Memory - part of the Self?

[Gregory Goode]

At 01:31 PM 2/13/98 -0500, Chandran, Nanda (NBC) wrote:
>Hold on Greg, you've lost me!
>
>Isvara, if my understanding is correct, is nothing but Saguna Brahman,
>which can be perceived in the world of Maya. ie a personal god with
>attributes, for even if we say a god with no attributes, it's still
>qualifies as an attribute!

I'm not saying that Iswara has no attributes, and I'm not saying that
Iswara is apart from the Self.  Really, if we attribute any action to any
agent, or if we say that something called X resides somewhere called Y, we
are REALLy saying this:  Brahman qualified by Maya is the agent doing the
action (which is also Brahman).  As for residing, we are really saying that
Brahman, qualified by Maya, is our X.  And it resides in Y, which is also
Brahman qualified by Maya.

As for this particular notion of Iswara, it's straight from Sruti.  Another
way of looking at it is that memories reside in the causal body.  But since
there is no individuation in the causal body, we can't say that Nanda's
causal body is any different from Greg's.  They are all indistinguishable
and therefore one, and this is why the causal body (AKA the bliss sheath)
is likened in the Panchadasi to omniscient Iswara, who is the Lord over
Maya.  Of course none of this is different from Brahman.   Brahman is all
this and more!  Were you thinking of Ishwara like the form of Shiva or
Saraswati or something like that?

If you want to look at it from another (non-Sruti, but I think logically
unassailable) viewpoint, you can say this -- there's no proof at all that
anything that seems like a memory really happened.  There's nothing but the
idea or appearance that is NOW.  Some ideas seem obviously NOW, like the
feeling of love, or pain.  Other ideas might seem to point to another time,
and we call these memories.  But there's no time outside of the present
appearance.  So there's no proof that there even ARE vasanas or memories or
any of that.  That is why all these things we are saying are just stories,
themselves illusory appearances in consciousness.

Did this make things any clearer?  I think the same answer applies to the
time between births as to the time between waking states...

--Greg