/lit/ - Literature

>>15890630
>How does god fall into illusion?
Brahman doesn't, the innermost Self of all beings is non-different from the already eternally liberated Brahman. The innermost Self is untouched and unbound by that which it seems to observe. Brahman's power of maya is responsible for the contingent existence of non-conscious minds and also causes the false sensation to inhere in them that they are an individualized and embodied being, when they are really non-conscious objects whose movement are illuminated by the all-pervading awareness of Brahman. Any time Advaita refers to a bound or ignorant soul, it refers to an unreal bundle of ignorance appearing in the infinite non-dual consciousness, the bundle falsely regarding itself to be a individualized consciousness, it doesn't refer to the already-free Self which provides the background or basis for the ignorance to appear in. During liberation the truth is experienced that one's innermost Self is and has always been unlimited, unbound, sorrowless, infinite and eternal self-luminous sentience which was never affected or bound by the things It seemed to witness like the mind via Its own power. Any attempt to assert that God is actually bound by the illusion of maya is witnessed as a thought in one's own consciousness, and something which consciousness or the Self witnesses as its subject doesn't actually reveal anything about that witnessing subject, it only provides indications about the observed object which is necessarily different from that witnessing subject.
>If God didn't, why did God will there to be plurality if plurality is bad?
Because the wielding of His power maya is analogous to the aimless disport or inhalation and exhalation of Brahman, something which proceeds effortlessly from Brahman's very nature without any extraneous purpose, like how the sun by its very nature always shines, as Shankara explains in pic related (the word Brahma in the picture refers to Brahman and not the demiurgic/creator Brahmā)
>And if God is First how is he not before even Oneness itself?
Brahman is beyond all such distinctions as number, size, first, being etc, Itself being the cause of those categories