of the two types of awareness and, therefore, we cannot understand what the
difference is. Even the best of minds can fumble here on account of a subtle desire to
transpose the characters of world perception to spiritual consciousness.
Spiritual consciousness is different from world perception, but many people do not
understand this. They are, again and again, brought to the wrong conviction by the
habits of the mind that, somehow or other, the conditions of world experience will
persist even in God-consciousness. This is exactly what is denied in this sutra. World
experience is different in character from spiritual experience, and those conditions
which are necessary to rouse a spiritual experience in oneself are to be acquired
before a meditation in this direction can be attempted.
No one can reconstitute the structure of the mind in such a way as to prevent it from
the affirmation of its own old conviction that world experience is real. Not only that—
it feels that it is the only reality. Who among us here is not convinced about the
reality of world experience? Who has the guts to believe that there is another sort of
experience other than world experience? All that we see here with our eyes and sense
with our senses is the only reality for us. That is why we cling to the things of the
world so much. Neither can we believe that there are other grades of experience than
the present one, nor can we believe that there is something wrong in the ways of
sense perception as provided now, in this condition of the mind. Therefore, it is a
Herculean task, indeed, to bring the mind round to a new type of conviction, which is
what is called viveka—right appreciation and a perception of the character of
Reality.
The sutra which I stated just now is a precise statement of the conditions of spiritual
meditation. What the sutra literally means is: sattva and the purusha—namely, the
mind and the ultimate consciousness, purusha—are opposed to each other in their
characters. In what way are they opposed? That is not mentioned here. We have to
understand what this difference is by studying the meaning of the implications
provided in other sutras. The purusha is infinite, whereas the mind is externalised.
This is the primary distinction. The mind cannot have infinite awareness. It is always
projected outwardly through the senses, whereas the purusha is eternally aware of an
infinitude of being. This is a great difference indeed.
Further, in certain other sutras we will be told as to what the differences are between
purusha-consciousness and mind-consciousness, or object-consciousness, or world-
consciousness, as we may call them. Externality and eternity cannot go together; they
are different intrinsically. Eternity is not externality. Though linguistically we are
able to understand what this difference is, the mind cannot comprehend the meaning
of this. The externality that is the character of mind perception, or any kind of world
perception, is involved in a time process, which is what is called duration—a passage
or a movement of time—whereas there is no such passage or duration in eternity. It is
an eternal ‘now’, a word with which we are familiar but which meaning is not clear to
us.
There is no such thing as past, present and future for the purusha, but there is such a
thing as past, present and future for the mind. Something happened yesterday;
something is happening today; something will happen tomorrow. This is how we
think, isn’t it? But the purusha is not aware of this kind of distinction of past, present
and future. There is a sudden awareness of a totality of existence and, therefore,