Tripura Rahasya

Sage Dattatreya

You have done well, Parasurama, to ask these questions, although not for the first time. They must be examined until one is thoroughly convinced.

Consciousness is one and non-dual, but shines as if diversified like the clean surface of a mirror reflecting variegated colors. Note how the mind unmodified in sleep, remaining single and blank, is later modified by dream and manifests as the dream world. Similarly, the One Consciousness - Sri Tripura - flashes forth as the various phenomena of the universe. The cogniser and the cognised objects are seen in dream also. Even a blind man, without sight, perceives objects. How does he do so unless by mental perception? Can anything be known at any time or place in the absence of the light of the mind? There can be no images in the absence of a mirror, for the images are not apart from the mirror. 

Similarly, nothing is cognisable if it lies beyond the pale of the cognising principle. For the same reason I say that the mind cannot lie apart from intelligence in the abstract. Just as the cogniser, cognition and the cognised are identified with the mind in dream, so also the seer, the sight and the phenomena are identical with the mind in the wakeful state. 

Just as an axe was created in the dream for felling a tree, which is the purpose for which it was designed, so is the mind said to be the faculty for giving perception. But, Rama, the faculty can be only of the same degree of reality as the action itself. For was anyone injured at any time by a human horn? The action and the instrument must clearly be of the same degree of truth. Since the action itself is unreal, can the mind, the faculty, be real? So, Rama, there is no faculty known as the mind. Mind is only surmised for the location of the dream subject, dream vision and dream objects. Its reality is of the same order as that of the dream.

Pure intelligence is quite unblemished; mind and other faculties are mere fabrications for enabling transactions to continue, which, however go on because the Absolute is self-sufficient and manifests as subject and objects. The same is often pure and unqualified, as in the aforesaid momentary samadhi.