Swami arathi

Essence of advaitha vedantam

God became man so that he could 'know' Himself

reproduced from

https://tomajjavidtash.com/2015/04/09/time-consciousness/

Time is nothing but the ecstasy of consciousness, that is consciousness experiencing itself as conditioned and partitioned. It is this partitioned and fragmented consciousness that appears to us as diverse experiencing subjects. In reality there is only one subject, but this subject cannot experience itself unless it objectifies itself into the manifold of its own infinite possibilities. Each person is one possibility for the being of one and the same consciousness.

Consciousness undergoes the same self-objectification into multitudes in the case of dream experience: In a dream one and the same consciousness, that of the dreaming subject, projects itself into a world of diverse objects and experiencing subjects. All the conscious agents that appear in our dreams are the possibilities inherent within the dreaming consciousness. It belongs to the nature of consciousness to project itself outwardly in such a way that it appears to itself as something fragmented and embedded inside a world as if it were only a part of that world. In our dream we appear as a person among others inside an infinitely extended world of objects, but all persons and objects are one and the same consciousness, only appearing to itself as if it were outside itself. Consciousness inside itself is the dreamless sleep, but consciousness outside itself is the world. It is in this sense that I see the world as the ecstasy of consciousness.

Creation is an expression of God in an attempt to 'know' Himself

Reproduced from
https://tomajjavidtash.com/2015/04/20/the-inexpressible-reality/

“We did not come to return; we have come to rise above.”

Man is a deep well connecting the oblivion of Godhead to the personified God. He is not something suspended in the abyss; he is the abyss itself. He seeks God, not knowing he is the very ground upon which God stands. The Absolute is void, and man fills this void by relative utterances of hopes and desires. Man seeks to be enlightened, not knowing that he is the light of the world.

Know thyself?! What is to be known, and who is to know it?

Ask yourself: Who is in there? Who is looking out into this world of empty appearances? And who is looking in? No “I” is to be found. Why? Because the “I” is the one always looking. How can anything be found where the only thing that is is seeking?

God became man so to find Himself as God, and yet in this becoming He lost himself in the midst of himself. He was a whole that has become a part. Dear, don’t give too much thought to this, for to think is to make apart. You have become too partitioned; your way back is to accept you are but a paradox.

God is never known if He doesn’t fall into pieces that can reflect His face. God remained unknown even to himself unless He becomes the other, the not-God, man.  He becomes whole precisely through becoming partitioned. Man isn’t the fallen Adam; man is the fallen God.

Sit back, relax; this world has never come into being, neither did your beloved personhood. Look again deep into your own eyes and see the bottomless well that you are. Don’t be the ocean wave seeking its own source; the wave and the ocean are never apart; it is all water. Zoom in and you see only the wave, the separation; zoom out and you see only the ocean. This god of yours and its creation are akin to the ocean and its waves. How can one be without the other? They are one and the same.

You are crucified by your own beliefs. You are bound by your own bonds. Use this body only to surf this life. The surfer who thinks he is surfing the wave little knows that waves too are surfing him. Surfers don’t last; waves never cease to be. You are that wave and not the surfing body; you are the ocean itself.

These words too are nothing but waves; don’t dwell in them, for they too shall be forgotten. Words need meaning but meaning doesn’t need words. You too need no words, for you are that which is meant throughout all empty appearances. You are the inexpressible Reality.

Zero and infinity - two sides of the same coin

Reproduced from
https://tomajjavidtash.com/2015/04/09/wholes-parts/

The whole is always infinitely greater than the sum total of its parts. Thus, the content of the whole, God, becomes both immanent and transcendent with regard to the manifested content.

One such example is the real line in mathematics. We know from Real Analysis that the interval between numbers 0 and 1 has the same size as the interval between 0 and 1000 or the interval between 0 and infinity! For our purpose we can pick the interval from 0 to 1. Every number between 0 and 1 is a finite number; in fact they are all smaller than 1. But as the length of the interval is infinite, any amount of addition among the numbers within the interval is always infinitely smaller than the length of the interval. Still fascinating is that despite the essential inadequacy of the parts in reconstructing the whole, the size of the interval between any two numbers within a larger interval is always the same size as the larger interval itself. For instance, there are the same amount of numbers existing between 0 and 0.00001 as there are between 1 and 10000.

In number theory we see that the distance between any two infinitely close numbers is always infinitely large, no matter how close the numbers become to one another. Number being itself something finite can never fill the gap between itself and another number. In light of this, every atom is essentially infinitely big as every universe is infinitely small. In terms of size, an atom and the universe are of the same size. Yes then, size matters; but it is either zero or infinite. But we also know that zero and infinity are the two sides of the same coin; one doesn’t exist without the other. Nothingness is God’s back. The choice is ours: Live in His face or die behind His back.

The One Remains, the Many Change..

https://mahaperiyavaa.wordpress.com/2016/08/25/the-one-remains-the-many-change/

There was a discussion with Swamigal about how famous English poets like Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Tennyson had expressed the principles of Vedanta in many places! I showed Swamigal an example of how Keats, though considered to be a Romantic poet, had spoken about Adwaita.

Swamigal replied: “Keats and Shelley should not be dubbed solely as ‘Sensual Poets’ (phrase used by Him). You gave an example of Keats. Has Shelley also spoken about Adwaita?”

I started to think but could not recollect.

Swamigal gave me a clue, “How about Shelley’s work in the poem Elegy?”

I still could not recall!

Swamigal Himelf continued, enjoying the beauty of Shelley’s words:

“The One remains, the Many change
Heaven’s Light forever Shines, Earth’s shadows Fly
… Life like a dome of many-coloured Glass
Stains the White Radiance of Eternity!”

“Is there a better way to explain the Adwaitha’ Oneness and the Illusion of Dwaitha’s Divisions?!”, said Swamigal.

*****

Narrated by the Supremely Blessed, Ra Ganapathi Anna.

224th birthday of that famous poet Percy Shelley who was born on August 4th in the year 1792 in England.

Shankara.

You are what you think..

https://tomajjavidtash.com/2015/04/25/you-are-what-you-think/

  The world that science tells us exists independently is only an abstraction from what we see intuitively; that world exists only in the mind or equations. But even these thoughts and equations exist in consciousness. It is meaningless to speak of a world existing independently of consciousness, and by this consciousness I do not mean mine or yours since we are themselves things perceived; I mean rather the absolute consciousness of god which is the real perceiver of our thoughts and actions; His knowledge is the knowing that runs through all our acts of consciousness, though which we know what we know; this knowledge is god’s and not ours; it is in this sense that he known us, and everything about us, better than we know. He knows first and only later we know, and only through him. He knows what is in our hearts, for all knowing is His...

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Truth and our fundamental relation to it creeps into our everyday language whether we want it or not. This is so because in a manner of speaking we are the truth, though we may be oblivious to this truth. Let us take a look at the way we express our actions in the present tense, exactly where we always are:

I say “I am thinking,” “I am imagining,” “I am remembering,” “I am going,” etc. If we pay attention to the structure of these expressions we see that they can be viewed and meant from a different perspective:

I am the thinking; I am the imagining; I am the remembering; I am the going. etc.

I am the thinking because I have become that thinking, being the thinker and the thought at once.

I am the imagining because the “I” has transformed itself into the form of imagination.

I am the remembering because I am transformed to the memory.

That is why at each moment I am at liberty to withdraw myself from these regions, and upon my withdrawal, the withdrawing of my attention, those regions too disappear: The imagining and the remembering cease once I stop being the imagining and the remembering. It is never the case that the imagination is still there whether or not I am imagining anything.

In all these cases the formless “I” which is never grasped in itself has become the perceptible form; I perceive the “I” now as thought and then as imagination, etc. because I can at will flow into the space of perception or imagination, hence making, i.e. projecting, forms that appear to have become the objects of knowledge. In all these instances, it is the “I” that projects itself into this or that form. This ability to project oneself into forms has been known as the creative power of Gods, i.e. their Maya. The “I” at the center of human experience has this power due to its being constituted in the image of God, hence inheriting the power of projection from the Lord, and the human form itself is nothing but a projection of the “I.” With projection comes concealment, the two being the sides of the same coin. It is the projections of the “I” into this or that form that conceals the essential identity of the “I,” i.e. Atman, with its principle, i.e. Brahman. This Supreme Identity is realized immediately and with absolute self-evidence the moment the “I” ceases to project itself, the end of projection being coincident with the end of the “I” as empirical ego.

The I which is the abode of infinity can project itself into various regions of beings: It can project itself into the space of perception and become the perceivable object; I then say “I am seeing the desk” which is really “I am the seeing of the desk,” for I have become the seeing of the desk. Projecting itself into the space of perception the “I” produces the appearance of a perceived world; it produces the perceivable objects from its own depths. We must only add that this becoming is only apparent from the empirical point of view, while from the metaphysical, i.e. transcendental, point of view there is no becoming, for all things exist in their potential form in the simultaneity of the eternal present.

The objects of sight are embedded within the seeing; it is not as if seeing just bumps into objects in the world. The objects are always already constituted within the ceaseless flow of seeing before we make the abstraction that they exists outside our seeing. The objects of sight are made of seeing and not of atoms. The objects of touch are made of touching, those of thought are made of thinking, etc.

The “I” can also project itself into the space of thought and appear to us as the thinking. The space of thought is a region of Being whose beings, objects, have the form “thought.” When we are thinking we never have to inspect a thought to make sure if it is a thought and not a perception or a smell, etc. The thoughtfulness of a thought is self-evident, and its self-evidence comes from the self-evidence of my “I” to myself.

We may suspect the reality of the objects of consciousness but can never suspect the reality of the acts of consciousness. When we are seeing we cannot doubt that we are seeing, though we may doubt the reality of what is seen. You may think that the seen object before you is a fantasy, an imagination, a dream, etc., but when you are seeing you cannot doubt that you are involved in the act of seeing. The reason that acts of consciousness are indubitable is that they are transformations, i.e. projections, of the indubitable “I.” We cannot doubt an act of consciousness because it enjoys the same absolute certainty and self-evidence as the “I.” It is my own “I” that in each and every case appears as perception, imagination, etc.

The world is constituted in and through the acts of consciousness. it is always in consciousness that we know the world, whether as laymen or as scientists. Even the idea that “the world exists independently of consciousness” is itself an idea produced and held in place by an act of consciousness, in this case by the act of thinking and abstracting and theorizing. Everywhere we look, whether with the eye of everyday commonsense or with the eye of modern science, we are in fact looking at perceptions, thoughts, abstractions, experimentation, etc. all of them being acts of consciousness performed within the manifold of conscious experience out of which we can never step, and this because there is no out of experience, this idea being itself a production of consciousness and hence already inside experience. And these are nothing but the transformed “I.”

When you fear you are fearing only yourself, for nothing exists but the contents of your consciousness.

When you are looking at the world know that you are looking at your own infinitude appearing to you as this boundless world. Everywhere you look you are seeing yourself, for you are the seeing itself, the seer itself, and the seen itself. And know that when you seek you are indeed seeking yourself. To be found is to stop seeking.