Error: ignorance, superimposition, and the rope-snake of transmigration

PS_25

Through [contact with] the darkness of ājñāna / ajñāna-granthi (ignorance; the 'knot' of ignorance), one perceives the Self — though it is one's own single essential nature — as the manifold variety of the grasped and the grasper.

PS_26

Just as syrup, molasses, raw sugar, lump-sugar, and the rest are nothing but sugar-cane juice [in different states], so all the differentiated states are of the one supreme Self, Śambhu / Śiva / Paramaśiva (the absolute non-dual consciousness-Lord).

PS_27

[The whole hierarchy] ending in the [pure-knowledge soul] vijñānākala, the inner controller (antaryāmin), the vital breath (prāṇa), the Cosmic Person (virāṭ), the body, the [class-]birth, and the [bodily] lump — all this is mere [practical] convention; in the highest sense (paramārtha) they simply do not exist.

PS_28

In the rope there is no snake, yet [the imagined snake] causes terror, even to the point of death. Great indeed is the power of error — it cannot, truly, be [easily] discriminated away.

PS_29

In just this way merit and demerit, heaven and hell, birth and death, pleasure and pain, and [the distinctions of] caste and life-stage — though unreal in [respect of] the Self — come to be by the force of delusion.

PS_30

This is that [primal] darkness: that, although [all] entities are nothing other than the Self by virtue of being illumined [by It], there yet arises this conceit of [their being] the non-self.

PS_31

This is darkness upon darkness, a great blister upon the boil: that in what is non-self — in the body, the vital breath, and the rest — there is the conceit of [their being] the Self.

PS_32

By [identifying with] the body, the vital breath, [their] awareness, and the manifold display of intellect, cognition, and [the inner] space, [the Self] wondrously enmeshes its own Self — like a spider [enwrapping itself] with its web.

PS_33

And by the shining-forth of the majesty of His own knowledge, He unwraps His own Self [again]. Thus does Śambhu / Śiva / Paramaśiva (the absolute non-dual consciousness-Lord), Paramaśiva, spread out the wondrous play of bondage and liberation.