Tripura Rahasya

Sage Dattatreya

What is this bondage? How can the pure uncontaminated Absolute Self be shackled by what look like images in the mirror of the Self? To imagine that the self is shackled by mental projections is to imagine that the fire reflected in a mirror can burn it. There is absolutely no bondage beyond the foolish certainty that you are bound and the difference of entity created by mind. Until these two blemishes are washed away by the holy waters of investigation into the Self, neither I, nor Brahma the Creator, nor Vishnu, nor Shiva, nor even Sri Tripura, the Goddess of Wisdom, can help that person to be emancipated. Therefore, Rama, surmount these two hurdles and remain eternally happy. 

The mind will shine as the Self if the mind be denuded of those thoughts now crowding it, and then all sense of duality will cease to exist. Mind is nothing but sectional knowledge as this and that. Eliminate such, and then pure knowledge will alone remain. This is the Self. 

As for the well-known example of the hallucination of a snake in a coil of rope, the rope is real and the snake is unreal. Even after the true state of affairs is known and the hallucination of a snake dismissed, there is still the reality of the rope (which contains the potentiality of the recurrence of the same hallucination in the same person or in others). The danger is always there until the rope is recognized to be of and in the Self. Then objectivity totally ceases, and pure knowledge alone remains. There is thus a complete annihilation of duality.