Recognition

Dhāraṇā 80 · Cognition without borders

Whatever knowing or wanting arises in me arises not as a confined event but as all-pervading — contemplating each cognition so, one becomes all-pervading oneself.

The previous dhāraṇā widened the self wholesale. This one is finer-grained: it takes cognitions one at a time — the seeing of a pot, a passing wish — and contests the belief that any of them was ever a small, local event.

The method

The verse chooses the humblest example Indian philosophy owns: ghaṭādau yac ca vijñānam — the cognition of a pot and such — icchādyaṃ vā, or a desire and the like, mama antare, arising within me. Ordinarily each such event seems triply confined: a small knowing, of a small object, inside a small knower. The contemplation reverses the reading: naiva jātaṃ sarvagataṃ — read with the verse's conclusion, it has not arisen as confined; it has arisen as all-pervading. When 'pot' appears, consciousness has taken the pot-shape the way the whole ocean takes the shape of one wave — the entire field of awareness is present in the appearing, not a corner of it. There are no part-time fragments of consciousness; there is only all of it, wearing this shape, now that shape.

The practice, then: at any moment, take the current cognition — whatever is being seen, heard or wanted — and contemplate it as an act of the whole. Bhāvayan iti — contemplating thus — sarvagaḥ: one becomes all-pervading. The knower inherits the width of his knowings the moment they are correctly read.

The smallness was borrowed

Notice the direction of the argument: the verse does not inflate a small cognition into a big one. It denies the smallness was ever real. Confinement is a description laid over the cognition afterwards — by comparison, by ownership, by the pot's own modest size being transferred to the knowing of it. The knowing of a small thing is not a small knowing, just as a mirror reflecting a pebble is not thereby pebble-sized. Strip the borrowed smallness from any single cognition, and the knower discovers there was never a border in the knowing at which he stopped.