Awareness is pure consciousness. The mind is reflected consciousness like a red hot iron ball.
Any appearance in this lake appears to be real not because of its reflection but for the water in which it is appearing.
Lucid dreaming is like receiving. In manifesting is the giving. The mind is like a needle in a turn, turn, turntable.
Beginningless ignorance and spontaneous revelation are two sides of Maya. Self-awareness is the coin of reality.
Some say what most know as consciousness is actually reflected consciousness. Some call pure consciousness awareness. All states of consciousness are appearances in awareness. Pure consciousness is nondual.
Attention equals consciousness plus thought. Thoughts comprise the subtle substances of every name appearing in this universal magic show. Which came first: Chicken Little or the Golden Egg?
The shadow is nothing but a cloud. Avidya is like a dirty rotten snake. Accumulation is against the laws of giving and receiving. Insincerity is not impeccable. These dogs of war are in your head.
Dream sleep is mind on. Deep sleep is mind off. Mindfulness is seeing through the mind when on. Enlightenment transcends the mind, off or on.
Senses are the instruments of the mind. Dreams are like sonatas, concertos, or symphonies. Intuition is that corona of the Self.
There are no states of consciousness. Like the Sun, awareness always shines.
The Self is self-luminous. There will be clouds.
States of consciousness are states of ignorance. Like cumulus, cirrus, and thunderheads.
The waking state is a dream state too. The mind is turned on asleep or awake.
Perception is 99% of all illusion. The rest is aura.
The explanation follows the line not of the ancient texts that proclaimed that the objects of the world came forth from the texts of the Veda, but the sceptical line of the teachings of Uddālaka. Objects are illusions, entirely dependent on their names.
They are the mere illusory appearance of a plurality of isolated units in the Absolute that results from the arbitrary activity of naming. In this sense, the object is entirely dependent for its existence on, and therefore identical with, its name.
And the name, too, is an illusion. For all modifications of sound are reducible to the one basic sound, OM. And... the syllable OM itself is ultimately reduced to the Absolute, which has no empirical features and certainly does not consist of a plurality of four component elements like the vocalized syllable OM.
So what we have here is not a theory of the creative power of sound in which words are regarded as the subtle vibrations from which gross objects come forth, but a resolute reduction of all plurality to illusion on the lines of Uddālaka.
A similar view is also found at Extract 17, where Śaṅkara reduces all words to the principle speech (Vāc), and reduces Vāc to the Absolute. In this case, what was originally a doctrine describing creation is reduced to a doctrine of illusion.
~A J Alston from 'Shankara on the Creation', p.154
Veni, vidi, vici. I am, I know, I know I am.
Being is the principle of existence. Awareness is the ground of consciousness.
Self-awareness is the essence of bliss.
Awake or asleep, the mind is always dreaming—except in deep sleep when the mind defaults. Trees sleep deep while people are dreaming.
Being, consciousness, bliss, name, and form are maximizing Maya. Satcitananda is the proverbial rope as name and form are making up the snake.
People come with gods and vice versa like a matching set. Any atheist believing in the personal subconsciously believes in some kind of god.
Liberation is a loaded word for clarity. Transmigration is universal dreaming. That is the revelation of divine imagination in this manifestation of self-awareness.
The mind is like an island. Folks are always doing or not doing raves on John Donne.
The sea is like a god to us. Depths of effortless intuition fill our prayers.
The absolute being of transcendental consciousness transcends
this universe of space and time. In other words, I am That minus Maya.
Can any means of knowledge reveal the Self, since to do so is to make the Self an object for a knowing subject. You cannot know anything as an object until you are separate from it and it is standing over against you as an object ready to be known.
Vedic revelation and critical reflection, therefore, as applied to the Self, are primarily negative in character. They do not yield determinate knowledge of the Self as if it were an object:
their function, rather, is to negate that which impedes the self-manifestation of the Self in its true form as infinite consciousness.
Śaṅkara is entirely on common ground with the Sūtras when he defends upanishadic monism by declaring not only that the effect is real before its production, but also that it is real before and during manifestation, and even that its future existence is real now and subject to apprehension by a yogin.
It is real, however, not in itself, but only as the cause, as the pot is real not qua pot but qua clay. The doctrine of the Sūtras that the objects come forth from, and return back to, the Absolute is defended.
But at times Śaṅkara goes back behind the doctrine of the Sūtras to certain texts of the old Upanishads and maintains that the effect is strictly nothing over and above the cause. As we already know, if the cause is said to be identical with the effect, this means that the effect has the nature of the cause, while the cause does not have the nature of the effect.
This, however, is to reduce the effect to the cause. If the world has an intelligible structure, and curds can only be obtained from milk and not from clay, this means that a certain power or predisposition to evolve into curds must be in the milk.
But Śaṅkara declares that all objects are non-different from the ‘powers, (śakti) or predispositions from which they proceed, while the powers, in turn, are non-different from the substances in which they lie, and the substances themselves are traceable finally to the great elements from which they proceed and into which they will eventually dissolve back, so that the whole world, beginning with the primordial element ether, is reduced to a mere inexplicable appearance arising on the face of the Absolute, while causality, law and intelligibility still reign within the appearance.
Śaṅkara transforms the older doctrine of Sat-kārya Vāda, the mere doctrine of the reality of the effect before its manifestation, into an instrument for affirming, yet again, the transcendence of the Absolute, which triumphs ultimately over all predicates attributed to it by the human mind.
~A J Alston from 'Shankara on the Absolute', p.126
The circumstance which prevents man from realizing his own true nature as pure Consciousness is attachment to the forms set up by nescience, and the deeply rooted habit of taking them for real.
The purpose of all religious practices, when viewed in the context of the path to liberation, is to weaken the hold of the illusory forms by developing a counter-awareness of deeper levels of reality hidden beneath the more superficial forms.
These ‘deeper levels’ of reality are themselves ultimately illusory from the very fact of being accessible to the understanding and will of man. They are, according to the rather drastic formula of Śaṅkara’s Commentary on Gauḍapāda’s Kārikā II.4, ‘false because seen’.
Nevertheless, the contemplation of the Lord as manifest under illusory forms relieves the mind of its burden of attachment to the grosser and more oppressive phases of the world-appearance, in particular to the objects of crude sense-enjoyment. Thus it prepares the soul for the final rejection of all forms as illusory,
~A J Alston from 'Shankara on the Creation', p.82
