You live in the “bubble universe” created by your thoughts
Jivanmukti is unique to Advaita. No other philosophy dares to talk of total freedom from bondage to a seeker while (s)he is still alive and kicking with a body. This uniqueness derives from the Oneness of the efficient and material causes of the visible world propounded by Advaita. The duality of a Creator sitting somewhere up there (as the efficient cause) and creating a world using some material (material cause) which is separate from Him is denied in Advaita. Thus it is in its truest sense a-dvaita (no-two-ness), the Creator Itself is the substance of creation. In other words, what exists is an absolute identity (in a mathematical sense) between the Creator and the creation.
Translating the above into simple English, it means “the world is you and you are the world.” You live in the “bubble universe” created by your thoughts. It is not somebody else’s creation that you happen to live in. All your friends and foes, problems and solutions, laughter and sorrow, ups and downs, songs and wails, births and deaths that comprise your world are your imagination. You are the Hiranyagarbha of your world. If you are reading this, it is you who created it, said ‘yes’ to its existence and permitted it to arise in your world. So Advaita places complete responsibility of the world you create on your own shoulders. How else could it be? There is only One, no second thing, anywhere to apportion any blame or credit, other than ‘you’. You alone exist and the world is a projection of yourself out of yourself.
Dream analogy serves the best to understand the model Advaita proposes. When you dream during your sleep, you know you are there in the dream world along with your friends and relatives maybe sharing food served on a table or taking a ride on a car. Maybe you find yourself seriously arguing with your friend who holds a diametrically opposing opinion to that of yourself. You may even come down to fisticuffs or chomp on some eatables angrily. Now where is all this stuff and of what material are these made up of?
Obviously there is none other than you as your mind in the dream. It is your mind alone that is assuming all the forms – including you, your opposing friend, the food you chomp on, the argument and even the action of eating/shouting etc. It is your dream world entirely made up of your mind by your mind for your mind!
Where does the dream world actually take place? Surprisingly at no place! There are no x-y-z spatial dimensions for the dream. It all happens in a placeless space but goes on in one dimension – that of time. So when you exist in one dimension, your world is the dream world.
As you move on to the awake world from the dream, your five sensory organs provide you with additional data. This data is interpreted by the mind to give a meaning to what is perceived by the senses and in the process add three more dimensions – that of the space. Now the single dimensional world of the dream becomes 4-D – three of space and one of time. Other than this, Advaita tells us, the wakeful world is nothing but just a seamless extension of the dream world.
The grossest forms of your projections take the shape of your physical world and your body. A little subtler forms are the ‘thoughts and images’. Though there is continuity between these two forms, we often try to pigeonhole them into two levels of reality. We call the reality of the gross world as the “Transactional or empirical reality” and that of the dream world or imagination as the “Dream world or ephemeral reality.” These two realities operate on the unchanging Absolute substratum that is ‘you’ like a document and a picture which appear on a computer screen.
‘You’ are like the changeless computer ‘screen’ which may at some pixel positions take the shape of a document and at some other positions be a picture. The screen has not disappeared or gone somewhere when a document or a picture appears on it. The screen is ever there and it is the very same screen which takes the form of a document or picture from moment to moment. Even if you are looking at the picture or the document, you are in fact actually looking at the ‘screen’ only. But the screen takes the shape of the document or picture in its appearance at that given moment. We can say, in other words, that the picture or the document is tentatively veiling the screen from appearing as the screen.
However, if you lose yourself in the story shown by the picture and get involved emotionally considering the picture or document to be real, it is tantamount to forgetting presence of the screen and developing a belief in the story shown by the picture/document. By so doing, you have “ignored” the presence of the screen.
Similarly belief in the reality of the wakeful world is “ignorance” of who or what you truly are. It means that instead of being the ‘screen’, you begin to misidentify yourself with the apparent ‘form’ of the screen at that time and place. So this misidentification is the beginning of the ‘ignorance.’
What is the instrument because of which this ‘misidentification’ has come about? It is the mind. But what is mind? Mind is nothing but the current thought that has arisen as a “belief” in the reality of the perception.
And what is the tool by which we can negate the ‘belief-thought’ and be free of ‘ignorance’? It is mind alone again that can come to help us! We will naturally then get a doubt whether mind which got us into the trouble of misidentification to start with can redeem us from the situation.
But there is a subtle paradox here. On one hand we are saying that the entire world including this Blog Post and the content therein is unreal phantasm in the imagination of the Hiranyagarbha that you are. What confidence can we have on this message about getting freedom from ignorance? In fact how can we rely on any spiritual teaching at all because all spiritual teaching takes place in the unreal world? Can there be anything like true spiritual teaching?
Lord Rama raised the same sort of question in Yogavaasishta. Let me reproduce in this connection a paraphrased dialog between Rama and Sage Vasishta from Chapter IV Sustenance, Sarga 41, Verses 12-17, Yogavaasishta.
Rama: “Master! You yourself are admitting that what you have been teaching is untrue. Any knowledge gained from falsehood would also be false and a part of nescience. One mendacity cannot be the opposite of another mendacity. How can then your teaching destroy nescience?”
Vasishta: “Some devoted wives follow their husbands into the funeral pyre. Don’t they know that their bodies will be burnt by this? They know! Still they do it with the belief that it will help them. Even in nescience, there is some superior type. The superior type ignorance enters into the mind of an individual as a result of his meritorious deeds. These are referred to as “the sattvic ignorance (the ignorance which is dominated by sattva guna – purity, goodness, softness and the like).” The ‘sattvic ignorance’ has a strong motive to do good to the individual who possesses it. It wishes for pure knowledge to dawn on the individual. The ‘sattvic ignorance’, like the devoted wives, purposefully invites on to itself pure knowledge that destroys it. The ‘sattvic ignorance’ takes root and intensifies with my teaching.”
