Sunday, February 12, 2012

None Duality according to Vedanta



Yoga describes the Ultimate Reality as Brahman, also as Satchitananda, or ever Existing Conscious Bliss, Absolute. Brahman is the only Real Existence. In It there is no time, no space, no causality, no multiplicity. But through maya Its power, time, space and causality are projected and the one becomes the many. The non dual Spirit appears as multiple individuals endowed with forms and subject to the conditions of time and space.
The immortal becomes a victim of birth and death. The changeless undergoes change. The sinless soul hypnotized by its own maya experience the joy of heaven and the pains of hell. But these experiences based on duality of the subject object relationship are unreal. Even the experience of a personal God is, ultimately speaking, as illusory as the experience of any other object. Man attains his liberation, by piercing the veil of maya and rediscovering his identity with Brahman. Knowing himself to be one with the universal spirit, he realizes peace. Only then does he go beyond the fiction of birth and death. Man needs to be dehypnotised by his own ignorance.
The path of the Vedantic discipline is the path of negation, not this, not that, by this discipline all the unreal, the changing is renounced until the changeless Reality is attained. It is the path of jnana, knowledge, the direct method of realizing the Absolute. After the negation of everything relative, including the ego, the aspirant merges in the One without a second, in the bliss of nirvikalpa samadhi, where subject and object are dissolved. The soul goes beyond the realm of thought; duality is transcended. Maya with all its changes and modifications is left behind. The soul towers above the delusion of creation, preservation and destruction. Bliss sweeps away all relative ideas of pain and pleasure, good and evil. There shines in the heart the glory of the Eternal Brahman, Existence, Consciousness and Bliss. Knower, knowledge and known are dissolved in the ocean of eternal Consciousness; love, lover and beloved merge in ecstasy; birth, death, vanishes in infinite Existence. All doubts and misgivings are conquered forever; the vrittis of the mind are stopped, past karma has vanished. Space disappears into Pure Being, time vanishes into eternity. Only existence is. Who can describe what the soul then feels in its oneness with Spirit.
When man descends from this height he will no longer think of ideas of “I” and mine, he looks on the body as a mere shadow, an outer sheath encasing the soul. He does not dwell on the past, takes no thought of the future and looks with indifference at the present. He sees everything in the world for what it is, a play of consciousness; he knows that it is Brahman alone that manifests Itself through everything.
The impact of such an experience is awe inspiring, as consciousness becomes illumined with light.
The result of such experience is that one will live and move in the world for only one purpose, the well being of human kind.

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