Ancient Indian Education (Brahmanical and Buddhist) c16.134

c16.134

Thus the consciousness involved at this stage (*Ahaṁkāra*) tends to lose its ego-centric character and becomes transformed into a fusion of sensory experiences. The consciousness " *I feel this taste* " changes into an indeterminate manifold of vision, taste, smell, touch, and sound, which cannot at the outset be discriminated or described. It is a stage of ineffable sensory experience, in which substantives and adjectives, similar feelings and opposites, are all in an inchoate mass (*asti hi ālochanam jñānaṁ prathamaṁ nirvikalpakam*). Thus, as the self-conscious ego senses a reality other than itself, it is overwhelmed by an inflow of sensory intimations, a mass-attack, as it were, of the other upon the self.