Advaita Vedanta

Author(s): Kalidas Bhattacharya, Dalsukh Malvania
Publisher: L D Indology Ahmedabad

Page 45

A Modern Understanding of...
stands the absolute. It is presumed that even ordinary men, the jivas, are somehow dimly aware, from the beginning, of the absolute as an ideal perfection, as a dimly apprehended regulative principle, so to say, but since they themselves are in that state of fusion and entanglement - another name of which is ajñāna - they misrepresent it, in various forms according to the density of their individual ajñānas, as various deities to worship, meditate on and offer prayers to. This is God as saguna Brahman and is as much in the world of objects (māyika-jagat) as any other thing, though it is much superior to them in various respects. This God is as much subject to the influence of māyā as any other individual in the world; only, dialectically enough, verily under the influence of māyā it is understood as free from that influence, its freedom, in other words, being itself māyika, quite as much as verily under the influence of drug a man may consider himself (or others ) as unlimitedly free. The other God, God as íšvurasākşin, however, is never under the influence of māyā; nor like the māyika God does it create ( re-create ) the world at a point of time. The so-called creation by the īśvara-sākşin is only symbolic construction which, as symbolic, i.e. unnecessary for him— being only a sport (lilā) for him — is undoubtedly māyika, but transparent at the same time, as every symbolism known as symbolism is. The fśvara-sāksin, in other words, is not subject to māyā; he rather weilds it, and, therefore, weilds it freely.
It is just in order to avoid confusion of these two ideas of Gods that the more important one we have called īśvarasākṣin and the other īśvara. The distinction between sśvarasākṣin and īśvara parallels that between jiva-sākṣin and jiva.
Pure individual subjectivity, in order to realize itself as the īśvara - sākşin, may deliberately attempt cognitive dissociation from its individuality in the way suggested above, or, alternatively, it may be made to attain that stage, once it has dissociated itself from all that is objective, through re-awaken. ing warning statements like 'I am Brahman' and 'That thou