Consciousness knows no decay and survives even destruction of the three states. The mind disappears as consciousness. Consciousness survives even the destruction of the mind, because it is the formless witness of the birth and death of the mind. It has the knowing ability. The mind is only known. Whatever is known emanates from consciousness. Consciousness has not seen death but it sees only the death of the mind.
v Why distinction should imply contradiction? What does distinction mean?
It implies that two things are not the same, hence duality exists there.
v What is the soul as different from mind?
Soul is only a mental picture. Even if one say that one are immortal and exist eternally, it is the ego that must tells him this, that is to the mind that it is only an idea.
Ideas are mere notion. Notion or idea never reaches the soul. The mind never knows it. He who says he has a vision of the highest or describes it as supra-mental etc. does not understand consciousness [soul], because it is free from imaginations or duality.
Physical knowledge arises from experience of object by a subject; that all knowledge of objects will only lead to more thinking but never give one ultimate reality. Intellectual position is "Let us try and get more and still more objective experience and then when one has enough he may get reality.”
Intellectuals can never get at ultimate truth that way because it leads to endless thoughts and because it ignores the Witness, intellectuals must make the inquiry into Invisible witness to find reality. One need not give up its investigations into objects; they are useful empirically; but only that he should not delude himself that this is the correct path to final reality.
When a yogi sits down to meditate, he is thinking first of sitting, that is his body; next he says "I do not want such and such thoughts," that is he is already thinking of those thoughts. Thus his mind is filled with two thoughts, never of the consciousness or soul. Hence "This is his bondage, that he practices Samadhi which is meditation or trance”.
Yoga can yield only experience of duality because everything that one can do or practice becomes a vanishing 'known.' It yields relative truth based on imagination, which is true from a particular viewpoint, not ultimate truth.
When seeker puts aside the imagination and has the thinker-- what does he get with thinking—he can get only a thought. Meditation is only an effort of the physical self/ego; it is imagination, an idea; the ego remaining the same with or without objects.
When one’s attention is riveted to an object, he forgets the subject, consciousness. This is true whether an external object or an internal idea. When one is absorbed in thinking of anything, he forgets the subject, his-self, that which sees all these subjects.
One may think for years but it is all thoughts, hence not consciousness. But when one inquires who is the witness of the three states is, then one does get consciousness, the knower, and the witness of the three states. Consciousness is the eternal.
