Ever since the dawn of Philosophy, there has been a

discord among the various schools regarding the

subjective/objective dilemma and whether one or the
other describes the nature of Reality. School of realism,
pragmatism and naturalism hold on the objective thesis
whereas German Idealism, Advaita Vedanta and Kashmiri
Shaivism propound the subjectivist theory. There has
been no agreement for over three thousand years over
this problem and it can well be said that the crux of the
problem lies not in the theories themselves but in the
nature and positing of the problem itself. The main thesis
of objectivists is that reality is objective by which they
mean that it has properties which can be verified by
senses of other individuals. Science in its modern sense
is based on this premise. It conducts experiments which
can be verified by peers and this gives the results an
objective standing which can then be taken to be
truth. The basis of the existence of objectivity is the
presence of senses common to everyone. This works well
for the physical plane of reality since existence and
cognizance of this level depends on the senses. But for
the realist thesis to hold, it must be assumed that the
physical plane is all there is. This is an assumption which
modern science makes without much proof, but on this
basis of which, it makes many claims, all of which are
based on this one fulcrum. The fashionable problem of
modern science, that of Consciousness, also called the
hard problem, is hard because Science is looking for a
material basis of Consciousness and in the absence of an
experimental proof of that, declares its helplessness. It
also makes an absurd hypothesis which sometimes can
be easily taken to be truth, which says the Consciousness
is created by the molecules of the brain. So matter in the
brain moves first and then we are able to think. For the
Sages of the India right from the Vedic age, such a
statement would have appeared laughable since they
could leave the physical body and travel to all corners of
the universe in their subtle bodies, appear to their
disciples in their dreams and do all sorts of miracles. But
to be fair, Science is not run by the wise sages today but
by fanatical cults of materialists who behave very much
like the religionists and theologians who they decry albeit
rightly many times. Science works fine only as long as
every assumption has a basis in reality but when they lack
such a basis, how can experiments based on such
assumptions give correct results ? The problem is, some
assumptions cannot be verified by Science in the present
state of human evolution. For that, the scientists have to
evolve, not science. This brings us to the question of the
subjectivist thesis.

Reality in its true sense has three aspects, matter,

consciousness and will (motion). Western philosophy has
captured the matter aspect of things, and Eastern
seekers and philosophers, the consciousness aspect of
things. For every human being, his feelings and thoughts
are what he calls subjective, which means he is the sole
witness to these movements inside his consciousness. He
cannot show them to anyone else. No one doubts that
he is more than just his external body. Every human
beings life is based on his inner thoughts and emotions
and it can be said that this subjectivity is the very
meaning of his life. Objectivity matters only so far as it
harmonizes with the demands of his subjective life. If this
were not the case, then truly man could live by bread
alone. Science tries to manage objectivity but the goal of
that endeavor is ultimately the subjective fulfillment of
Man. Every Scientist is a subjective individual who lives a
life of thoughts and emotions privately and argues against
the existence of such a dimension in outward life. A
strange predicament indeed. Eastern wisdom has been
much more true to the individuals inner life than the west.
In the very DNA of the eastern man, is the idea that
everything is Consciousness. At the ultimate level, this
Consciousness is called Shiva, Brahman, or Absolute.
The result of thousands of years of such a stream of
thought has resulted in a form of detachment or
otherworldliness in the land of India whose result on the
physical plane has been an impoverished, life stunting
existence. Of course, this very detachment has also
produced a galaxy of saints and enlightened beings who
have achieved the highest accomplishments in
Consciousness too. But one is forced to wonder if
Spiritual accomplishments must necessarily entail a
materially deplorable state of things. The exclusive focus
on consciousness in comparison to matter has a basis in
reality but that basis is partial and not complete. In Tantra,
it is always maintained that though Shiva is the highest
consciousness and uses his Shakti to project the universe
outside himself, at every level of creation, Shiva and
Shakti are ONE and the SAME. The only difference is in
the dominance of one principle over the another. As we
come closer to the material aspect of reality, there is more
Shakti with Shiva sleeping deep inside and as we go to
higher levels, Shiva reveals himself more. In the same
way, the focus of Consciousness for the eastern adept is
based on his desire to escape from this covering of
matter by which, he will be able to realize the true
dominance of Consciousness over matter. But it is not the
case that as Consciousness is attained in its pristine
brilliance, matter is completely negated or stops existing.
It simply becomes more refined and less rigid. Ultimately
matter is the carrier of Consciousness. As one goes into
the deeper levels of reality, matter stops being the
dominating principle and becomes the servant of
Consciousness who can shape matter as it wants. In the
physical plane, this is not possible for the ordinary man
who sees the immovable sternness of matter confronting
him with irresolute will in every aspect of life. This very
static nature of matter made the scientists assume that
matter is all there is. This staticity is also the basis of the
objectivity which Science takes to be the rasiondetere
for its existence. We should then ask, what is the nature of
matter as the physical plane is transcended ? What does
the eastern adept see as he travels upward in the higher
planes of reality ? And what is the nature of refined
matter that sages dont even mention its presence ? This
brings us to the question of Death.

In the ancient Puranas, reality has seven lokas, starting

with the Physical or Bhu loka, Bhuvar Loka, Swarga Loka,
Mahar Loka, Janah Loka, Tapah Loka and Satya Loka.
After death, man travels in his subtle body to the Bhuvar
Loka. In esoteric terms, he leaves his physical and etheric
sheath and travels in his emotional body to the Emotional
Plane of Reality. This is the level of reality where for many
human beings, life is a kind of real Hell because there,
emotions are all there is. A jealous individual gets to meet
other similar jealous beings, the lustful gets to meet his
fellow fornicators and the innocent stays with similar
souls. The ancient descriptions of Hell and Heaven were
exaggerations with a kernel of truth. Hell and Heaven are
not some planets where a Dark and Horrible Being boils
you in a cauldron of molten Iron. Its the nature of the
vibrations in which you find yourself after death which
subjectively feels like Hell since there is no way out of
that. This is because emotions control you in that plane.
They do so in the physical plane too but in ignorance of
the true nature of life, we justify that expression of
emotion, attributing it to the actions of someone outside of
us. It is only after death that most human beings realize
that emotions are not natural expressions of life. They
are instead an automatic reaction within us which we
dont have much control of usually. This automatism of
emotions in response to outer events is the source of
much of the misery in Planet Earth right now. After death,
this truth is revealed with a chilling horror. Matter in that
plane is dependent on the expression of emotions. So
anger has a particular color, so does jealousy, lust,
anguish and so does Love and Compassion. Many of the
ancient descriptions of emotions in literature were actually
based on this aspect of reality. Thus they called jealousy
green and anger red. These are realities in the emotional
plane which in a physical plane cannot be seen by an
embodied being. He considers them subjective until
after death, it is realized that emotions are very much
objective but only in that plane of reality. So we come to
an understanding that the subjective/objective divide is
as aspect of consciousness and not some absolute truth.
What is subjective on earth is objective on the plane
beyond earth. The question of the automatic nature of
emotions which is revealed after death will be answered a
bit later. But before that, we can understand the wisdom
of all the injunctions of the sages who asked us to
practice self-control of emotions and even thoughts for a
good life on earth and hereafter. Actually hereafter is the
more pressing reason for cultivating such controls since
life on earth might well be prosperous with a maxim that
says do whatever you feel like, but life hereafter will
certainly not be. Today we live in an age where
expressing emotions in every color is the fashion of the
day and in spite of all the horrors it unfolds, is being
advocated as a worthy philosophy to live by. This kind of
a maxim fundamentally depends on the assumption of
one life to live. Only Science really bases itself on such
a materialistic thesis because throughout history, Sages
and spiritual souls have talked extensively about the after
life. This also shows the dominance of mainstream
Science in the cultural sphere today. An assumption of
science has negated the testimony of many thousands of
saints and sages. We come back to the situation of the
hapless newly dead entrant in the emotional plane who
can do little now except cavort with the emotionally
familiar club he meets. There is some respite though
because residence in this place is not for long. After a
sojourn there, the emotional cloak is taken off and the
soul enter the mental plane in its mental body. The mental
plane by its very definition is the plane where thoughts are
everything. By everything is meant the structure of reality
composed of mental matter. This matter is even more
refined than emotional matter. Therefore consciousness is
even more dominant here and every thought shapes
reality instantly into the shape conceived. This is a very
blissful state of existence since all the negative thoughts,
which are invariably connected with emotions have been
left behind in the emotional plane and only the purest
thoughts have accompanied the soul in to the mental
plane. Such purity is the real meaning of the ancient
Swarga Loka desired by all hindus. Here is the place
where all the purest thoughts of benevolence and truth
live themselves out in an enchanting panorama of
dazzling light. The problem is, the soul is actually not
conscious in the way on earth he was. These thoughts
that play themselves out are like a dream where one is not
in control of anything. It just happens to be the case that
the dream here in intensely real and blissful and so there
is only joy and happiness. The content of the dream is
based on the life he left behind. Thus one can say this is
selfish in a very good way. Just like the emotions
controlled the soul in the last plane, so does thoughts do
on this plane. But here there are no fellows with similar
thoughts like the emotional plane. Life in the mental
plane is pure subjectivity. One can create any individuals
persona by thinking about the person. So one can live out
the most joyous events in the life gone by with the most
loved ones simply by thinking. Our subconscious which
never forgets anything, has recorded every waking
impression with perfect replicability and this is used in the
mental plane to relive those moments. The dreamy nature
of this plane is not of much concern since no one minds
such a vividly real and blissful dream. But this is not Real.
These are your own ideas and thought forms which are
akin to fictions and may not have any correspondence to
reality in the physical plane when they were formed. The
subjective aspect here raises a question of the possible
objectivity on this plane. The question is, is the mental
plane just a subjective world ? The answer is, it is NOT. In
fact the possibility of this Objectivity raises the question of
the fictitious nature of thoughts. On earth, we think our
thoughts are all that matter to us. Often driven by
emotions which then capture our thinking process, we
endlessly spin yarns of thoughts on all manner of things,
people and events. Very rarely do we plan to seek out the
truth of our thoughts. The much more spiritually relevant
thing is that we are NOT our thoughts. This is revealed
most clearly in the mental plane where the very
dominance of our thought life is revealed in the dreamy
nature of that plane since we do not consciously control
that dream. Thinking is done in matter of extreme
refinement even in a physical body. The brain actually
receives a certain percentage of this mental body
movements. This matter is also an automatic matter and is
normally outside our control. The physical world affects us
and we start thinking automatically. Much more
importantly, the mental body is not an isolated space but
a shared one. Thoughts are like waves which fly about in
the mental plane which humans catch like receivers.
This is why every nation has a certain dominant thought
pattern which defines it. Culture as we know it is
essentially the dominance of these waves of thought
matter over a geographical area. It is difficult to extricate
oneself from such waves because energy follows
thought. As more and more people think on the same
lines, the thought forms get more and more energized.
The usual saying that I cant get it off my mind hides
very deep physics about the nature of the thought plane.
Entire nations can be colonized by thought forms of
intense vitality. Germany for example in World War 2 was
colonized by a certain Spirit which Carl Jung called
Wotan who fed and sustained the murderous rage of the
Germans. It was as impossible in that age to think freely
as its impossible to rescue yourself from drowning in a
sucking whirlpool. Thoughts have energy which is why
one needs extensive force and will to remove them. This
feature of the mental plane reveals many truths of racism,
suicide bombing and all manner of mass thinking
patterns. It also reveals the importance of the arduous
processes of Yoga which essentially is the stoppage of all
involuntary thoughts as Patanjali speaks in the 2nd sutra
of the Yoga Sutras. Yoga seeks to take the seeker to the
Ultimate Truth which in the preceding description of
planes, lies beyond the mental plane. Only when one is
able to control all automatic thoughts and emotions, does
one travel past the emotional and mental plane and land
in the planes of Nirvana. This is the first plane where one
is truly free of all emotional illusions and mental fictions.
As we saw, emotions and thoughts are both composed of
bodies of matter which are automatic in nature and being
bodies, do not contain our essential self. They are both
aggregations of matter which activate on the slightest
perturbation. More importantly, they do not correspond to
reality. One can build all sorts of day dreams and fictitious
ideas about the world and all that will amount to, is a
sojourn in these planes of emotion and thoughts after
death. To get objective consciousness on the mental
plane is possible only for enlightened beings who are no
more controlled by thought and so can investigate it
without any bias. Bias is what defines the usual man who
is driven by his subconscious drives and tendencies
which were called Samskaras and Skandhas. In the after-
death planes, every thought and emotion is a living reality
completely defined by individual opinions. One can well
say that there is nothing wrong in living in these planes of
illusion since it is still some way of living. This question
has always had a standard answer historically, that
releasing yourself from the fetters of attachment to
emotions and thoughts is the goal of life on earth. Its not
only a question of the ineradicable havoc and suffering
that blind emotional urges and fanatically resistant
thoughts bring upon man when on earth, its also the
question of the real identity of man. If man were just
emotions or thoughts, the after death life presented here
might well have been an acceptable one. But is that true ?
Any beginner in meditation is asked to observe thoughts
and it is well known that thinking people can control their
emotions to a great extent. What this reveals is that
reason can unravel the blind and illusive structure of
emotions and also that the rational process of reason can
be observed as a movement separate from the observing
individual. This shows that beyond thoughts and emotions
is some aspect of existence which is neither of the two.
The illusory nature of the emotional and mental planes
explains the tremendous importance of the physical plane
existence. Its only on earth, as an embodied being that
we can transcend emotions and thoughts. After death, we
are bound by what we attained in life on earth. We give
ourselves over to the automatic bodies of emotions and
thoughts which life can be called a sort of rest from
earthly life since there is nothing we consciously control.
On earth, we can learn to control our emotions, use our
will to change patterns of thoughts. This is partly because
the physical body is a great help from the spiritual point of
view. All Hatha Yoga is based on the impact that certain
postures of the physical body have on our thoughts and
emotions. More importantly, physical plane life presents
us with a laboratory called objective life where we learn to
master outer events through inner control of thoughts and
emotions. Such a laboratory is missing after death. Then
we are stuck with our automatic emotional bodies and
their vibrations and have no will to transcend that level of
vibration. The aspect of truth beyond emotions and
thoughts have to be transcended only in a physical plane
birth. What that aspect is, is the goal of all Yoga and all
seeking after Truth. Now this is the experiential aspect of
truth. The objective aspect as to why reality has been
structured like this, that we are forced to live in bodies of
emotion and mind and then asked to transcend these
very bodies through struggle and renunciation concerns
the esoteric structure of evolution on planet earth. One
can ask if all this was necessary. Why couldnt God just let
us live in the planes of reality beyond the mind itself ?
Why did we have to come down to this coarse material
plane of reality and then travel all the way up giving up
these cherished planes of emotion and thought ? The
answer to this question will involve a detailed explanation
as to the purpose of Life and existence and in a future
post I shall do that. For now, we can take the experiential
description and proceed.

The post started with the question of Philosophy and will

end with it. Philosophy is essentially complex movements
of matter in the mental plane. The mental plane can be
considered one super-complex laboratory where one can
create prototypes of external reality and dive deeper and
deeper into that created structure which will reveal more
aspects than the initial impression. Its consciousness
examining consciousness. Thought takes an impression
from external reality, churns it in the mind and reveals
aspects which are completely new. All inference and
deduction are such movements. Philosophy looks at the
external reality of appearances and in the mental plane,
tries to go beyond the appearance. It can do so because
appearance by its very nature, hides the truth. To the
extent, the truth lies beyond it, the mind can reveal it. But
because the mind is a subjective plane of reality, unless
the topic of churning is the physical reality, there is no
way to verify whether the conclusions of the mind are true
or not. Science does a very good job of explaining most
of every day life because its hypotheses can be verified.
But when it comes to the emotional and mental planes,
there is no way to give an objective description of that
reality. Subjectivist Philosophy tries to explain the reality of
the seven planes of reality through a mental plane
description. But the problem is, unless one has objective
consciousness on the mental plane, one cannot even
describe that plane properly. And planes beyond the
mental do not even have a structure of reality that the
mind can fathom. These supra-mental planes are
structures where pure Intuition reigns which is a reality
where Oneness is realized without the sequential nature
of logical thought. This is why metaphysics is essentially a
flawed discipline. It can create elaborate fictions which
can at most approximate reality upto the mental plane as
Hegel shows but its reach is limited. All metaphysical
problems are insoluble for the non-realized man. Only a
self-realized being having travelled beyond the mental
plane, can then undertake the task of explaining the true
nature of the mind. And for the nirvanic planes, the mind
itself is incapable of understanding. This is the reason
why so many of the mystics say things which appear
inexplicable to reason. Creation ex-nihilo, or reality is One
or many, these are all intractable questions for the logical
mind. All philosophers have given many descriptions of
reality according to their own subjective fictions created in
the mental plane. This has done only one good thing
which is that the philosopher and his readers have
travelled to the more finer realms of the mental plane.
which are abstract planes. Abstraction is a way to travel
up though subjectively. Only realization gives one the true
access to ones own and the universes reality. Realization
gives you the first understanding of how reality is truly
structured, how the oneness spoken of by mystics and
sages is a lived reality, how every inch of creation is
bursting with consciousness starting from the rock to the
entire planet with its billions of animals, plants and human
beings and also the meaning of Maya or the illusory
nature of reality. One realizes that all forms of separation
is an illusion. The universe is actually one single block of
consciousness which appears separate only in
appearance. Such a realization for her children has been
the goal of evolution on planet earth ever since the planet
appeared in the mists of antiquity.