Part I: Chapter IV / II

Nature of Creation

*Creation as such does not exist per se. The actual and the real is ever the same and is not the subject of change. The unconditioned cannot be conditioned as infinity cannot be finitised. All that is, is Brahman, and there can be nothing apart from the Absolute Unity. It projects itself into varying forms, which are an expression of its power (* This section is adjusted to the First Edition of 1961; Editor’s Note 2011); but if we perceive them in terms of plurality or duality and of limitation, it is not that such qualities inhere in the Absolute, but that our own perception is limited by the narrow, everyday, human consciousness. He who has passed from avidya to vidya, from ignorance to knowledge, knows the world of the relative to be only maya or illusion, and sees the Absolute in everything, just as he who knows the true nature of ice sees it only as another form of water.

The power of the Absolute, popularly known as Ishwar and called the Creator, is the root-cause of all consciousness. The world of plurality or duality is mere maya (an instrument for measuring things on the level of the intellect), while the real One is non-dual and hence is at once measureless and immeasurable. To use the well-known simile –

The variety subsists in the atman, as does a snake in the rope or a ghost in the stump of a tree.

As an empirical experience is neither identical with the atman, nor exists apart from or independent of the atman, so the world is neither one with the atman nor separate from it.

Atman is one and universal, unconditioned and limitless like space, but when conditioned by mind and matter, it looks like Ghat-Akash or space enclosed in a pitcher, yet becomes one with the universal space when the pitcher breaks apart. All the differences, then, are but in name, capacity and form.

The Jiva and the atman are one and of the same essence. Kabir, speaking of it, says that the spirit is part and parcel of Ram, or the All-pervading Power of God.

The Muslim divines also describe it (rooh) as Amar-i-Rabbi, or the fiat of God. While the Jiva is conditioned and limited by the limiting adjuncts, physical, mental and causal, the atman or the disembodied Jiva, freed from these finitizing adjuncts, is limitless and unconditioned.