Page:Ramakrishna - His Life and Sayings.djvu/100

82 form part of our body, they perish with the body, and cannot therefore constitute our real Self. Besides the five senses which the Hindus call ^Snendriyas, senses .of knowledge, they admit five other senses which they call karmendriyas, senses of action, namely, the senses of speaking, grasping, moving, excretion, and procreation. This is an idea peculiar to the Hindus, the former five being intended for action from without to within (upalabdhi), the latter for action from within to without (karman). The images brought to us by the senses, on which we depend for all our knowledge, are what we should call states of consciousness, they are not even our Ego, much less our Self. They come and go, arise and vanish, and cannot therefore be called real or eternal, as little as the body. In all these images we may distinguish the subject or the active element, and the object or the passive element The passive or objective elements are what we are ac- customed to call matter, and this matter, according to the five senses by which it is perceived, is divided into five kinds, viz. ether, corresponding to hearing; light, corre- sponding to seeing; air, corresponding to touching; water, corresponding to tasting; and earth, corresponding to smelling. This is all that we can legitimately mean by the five elements. They are to us states of consciousness, or vfe#na only. But though to us elementary matter exists, and can exist as known, or in the form of knowledge only, the Vedanta does not deny its existence, whatever it may say about its reality. If the objects of our sensuous knowledge are all the result of AvidyS, the elements also