Indian Philosophy v2.c26.s24.2.2

v2.c26.s24.2.2

neither of them is thinkable apart from the other, so that even avidyā is dependent on the ultimate reality.¹ The phenomenal self and the phenomenal world are mutually implicated facts.² Avidyā and prakṛti are co-eternal and belong to the world of experience.³ The space-time-cause world is the view of reality given to us through avidyā, which is adapted to the purpose of presenting us with such a world. Śaṃkara steers clear of mentalism as well as materialism. We cannot say that nature is a phenomenon of our consciousness, any more than the phenomenal self is a product of nature. The conditions of the possibility of objective experience are also the conditions of the possibility of logical selfhood or self-consciousness. Why do our minds work in this misleading way? Why is there avidyā? Why do we have the space-time-cause world? Why is there māyā? are different ways of stating the same insoluble problem. The Ātman, which is pure knowledge, somehow lapses into avidyā, just as Brahman, which is pure being, turns aside into the space-time-cause world. Through avidyā we reach vidyā, even as through the empirical world we reach Brahman. Why there is this universal and primeval turning aside or perversion, is more than we can say, yet we must hold that neither our logical minds nor the world which it apprehends is an illusion. A phenomenon is not a phantasm. Avidyā and māyā represent the subjective and the objective sides of the one fundamental fact of experience.