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The Absolute as...
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only difference between jīvanmukii and videhamukti is that at the former stage one is still living, whereas the jīvanmukta attains videhamukti only after death. The jivanmukta to remain living does not mean that he remains tied wholesale to his body. What it means is only that though he has attained that stage through his own effort at dissociation and though no amount of that effort has undone, because it cannot undo, his prārabdha-the system of those pūrvajanmasamskāras which are responsible for all his experience (except those which are due to dissociation) at the present life-he, even as jīvanmukta continues to have those experiences, in spite of the fact that he has learnt to keep spiritually aloof from them at the same time, much as one can keep aloof from the pain consequent upon a surgical incision even though that pain continues to be felt. There is, of course, a theory that at the stage of videhamukti one ceases to construct objects symbolically. We shall examine that theory in a later section.
'Tat tvam asi' is a mahāvākya which is to be received by the jiva-sākşin from a you. The mahāvākya 'Ahaṁ Brahmā'smi' on the other hand, is not to be so received from others. It is an idea, or a re-awakening statement, that arises automati. cally, and either the jiva-sāksin follows assiduously what is suggested by it or it directly occasions, through śābdāparokşa, the realization of that Brahman. 12
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There may be another course of advance (even in the region of free. dom) where the free I may have to encounter - it may be in supreme love or some such pure sentiment - free you-s and he-s and may, that way, realize a cosmic subjectivity which in no time gives way to the impersonal pure consciousness as the absolute.
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