ABSTRACT
" Neti, Neti" is an attitude of shrinking. It is the spirit of rejection. Saksi is the perpetual witness, distinguished from the oscillations of life and mind. It does not wink. It is the unwinking vigilance of spirit-waking. It neither accepts nor rejects. Rejection or acceptance posit the quality of subject and object. It is a choice on the presentation of a datum to the subject. Life moves here in a groove, it has lost its flow. Consciousness works with a limitation set upon it—the limitation of working through selection. Saksi allows freedom from such limitations. The word means literally the detached percipience. It reflects everything, but it is never a logical subject. The subject works under the categories of knowledge and value, it cannot rise above the sectional impressions of life and experience received through the fixed concepts of intellect. Intellect is not, therefore, the proper instrument to apprehend truth. It can grasp the static relations and even the dynamic divergence or unity, but it cannot grasp truth that is neither statical nor dynamical. The subject works under a harassing limitation. The self is the subject, not in its naked purity and simplicity but as a centre of reflection and desire. To understand truth the self must rise from the notion of itself as a subject, to the understanding of itself as the free creative principle and then finally as the percipience. The understanding of it as the subject limits its knowledge and activity to an object; it then cannot feel the free spontaneity of life. The rigidity of the logical construction based upon the conception of the self as subject cannot impress us with the spontaneity of the subject. The necessity arises, therefore, of understanding the self not only as a subject but as a creative agent. This is an important step on the path of realization. The structure which intellect builds up is made up of a constant reference and relation of the subject to the object, and hence the subject cannot feel, so long as it works through concepts, its free nature and spontaneous creation. This spontaneity of the self has to be felt to make way for the final release, for it puts us beyond the world of rigid determination and makes us acquainted with the free creative activity of the self. In this sense the idea of spontaneous being has an appeal to the human mind, for this spontaneity puts us beyond the realm of law and determination to the reality of indeterminism and free expression which is the essence of spirit. The self as freely creative is an advance upon the self as constitutive.
