Consciousness has not seen death but it sees only the death of the mind.

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.

Gnani

People think Gnani is to refer to a Saint  or religious head but the true import of this word Gnani is one who has realized the fact that the self is not physical but it is the soul and Soul is the innermost  Self and soul is ultimate truth. the soul is in the form of consciousness .

 A simple point is that one is a Gnani whose "ego" is totally absent because he is fully aware the consciousness is the true self and he abides in the Soul, the innermost  self, which is ultimate reality.

A Gnani has no real teaching, and has nothing new to add to us in the conventional sense. This is because he sees everything as the manifestation of the Consciousness [Self] and there is no difference in their perceptions of the world of forms. To them, the individuals are no different from them. They work on their own way and guide the fellow seekers to move ahead without expecting anything in return.

The one who believes in re-incarnation cannot be Gnani. A Gnani his-self with the consciousness therefore the question of birth, life, death and world does not arise. Gnani don't initiate people into any practice of path, and in fact they exhort people to go beyond the mind. They only prescribe discrimination between the Unreal and the Real.

The Saints and Spiritual teachers may not fit the description of a Gnani. To compare a religious guru or god men or scriptural scholar as Gnani is too farfetched.

Consciousness is the witness and what appears is also consciousness.

People consider themselves to be knowledgeable because they have read books and well informed about the subject. But all these accumulated knowledge is not wisdom. One can’t get non-dual wisdom from accumulating knowledge.

Whether the knowledge accumulated are scriptures  or something from more recently published books are mere pointers to truth but not wisdom.  First, whether we're aware of it or not, as one reads he is imposing his own cultural conditioning, biases, experiences, and prior knowledge onto what he is reading; this is how his brains work. He “makes sense" of new things by associating them with things he already knows.

Most of the time, this is useful.  But if the "new thing" is utterly different from anything one has been exposed to before, he is almost certain to distort it to make it fit into pre-existing conceptual boxes. So much of knowledge   is about changing perspective, but that's hard to do when one is twisting the knowledge around to fit the perspectives he is already has.

Regarding the Vedic scriptures, most of us are reading English translations of texts written in Sanskrit or some other language from long ago and far away. Because these languages are enormously different from English, literal translations into sensible English are not possible. So, what we're reading often is as much the translator's interpretation as it is a translation. Often English syntax requires that the translator construct phrases that aren't in the original. And to do this, the translator must draw upon his own cultural conditioning, biases, experiences, and prior knowledge.  That becomes apparent if one gets the chance to compare several translations of the same text. Sometimes the differences are significant.

One should not accept the scriptures as proof the way religionists hold as ultimate truth without verification. Scriptures may be useful to validate a path already travelled, but not much good as a roadmap to the final destination.

Non dual Wisdom  does not depend on reading, or by following the path or teacher, or through  scriptural studies or by  practising yoga or by  leading a religious oriented life, but it comes by perfect  understanding, assimilating  realizing the fact that, the self is not physical but self is consciousness [soul. 

Self is consciousness, by mistaking self to be physical entity, the ignorance is born. One thinks one is imprisoned within the physical body; but in reality the consciousness is within the three states but it is without the three states.   One has to mentally grasp the existence of the consciousness. One has to realize the Consciousness is the true self, by knowing it without the three states to realize its formless true nature.  

The moment one knows that the mind is consciousness, and then there is no ignorance. When there is no ignorance than there is no duality. When there is no duality then there is no illusion. When there is no illusion then there is only reality, which prevails as non-dual existence.  

Consciousness is of the nature of knowing. Existence of god means one is thinking of god but gods existence is depends on consciousness.  It is duality which causes the ignorance. Thus one has to inquire in to the nature of the mind [duality/universe] first, after understanding the nature of the mind, and then only he has to proceed further to understand the consciousness.  By understanding “what is mind? And “what is the substance of the mind?”, is the only way to acquire Self-Knowledge.  Until and unless one knows the consciousness, he has only the mind, which is the whole physical existence [man+ universe].

If one goes beyond mind, it is nothing but consciousness. Inside and outside the mind everywhere is only consciousness. 

When the mind manifests as universes itself it is the consciousness that shines. Consciousness is the witness and what appears is also consciousness.  Whatever has appeared is   appeared on its own. Man and the world are within that appearance. The one which is aware of the appearance and disappearance of the appearance is not the waking entity, because waking entity is within that appearance.   Therefore, viewing the appearance on the base of the waking entity is cause of all confusion.   Therefore, one has to mentally trace the formless knower of the appearance, to realize the waking entity is not the knower of the appearance but the formless consciousness [soul] is the knower of the appearance  of  dual and non dual experiences.