/lit/ - Literature

>>13558471
>Is he saying that our "individual" souls aren't actually divided up?
According to Advaita Vedanta, the inner Self (Atma) of all living beings is Nirguna Brahman, the attributeless, immutable, undivided and limitless Supreme Being comprised of consciousness-bliss. This can be considered the true 'soul' from the Advaitic point of view. This is considered to be separate from the mind and intellect, which inhere in something called the subtle body. The awareness of the Atma illuminates and observes the activity of the intellect/mind (of all beings) while the Atma remaining itself unaffected and changeless. The reflection of the Atma in the intellect is mistaken for the Atma itself as though would mistake one's reflection on the surface of a mirror for yourself. This occurs because of ignorance which itself stems from the maya that the Lord exercises as His power. The subtle body is the thing that is held to transmigrate from body to body at death, while the Atma remains unchanging, formless and all-pervading like space or the ether; although the subtle body is not conscious and it has no soul or awareness, it is like an inert object that the Atma animates.

Hence when Shankaracharya says "there is no transmigrant but the Lord", he is not saying the Atma (which is the Lord) really descends and becomes bound up in and connected with a body but he is talking about really the only continuity is the Atma, and not the subtle body which is itself not ultimately real. The personality/traits of a single person isnt reborn again in another life but its forever lost while only the subtle body observed by the Atma transmigrates. The very sense of being an individualized presence (due to identification with the subtle body) instead of the one all-encompassing infinite bliss is a false appearance due to maya similar to how the one moon falsely appears as many when reflected in many ponds. Coomaraswamy writes there about how Plato, Plotinus and Hermes took the same/similar view in some way. I can see a similar concept with how Plotinus regarded the soul as not fully descending but that the soul was split into a higher/divine soul that remained in contact with the Intelligence while only the lower one descended into matter.

>If this is the case, then what exactly is liberated?
Advaita holds that liberation is synonymous with the destruction of ignorance, when the illusion of multiplicity/individuality caused by ignorance vanishes along with that ignorance, only the one undivided and omnipresent Atma remains in its true state that it was really in all along; liberation is the end of the 'dream' of embodied existence that obscured this.