Parable for the Body-Mind
A video game avatar has a distinct appearance, specific characteristics, and a limited set of actions that are confined by the parameters of the game.
Although the game avatar has no separate awareness of its own, it plays an integral part, for it is through this first-person perspective that the world of the game is known. ⬚
The Unifying Reality of Awareness
Day to day experience is structured by the activity of the mind. The mind, through conceptual thinking, divides reality into a subjective world of thoughts, feelings, and sensations, and an objective world of objects, events, and relationships. The mind perceives itself to be contained within a physical body, acting and reacting with a physical world. To the mind, the sense of separation seems intuitively true.
However, the awareness that knows both the subjective and the objective makes no such distinction.
Timeless, formless awareness is not located within the body or the mind. The body, the mind, and the entirety of perception, arise and subside within awareness. The awareness that illuminates thoughts and feeling is the same awareness that illuminates the world.
Awareness is the formless eternity in which all experience unfolds. ⬚
“Atman is Brahman” / “I and the Father are One”
Both the Advaitic saying, “Atman is Brahman,” and Jesus’ declaration, “I and the Father are one,” point to the indivisibility of consciousness.
“Atman is Brahman” is a core tenant of Advaita Vedanta. Atman refers to the first-person consciousness that gives rise to the sense of a personal “I,” and Brahman is the all-encompassing reality of infinite* being. Accordingly, the apparent personal self is, at its core, nothing other than this infinite reality. There is only one consciousness going on here.
The mind is an activity of consciousness and therefore cannot be separate. In Advaita, one does not merge, at some point, with the ultimate reality of being (Brahman); one simply recognizes that consciousness is not two. Separation is an appearance in the mind in the same way that the mind is an appearance within consciousness.
Jesus offers the same insight in the Gospel of John when he says, “I and the Father are one.” The “I” here is not the body-mind, but the divine consciousness expressing itself through that particular form. This is Jesus’ declaration that the fundamental oneness of his own being is the source of all being: the perceiving consciousness, the light through which all experience is known. ⬚