Transcendental Nectar of Sadhu-Sanga

by

Sripad Bhakti Madhava Puri Maharaja, Ph.D.

Thank you for pointing this out. I usually leave out diacritic marks due to the nature of different email clients interpreting them in various unexpected ways. The original had a diacritic over the "a" in the first bedha, and so should have been bedhaa, But the way you have written it is also correct. It shows the difference between bedha (difference) and abedha (non difference).

The use of example/analogy never provides a perfect explanation. But in this case, the use of the analogy of space and its rooms is especially poor and even misleading. It leads to the wrong conclusion.

Analogy works best the closer it is to the original entity it is describing. Brahman, the Absolute, as we have mentioned in previous messages, is to be understood essentially as consciousness. An example of the identity and difference of Brahaman would thus be more precisely exemplified if we considered the case of an individual consciousness. An individual has his own identity, but he may be a father to his son, a husband to his wife, as son to his parents, a brother to his siblings, an employee to his boss, a friend to his neighbors, etc. Although he bears a single identity of his own, (his own being for himself), he also displays multiple identities with respect to others (in his being for others).

This is what we mean by the essential nature of the Absolute being identical and different simulataneously and inconceivably. It cannot be analytically determined where the identity distinguishes itself from its various manifestations, or where the diversity divides itself from the identity. Thus it is "acintya" or inconceivable to the analytic understanding, yet nonetheless quite reasonable in anyone's normal experience. This principle is actually quite universally experienced. Movement, for instance, requires that a moving object be in two different places at one and the same time. It is and it isn't at one and the same place, and thus it is said to be moving. Life is simultaneously a activity of living and a dying at one and the same moment. In biology this is called anabolism and catabolism, (building up and tearing down) or metabolism. The moment you are born is the moment you begin to die. You can either say you are living for 70 years, or you are dying for 70 years.

And cognition is the simultaneous becoming of subjectivity from objectivity, it is both. Just as willing is the objectification of subjectivity, through an indistinguishable process that proceeds without our understanding, although it is essential for it.

This mysterious principle of acintya bedha abedha tattva, contains the secret of dialectical spiritual reality. The differential calculus which tries to deal with kinematical movement is unable to deal with the philosophical applications that we are presenting here. A new science of spiritual dialectics is needed to comprehend these movements.

This is a reply to this message posted in the group.