[Advaita-l] Sleep, tamas and brahman

[Venkatraghavan S]

Thank you Ravi Kiran ji for the translated references. I will read them.

Regards,
Venkatraghavan

On Sun, 20 May 2018, 13:53 Ravi Kiran, <ravikiranm108 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Namaste Venkatraghavanji
>
> On Thu, May 3, 2018 at 2:15 PM, Venkatraghavan S via Advaita-l <
> advaita-l at lists.advaita-vedanta.org> wrote:
>
>> Namaste Kalyan ji,
>>
>> I had the good fortune of revisiting these bhAShya portions yesterday
>> following your references. In fact, I read the whole brAhmaNa and bhAShya.
>>
>> It appears to me that the purpose of the teaching here is to talk of the
>> nature of Atma - of it being self effulgent, one without a second, free
>> from misery etc, because such a knowledge is key to liberation.
>>
>
> Agreed, as such teachings/discussion (based on paramArtha dRSTi) being
> more conducive for
> attaining samyak jnAna..
>
> There is related discussion of deep sleep in BSB 3.2.7 to 3.2.9...
>
> तदभावो नाडीषु तच्छ्रुतेरात्मनि च ॥ ७ ॥
>
> some snippets taken from Sw. Gambhirananda's translation ..
>
> Without the association with the limiting adjuncts, the soul (Atman)
> cannot have any natural
> encasement, since it is ever established  in its own glory owing to its
> identity with Brahman.
>
> The statement, He attains his own Self, is made, because in dream and
> wakefulness, the soul
> seems to assume another's garb under the influence of the limiting
> adjuncts with which it remains
> associated, where as in sleep, that garb falls off, so that in comparison
> with the earlier stages, sleep
> is spoken of as the state of assumption of the real nature. From this it
> is clear that it is improper to say
> that in sleep the soul sometimes becomes unified with Existence and
> sometimes not ....
>
> deep sleep as consisting in the cessation of particularized perception
> ...it is but logical, that a soul,
> merged in Existence, should not know anything just because of non-duality,
> as stated in Br. II.4.14
>
> 3.2.9..
>
> It has been shown more than once that Existence Itself comes to be called
> indirectly a soul, because of the intervention of limiting adjuncts..
>
> That very same set of adjuncts persists in sleep and wakefulness on the
> maxim
> of seed and seedling, so that the reasonable position is that the
> self-same sould wakes
> up from sleep.
>
> Thanks
>
>
>> To convey this understanding of the Atma to Janaka, Yajnavalkya takes him
>> through each of the three states in sequence. In each instance, the states
>> are used as experiential bases to understand the nature of Atma. Like any
>> good teacher, Yajnavalkya starts off with the things that the student has
>> personal experience of, and uses that to teach something about the Atma.
>>
>> Looked at from this perspective, the nature of deep sleep, where one
>> experiences no duality, no misery, no ignorance is used to highlight not
>> the nature of deep sleep (for that is universally known)  but to point out
>> that that is in fact the nature of Atma.
>>
>>
>>
>