Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Pandit, Shilpa Ashok

Titel

Prama: Consciousness and valid cognition

Ist Teil von

• Decolonizing Consciousness, 2023, Vol.1, p.79-105

Auflage

1

Ort / Verlag

United Kingdom: Routledge

Erscheinungsjahr

2023

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• There is substantial literature on cognition, and indeed, it is conventional to assume that consciousness and cognitive processes are co-determinate. The question that Indian psychology asked millennia ago is more radical - Do we see the reality as it is? Without getting into disciplinary siloes of metaphysics and philosophy, this question is central to cognitive psychology. Human cognition can be valid or invalid; Indian psychology proposes pathways to achieve valid cognition; assuming that conventional cognition frequently mis-perceives the reality - internal and external. Pramā is the concept used for valid cognition in IKS, and the chapter discusses both mainstream psychology and Indian psychological concepts to build a case for Pramā or valid cognition. Attention is a central set of processes utilized by IKS to arrive at Pramā. The chapter further discusses other cognitive processes such as concepts, schema and symbolization and intentional re-symbolization in human cognition through language and sensory codes. The chapter restates the Indian psychology that recognizes the emptiness of the conventional cognition and a conventionally constituted self to then engender the lived practice of mantra, mudrā and yaṇtra as the psychological tools used by IP to re-symbolize the internal and external worlds in states of sustained attention. Thus, the Indian psychology of valid cognition opens up the possibility of freedom from the suffering of self-constructed concepts and schemas of the world. Finally, Indian psychology then leads to the intriguing idea of a 'no mind'. Clearly, the Indian psychology pathways step the grounded embodied consciousness, a transformed affect and a valid cognition to lead to a no mind! On a surface and much commodified level, contemporary discourse does allude to a mindful living, but we have not yet given a thought to the possibility of a no-mind. Prama is the concept used for valid cognition in IKS, and this chapter discusses both mainstream psychology and Indian psychological concepts to build a case for Prama or valid cognition. It restates the Indian psychology that recognizes the emptiness of the conventional cognition and a conventionally constituted self to then engender the lived practice of mantra, mudra and yantra as the psychological tools used by IP to re-symbolize the internal and external worlds in states of sustained attention. Indeed, the recent advances in cognitive psychology have flipped several earlier held notions which arose from the behaviourist paradigm about concepts such as memory, attention and learning. The corpus callosum or the bridge between two hemispheres plays a central role in language and cognition. Further, recent evidence suggests several other areas of the brain in language and cognition - including the motor and visual areas as well as the frontal lobe-which is implicated for attention and planning as well as abstract thought.