Christopher Isherwood

So much for what Vedanta has to say regarding Reality and the
nature of the cosmos. What about the nature of the human mind
and human character? It has been already stated that, according
to Vedanta, mind, as much as matter, is composed of prakriti.
The mind is called chitta. It is made up of three components:
manas, the recording faculty which receives impressions from the
senses, buddbi which discriminates among these impressions,
classifies them and reacts to them, and ahamkara which is the egosense
that claims these impressions for its own and stores them
up as individual knowledge. The mind is not intelligent in its
own right. Its intelligence is borrowed from the Atman which is
intelligence itself, pure consciousness. The mind is merely an
instrument of knowledge. Knowledge or perception is a wave or
vritti in the chitta, and therefore all knowledge or perception is
objective, even what is called self-knowledge or introspection in
Western psychology. Every perception arouses the ego-sense in
us which says: I know this. The ego-sense is caused by the false
identification of the Atman, the real seer, with the instruments of
seeing, the mind, the senses, etc. Until we break free of this false
identification, we shall not achieve freedom from birth and
death. The point is explained by means of an image. If the surface
of a lake is lashed into waves, the water becomes muddy and the
bottom of the lake cannot be seen. The lake stands for the mind
and the bottom of the lake for the Atman. When the lake of the
mind becomes clear and still, man knows himself as he really is,
always was and always will be. He knows that he is the Atman.
'His "personality", his mistaken belief in himself as a separate,
unique individual disappears' (How to Know God, p. 16).
How does one achieve this realization that he is Atman,

Christopher Isherwood
and the Vedantic Novel
A Study oj 'A Single Man

S. NAGARAJAN