The Genius of Dnyaneshwar Dnyaneshwari Verses 111–138 Geeta Chapter 2
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Chapter 26
The Sensorium1/ Plato’s Cave
What if we were chained inside a cave, from our childhood, always facing a wall, and shadows were to fall on this wall of the outside world because of a light that came from behind us? Could we deduce what was actually happening outside? Or would the reality be quite different from what we were assuming? These are the questions that the Greek philosopher Plato (428–348 BC) asks after narrating his famous allegory2 of the cave. In his time, Gautam Buddha (563–1483 BC), a predecessor of Plato by a few decades, was telling Indian audiences that not only ‘what we conclude from the sensations that we get’ was meaningless, but even the idea that ‘we are’ is a false assumption. In times recent, it was Locke (1623–1704, English), who made his well-known statement that we are born with a clean slate and that over time, matter writes on this slate (for us to make sense of this world). Later Berkeley (1685–1753, Irish) was to go a step further and say that whatever be the ‘matter’, it is only sensations that really matter. The play on the word ‘matter’ is not accidental but inevitable because matter is the source of sensations. The Scotsman Hume (1711–1776) was even more radical. He denied the existence of the mind (Locke’s slate) because it cannot be proved, and therefore concluded, somewhat shockingly, that only sensations constitute our life. Emanuel Kant (1724–1804, German) who by all evidence laid the foundations of modern Western philosophy was to prove by some extremely complicated arguments, that even ‘time and space’ on which man bases all his experiences are mere convenient ideas. Some of the Upanishads4 almost certainly predate Plato and Gautam Buddha. But they began to be usefully consolidated in the form of the Geeta probably around the same time that Plato and Buddha were active philosophers. This chapter has to do with what Shrikrishna has to say about sensations, by way of the Geeta, in the words of Dnyaneshwar (for Upanishads4 see Chapter 12, Geeta and