RELATIVITY OF THE PHENOMENAL DOMAIN

Brahman (Cosmic Self, or Paramatman, or Absolute Existence) is complete and full in every respect and beyond, according to the invocatory verse of Ishavasya Upanishad. Brahman is beyond the comprehension, imagination and purview of any finite being, as He is the infinite of infinitude. He is the origin, expansion, contraction, and culmination of all that is manifest and unmanifest. Everything is in relation to Him; there is nothing beyond and outside of Him. He is the Supreme Divine Personality, the Supreme Abode, the Supreme Purifier, the Eternal God, the Primal Being, the Unborn, and the Greatest (Śrimad Bhagavad Gita, 10.12-13). Sri Krishna in Śrimad Bhagavad Gita (10.2) articulates that neither gods nor the great sages know of My origin. I am the source from which the gods and great seers come. The same Bhagavad Gita (Chapters 9 and 10) pronounces that He is the origin of all creation. Everything proceeds from Him only. The progenitor of mankind, the seven great Sages, the four great Saints before them, and the fourteen Manus are all born from His mind. From them, all the people in the world have descended. This way, the phenomenal dimension that is visible and invisible is also in relation to Brahman—the eternal, imperishable, complete, and full. He is omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, Self-effulgent, Self-existent, Self-caused, Self-luminescent, and transcendent as well as immanent. He is Absolute Existence, and everything else is relative to Him. The rest of them are derivative, relative, and transient.

1. Outline 

Existence is One only. That Existence is eternal, infinity, complete, and full. There is nothing outside and everything is inside. All that manifest and unmanifest is in relation to One Absolute Existence only. As He is complete and full, there is no requirement of additional creation to complete the Whole. The pertinent question that crops up is the reality of a phenomenal dimension. The very fact is that the phenomenal realm is a sensual perception, which by its very nature is evanescent and in relation to the sense driven perception only controlled by the mind. The mind is intrinsically inert and impetus into momentum in contact with the life force. The mind is the force behind all experiences, including both the universe and personal, which are seen as mental constructs that vanish with self-knowledge. Liberation is achieved by realising one's true nature as pure consciousness, which transcends the mind and its illusions. Yoga-Vasistha sees 

 the entire universe, including all beings and relationships, is a manifestation of the mind. Karma (actions) and their consequences are primarily created through mental thought and imagination at work. Our experiences are products of this mental "seeing" or imagination. This mental thought process moves from heaven to hell thus creating the cycle of freedom and bondages. It is freedom, when it receives knowledge of Self through a controlled mind. True enlightenment is the realisation that one's essential self is not the body, senses, or mind, but the pure, blissful Atman, or Self. But one gets into the other way round when one tries to relish the sensual objects and get into bondage and attachments that perpetuate perennially in the cycle of Samsara, or of birth and death.

The sage philosopher Swami Krishnnananda in his commentary on Yoga-Vasistha says that the lines of doctrinaire of Yoga-Vasistha highlights the universe are a manifestation of thought and mind that itself is transitory and ephemeral. It is only an idea and a conception of the mind. Yoga Vasistha (4.47.1-4.47.90) holds that the world appears so extensive and thickly populated, but a fancied unreality like the erroneous appearance of two moons in the sky. It is made of unreality though appearing as real, and is not worth reliance by our ignorance of its nature. The revolution of the world resembles the hallucination of mind; it is a phantasia without any solidity in it. Water in the mirage does not come into being and go out of existence; even so, this world neither comes out of the absolute nor does it go anywhere. The creation of the world has no cause, and therefore it has no beginning. It does not exist even now; how can it reach destruction? He further says that space and time are not absolute. Space and time do not have any absolute meaning, being relative to the standpoints of observing centres or perceptual contents. He asserts that space is the relation of the coexistence of ideas, and time is the relation of the succession of ideas. The spatiality, temporality, regularity, and objectivity of the world are as real as those observed in the world of dreams. As the dream-world vanishes in waking, the waking world vanishes in the experience of the Absolute.  Yoga-Vasistha, through the commentary of Swami Krishnnananda, tells the uncanny truth while explaining the variety of existence. Sage Vasistha says ,just as in this universe there are countless beings of various species, in other universes, too, there are similar beings, with different bodies suited to those universes. The relativity of the cosmos implies the existence of worlds within worlds and worlds interpenetrating one another without one being aware of the existence of others. Everyone is locked up within the processes of his own mind, and hence, worlds that exist outside the purview of a particular set of thought processes cannot be known to exist. The number of worlds, therefore, cannot have any limit. It is infinity moving within infinity. But the worlds, though they are all made up of the same stuff as the mind, individual or cosmic, differ in their makeup and contents. Some of them may be almost similar in nature, but mostly they differ completely and may be inhabited by different kinds of individuals who cannot be even adequately imagined by our present state of mind. The evolution of the world goes on due to the impetus it has received from Cosmic Mind, and the process of creation continues even in individuals, though in a misplaced and distorted manner, quite at a tangent from the original Will of Brahman, or Supreme Self, or Absolute Existence.            

 2. Scriptures

 Absolute Existence is only One. There is no existence outside of It. Any other is in relation to Absolute Existence. Yoga-Vasistha (4.31.12) explains that nothing can ever be something, or anything can ever be nothing. It, Yoga-Vasistha (4.31.32-34), elucidates that there is but One Being that is really existent, who is Truth and Consciousness Himself, and of the nature of the vacuum and pure understanding. He is immaculate, all-pervading, quiescent, and without His rise or fall. Being perfect quietude and void, he seems as nothing existent, and all these creations subsist in that vacuity as particles of its own splendour. Śrimad Bhagavad Gita (2.72) elaborates on the eternity and infinity of Absolute, and the relativity of the rest and anything else.  Sage philosopher Swami Krishnnananda, in his commentary of Śrimad Bhagavad Gita, observes that this is the state of Brahman, or Absolute. This is the state of Existence One, only untouched by the sensory world's desires and thoughts. Having attained this state, nobody is confounded afterwards. Once a person is awakened and established in the consciousness of the absoluteness of their existence, they will never become confused by the opposites of the phenomenal dimension. 

  The phenomenal realm is a projection of mind and has no validity. Yoga-Vasistha (4.31.1-4.31.48) states that the non-existent and unreal entities appear to exist only through illusion, similar to how a mirage seems to be full of water due to our optical delusion.  It is in a like manner that we ourselves, these gods and demigods, and all things besides, are unrealities in fact, and yet we seem to turn about and speak and act as real persons. My existence is as unreal as yours, yet it seems as real as the way we dream of our death during sleep. The mistaken impression of the reality of the world is never to be effaced without the knowledge of its unreality, derived from the sastras, or scriptures, and the assuetude of thinking it so. Yoga-Vasistha emphatically says there is nothing real or unreal in the three worlds, but all of it is of the same form as it is viewed by the Intellect and rises before it of its own spontaneity. It tells that This infinite and formless void of the intellect is ubiquitous and all-pervading, and in whatever form this intellect manifests itself in any place, it appears there just in the same figure and manner. As the divine consciousness expanded with the images of Dama and others, it immediately assumed those shapes based on its own perceptions. So it is with every one of us, that all things are produced to our view, according to their notions, which are presented to our consciousness.  What we call the world is the representation of things to us as in our dream; it is a hollow body as a bubble rising in the empty ocean of the Intellect and appearing as the water in the mirage. The waking state of the vacuous intellect is styled the phenomenal world, and its state of sleep and rest is what we call liberation, emancipation, or salvation from pain. But the Intellect, which never sleeps nor has to be awakened at any time, is the vacuity of the Divine Mind, in which the world is ever present in its visible form.

 3. Remarks 

Heightened consciousness purifies the mind, the nerve centre of the thought-manufacturing machine. Mind, through its manufacturing processes, creates, uncreates, solidifies, and nullifies everything. It is the dimensional realm of relativity that is the basic foundational stone of ignorance. A controlled mind can be accentuated to contemplate in all states of consciousness on Atman, or Self, to become aware of every aspect at the macro- to micro-level as one indivisible and inseparable aspect of Brahman Consciousness. Constantly contemplating Atman purifies the mind and uproots ignorance.  When the mind is pure, one attains unalloyed bliss and is liberated from the cycle of Samsara Chakra, or wheel of birth and death. At this point, the mind's perception of a separate self and a separate world disappears.

-Asutosh Satpathy