Bondage and Release

Sri Tandavaraya Swami

Master: Only he is Self-realized who knows what is body and who is embodied.

Disciple: Who else is embodied but this gross thing?

M: You say that you cannot find the embodied being as different from the gross body. Then tell me who appeared as the subject in your dream, or who experienced the sleep in which even the pain of dream was absent, or again what is this consciousness in the waking state?

D: Everyday experience proves that the experiencer in the waking state or the experiencer of the dreams when the waking consciousness is gone, or the experiencer of deep slumber must be different from the gross body. Yet it is not realized. It just flashes in the mind, only to fade away at once. Please explain this.

M: The Vedanta, as a whole, mentions as the cause of bondage and release, superimposition and its effacement respectively. Bondage is caused by superimposition; release by its effacement. 

Superimposition is seeing one thing in another: a snake, for instance, in a rope; a man in a post; water in mirage; or a blue canopy in the empty sky. Similarly the five elements and their combinations seen in Brahman, which is free from name and form, one and the same without a second, self-conscious and perfect, are products of illusion. 

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Only he is a jnani who knows beyond doubt that all that is seen is only ephemeral like a dream. Now listen to the process of effacement of superimposition, the way to wonderful moksha which resembles the placid sky when all the clouds of winter clear away.

Just as one examines and finds out that this is not a snake but a rope, and this is not a thief but a post, so also one makes out beyond doubt, by the word of the Master and the light of the scriptures, that the body, the world and the elements are only Brahman, i.e., unchanging consciousness.