Pure consciousness Devoid of all attributes Brahman associated with its potency my appears as qualified Brahman Or Lord who is the creator, preserver and destroyer of this world Jiva or the individual self is a subject-object complex Its subject element is Pure Consciousness, called Sksin Its object element is the internal organ called the antahkarana The source of this internal organ is Avidy which is the cause of individuality In perception the internal organ assume the form of the object In waking state, the internal sense is aided by the senses In dream state, it functions by itself and in deep sleep it is lost in its cause Avdy. In liberation, Avidy is destroyed by jana and the Sksin is realized as the Brahman which it always is My is not purely illusion It is not only absence of knowledge It is also positive wrong knowledge It is the cross of the real and the unreal It is indescribable It is neither existent nor non-existent nor both It is not existent for the existence is only the Brahman It is non non-existence for it is responsible for the appearance of the Brahman as the world It cannot be both, for this conception is self contradictory It is called neither real nor unreal It is false or Mithy But it is not a non-entity like a hares horn It is positive. It is potency It is also called superimposition A shell is mistaken as silver The shell is the ground on which the silver is superimposed When right knowledge arises, this error vanishes
The relation between the shell and the silver is neither
that of identity nor of difference nor of both
It is unique, known as non-difference (tdtmya)
Similarly Brahman is the ground on which the world
appears through Mya
When right knowledge dawns and the essential unity
of jive with Paramtman is realized, Mya vanishes From the phenomenal point of view the world is real It is not an illusion. It is a practical reality He distinguishes the dream state from the waking state Things seen in dream are quite true as long as the dream lasts They are sublated only when we are awake The world is creation of Isvara The Jiva is ignorant of the essential unity and takes only diversity as true Avidy conceals the unity and projects names and forms My in Advaita Vedanta Brahman is the only Reality, The world is ultimately false And Individual soul is non-different from Brahman Brahman and Atman are synonymous terms The world is creation of My The individual selves on account of their inherent Avidya imagine themselves as different from Brahman And mistake Brahman as this world of plurality Even as we mistake a rope as a snake My in Advaita Vedanta There are two aspects of My Avarana (negative aspect of concealment) Viksepa (positive aspect of projection) Characteristics of My It is something material and unconscious as opposed to Brahman It is inherent power of Brahman. It is absolutely dependent on and inseparable from Brahman It is non-different from Him The relation of My and brahman is unique , called tdtmya It is neither identity nor difference nor both Myis energized and acts as a medium of the projection of this world of plurality It is beginningless It is something positive, thought not real. It has two aspects (Avarana & Viksepa) In its negative aspects it conceals Reality and acts as a screen to hide it In its positive aspect it projects the world of plurality on the Brahman Ground It is non-apprehension as well as misapprehension My in Advaita Vedanta It is indescribable and indefinable for it is neither real nor unreal nor both
It is not real, for it has no existence apart from Brahman
It is not unreal, for it projects the world of appearance. It is not real, for it vanishes at he dawn of knowledge It is not unreal, for it is true as long as it lasts
It has a phenomenal and relative character.
It is an appearance only It is of the nature of superimposition. It is an error like that of a rope-snake It is the superimposition upon one thing of the character of another thing. It is wrong cognition It is removable by Right Knowledge When Vidya dawns Avidya vanishes When rope is known, the rope-snake vanishes Its locus as well as object is Brahman and yet Brahman is really untouched by it It is self evident, that the subject and the object are absolutely opposed to each other The subject is pure Consciousness The object is Unconsciousness This it the ultimate I, the other is non-I Neither these two nor their attributes can be identified Yet it is the common practice of the people that they wrongly superimpose The object and its attributes upon the subject and vice versa This co-mingling of subject and the object, this coupling of the real and the unreal is called superimposition This superimposition the learned called ignorance And the realization of the true nature of reality is knowledge Superimposition is the notion of a thing in something else The study of Vedanta is undertaken in order to free oneself from this false notion and realize the essential unity of self This superimposition is not secondary, it is false All difference is due to Ignorance It is not ultimate Names and forms are only figments of Ignorance They are neither real nor unreal Isvara is limited by His own power of Nescience and appears as many phenomenal selves Where the essential unity of the Atman is realized they all vanishes Creation is due to Ignirance It is not ultimately real My is not only absence of knowledge
It is also positive wrong knowledge
It makes the infinite appear as finite It produces the false notion of plurality and difference
But it is not the real characteristic of tman
because it is destroyed by true knowledge
Brahman through My appears as the manifold
world of names and forms Brahman is the locus and objects of Avidya
Avidya is the darkening power
Its essential nature is to recover or hide the real
It operate in three ways: As positive wrong knowledge As doubt And as absence of knowledge The phenomenal world is condemned by Sankar as unreal It is said to be like mirage-water, rope-snake, shell- silver etc The beginningless samsara which is of the nature of suffering and rooted in ignorance Just a person of defective vision sees double moon, or just as a dreamer sees many things in the dream Similarly the world of plurality of names and forms is imagined through Ignorance The world is an appearance It is not ultimately real It becomes sublated when knowledge dawns But so long as we are in this world, we cannot take it to be unreal It is a practical reality No appearance is so low that the Absolute does embrace it It is the Real which appears and hence every appearance must have some degree of truth Object seen in a dream are quit real as long as the dream lasts It is only when we are awake that we can realize the falsity of the dream state So long as we are engrossed in Ignorance, the world is quit real for us It is only when true knowledge dawns that the world becomes sublated Just as foam, bubbles, waves etc. exists separately, though in fact they are not different from water The subject and the object, the enjoyer and enjoyed do exist separately though in fact they are not different from Brahman The manifold world of experience is the effect The Highest Brahman is the cause And the effect has no independent existence apart from the cause Plurality of effects is only a creation of Ignorance How can unreal Maya cause the real Brahman to appear as the phenomenal world? How can false personalities through false means reach true end? Sankaras reply is that: A person entangled in mud can get out of it through the help of mud alone That a thorn picked in the body can be taken out with the help of another thorn Ch There are many things in this life which shows that even unreal things appears to cause real things A reflection in mirror is unreal but it can correctly represent the reflected object The manifold world is taken to be real as long as long as the essential unity of the jiva with Brahman is not realized The opponent says he fails to understand as to how unreal Maya can cause the real Brahman to appear If the world is unreal, unreal means like the Vedanta texts cannot lead to real liberation If the world is real, it cannot be maya The dilemma is: Either frankly admit that the world is real or that unreal personalities are unreal striving in an unreal world through unreal means to attain an unreal end, is itself unreal One bitten by a rope-snake does not die nor can one use mirage-water for drinking Sankar replies that the objection is wrong If a person imagines himself to have been bitten a poisonous snake, it may result in heart-failure or in some psychological disaster The opponent confuses the two different stand points the empirical and the absolute The falsity of the dream-objects is realized when the dream gets awake Though these dream-objects are sublated, the consciousness that the dreamer had experienced these objects in the dream is not sublated in waking The consciousness is eternal and real It is only from the absolute stand point when right knowledge is attained Vedanta declares world unreal The words real and unrealare taken by Sankar in their absolute sense Real means real for all time and Brahman alone real in this sense Unreal means absolutely unreal like the hares horn, which this phenomenal world is not Hence this world is neither real nor unreal It is relative, phenomenal, finite But it is not illusory It is true for all practical purposes