[Advaita-l] Bhagavad Geeta 4.7, 4.8

[Amuthan]

namo nArAyaNAya!

dear shrI Siddhartha Reddy,

i'm sorry to intervene in the middle of your
conversation with shrI sadAnanda. i'll just touch upon
one question that you raised.

--- Annapureddy Siddhartha Reddy
<annapureddy_at_gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> [...] When the
> very notion of Isvara is a
> figment of our imagination, how can Isvara save us.
>

it is actually the other way about! it is we who are a
figment of imagination in the mind of Ishvara. see for
instance shrutIs like 'so.akAmayata, bahusyAm
prajAyeyeti' - 'He desired "let me become many"'.

if you say that Ishvara is an imaginary entity, then
according to advaita, *you* are also an imaginary
entity. putting it differently, if you accept your
existence as a jIva (if you are reading this mail,
you've already done that :) ), then it is
'anti-advaita' to say that Ishvara is a product of our
imagination. the correct advaitic position is much
closer to the statement 'Ishvara alone exists'. 

for a sincere aspirant, the idea 'Ishvara is
everything' ('vAsudevaH sarvam') is more condusive to
liberation than the idea 'I am everything' ('ahaM
sarvam') though both both mean the same in the
ultimate sense. only a jIvanmukta can say the latter
without any hypocrisy. this is because we normally
identify the term 'I' with our personality (i.e. mind,
body etc.) by default whereas for a jIvanmukta this is
not the case.

vAsudevaH sarvaM,
aparyAptAmRtaH.     


		
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