Is this right, Ramji?
For the longest time, I’ve wondered why Isvara has been necessary. You could go from the location of objects teaching to the thoughts are not real and existence/awareness is real.
Isvara is very necessary because so long as Maya is seemingly real, the thoughts are seen as real, they need some place to be “parked” conceptually so it is possible to infer what the Self is through discrimination.
It is like the tweezer that takes out the thorn, but once the thorn is out, the tweezer and thorn have no value.
Ramji: Mostly right. The only possible problem is the statement in the second paragraph “it is possible to infer what the Self is through discrimination.” It is possible to infer that something caused the world but not necessarily that uncaused existence/consciousness caused the world. If you’re looking for causes you might assume that the cause was also caused, so you need the teaching that the Self is unborn, i.e;. uncaused.
Also, the location of objects teaching doesn’t prove that the thoughts are unreal, only that they are located in consciousness. If the person assumed that reflected consciousness was real then he or she would probably conclude that the thoughts were real too. So you need the satya/mitnya teaching to point out the difference between the original and the reflection followed by the non-difference of the reflection and the original.
The third paragraph is correct and very well expressed. I like the word “parked.”
And the final sentence is correct too. Vedanta is a means of knowledge, not the goal. I just posted a satsang on that topic today. People think that learing the whole teaching is equivalent to liberation, not realizing that the Vedanta negates the learner too. When one learns the nature of the “I” one automatically unlearns the reflected knower. Stated differently, when one learns that the reflected knower is unreal, one discovers that the Self is, was and will always be the only knower.
Love,
Ramlji