adhyAropa apavAda: a short note

The oxymoron, advaitic dichotomy, is an issue that a lot of opponents bring to the argument-desk justifying duality! They term the teacher-student, teaching-taught, real-unreal, original-reflection, God-world, and you-me relation to exist due to the duality and call advaita bogus or ridiculous. The argument itself is ridiculous, to me. Every example that advaita takes up to explain its stand is seen dualistic. This is precisely where advaita is misunderstood. A smart opponent will call the earlier statement dualistic and run away under the cover of duality again. But advaita stands bold in the face of duality, by saying that the journey is dualistic to the end that is non-dual. That is, dvaita has its use in the path, but its not the end. Well, that has been voiced over and over by all, including me, so I'll return to the points I want to make.

Advaita is difficult to understand since someone who understands something else would mean duality and that blocks the merging step. Keeping that aside, one must take the examples intuitively. Just because a dumb person like me doesn't understand infinity, doesn't term the mathematical expression tending-to-infinity as junk. Lets take another example that we can relate to: I take a bath to cleanse myself. To clean it, I need to add soap, which is factually another impurity! Now, the question is why I add an impurity to remove another impurity? We all know that the latter would remove the former. So, I superimpose to remove the superimposition. That is adhyAropa apavAda. Removal of superimposed world needs a superimposed dvaita bhAva that removes both and advaita shines on its own then! No one says after the bath that I've soap over me and thats why I'm clean, but I washed myself with soap and therefore I'm clean. So too, one washes oneself off dvaita and advaita shines forth.

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