I'm

Ahandam Satchidhanandam

Avang Manasagocharam

Aitlanam Akhila Dharam

Ashray Bheistda'sed-thai.

I take refuge in the self, the indivisible, the existence, consciousness, bliss, absolute, beyond the reach of words and thought, the substratum of all, for the attainment of my cherished desire.

I thought I've been chanting that every day, but it's good to give the translation too.

So in the Vedantasara, which we have been studying,

we have been coming across the basic building blocks, the basic definitions of Adwaitavidanta, the system of Adwaita Vedanta.

And now the question arises, how does this entire universe come from Brahman, the ultimate reality, the one, how does it appear as the many?

So that's what we're going to talk about now.

We have started.

We know that Brahman is now associated with Maya.

And we were told that Maya has two powers, the power of wailing and the power of projection.

It's like the classic example of the rope and the snake.

There's a rope which exists really. And then there is ignorance of the rope. And that ignorance has two

powers. One is it hides the rope from us. I'm ignorant of the rope. It literally means I don't know it's a rope.

I know there's something there, but I don't know it's a rope.

And the second power is it makes me commit an error, a mistake.

I think it's a snake or something else.

I don't see the rope as a rope. I see it as a snake by mistake.

Similarly, Brahman is the reality and then it is associated with Maya, which is this cosmic ignorance.

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