Dear James,
It was a pleasure talking to you on Wednesday.
I’m listening to you teaching the Mandukya at the moment and you’re at the point of the non-origination teaching. It’s stunned me – I’ve been walking around the house most of the morning going “what the hell?! No way!”. It’s a total mindfuck!
Let me see if I have this right….
- Ignorance is not a thing in itself. It is not knowing or misapprehending something (i.e. the absence of knowledge)
- I, consciousness, am all that there is, so whatever is ‘present’ is consciousness.
- Ignorance of this fact means that what is ‘present’ (i.e. me, consciousness) is taken to be something other than what it is and objecthood is ‘projected’ (even though it’s not an active doing) onto consciousness.
- And thus the material world is ‘created’ (again, this is not an active creation in the sense of creating a sculpture).
It’s like a magic trick in the sense that the magic is ‘created’ by not knowing how the trick works. Once you know, the magic vanishes but you can still appreciate the trick’s tricky-ness.
I always struggled to understand the cause and effect teaching teaching (panchikarana) and I think I now know why – how can you get matter from consciousness if it’s non dual? Of course, it’s not actually created, you just mistakenly think consciousness is other than what it is and that mistake ‘produces’ the creation.
Have I understood this correctly? If so, is there another way to express in words this type of ‘creation’ by misapprehension or any other examples to chew on? It is totally bizarre and has stunned the mind. What a trip!
Lots of love to you
James: Got it in one, Dave! Gold star. Go to the head of the class. Kind of makes a joke out of all this Self inquiry, doesn’t it. This is not to say that anything needs to change on the mithya level because mithya is satya. No worries henceforth.