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Pu. Abandon the error of difference. All these and other texts, the purport of which clearly is instruction as to the essential nature of things, declare that Brahman only, i.e. non-differenced pure intelligence is real, while everything else is false. The appearance of plurality is due to avidya.
And the different arguments which were set forth as proving Brahman's non- differenced nature, are sufficiently refuted by what we have said just now as to all such arguments themselves being the products of avidya. Nor again is there any sense in the theory that the principle of non- differenced intelligence 'witnesses' avidya, and implicates itself in the error of the world.
Nor must it be urged against him who holds this view of avidya belonging to Brahman that he is unable to account for the distinction of bondage and release, for as there is only the one Brahman affected with Nescience and to be released by the cessation of that Nescience, the distinction of souls bound and released, &c., has no true existence: the empirical distinction of souls bound and released, of teachers and pupils, &c. is a merely fictitious one, and all such fiction can be explained by means of the avidya of one intelligent being.
Well, then you yourself are in no better case; for you admit that Brahman is something different from avidya. From this admission it follows that Brahman also is something 'different', and thus all the disadvantages connected with the view of difference cling to your theory as well.
The former alternative is excluded, as it is admitted that the soul essentially is pure, non-differenced intelligence; and because on that alternative the assumption of avidya to account for the distinction of souls would be purposeless.
Since its nature, its origination, and its destruction are all alike fictitious, we have clearly to search for another agency capable of destroying that avidya which is the cause of the fiction of its destruction! Let us then say that the essential nature of Brahman itself is the destruction of that cognition!
So long as man remains subject to the dualistic delusions of nature, the Janus-faced MAYA is his goddess; he cannot know the one true God. The world illusion, MAYA, is individually called AVIDYA, literally, "not-knowledge," ignorance, delusion.
With its help creatures are distinguished as possessing more of it or less of it in their constitutions. It helps one to an apprehension of self as distinguished from what is not self. Desire is the fifteenth principle, O king. Unto it inhere the whole universe. The sixteenth principle is Avidya.
That is why the wise man comes and says, "Set yourselves free from the avidya; know your true soul and be saved from the grasp of the self which imprisons you." We gain our freedom when we attain our truest nature. The man who is an artist finds his artistic freedom when he finds his ideal of art. Then is he freed from laborious attempts at imitation, from the goadings of popular approbation.
The distinctions of bondage and of one's own self and other persons are fictitiously shaped by one's own avidya; for they are unreal like the distinctions seen by a dreaming person. Other bodies also have a Self through me only; for they are bodies like this my body.
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