Pure consciousness

Pure Consciousness wholly unrelated to the physical body and transcending the mind is a matter of direct experience. Sages know their bodiless, eternal existence, just as an unrealised man knows his bodily existence. But the experience of Consciousness can be with bodily awareness as well as without it. In the bodiless experience of Pure Consciousness the Sage is beyond time and space, and no question about the position of the Heart can arise at all. Since, however, the physical body can not subsist (with life) apart from Consciousness, bodily awareness has to be sustained by pure Consciousness. The former, by nature, is limited and can never be co-extensive with the latter which is Infinite and Eternal. Body-consciousness is merely a miniature reflection of the pure Consciousness with which the Sage has realised his identity. For him, therefore, body-consciousness is only a reflected ray, as it were, of the self-effulgent, infinite Consciousness which is himself. It is in this sense alone that the Sage is aware of his bodily existence.