Sandeha Nivarini - Post 56

Dear All,

Let us summarize the learning from the last chapter of this treatise.

Love.

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QUESTION

This delusion of the objective world (samsara) overpowers us, thick and strong, like the darkness of clouds in the rainy season.

What is this mighty force that drags us along?

SWAMI ANSWERS:-

That, which is attached to the body and feels as “I” is the individual soul (jiva). The soul is outward-faced; it believes all this mutable creation (jagath) and objective world; it is immersed in both. When the soul ignores and forgets its non-dual embodiment (a-dwaitha-swarupa), we call it ignorance (a-jnana)

Author’s note

• God has created human beings as divine, verily as God Himself.
• Once a human being gains conscience and starts sensing/ knowing this world, he ends up looking the world and the body with which he is born as real.
• In this way, Man forgets that he is created as divine by the God.
• This forgetting of man’s reality as DIVINE, is Absence of wisdom or Avidya or Ignorance.                                 

AVARNA

Veiling without appearance

Even when one’s divine identity is taught, it is denied / one fails to grasp it. Lack in faith and steadfastness to Imbibe the teaching.

Veiling with appearance

Even when someone believes by study of the  scriptures (sastras) and by the grace of providence that there is non-dual Atma, one can be carried away by cursory and superficial arguments and dismiss it as non-existent.

Though one has the consciousness (chit) that is aware of the very thing that one denies, the delusion (moha) makes one declare that it is non-existent. This is the sinister role of veiling with appearance.

Vikshepa

Though you are formless and changeless, and though your nature is bliss (ananda), one is  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.

One refers  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 the real, and what is the unreal?

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: 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.

What is the distinction between the waking stage and the dream stage?

Swami: Both are of the nature of illusion. The impressions operate in both. The cosmos (jagath) is the stable illusion; the dream is the unstable illusion. This is the distinction, there is no other.

Devotee: Swami, how can it be said that this cosmos is unreal, when it is concrete and capable of being experienced in a variety of ways?

Swami: It is a delusion that hides the reality from the understanding, the cosmos is as much a superimposition on Brahman as a series of pictures on the wall.

This concludes the theme - Sandeha Nivarini.

Love.