Tripura Rahasya

Sage Dattatreya

Sri Parasurama asked:

O Lord, I find it difficult to follow your reasoning when you say that Abstract Intelligence, being only one, yet manifests as the diverse objects of creation. The two entities, the cogniser and the cognized object, are distinct and separate. Of these, the cogniser, namely consciousness, may be self-luminous, illumining the objects. Just as objects stand apart from light so the universe seems apart from the Intelligent Principle. Experience does not reveal the identity of the two. Furthermore, you are confirming the statement of Janaka as regards samadhi. 

Janaka has said: Mind divested of thoughts becomes pure and is identical with the Self and further, that alone destroys ignorance. How can that be the Self? Mind is always taken to be a faculty with which the Self functions in the supra-material planes. The Self would be no better than insentient but for the mind, which characterizes it as different from the insentient world. 

Further, even the scriptures admit that liberation and bondage are only attitudes of the mind, according as it is unmodified or modified respectively. How can the mind be the Self as well as its faculty? Again, granting that the world is an image on the mirror of consciousness, the fact of its perfection is there, so the non-duality of consciousness does not follow.

There are hallucinations known, like a rope mistake for a serpent. Hallucination is not correct knowledge; but it does not end the duality attendant on its perception. Still again, unreal images cannot serve any useful purpose, whereas the universe is enduring and full of purpose. Tell me how you assert it to be unreal, thus establishing the non-duality of the Supreme. 

Furthermore, if the world itself is unreal, how does that unreality happen to distinguish between fact and hallucination in the affairs of life.  Still more, how does everybody happen to have the same hallucination of mistaking the unreal phenomena for reality?