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A Modern Understanding of...
There is another difference which is more fur damental. It is that in his very act of constructing the fira-säksins and the world of objects the Tsvara-sāhsin is understood equally also as not constructing ut, understood, in other words, as enjoying his being - and that in fullest self-evidence - as just the sole solitary truth = pure impersonal consciousness, and nothing else This is yśvara-säksin evidencing himself as just the absolute, and for this he requires no extra labour, no extra discipline The jiva-sāksin too has, it is true, some such dual function. he constructs - ratbei, is made to construct - the world of objects and evidences himself at the same time a3 pure consciousness. But the pure consciousness as which he evidences himself is neither that yśvara-sāksin nor the impersonal absolute as they are in themselves he evidences himself as de limited consciousness, as an individual subjectivity which he is. What it all means is that the jiva-säkşin is still unfree in the sense that experiencing himself as limited he experiences at the same time that this limitation is a fault and experiences, therefore, a demand to dissociate bimself from the fault af some later stage of experience. Till then the jiva-säksin does not know himself as absolute, though he knows himself very well as pure subjectivity and even as delimited pure consciousness. While, thus, all the distinction that there is between the 7svara. sākşin and Brabman is just functional, nothing ontologicalthe same principle alternatively experiencing itself as Brahman and the Isvara-säkşin this cannot be said of the jiva-sākşin. The distinction of the jiva-sâkşin from the Tśvara-säksin and a fortiriori from Brahman is of profound ontological import
We have given above the more important of the two senses in which the term Isvara (God) is used in the Advaita literature. The other sense is much naiver, though, strangely enough, often popular among later Vedantic scholars. In this other sense, God is what ordinary man has made of the abso. late. He is how the piva (not the jiva-säkşın), with all his (the jiva's) fusion with the mind-body complex and entanglement, through that, with the world of physical things, under
