[Advaita-l] No one is liberated yet?

[Anand Hudli]

Raghav Kumar wrote*:
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>One AcArya who had studied prakASAnanda-sarasvatI once said that the
>eka-jIva referred to in eka-jIva-vAda is not the simple jIva who
>identifies with one body-mind the person who goes to work in the
>morning and comes home in the evening - rather he is one who has
>accomplished proficiency in ahamgrahopAsaA to identify with
>hiraNyagarbha, the Cosmic Being (or an equivalent upAsAnA whereby he

Some say that the lone jIva is HiraNyagarbha, some say it is the inquirer
who is this jIva. For example, if I am the inquirer, I am this jIva. If you
are the inquirer, you  indeed are this jIva. What this amounts to is that
for me, you are not an independent jIva but part of my dream, where I have
created this universe, and Ishvara Himself. (Note that in this eka-jIva
vAda, it is the jIva that creates the world and Ishvara as part of his
dream.) And you can say the same about me. But then the question arises:
who is correct? This is an irrelevant question because the ekajIvavAda
holds for the person who is the inquirer and does not admit more than one
inquirer. I can hold that you are part of my dream and you can hold that I
am only a part of your dream. For me, even when you say to me, "You are
part of my dream, not a real jIva.", I can dismiss it as being part of *my*
dream. It so happens that a so-called jIva who is no different from a dream
object is making a statement in my dream that I belong to his dream! And it
does not matter even if the rest of 7 billion people in the world tell me
that I am part of each person's dream. I can dismiss all these statements
as coming from people in *my* own dream. They are not different from any
other dream object. All this seems to border on absurdity, but as the
siddhAnta-lesha saMgraha says about the eka-jIva vAda: "atra ca
sambhAvitasakalashaMkApaMkaprakShAlanaM svapnadR^iShTAntasaliladhArayaiva
kartavyamiti". Any doubts that arise (in the ekajIvavAda) should be washed
away with the water of the dream analogy!

>2.1.  I can imagine an apple or a chair etc., only if I already
>possess knowledge of the object I am imagining. If shAstra is being
>'imagined' by the me, I already have the knowledge of shAstra, which
>renders the whole pramANa-vyApAra infructuous even before it is
>operated ; rather than it (prAmANa-prameya-pramAtA) being sub

Again, this can be explained by the dream analogy. People have
discovered new information in dreams, mathematicians have solved
problems in dreams that they could not solve in the waking state. So
it is not necessarily the case that a person can
only dream about things that he/she already knows. It is quite
possible to discover new information in dreams. Even in ancient times,
we hear that Shiva (or Vishnu or any other God) instructed a person
during a dream. For example, the
rAma-rakShA stotra is said to have been instructed by Shiva in the
dream on a Rishi called Budhakaushika, who wrote it down upon waking
up in the morning:
"AdiShTavAn yathA svapne rAmarakShAmimAM haraH|
tathA likhitavAn prAtaH prabuddho budhakaushikaH||"

Therefore, it is possible for the single jIva to dream that he gets
instructions in the shAstra from a Guru, who is also part of the
dream, and realize his own Self.


Anand


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