Question:

Didi, is my understanding correct?
Pratyaksha Gnyana: I see/meet a new person in the neighborhood.
Paroksha Gnyana: Prejudices/assumptions about him/her based on the looks/conversation.
Aparoksha Gnyana: In awareness, I don’t exist. The person also does not exist. The person/conversation was only a projection of my thought/conditioning.

Answer:

That’s correct but let me detail this for the newbies.

• • Pratyaksha Gnyana is that which is directly perceived through the 5 senses of sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. Meeting a person involves sight, sound [talking] and touch [handshake], etc.

• • Paroksha Gnyana is that which is indirectly deduced by the mind. All your prejudices of how the person walks, talks, behaves, dresses up, etc come under Paroksha Gnyana. All your assumptions of what he is thinking, what is he not saying, etc is Paroksha.

• • Aparoksha Gnyana is direct knowledge that is available to awareness devoid of the Pratyaka and Paroksha.

‘The body-mind does not exist independent of I-the-Awareness. This means that the senses do not exist independent of I-the-Awareness. The senses are simply superimpositions on awareness. This means that which is actually happening in the space of awareness and is known by the space of awareness is being wrongly understood as ‘happening outside’ and being perceived through the senses by the mind ‘inside’.

See the truth as it actually is.

Through direct knowledge, you can see that the person and the conversation with him was only a projection similar to a projection in dreams. A similar event could occur in the dream state and on waking up, you would discard the illusory dream. Is that correct?

Yet, you would not be able to discard the existence of the ‘dream experience’ – the dream happened and was experienced. Is that correct?

In other words ‘I-the-Awareness perceived the dream’. The dream is made of awareness, it appeared in awareness, it was known by awareness, it disappeared in awareness, its disappearance was known by awareness. Awareness remains whole, untouched, intact.

Look further into your dream experience:

I-the-Awareness have naturally projected the dream. Aliens did not come to plant a dream. Yet, I do not know how I would choose to see a tiger chasing me in my own dream and wake up frightened.

Therefore, it can be experientially recognized that I-the-Awareness have two separate modes:

• • Perceiving only mode:  When I am in the perceiving only mode, I-the-Awareness have chosen to limit myself to the finiteness of the body-mind as I have assumed that I can perceive only through the 5 sense organs. When in the limited mode of ‘perceiving only’, I don’t know how I projected the person and the conversation in the waking-dream OR how I projected the tiger in the sleep-dream.

• • Projection mode: This is the unknown mode. That means I do not know how and when I would have sowed the seeds of such a projection. Yet it is my own projection, nobody else plants stories in my mind. In the projection mode, I-the-Awareness plant the seeds of a tiger chasing me in my sleep-dream and meeting a new person in my waking dream. Why would I create such an impression is totally unknown to me when I change out from this ‘projection mode’ to ‘perceiving only mode’

I-the-Awareness perceive what I have projected in the projection mode when I am in the ‘perceiving only mode’.

How do I know that I-the-Awareness projected the waking-state conversation?

Because the person and the conversation were tinted with your body-mind’s conditioning. When you stand back as a witness, you will notice the nuances of your body-mind’s conditioning very clearly. This will be reflected by the Paroksha Gnyana clearly.

Secondly, the existence of the entire sequence [person + conversation] is dependent on I-the-awareness. When in deep-sleep-state, the previous night, the person & conversation did not exist. When I transitioned from the deep-sleep to dreaming to waking, the first to appear was the awareness, within which appeared my mind, within which appeared my body, within which appeared my personal world. The meeting with the person was a part of my personal world. Thus I-the-Awareness projected the person & the conversation!

Explore by diving within! See the truth as it is!

P.S. If you can see this clearly, feel free to share a few more examples of Pratyaksha, Paroksha and Aparoksha in the comments below.

#AtmaNirvriti #AtmanandaKrishnaMenon #AdvaitaVedanta #Non-duality #Nisargadatta Maharaj