#apavada

🕉️ Arunachala Shiva 🕉️ - Photo by  Bernd Kalidas Flory

Superimposition and its effacement

26. Master: The Vedanta as a whole mentions as the cause of bondage and release, superimposition [1] and its effacement [2], respectively. Bondage is caused by superimposition; release, by its effacement.

Now listen as regards the former.

27. Superimposition is seeing one thing in another: a snake, for instance, in a rope, a man in a post, water in a mirage, or a blue canopy in the empty sky.

28. 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 (Liberation) which resembles the placid sky when all the clouds of winter clear away.

46. Just as one examines and finds out that this is not a snake but a rope, and this is not a thief but a thick 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. Know this to be the effacement of superimposition.

47. Cause and effect are the same, like cloth and yarn, ornaments and gold, utensils and clay. To resolve the body into its antecedent cause, until avidya (ignorance) is traced as the root-cause of all, is the method of effacing superimposition.

[1]  Aropa — erroneous knowledge, false attribution, or illusion.

[2]  Apavada

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