Sandeha Nivarini - Post 54

Devotee: You also spoke of the projecting power. What is meant by that?

Swami: Though you are formless and changeless, and though your nature is bliss (ananda), you are deluded into believing, feeling, and acting as if you are the body, which has form, which changes, and which is the seat of pain and grief. 

You refer to your self as the doer and enjoyer; you speak of I, you, they, this, that, etc., deluded into believing variety and multiplicity where there is only One. This illusion of projecting many on the one is called vikshepa-sakthi, or superimposition.

Devotee: What is that?

Swami: When you superimpose the object “silver” on mother-of-pearl, when you see not the stump but the human form, you have superimposed on it. Or when instead of the stretch of desert you see a lake, you have superimposed the unreal on the real. This is superimposition.

Devotee: Well, Baba. What is the real, and what is the unreal? Please explain that too.

Swami: The one and only, non-dual, being-awareness-bliss (satchidananda) absolute Brahman (Parabrahman) is the Real. Just as the name and the form of the snake are superimposed on a rope, this cosmos (jagath) — inclusive of everything from Brahman to a blade of grass, all creatures, all inert objects like the earth — is super-imposed on that Absolute, Supreme Real. The cosmos is the unreal (a-vastu) — that is, the superimposed thing.

Devotee: This superimposition of the name-form cosmos on the non-dual Real, how is it caused? 

Swami: By illusion (maya).

Devotee: Illusion means ...?

Swami: The power of ignorance (a-jnana-sakthi) of the above-said Universal Absolute Brahman (Parabrahman).

Devotee: Power of ignorance means ...?

Swami: I told you, didn’t I? The incapacity to understand the Supreme Being (Brahman) even though you are fundamentally Brahman — that is ignorance (a-jnana).

Devotee: Well how does that ignorance produce all this cosmos (jagath)?

Swami: The power of ignorance doesn’t allow you to see the rope; instead it imposes the snake upon it; it makes you see the cosmos where there is only Brahman.

Continued......