A: Nāgārjuna introduces śūnyatā or voidness. When fragmentation is eliminated,
there is a void. In the void is everything. Did you come to this spontaneously?
K: What else do the professionals say?
A: Śaṅkara says: Acquire learning and the prestige that goes with learning—so
what? Acquire wealth and the power that goes with it—so what? Visit many
countries, feed and entertain your friends, help the poor and the sick, bathe in the
Ganga, give alms in vast quantities, repeat mantras by the million, and so on—so
what? All these are of no avail unless the Self is realized. And Śaṅkara ends by
saying that the man who discovers that all these forms of prestigious action are
bereft of significance for self-knowledge alone is capable of self-realization.
K: How has the question of fragmentation in consciousness been tackled by the
professionals?
A: They distinguish the citta from caitanya; the common root here is cit.
N: Cit is consciousness.
A: Do they go into the fragmentary nature of the mind, or do they say that the
activities of the mind are unreal?
K: What is the question we are trying to explore?
A: We only know the various fragmented expressions of energy. Is it possible to
see the entire field? Or is this a wrong question?
K: If one fragment or many fragments exist, what is the entity that is going to
observe the totality of energy? Are our minds so conditioned that we cannot
break ourselves from the conditioning?
A: We are so conditioned.
R: The other day at the discussion you said that if someone slapped me, I’d feel
hurt. But that if attention were given at that moment, then I would not feel hurt;
there’d be no recording of it. But the fact is that reaction is instantaneous. When
reaction is instantaneous, how is it possible to give attention at that moment?
K: (pointing to the carpet) There is this little bit of carpet which is a part of the
whole carpet. I have been seeing only this fragment, and you say that this
fragment could not exist without the whole carpet. My life is spent observing the
fragment. Then you come along and say: This is part of the whole, this would not
exist if the other did not exist. But I cannot take my eyes off this fragment. I
agree that this can only exist because of the whole carpet, but I have never, never
looked at the whole carpet. I have never moved away from this. My attention has