Recall
again the Chändogya Upanishad description of the creation of the world that we
discussed in an earlier post. Originally there was a single entity. But that
single entity (simultaneously) took different names and forms and ‘became’
many.
No matter
what forms and names the original ‘That’ took, the fact remains that each of
those forms are all ‘That’ in the essence. The names and forms may be
different. It is a case of simultaneous coexistence of the same entity in many
forms. In our space/time limited world view, such a thing is difficult to comprehend.
But let me give a simple example to illustrate this point (this is only for
illustration, please don’t stretch it beyond limits)
Assume that
there are multiple movie theaters adjacent to each other, each running
different movie with the same actor playing the lead role. In each movie, the actor plays a different
role – in one he may be a drunkard, in another he may be a wicked man, in yet
another he may be a saint and so on. The role is dictated by the story line of
each movie and the actor plays exactly as per the script – the name and form he
has taken.
At the same
time the real actor sitting somewhere, may neither be a drunkard, nor wicked,
nor a saint. He is in no way bound by the story line of the movies he has
enacted. For a viewer, the same actor appears differently. But behind all those
diversity of roles, it is the single actor who is playing the roles. The
differences are imposed by the story lines of each movie.
So if we
ignore the space/time limitation of our perceptible world, it is not too
difficult to understand that behind all this seeming diversity, there is a
single entity that appears differently.
This is
exactly (well, almost), the Advaita philosophy of Šankara – “Brahma (the name
used for ‘That’) alone exists, the diversity is just apparent (Mithya) “
Let us move
back a step and see the original strange mantra with which we started and see
how all these things mesh well. That will be the next post.
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