[Advaita-l] No one is liberated yet?

[V Subrahmanian]

On Thu, Dec 22, 2011 at 9:44 AM, Anand Hudli <anandhudli at hotmail.com> wrote:

>
> 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
>

Thank you for a very nice post on the topic.  Some Acharyas have shown that
every question can be addressed by taking the dream analogy.  Just as one
would upon seeing an ancient monument in the waking and  think 'this is
said to be 800 years old' , one can have a dream where one sees a monument
and think similarly.

The eka-jiva prakriya is the refinement of the Vedanta itself and not
necessarily to be termed 'the pre-eminent' one.  In the Mandukya
kArika/bhashya of the verses 4.61 onwards several of them are about the
entire samsara being the experience of one perceiver.

subrahmanian.v



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