Atma Bodha - Post 13

VERSE 6:

संसारः स्वप्नतुल्यो हि रागद्वेषादिसङ्कुलः ।

स्वकाले सत्यवद्भाति प्रबोधे सत्यसद्भवेत् ॥ ६॥

SAMSARA SVAPNATULYO HI

RAGA DVESHADI SANKULAHA

SVAKALE SATYAVAD BHATI

PRABODHE SATYASAD BHAVET

(The world which is full of attachments, aversions and so on, is like a dream. It appears to be real as long as the dream continues but becomes unreal when one wakes up, when true wisdom dawns)

From verse 6 – 9, we shift our attention from the Self and Self-knowledge to the world of appearance of names and forms.

Samsara here means the world of transmigration, the world of births and deaths in an endless cycle, which can only be escaped through knowledge of the Self. The characteristic feature of this Samsara is that “it is the realm where one thought is not like the next thought, and thoughts change so rapidly from one to the next. That is the nature of Samsaric life.

Samsara means “that which is ever-changing”, and that is why it is such an appropriate word to describe this world – which is a play, changing every moment.

A thought does not stay for long in the mind; it changes moment to moment. The message of this verse is to show how unreal this world is. 

It does that through a beautiful simile… “Swapna –Tulyo” Nyaya or Analogy: The world of objects, existing in time and space, is compared to a dream as it is viewed from the waking state.

Raga Dwesha Aadi: The word Aadi after Raga-Dwesha indicates “etc”. It refers to the whole chain of qualities of which Raga and Dwesha are the first two. The others are Lobha, Moha, Mada and Matsarya.

Translated into English, the six negative qualities are likes, dislikes, greed, delusion, pride and jealousy. By keeping these alive it is like stabbing ourselves daily with six daggers!

The world which is full of attachments, aversions, etc., is like a dream. It appears to be real, as long as it continues but appears to be unreal when one is awake (i.e., when true wisdom dawns).

It is very hard for a seeker to get conviction that the world so clearly perceived is unreal and the only reality is the non-dual Atman. Hence the compassionate Acharya in this verse is explaining the relevance of the world by the analogy of the dream.

  

DREAM AND WAKING STATE

In dream, the mind creates fanciful existence. Unfulfilled desires, passions and emotions which we carry in our minds when we go to sleep, often manifests in our dreams.

In this verse, Sankara compares a human being’s life full of attachments, aversions etc. with the dream state explained above. 

When a person is dreaming, then the dream world itself is mistaken as real, in that world one may become a king and be happy or lose everything or even die and become sad or afraid. 

Till the dream exists, i.e. till one is in the dream state, all this may appear as real but once one wakes up from that state, the dream is known to be nothing but as an illusion. It is unreal because it is impermanent and never exists forever.

Once a person wakes up from his dream, invariably every human being in the world knows that whatever was experienced by him in his dream is unreal and is only an imagination.

We experience thus so many times in our life when we go to sleep and we get a dream.

• We get such dreams which we can never imagine in our normal life.
• It is often, though not every time, that we get certain things in our dream, we enjoy certain things in our dream which we aspire for in our life but which we never get in our life.
• Also, when our thoughts are not pure and serene, we get dreams some times in which we undergo sufferings 

What happens when we get up??

• We realize at once that the environment seen in the dream, the people, the events which were seen/ experienced in our dream - all of them are not there at all when we wake up and come to our senses.
• We often caught it away internally , saying, o, what a crazy dream it was, How can all that be true in our real life?

STATE OF ILLUSION / IGNORANCE  AND STATE OF REALITY / WISDOM

• Exactly the  above points about dream applies to all the worldly experience which we get in this objective world.

• Due to our ignorance ( which can be related to our dream in the above analogy), we believe and we indulge in so many experiences in our life in this world.

• These worldly experiences are exactly comparable to our dream experience where, we had so many dreams and in the dream, we were actually there, very much involved in the events that were going on in the dream and we are smiling, we are crying , we are undergoing so many things there.

• The world that we perceive is felt through our senses and is full of attachments and aversions. These are only due to ignorance.  The ever changing world can never be real and is an illusion only. It is just like a prolonged dream created only by our mind.

• Till one is in ignorance, the world with all its duality is perceived as real, and one gets deluded by bonding, hatred etc. of different objects of the world. Just as in the dream world, one may feel happy and proud about ones wealth or sad thinking about all miseries.

• All these arise only due to ignorance and once the knowledge of the Self dawns, then this world is known only as an illusion, just like the dream world that never existed.

Till one is dreaming, we cannot know that  the dream world is unreal. Similarly, the world perceived in the waking state can be realized as unreal only after the ignorance that creates it is completely negated.

Thus Acharya here is explaining that world appears to be real only as long as one is ignorant about the nature of Self. 

A seeker must hence constantly remember that the world that is perceived and appears to be real is only an illusion created by mind and must not get affected by all its happenings. 

Just as the dream world, it will be known as unreal once one ‘wakes up’ from this state of ignorance.

A person who has a balanced and a controlled mind, who is not tossed by anger, pride and petty jealousies, likes and dislikes- he does not wander away into wild dreams created by a feeble mind.

Such a man of realization recognizes the experience in this world as “a dream” wherein he experiences this world as a realm of objects, time and space.

Just as dream is so distinctly different from the waking state, so also the waking state is distinctly different from the state of God-realization. This is the appropriateness of the analogy.

Love

PS- If a person continues to believe the world as real and moves around in the world with Attachment, Aversion etc. then what is his state in the context of a dream?

We often observe that in a dream, we ourselves would be seen witnessing all that is happening in the dream and in the dream, we ourselves stand there and pass a judgement that this is not a dream this is all real. This happens so many times to us. Does it not??

State of a person who has not realized the world of attachment etc. as unreal is exactly like this. 

He exists there, witnessing the illusory world very much (like the person who stands there and experiences the dream experience happening to him, as a witness) and, as explained above in the context of dream, he also passes a judgement that all these experiences in his life are real because he has a mistaken notion on account of his ignorance that his identity as a limited  jiva is real, the world is real, all the experiences which the world fetches to him are real!!!

Due to the grace of God or a Guru, time comes in one's life in some birth or the other when this ignorance is broken, the falsity of the world and our limited existence with this body is known and our actual, true identity as the infinite SELF/ATMAN is realized!!!

Love