When a person awakens to the very essence or substance of thought, reaching pure Mind which is devoid of mentation, i.e., mental activity, this realization is first-person, not third-person. It cannot be shared like a conventional object, although two people enlightened recognize a connection. Even the attainment of nirvana is first-person which in Pali is paccatta and in Sanskrit praty-ātman, both meaning the “very self,” or “inmost self.”
Why is this important? Because Western Buddhists generally believe in only one kind of knowledge this being third-person knowledge. As close as they will allow to first-person is autobiographical personal facts such as information relating to one’s birth, schooling, jobs, criminal record, etc.
If you’ve made a claim of having had kenshō, which is first-person, then it is demanded of you extraordinary proof which is always something third-person like a certificate. This is only fair some might argue. Don’t we demand proof that a person is a qualified surgeon before they can operate on a person? But in this situation, surgical skills have already been demonstrated, third-person, through a kind of medical apprenticeship program. As a student you have to work with a qualified teacher-surgeons in a specialized type of surgery.
In spite of this problem, first-person knowledge in terms of mentation has to be admitted by all. We all have an inner voice, thoughts, mental images and feelings. Just precisely what they are from one individual to the next is where we differ. We are able, so to speak, to get behind our mentation so as to have an awareness of it—of what is going on in our heads. But what we are unable to do is get in back of behind. This would be the primary, inmost self or paccatta. But this is what enlightenment achieves. And this is accomplished by the sudden negation of mentation. The adept enters into an indescribable state of oneness (ekatva). Even consciousness (vijñāna), which is bifurcated knowing, has returned to the one.
One more way of looking at this, if we can imagine a substratum of our mentation it would be pure Mind or the same, the unconditioned Mind. All mental activity arises from the substratum of the Mind which is universal. This is something along the lines of the late quantum physicist David Bohm’s ultra-holistic “Implicate Order,” which he describes as an “unbroken wholeness of the totality of existence as an undivided flowing movement without borders.” He further says:
In this flow, mind and matter are not separate substances. Rather, they are different aspects of one whole and unbroken movement. In this way, we are able to look on all aspects of existence as not divided from each other, and thus we can bring to an end the fragmentation implicit in the current attitude toward the atomic point of view, which leads us to divide everything from everything in a thoroughgoing way (David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, 14).
Bohm's Implicate Order adds a measure of credibility to the validity of Buddhism's first-person knowledge in which I would argue that the Buddha's awakening had direct insight into Bohm's order in which thought and matter returned to the original whole or one which cuts against the current fragmentalist view of reality which still dominates the sciences and impacts our way of thinking in an unrealistic, negative way.
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