to whether the state of clear light should be considered a lucid state similar to lucid dreaming still arises. I argue that the concept ‘lucidity’ used to describe this sort of state is imprecise and that two theoretical notions of lucidity should be distinguished. The first one, which I call the technical notion, requires the recognition of the hallucinatory character of my current experience. The second, the broader notion, involves the seeming recognition of being directly acquainted with the phenomenal character of my experience. I spell out these two notions of lucidity and argue that only the latter could apply to the state of clear light sleep.

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Ayam aham asmīti: Self-consciousness and Identity in the Eighth Chapter of the Chāndogya Upanişad vs. Śankara’s Bhāşya

Cited by 7 publications

References 3 publications

Dreamless Sleep, the Embodied Mind, and Consciousness: The Relevance of a Classical Indian Debate to Cognitive Science

Dreamless Sleep, the Embodied Mind, and Consciousness: The Relevance of a Classical Indian Debate to Cognitive Science

“Become This Whole World”: The Phenomenology of Metaphysical Religion in Chāndogya Upaniṣad 6–8

Is Lucid Dreamless Sleep Really Lucid?

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