/lit/ - Literature

>>16084455
>So, within Advaita, if Atman and Brahman are one, how does individual experience arise?
The individual experience of Jivas never arises from its previous non-existence but is beginningless as it is derived from or contingent on Brahman's power of maya which is itself beginningless because it belongs to Brahman who is beginningless and uncreated. The Brahma Sutras in 2.1.34 affirms that the soul is beginningless and uncreated. The idea of an eternal and beginningless cycle of a series of universes being manifested and then withdrawn by God is alluded to as early as the Ṛigveda-saṃhitā in verse 10.190.3 where it says ‘The creator fashioned the sun and the moon as he did before’. The innermost consciousness and unchanging sentient presence illuminating the Jiva is Itself the beginningless consciousness of Brahman refracted as it were through the power of maya into the hearts of multitudes of contingent beings, the Atman is without a mind or organs while the Jiva has something called a 'subtle body' which includes the mind that is the thing which actually engages actions and which is affected by the world.

The Atman is always liberated, it doesn't enter into bondage or become freed from it. When the Jiva is liberated, in a way it 'awakens' to the fact that it has always been that very liberated Awareness, that in their whole beginningless existence as Jivas the whole time there was an unbound luminescent sorrowless Sentience which was the basis of and which had permeated every aspect of their previous conscious experience but which they had never recognized before until liberation.