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Re: Dreams as explained by discussion on pramAnas

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Chandrasekaran Venkatraman • April 17, 2000 


Dear Sri Venkat,
   I was away from my mails for the past 3 days. So please bear with me this delay.
   Please don't misunderstand that I am talking for/against a school of philosophy in this mail. Basically I am trying to resolve my doubts.

   I agree that without cognition, fear won't arise. This is because if the person seeing the rope didn't have the cognition, he won't get the illusion of snake in the first place. For example a child won't experience fear upon seeing rope-snake.
   What I feel is cognition plays only a role of a medium of understanding in an experience and not a role of a cause because without cognition there is no talk about experience itself. It's only a medium and it should be there. And it's true that there is no cognition without external objects (real and unreal). The question here is about the external objects that give rise to this cognition and not about the cognition itself which happens internal to a being. I hope I am clear here. 
   You said that "cognition is real and hence only real objects can cause real experience". This is a partial statement.
   I feel here you are generalising by using the term "real objects" which in this case means only cognition which is internal. But how does this go to prove that illusory objects can't give rise to cognition ? Cognition can't arise by itself. There has to be a rope-snake to cause cognition of false-snake to arise.
   So I feel by dealing with the rope-snake case, you only proved that cognition causes real experience. That cognition is real needed no discussion. The question remains as to whether unreal external objects can give rise to cognition. If answer is yes, then "unreal objects can give rise to cognition and hence real experience".

   In summary, cognition is only internal medium of understanding in an experience and without that there is no talk about experience itself. So describing that as the cause will limit the scope of the discussion and will not answer the actual question. The "rope-snake" case is a question about external objects. So the problem is whether an unreal external object can give rise to cognition and hence real experience or not.

   Looking forward to your clarification on above notes.

   Members, please don't misunderstand that I am explicitly talking for any school of thoughts or against any default authorities of this list. This is purely self-educative. 

   Thanks and regards,
   adiyEn,
   chandrasekaran.



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