The Advaita Vedanta tradition employs a three-fold scheme as it speaks of: 1) The “thunderous silence” which “speaks” about the Unspeakable; 2) “words to live by” for the spiritual aspirant in search of personal experience, and 3) a “philosophy” for the seeker/scholar who desires a theory with conceptual consistency.
Three Perspectives
In other words, there are seemingly different perspectives: i) Reality may be approached from a position of radical non-duality; ii) a position of qualified non-duality, or iii) a position of multiplicity.
For instance, a man may be viewed from the perspective of himself; from the perspective of father and child, and from the perspective of an employee. In other words, one person is viewed from three perspectives, each succeeding perspective involving a greater degree of separation from oneself: At first, one feels one is in the light (the world is external to you); secondly, the light is in you (the world is within you); thirdly, you are the light.
Advaitins often adopted these three different stand points (sometimes calling them ajati-vada, drsti-srsti-vada, and srsti-drsti-vada, and sometimes as paramarthika, vyavaharika, andpratibhasika) when they speak about the nature of the physical world. One or the other of them is applicable to whatever they speak about. It cannot be stressed enough that it behoves the reader to be consciously aware of from what/whose perspective they are speaking.
One Indivisible Self
Indeed, Advaitins never get tired nor wearied in asserting that, from the viewpoint of a sage, a mukta, there is only the one indivisible Self; there is neither a knower, nor known, nor any process of knowing; neither a guru, nor disciples, nor teachings; neither a liberated individual, nor any bound individual. The essence of Advaita’s teachings is that there is a single, immanent, partless, indivisible Reality, directly experienced by everyone, that
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