Desire, ignorance, and inequality this is the trio of thrall.
Freedom is the thing of the macrocosm.
— Swami Vivekananda( CW 8. 344)
The trio of thrall is a chain ignorance, desire and inequality are three of its links — each leading to the coming — in a circle that binds us indefinitely unless and until it's snapped.
Vedanta’s vision of reality is of one, horizonless, perfect Being, beyond time( kāla), space( deśa) and reason( nimitta). commodity inexplainable seems to have happed to this nondual reality. Since no bone
knows how, why and when it happed( or whether it indeed happed at each), the first link in the chain is ignorance( avidyā). It feels as if the horizonless Being may have ever been overcome by some kind of sleep. In the performing dream, the infinitude faded and the horizonless Being was reduced to a finite being. This seems to be the only way commodity so insolvable may come within the range of possibility.
The original state of fulfillment lost, the utopian began to ask ( kāma) effects which were believed to bring fulfillment. Desire coupled with will( icchā) produced intention( saṁkalpa) which led to action( air). The world of action is also the world of inequality inequality in the kinds of work and the kinds of results, and inequality among the people who reaped those results in different ways. Not for nothing did Swami Vivekananda say that inequality “ is the source of all thrall ”( CW 4. 329).
Trapped and bound in the whirlpool of air, the inexorable chain of cause and effect, the utopian is dragged from one day to the coming, one time to the coming, one life to the coming. Death is no respite, as the power of unrequited air leads to another birth and further air which, in turn, leads to yet another birth. Every life is a new dream. relatively conceivably, every day( not simply every night) may be a new dream. The wheel of air is grim in its movement.
At face value, air produces both joy and anguish. Good air produces happy results and bad air produces painful results. While this may feel to be a fair deal, it actually is not. It's atrocious. There's no way to keep the joy and avoid the anguish. There's no way to have only one and not the other. Worse, the dream seems endless the utopian continues to witness mortality, fault and ignorance.
The trio of thrall — ignorance( avidyā), desire( vāsanā), inequality( vaiṣamya) — remains forcefully in place. The introductory constituents of mortal experience — videlicet, complaint, growing and death at the physical position and stress, anxiety and disaffection at the cerebral position — are anything but fun. Indeed the transitory and sporadic “ happiness ” endured in life is oppressively compromised by the painful recollections of the history and the anxiety- ridden query about the future. Which, in practical terms, means that life is principally suffering. This is the stark verity which formed the centerpiece of Buddha’s communication. In the Gita, Sri Krishna appertained to the world as “ joyless ”( asukham, 9. 33) and as an “ residence of suffering ”( duḥkhālayam,8.15).
The good news is that none of this is real. All of this happens in a dream. The bad news is that the dream is continuing, indeed as I write this; worse, utmost do n’t indeed know that they're featuring. We're in the dream indeed as we read this. Unless the utopian wakes up, the dream will continue to feel real.
The dream becomes unbearably painful for those who are sensitive to the imperfect nature of mortal actuality. This is the verity of our present life, our present experience. Thankfully, it's a “ lower ” verity which can be overcome by a “ advanced ” verity. As Swamiji refocused out, we aren't traveling “ from error to verity, but from verity to verity, from lower verity to advanced verity ”( CW, 4. 147).
The advanced verity comes to us through the trio of freedom, which will be the focus of the coming post.