Usage of ‘knowingness’ in the teaching of Advaita
*** Read Part 1 ***

This is the first part of my search to find other uses of the word. I separated the domains of my searches into the following categories: 1) Scriptures (i.e. prasthāna traya and bhāṣhya-s, and very well-known post-Śaṅkara works such as Pañcadaśī), and Traditional teachers such as Dayananda; 2) Ramana and disciples; 3) Nisargadatta and disciples; 4) Direct Path (Atmananda Krishna Menon and disciples); 5) Neo-Vedanta (Ramakrishna-Vivekananda and disciples); 6) Osho and disciples; 7) Neo-Advaita; 8) Miscellaneous (difficult to categorize or clearly not Advaita).

Scriptural

I have nearly 4GB of original scripture documents in nearly 4000 files. There exist a grand total of about 50 occurrences of the word ‘knowingness’. Nearly 40 of those are in the few Yoga Vasishtha-related documents that I have. Of the remaining occurrences, the only source with more than 1 reference is a book entitled ‘The Supreme Knowledge of the Self: The Timeless Wisdom of Jagadguru Adi Śaṅkara’, which just happens to have been written by Shri Yellamraju Srinivasa Rao! (Translated by Neppalli Padma “under the guidance of Dr. Ramesam Vemuri”!)

He says, for example:

“By meditating on the great sayings, our consciousness will gradually expand into non-dual Consciousness. We will stop seeing names and forms, develop conviction that the world is an illusion, and start seeing Consciousness as Beingness (sat) and Knowingness (cit).”

(This is like saying that, when a jar breaks, the space inside it expands to merge with the universal space. And we immediately fall over the nearest chair that we no longer see.)

I have nearly 1.4GB of well over 1000 files from some 69, essentially traditional teachers. Yet, in all of these, I only found 40 occurrences of the word ‘knowingness’ and – guess what – 30 of these were in the series ‘sAdhana in Advaita’ [Based on Shri Yellamraju Srinivasa Rao’s Audio Talk  – An Overview of The Advaita Doctrine] and translated and posted to the site by Ramesam – https://www.advaita-vision.org/sadhana-in-advaita-1-6/.

It does occur twice in Krishnananda’s Muṇḍaka Upanishad but the first of these is simply using ‘all-knowingness’ as a synonym for omniscience. The other, in the third mantra states that “To the individual is attributed the quality of knowingness which is the knowledge of the Supreme Being achieved after the acquisition of the power of correct discrimination”, which is at least an understandable usage.

Swami Nikhilananda uses it once in his Māṇḍūkya commentary – on kārikā 1.5 – as a synonym for ‘awareness’:

As (the heat of the) fire does not increase or decrease by consuming wood, etc., so also nothing is added to or taken away (from the knowingness or awareness of the Atman) by its experience of that which, is its object.

Sivananda uses it once in his commentary on the Brahmasūtra but there is nothing strange here. He is taking about the Sāṃkhya belief that pradhāna is ‘all-knowing’ and concludes that “all-knowingness cannot be ascribed to Pradhāna”.

As noted, Yoga Vasishtha is a good source for the term. Kuppa Venkata Krishna Murthy (rendered into English by Dr. Vemuri Ramesam) gives his justification for the invented word in his ‘Musings on YOGAVASISHTA Part- II’:

“By giving the label ‘knowingness,’ it appears as if it is an unknown animal. But if we think over a bit on who is it that is actually aware of the movement of the sensory organs, you will find that it is none other than the ‘individual’ inside ‘me.’ Therefore, the knowingness or the individual (jIva) is one and the same. Or knowingness is the ‘me’ inside me!”

As noted at the beginning of this post, Ramesam’s especially prolific use of the term ‘knowingness’ occurred in the first part of his Aitareya post. saying that:

“The Aitareya Upaniṣad offers a radically different answer. (The word aitareya literally means ‘other,’ suggesting a different standpoint). It declares that the individual and the world do not exist independently; both depend upon Knowingness. Knowingness alone is self-existent.”

Ramana

Mountain Path 1964 – 2011 – 10 hits found; 6 of these in April 2004 in an article on Nisargadatta by Philip Renard. According to Renard:

He (Nisargadatta) supplied numerous synonyms for it (the sense of ‘I am’)  like ‘knowingness’, ‘Krishna state’, ‘child consciousness’, ‘seed’, ‘witness’, ‘God’, ‘being’, ‘beingness’, ‘sattva’, ‘the chemical’, ‘Saguna Brahman’, ‘the manifest’, ‘the supreme principle’: they all come down to the same.

And Renard goes on to say:

Noticing, for instance, the body sitting here could be called ‘knowingness’. This knowingness is in fact Knowing as such, and this is the liberating element, because knowingness is literally the expression of the Absolute… Within the Absolute there is just nothing to Know, hence Nisargadatta calls this the ‘state of no-knowingness’, or ‘nomind’, the state in which attention is dissolved in itself.

I have over 300MB of material from Ramana and his many disciples, with over 600 files but the only use of the word is from Robert Adams. He says: “The bliss of life itself has nothing that can describe it, it’s silence, it’s knowingness, it is the Self, it is beingness, it is you.” He explains that who you are is nothing to do with experience. “It’s way beyond experience. That makes sense because to have an experience there has to be an experiencer. Somebody has to have an experience but if there is nobody how can there be an experience?” “It’s pure awareness. knowingness, Jnana.”

He says that Self-realization: “is a state of knowingness. Not knowing something, but just knowing. End.” Yet, confusing the issue for me at least, he also says that ‘life in its essence’: “is beyond knowingness. It is beyond all concepts. It is your real life. Some people call this life Brahman. Some people call this life consciousness, pure awareness, absolute reality.”

Nisargadatta

He seems to be the one well-known teacher who liked this term. Whatever ‘Knowingness’ is, I thought when I came across the term, I assumed it was a ‘good’ thing. Nisargadatta apparently says that it is not! Here are some examples from teacher and disciples:

• First, the knowingness knows itself, knowing that ‘I am’.
• The primary illusion is only this knowingness ‘I am’, prior to that there was no illusion. This very consciousness is the source of illusion. This illusion or consciousness or ‘I amness’ does not remain as something eternal.
• when the knowingness is transformed into non-knowingness, that is liberation.
• The world of ‘Maya’ is built up of concepts only. I cannot charge the world with giving me the pain; the whole cause of the pain is the knowingness ‘I am’.
• The Absolute transcends knowingness and no-knowingness. So, no-knowingness is the highest in the hierarchy of spirituality, and the destination is the transcendence of knowingness and no-knowingness.

Yet he also says: “Consciousness is the sense of knowingness ‘I am’ without words, and it appeared unknowingly and unsolicited. Only in the realm of knowingness ‘I am’ – the consciousness – can a world be, and so also an experience. Hold on to this knowingness ‘I am’ and the fount of knowledge will well up within you, revealing the mystery of the Universe…”

But Robert Wolfe claims that Nisargadatta said that “The Self cannot experience its knowingness [Self/self-awareness] without the help of the body.”

Siddharameshwar was the teacher of Nisargadatta and did use the term. The translation of his usage puts the words ‘power of knowing’ after the word and that seems reasonable (although why not simply use those words and avoid the confusion?).

Ranjit Maharaj was the other principal disciple of Siddharameshwar and obviously picked up the same terminology: “So self is `Consciousness’ and of the nature of `knowingness’ and prior to that is Parabrahman.”

John Wheeler (no longer actively teaching) wrote some clear texts based upon his teacher, ‘Sailor’ Bob Adamson (who was a disciple of Nisargadatta) and he explains that “Knowingness is the space or ground in which all arises. Without knowingness, you can have no other experience.” and further clarifies that “You are that to which (or to whom) the principle of consciousness or presence (also called knowingness, beingness, or ‘I am-ness’) appears.”

Randall Friend, describing his book ‘You are no Thing’: “Part 3 points out our true nature –   the vast and empty  knowingness which pervades all, sees all, cannot be separated from the totality of present appearance.”

Steve Wingate: “I am complete and perfect. I am the beingness of being, the knowingness of knowing, the fullness of happiness.”

The final part will look at the remaining categories and provide my conclusion.

*** End of Part 2 ***