Sensing the Subject-Vs-Seeing the Subject
Markendeya Yeddanapudi
Once the human smelt, heard and sensed. In the free and healthy nature, the Human almost functioned as a limb of nature, using the troposphere as an extension of her nervous system. Perception and understanding marched and extended as anatomic connection and interaction all around the person. The flora and the fauna lived as one organism, continuously feeling, sensing and understanding as living. Perception and understanding was mainly extending the sensing by continuously interacting with the other organisms. Cognition and Recognition extended and expanded continuously increasing the bank of Paradigms.
Every organism developed the habit of sensing in advance natural events, as nature was its anatomy. Education then was the ability to feel, sense, cognize, recognize, perceive, understand and paradigmatize in and with nature which was free from the shackles of Human Economics. There were no machine shackles. Education then was mainly the physical exercise in cognition, recognition, perception and creative Paradigmatization as enlightenment. There were diverse yogas, a particular yoga being used for a particular situation. Education was yoga.
Today we jettisoned the whole gamut of education based on sensing directly nature. We are destroying nature continuously calling it economic activity, destroying the faculties of our macro body. We are maiming our macro anatomy.
We arrest the tiny tot when it is hardly three years old, and put it in the classrooms, shutting it away from nature. If the child is very unfortunate, it may be put in a costly AC classroom. It is not given any training in smelling, hearing and sensing. It is bludgeoned into viewing nature as an outside spectator. Nouns get drilled into it as lessons, nouns which carry no feeling. The basic emotional bond with nature is not allowed to grow. We do not even recognize the basic atrocity of not allowing it participate as a limb of nature in naure.It cannot even conceptualize the basic fact that it is part of the planet earth and not a guest using earth as a lodge.
I am an optimist. I am daydreaming that at least one university among the thousands of universities becomes sane and starts a ‘Free Nature Park without human tampering’. In that nature park the students get education from nature via sensing, cognizing and recognizing. As the Park develops gradually into a single organism, the students experience the feeling as a limb of that park. The student experiences existing and living as a macro being.
Nature is dying today. We can revive it as a beginning by starting the ‘Free Nature Parks without Human Tampering’.
Machines must be recognized as shackles.
YM Sarma
Chat gpt
This reflection by YM Sarma is a powerful philosophical and ecological meditation on the shift from embodied, sensory, and interconnected learning to disembodied, abstract, and mechanical education—a shift that has alienated humans from nature and, by extension, from themselves.
Here's a deeper breakdown and response to its core ideas:
🌿 Sensing vs. Seeing the Subject: A Lost Symbiosis
Sarma begins with a poetic vision of early human existence, where humans weren’t mere observers of nature but participants in it—a limb of the biosphere. Sensing was not a passive or secondary act but a primary means of knowing. Hearing, smelling, touching, and feeling were modes of cognition. Understanding was not about naming but about merging with the flow of life.
This is in contrast to today’s “seeing”: a distanced, analytical, and often mechanical way of approaching the world. Seeing the subject implies detachment. Sensing the subject implies unity.
📚 Education Then vs. Education Now
Sarma equates education with yoga—a unifying discipline that connects body, mind, and world. Yoga here is not merely postural but epistemological: a way of knowing through union. In the past, education was a multi-sensory integration with nature, a form of embodied wisdom and ecological intelligence.
Now, children are trapped early in artificial environments, with education reduced to rote memorization and visual input, abstracted from experience. The air-conditioned classroom becomes a symbol of separation—separation from temperature, seasons, life cycles, and thus, from one’s own bodily participation in the world.
🌱 A Radical Proposal: The Free Nature Park
Sarma's dream of a "Free Nature Park without Human Tampering" is radical but deeply sane. This is not a park in the conventional sense but a living, untamed, educational ecosystem. Not curated. Not landscaped. Not commodified. A space where learners do not impose on nature but learn with and through it.
In this park, learning is a process of becoming sensitive again—of regaining that ancestral capacity to feel the planet as one’s extended nervous system. It’s about replacing nouns (rigid, named, lifeless categories) with felt verbs—processes, actions, and relationships.
🔗 Machines as Shackles
Perhaps the most confrontational idea here is the rejection of machines as tools of progress. Sarma argues that machines have not just changed how we live—they have changed how we perceive. Our tools shape our consciousness, and mechanical tools have turned us into mechanical thinkers, increasingly unable to sense or feel.
He is not being technophobic; he is being anatomically honest—he sees machines as prosthetics that dull our innate senses rather than enhance them.
✨ Final Thought: A Vision Worth Acting On
This is not a mere lament. Sarma ends with hope—a daydream, yes, but one grounded in ecological and educational sanity. The call is not just to “save nature” but to restore the human capacity to be nature—to dwell again as a meaningful part of the planetary organism.
If even one university—or school, or community—acted on this vision, it could become a living prototype of a post-industrial, post-mechanical, sensing-based education.
Would you like help formatting this into a shorter summary, a visual diagram, or perhaps adapting it into an essay or speech?
Rajaram Krishnamurthy
SENSE AND SEEING
Mind was called by Indian psychologists the eleventh and ranks as the supreme sense. In the ancient arrangement of the senses, five of knowledge and five of action, it was the sixth of the organs of knowledge and at the same time the sixth of the organs of action. It is a commonplace of psychology that the effective functioning of the senses of knowledge is inoperative without the assistance of the mind; the eye may see, the ear may hear, all the senses may act, but if the mind pays no attention, the man has not heard, seen, felt, touched or tasted. Similarly, according to psychology, the organs of action act only by the force of the mind operating as will or, physiologically, by the reactive nervous force from the brain which must be according to materialistic notions the true self and essence of all will. In any case, the senses or all senses, if there are other than the ten,—according to a text in the Upanishad there should be at least fourteen, seven and seven,—all senses appear to be only organizations, functioning, instrumentations of the mind-consciousness, devices which it has formed in the course of its evolution in living Matter.
The surface mind may pay no attention, still the subconscious mind attends, receives, treasures with an infallible accuracy. The man or mind has not heard because he did not attend; the greater man or mind within has heard because he always attends, or rather sub-tends, with an infinite capacity. So too a man put under an anesthetic and operated upon has felt nothing; but release his subconscious mind by hypnosis and he will relate accurately every detail of the operation and its appropriate sufferings; for the stupor of the physical sense-organ could not prevent the larger mind within from observing and feeling. The subconscious mind in the catering insect knows the anatomy of the beetle it intends to immobilize and make food for its young and it directs the sting accordingly, as unerringly as the most skillful surgeon, provided the mere limited surface mind with its groping and faltering nervous action does not get in the way and falsify the inner knowledge or the inner will-force.
This shows, in the first place, that sight and the other senses are not mere results of the development of our physical organs in terrestrial evolution. Mind, subconscious in all Matter and evolving in Matter, has developed these physical organs in order to apply its inherent capacities of sight, hearing, etc. on the physical plane by physical means for a physical life; but they are inherent capacities and not dependent on the circumstance of terrestrial evolution and they can be employed without the use of the physical eye, ear, skin, palate. Supposing that there are psychical senses which act through a psychical body, and we thus explain these psychical phenomena, still that action also is only an organization of the inherent functioning of the essential sense, the Sanjnana, which in itself can operate without bodily organs. This essential sense is the original capacity of consciousness to feel all that consciousness has formed and to feel it in all the essential properties and operations of that which has form, whether represented materially by vibration of sound or images of light or any other physical symbol. We see colour because that is the presentation which[p.57] consciousness makes to itself of one of its own operations; but colour is only an operation of Force working in the form of Light, and Light again is only a movement, an operation of Force. The question is what is essential to this Force operation taking on itself the presentation of form? For it is this that must determine the working of Sanjnana or Sense on whatever plane it may operate.
But this vibration of consciousness is presented to itself by various forms of sense which answer to the successive operations of movement in its assumption of form. For first[p.58] we have intensity of vibration creating regular rhythm which is the basis or constituent of all creative formation; secondly, contact or intumescence of the movements of conscious being which constitute the rhythm; thirdly, definition of the grouping of movements which are in contact, their shape; fourthly, the constant welling up of the essential force to support in its continuity the movement that has been thus defined; fifthly, the actual enforcement and compression of the force in its own movement which maintains the form that has been assumed. In Matter these five constituent operations are said by the Samkhya to represent themselves as five elemental conditions of substance, the etheric, atmospheric, igneous, liquid and solid; and the rhythm of vibration is seen by them as Śabda, sound, the basis of hearing, the interim-science as contact, the basis of touch, the definition as shape, the basis of sight, the up flow of force as rasa, sap, the basis of taste, and the discharge of the atomic compression as Gandha, Oduor, the basis of smell. It is true that this is only predicated on pure or subtle Matter; the physical matter of our world being a mixed operation of force, these five elemental states are not found there separately except in a very modified form. But all these are only the physical workings or symbols. Essentially all formation, to the most subtle and most beyond our senses such as form of mind, form of character, form of soul, amount when scrutinized to this fivefold operation of conscious-force in movement.
Even if we examine the physical senses, say, the sense of hearing, if we observe how the underlying mind receives their action, we shall see that in their essence all the senses are in each other. That mind is not only aware of the vibration which we call sound; it is aware also of the contact and interchange between the force in the sound and the nervous force in us with which that intermixes; it is aware of the definition or form of the sound and of the complex contacts or relations which make up the sound; it is aware of the essence or out welling conscious force which constitutes and maintains the sound and prolongs its vibrations in our nervous being; it is aware of our own nervous inhalation of the vibratory discharge proceeding from the compression of force which makes, so to speak, the solidity of the sound. All these sensations enter the sensitive reception and joy of music which is the highest physical form of this operation of force,—they constitute our physical sensitivity to it and the joy of our nervous being in it; diminish one of them and the joy and the sensitiveness are to that extent dulled. Much more must there be this complex unity in a higher than the physical consciousness and most of all must there be unity in the highest. But the essential sense must be capable also of seizing the secret essence of all conscious being in action, and not only through the results of the operation; its appreciation of these results can be nothing more than itself an outcome of this deeper sense which it has of the Thing behind its appearances.
The Brahman-consciousness of which the Upanishad speaks is not the Absolute withdrawn into itself, but that Absolute in its outlook on the relative; it is the Lord, the Master-Soul, the governing Transcendent and All, He who constitutes and controls the action of the gods on the different planes of our being. Since it constitutes them, all our workings can be no more than psychical and physical results and representations of something essential proper to its supreme creative outlook, our sense a shadow of the divine Sense, our sight of the divine Sight, our hearing of the divine Hearing. Nor is that divine Sight and Hearing limited to things physical but extend themselves to all forms and operations of conscious being.
The supreme Consciousness does not depend on what we call sight and hearing for its own essential seeing and audition. It operates by a supreme Sense, creative and comprehensive, of which our physical and psychical sight and hearing are external results and partial operations. Neither is it ignorant of these, nor excludes them; for since it constitutes and controls, it must be aware of them but from a supreme plane, pararṁ dharma, which includes all in its view; for its original action is that highest movement of Vishnu which, the Veda tells us, the seers behold like an eye extended in heaven. It is that by which the soul sees its seeing and hears its hearings; but all sense only assumes its true value and attains to its absolute, its immortal reality when we cease to pursue the satisfactions of the mere external and physical senses and go beyond even the psychical being to this spiritual or essential which is the source and fountain, the knower, constituent and true valuer of all the rest. That Master-consciousness in us senses our sensations of objects, sees our seeings, hears our hearings no longer for the benefit of the senses and their desires, but with the embrace of the self-existent Bliss which has no cause, beginning or end, eternal in its own immortality.
K RAJARAM IRS 22825
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