Introduction

Chittaranjan Naik reminds one of the Vamana Avatara of Sri Vishnu. He is an unusual genius who strides the three huge worlds of modern science, Indian traditional philosophy, and Western philosophy with aplomb. The graduate and post-graduate degrees in Aeronautical Engineering and Industrial Engineering respectively from IIT-Madras followed by a career as a technocrat in various organizations gives him more than adequate scientific authority. He resigned from his job and devoted himself full-time to the study of both Indian traditional and Western philosophies for more than a decade, which again should give him some authority.

He shows in this book, like in his previous book Natural Realism and Contact Theory of Perception, how lucid has been the development of the theme of the Self or Consciousness in Indian darshanas or philosophies. The understanding of reality and consciousness has been in clear terms for thousands of years and it is an unfortunate fallacy of our educational systems that most of us are not even remotely aware of it. It is a tragedy that an average Indian who wants to explore philosophy would pick up a Bertrand Russell or a Will Durant. Not to take away anything from them, but nobody even thinks or knows about books by Ramakrishna Puligandla or Hiriyanna on Indian philosophy.

Consciousness has been the trickiest problem in philosophy. Western philosophers and neuroscientists continuously indulge in never-ending discussions and debates on consciousness. Indian philosophy has taken a uniform stand on consciousness without change for centuries, much before even Greek philosophy (Western philosophy appropriates itself as heirs to the latter). The most crucial difference between Western and Indian philosophy has been the importance of the study of philosophy. For the former, philosophy is still mostly a dry intellectual exercise lying somewhere between where religion ends and science begins. The tool of logic also gives importance to the form of arguments (syntax) irrespective of whether they explain the reality or not, rather than the meaning of arguments (semantics).

Indian philosophy does not work with such artificial paradigms. It is never a dry intellectual exercise and has a deep purpose of not only explaining reality but also as a major tool in personal liberation or moksha, the foremost Purushartha. In the first book, which is perhaps a necessary background to this book- though not mandatory, Naik explains the perception of the reality around us through the idea of the Self-existent in Indian traditions. However, the author incorporates the relevant aspects of the first book into this second book where he proves the existence of the Self. It is a paradox, Naik says, that scientific progress and the inability to question scientific ideas prevents the understanding of reality in western traditions.

What follows is a four-part summary of Chittaranjan Naik’s book, On the Existence of the Self, with the permission of the author himself. The book broadly divides into two parts. In the first part, Naik proves the existence of the self by demonstrating that goal-oriented actions emanate from a unique power of the self (also known as kriya shakti). This power is from beyond the laws of physics and thus Naik dismantles the idea that the physical universe forms a causal closure (a strict cause and effect working purely at a physical level).

In the second part, he shows how mistaken their reasonings were for the influential western philosophers like Hume and Kant who buried the idea of the soul in western traditions. Similarly, Naik shows how Socratic and Descartes’ dualism are more in line with Indian traditional philosophy. The rejection of Cartesian dualism led to increasing confusion in western philosophy continuing till date, says Naik. The summary does not replace the book. It only provides the salient features of the book so that reader may have a better understanding while reading the book itself. The fantastic book needs careful reading and it is a promise that the reader will confront many striking and illuminating ideas at regular intervals throughout the book. The language is surprisingly easy for a layperson and this makes it more interesting.

The Self (consciousness) and its powers

In contemporary philosophy, the overwhelming belief is that consciousness (or awareness) does not have the power to cause anything. It is the subjective texture of experience leftover after the provision of all functional explanations. For most philosophers, consciousness is a secondary outcome or emerges as an epiphenomenon of physical matter. Even the few like David Chalmers who attribute a primary nature to consciousness agree that the latter has no functional role. Indian traditional philosophy challenges this view which not only ascribes a primary nature to consciousness but also to its causal power over certain aspects of reality.

Socrates and Plato held the belief, like Indian traditions, of a distinct indestructible and eternal soul separate from the destructible matter. However presently, the conception of self, being an emergent property of matter, disappear at death. Western philosophy treats the ‘self’, ‘soul’, ‘consciousness’, and ‘mind’ as the same arising from some part in the brain. The indiscriminate mixing of categories leads to muddling up many issues in philosophy especially the mind-matter problem. Does the mind give rise to matter or does matter give rise to the mind?

Indian philosophy makes a clear distinction between the self and mind-matter as two distinct identities. Mind and matter belong to the same category. In Indian traditions, the category of the cognizer is the self (or Purusha) whose characteristic feature is consciousness. Hence, self, consciousness, cognizer, and Purusha belong to the same category of sentience. Mind-matter, also known as prakriti and always insentient (inert or having jadatva), are one only belonging to the distinct category of the cognized.

The self, as the cognizer, can never be cognized as an object. However, the self is either known by its reflection on the cognized objects (like the hidden sun inferred from the light reflecting on the moon) or most importantly, by its self-luminous nature. A robot, Artificial Intelligence, or a computer also knows, sees, listens, or converses with a living or non-living object. But additionally, we also know that we know the object.  I am seeing something but I also know that I am seeing something. This is the self-luminosity of the cognizer.

In the Western tradition, the power assigned to the soul (or the mind) is the power of thinking and reasoning which strictly stays within the ambit of cause and effect arising from matter. However, in Indian traditions, the self has three powers and effects independent of matter and physical laws of cause and effect:

1. Iccha shakti (the power of willing)
2. Jnana shakti (the power of knowing)
3. Kriya shakti (the power of acting)

The exercise of these powers would not reflect in the unmoving and immutable self. They reflect in the mind and the inner instruments of the self while inhabiting the physical body as a being-in-the-world. The self exercises these powers by its mere presence and not by any exertion. It is an unmoved mover.

Iccha shakti is the power of exhibiting a desire for something. Jnana shakti is the consciousness about an object itself that becomes the knowledge about that object. In Indian philosophy, there is no fundamental difference between consciousness and knowledge. Consciousness is responsible for both immediate knowledge arising from direct perception and inferential knowledge arising in a mental mode as an ideated object.

Finally, Kriya shakti is the power by which the soul (or the self) can act upon external matter. The unimpeded self can act on all matter but the embodied self can only act on certain domains of the physical matter like the motor organs of the body it inhabits. It can act on other matters of the world only by channelizing its motor organs to act. All living beings having the soul possess these three characteristics in varying degrees. 

THE PROOF FROM JNANA SHAKTI

Western Traditions in Explaining Reality and Perception

Any attempt to explain perception through a set of purely physical processes fails. When it comes to perceiving objects in the external world, the standard Western paradigm is that light falls on an object first. This reflected light enters the eyes, falls onto the retina from where neural impulses travel via the nerves to a region of the brain. The reconstruction of the image leads to ‘seeing’ the object. The same is true for all the other senses.

This is the ‘stimulus-response theory of perception’- a stimulus evoking a response inside our brains through an intermediate causal chain. Of course, there is a difficulty in explaining how an internal image projects to the outside world. Since the external world is the interpretation in our brains depending on our endowed senses, the reality is indirect- a Representationalism. This contemporary scientific view, forming the basis of both philosophy and neuroscience, gets the term ‘Scientific Realism’ or ‘Indirect Realism’.

The real world (noumenon) is always beyond our capacity of comprehension. The ‘phenomenon’ is always a construction by the senses of the real world. The stimulus-response system is incoherent in explaining the ontological status or reality of the world. If there is an unknown ‘noumenon’ and a representative ‘phenomenon’, then every object in the causal chain from the external world to the perceiver, including the intervening medium is unknowable. Even the brain has a noumenon and it is a representation of something else. What are the true status of our body and the sense organs? This logical extension of the current thinking leads to various conundrums and inconsistencies. The main problem with the stimulus-response theory of perception is the problem of consciousness. It is impossible to perceive an object without there being consciousness of the object. Assuming a stimulus-response model of perception, consciousness would logically belong to noumena which we can never know. Hence, the conundrum is knowing unknowable objects by an unknowable subject too.

There have been some attempts to develop a Direct Realism theory in western traditions saying that there is somehow no transformation by the intervening medium. However, these positions do not reject the scientific principle of reflected light on matter reaching our senses and the brain converting the neural data. Problematically, this scientific paradigm is perfectly incompatible with Direct Realism. One either rejects science or rejects Direct realism finally in the western philosophical traditions.

Reality and Perception in Indian Traditions

In contrast, Indian philosophy stands on a robust ‘Natural Realism’ (or ‘Direct Realism’). The perceiver goes out and reaches the object in the world. This is the ‘contact-theory of perception’. Contact with the object gives direct information of the world as it exists. Hence, the external world as seen or heard is an actual world in its reality and not a construction. This establishes the role of pratyaksha or direct perception as a valid pramaana (means of knowledge). Perception obviously is not a valid source of knowledge in western traditions.

In the Indian tradition, the cognizer (purusha) and the cognized (prakriti) belong to two distinct categories with essential characteristics of sentience (awareness or chaitanya) and insentience (inertness or jadatva) respectively. The sentient self is the cognizer; the inert mind-matter is the cognized. Mind and matter are the two different modes of cognitive presentations (mind-matter equivalence) in which objects appear and reveal the furniture of objective reality. An idea in the mind is the same as the body apprehended in the world of matter. In Indian traditions, a conceived object cannot be unknowable; and if it is unknowable, there is no conceiving.

The self or consciousness is self-effulgent but the absence of ubiquitous perception indicates some primal covering over the self, obstructing its natural revealing power. This obstruction is the three-layered body: mula-sharira (seed-body), sukshuma-sharira (subtle-body), and sthula-sharira (gross body). The most primal covering layer is the nature of sleep. The middle layer is the layer of ideation, the realm of mind. The outermost layer is the layer of the gross physical body through which the embodied-self comes as a being in the world.

The instruments of perception are in this three-fold embodiment. Even though the self has the capacity to reveal objects by its intrinsic effulgence, maya obstructs its power of revealing. A clearing appears in the innermost covering of maya; the middle layer actively reaches out to the object helped by the instruments of perception; and the outermost layer comprising the physical body is the seat of experience. Perception, direct and immediate, is an inside to outside process.

The Embodiments, Reincarnation, and Liberation (Moksha)

The paradox is that the embodiment of the Self does not, in truth, exist which comes not through a physical process but through a cognitive condition whereby the Self morphs as the body and erroneously believes the body to be the self. By its true nature, the Self (with a capital ‘S’), being all-pervasive, has no containment. Only an erroneous cognition generates a certain psycho-physical bodily structure. Self’s embodiment through a cognitive condition forms a core tenet in all the six systems of Indian philosophy with slight variations.

Even when the physical body undergoes destruction, the idea of the body persists in the realm of the mind. The self, still equipped with the power of thinking, considering the body destruction as a loss, craves for a body. In the Indian tradition, this craving, along with the law of causation related to the embodied self’s moral actions in its past births, results in reincarnation of the self in another body.

Embodiment persists so long as the erroneous cognitive condition persists; hence, right-knowledge confers liberation. Thus, when the erroneous cognition dispels, one is set free from the shackles of bondage (to the body) and to the cycles of birth and death. This is the idea of embodiment and liberation that is central to the Indian tradition.

Perception

Perception is by the removal of the covering of maya (avidya or nescience) over the individual self (with a small ‘s’), allowing the conscious light of the Self to reveal external objects. The mind, in a process called vrtti, assumes the form of the target object during a conceptual act. The mind forms a vrtti both when it mentally constructs an object or when it contacts an external object to assume its form.  Perception is thus a composite process in which the Self, the mind, and the sense organs together establish a contact with the object.

In the Indian theory of perception, there is no transformation of the object. Once the mind and sense organs contact the object and assume the form of the object by forming a vrtti, there would be a conjunction of the mind, the sense organ, and the object at the very location of the object. There would be nothing in between the self and the object to hinder revealing the object in its true form. Perception is direct and reveals the object in its actual form. Contact is instantaneous since the all-pervasive consciousness that appears within the body is the same consciousness that exists everywhere. Hence, perception is nothing more than the removal of the covering of maya over the individual consciousness to reveal the conjunction that already exists with the object.

The Time-Lag Objection and The Simultaneity Experiment

Light travels at a finite velocity, and so there is always some time interval between the reflection or emission of light from a physical object and the light’s reaching our eyes. When the light of a star reaches our eyes, the star may no longer exist. Hence, Direct Realism is false say the objectors. Naik says that all the premises are theory-laden with the assumptions of the theoretical framework of science: (i) light travels with respect to a sentient observer, and (ii) we perceive objects because of a stimulus-response process.

The time lags observed are the time intervals for light to travel from one observed object- the source of light, to another observed object, namely the object illuminated. It is not for light to travel from the object to the observer. Naik offers an ingenious experiment called the ‘Simultaneity Experiment’ to address the major objection of time lag against direct perception. The author explains the mathematics of the experiment in detail.

Briefly, the measurement of the speed of light has always been from the source of light to another object, but never from the source of light to the sentient observer. A sentient observer would observe the light instantaneously. A nuclear explosion at 44,000 miles or so from Earth; instruments for measuring the speed of light from the event to a space station above Earth; and sentient observers recording the event on their watches on the same station are the paraphernalia for the experiment. If the Indian thinking is correct, the sentient observer would detect the nuclear explosion much earlier than the instruments. Such instantaneous perception of the explosion would be inexplicable through the laws of physics. This is a challenge for any future experiments which can change the present scientific-philosophical paradigms.

Irrespective of whether the Simultaneity Experiment is feasible or not, it would be unreasonable to continue to accept the physicalist theory of perception with all its logical inconsistencies. Thus, the primary cause of perception is not something that belongs to the domain of physical objects (the kshetra). The kshetra and the kshetrajna (consciousness or the conscious percipient) are two separate and distinct components of reality with the latter possessing as part of its nature the power of illuminating objects. If there should be some aspect of reality that defies explanation when considered through purely physical causes and admits to a coherent explanation by the acceptance of consciousness as a separate entity, then it is reasonable to hold that consciousness exists as a substance distinct from material bodies.

In Part 2 of this essay, we see Naik’s proof for the existence of Self through its power of Kriya Shakti.

To be continued