[Advaita-l] The nature of spiritual realisation

[Bhadraiah Mallampalli]

Dear Tahir,

The issue of a cause for realization had been settled by Sankara, and this 
is similar to the halting problem in computer science. Please check archives 
of this list..

http://www.escribe.com/religion/advaita/m10829.html

As for body & unity of thought of an individual, there are three views.

1. At one extreem, every cell in the body has its own life. Also every 
object in the universe has its own consciousness, and this does not conflict 
with vedanta, as one upanishat says 'Mountains are meditating as it were, 
rivers are meditating as it were..'. Now in this case every one of the 
billions of cells or objects has its own realization to worry about. This is 
close to Aurobindo's cell yoga. This is an atomized way of looking at the 
universe.

2. At the other extreme, there is a collective universal consciousness of 
the whole universe. This is called saguna brahman.

Between the two extremes, there is a traditional view

3. That there are some 33,000 devas, each representing a state of 
consciousness of an organism. They also effectively represent and replace 
every part of the body, so the body will be out of picture once we conceive 
of the 33,000 devas. Ego (aham) is one of them, but not the only one! Other 
devas are called indra, vishnu, rudra, gayatri, saraswati etc. Again, there 
are cosmic interpretations of these 33,000 devas, so we are not bound to a 
body, and even the whole universe can be represented by them. But for 
simplicity and practical verification, we shall consider the body and mind. 
Now in this model these 33,000 devas has his/her own realization to worry 
about. Now why do you assume that brain/body activity is estinguishing 
obstacles to realization? Isnt it possible they are adding to obstacles? 
Well, anything is possible when 33,000 entities interact. We don't always 
perceive all 33,000 because one of them takes control at any time and we 
only experience that one who is in control and identify with that one deva, 
which is our chief misconception. Rest of the activity of 32,999 devas 
happens in the back ground, and we would only be too naive to ignore the 
background activity. A true inquirer assumes nothing and takes nothing for 
granted.

To answer Sri Kartik's point, yes if two bodies have the same deva namely 
indra, both indras are same. But two ahams (egos) do not feel the same thing 
because they think they are not in identical bodies. aham (ego) operates at 
much lower level, and too much aware of specifics of that body; where as 
devas like indra operate at much higher level, so two indras ni two 
different bodies are same.

Regards
Bhadraiah

_________________________________________________________________
Get McAfee virus scanning and cleaning of incoming attachments.  Get Hotmail 
Extra Storage!   http://join.msn.com/?PAGE=features/es