Subhas Kumar Sinha : Whether the self retains it's identity/existence even after self realisation?
Sugata Bose : The unreal self had never existed and had only appeared to exist. With the dawning of Self-realisation it dissolves into nothingness for it was ever but a shadow and never anything substantial. The real Self now shines in its own resplendence as it ever had through the shadowy form of this phenomenal universe and of countless such universes which form the vast mythical body of what modern scientists call the multiverse and what ancient rishis in India had termed 'ananta koti brahmanda'. When Brahman is realised as the substratum of phenomena, it is not a nihilistic experience but is a positive experience of underlying existence, a solidarity of the Being, an undivided consciousness whose integration is such that the trinity of the percipient, the perception and the perceived become redundant and the act of cognition becomes a self-cognition without the division into the trinity. It is the Atman that broods on the Atman in total self-awareness of a heightened transcendent kind and not quite like anything we experience in our fractured frame of phenomenal cognition. The Buddhists entirely deny the residual ultimate reality but Vedanta categorically affirms it. In the final analysis, Subhas Babu, you will have to experience yourself the veracity of the scriptural statements either way and come to your own affirmed or negated conclusion. Till then, I guess, you will have to rely on what the scriptures of both the Vedanta and Buddhism says about it and will, thus, have to oscillate between acceptance and denial.
Humbly yours ever in Ramakrishna-Vivekananda,
Sugata Bose
Sugata Bose : The unreal self had never existed and had only appeared to exist. With the dawning of Self-realisation it dissolves into nothingness for it was ever but a shadow and never anything substantial. The real Self now shines in its own resplendence as it ever had through the shadowy form of this phenomenal universe and of countless such universes which form the vast mythical body of what modern scientists call the multiverse and what ancient rishis in India had termed 'ananta koti brahmanda'. When Brahman is realised as the substratum of phenomena, it is not a nihilistic experience but is a positive experience of underlying existence, a solidarity of the Being, an undivided consciousness whose integration is such that the trinity of the percipient, the perception and the perceived become redundant and the act of cognition becomes a self-cognition without the division into the trinity. It is the Atman that broods on the Atman in total self-awareness of a heightened transcendent kind and not quite like anything we experience in our fractured frame of phenomenal cognition. The Buddhists entirely deny the residual ultimate reality but Vedanta categorically affirms it. In the final analysis, Subhas Babu, you will have to experience yourself the veracity of the scriptural statements either way and come to your own affirmed or negated conclusion. Till then, I guess, you will have to rely on what the scriptures of both the Vedanta and Buddhism says about it and will, thus, have to oscillate between acceptance and denial.
Humbly yours ever in Ramakrishna-Vivekananda,
Sugata Bose
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